Encyclopedia of Archaeology [2 ed.] 0323907997, 9780323907996
Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Second Edition, Four Volume Set covers the standing of archaeology as a scientific discipli
116 15 185MB
English Pages 3728 [3776] Year 2023
9780323918565v1_WEB
Front Cover
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Copyright
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1
CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 1
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES
Editors in Chief
Editors
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Cultural Ecology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Global Theories of Archaeology
Introduction
Overview: Global Theories in Archaeology
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Historic Roots of Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
History of Archaeology: The Last Few Centuries
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Afro-Brazilian Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Material Culture Studies
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Philosophy of Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary
Funding Statement
References
Further Reading
Processual Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions: What Happened, Where Did It Happen, What is Happening, and What Will Happen
References1111The publisher's editorial policy limited the number of bibliographic citations. The interested reader will fi ...
Post-Processual Archaeology
Introduction
Overview: Modern, Post-modern, and Post-processual Archaeology/Archaeologies
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Social Theory in Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
World-Systems Analysis: Traditions and Schools of Thought
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Agency in Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Anthropological Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Archaeoastronomy
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues and Examples
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Archaeological Science
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Archaeology of Childhood
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeology of Cult and Religion
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Digital Sources
Archaeology of Enslavement
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Archaeology of Food
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Archaeology and the New Materialisms
Introduction
Overview of the New Materialisms: Key Concepts
Key Issues: Archaeological Applications of New Materialisms
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Behavioral Archaeology
Introduction
Overview: The Birth of Behavioral Archaeology
Key Issues: Similarities to Evolutionary Archaeology
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Biblical Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Cognitive Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Community Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Conflict Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Contextual Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Digital Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Economic Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Environmental Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Ethnoarchaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary
Further Reading
Evolutionary/Neo-Darwinian Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgment
References
Experimental Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Feminist Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues and Important Directions
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Field Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Conclusions
References
Relevant Websites
Forensic Archaeology
Introduction
Overview: Traditional vs. Forensic vs. Humanitarian Archaeology
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Funerary Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues in Funerary Archaeology
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Gender and Queer Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Interpretive Art and Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Islamic Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
For Terms, Sites and General Discussions
Selected Topics
Further Reading
Landscape Archaeology and Socio-Environmental Patterns
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Relevant Websites
Maritime Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Relevant Websites
Marxist Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Networks in Archaeology
Introduction
Historical Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Phenomenological Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Postcolonial Archaeology and Colonial Praxis
Introduction
Overview: Anticolonial/Decolonial/Postcolonial Projects
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Primate Archaeology
Introduction
Overview: Discoveries and Contributions to Human Origins Research
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Archaeological Ethnographies
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Identity and Power
Introduction
Identity: Self and Group
Power: Substance, Relationship, or Discourse?
Categorical Aspects of Identity in Archaeology
The Politics of Identity
Further Reading
Gender and Heritage
Introduction
Overview: Gender and Heritage—State of the Art
Key Issues: What Does Heritage Have to Do With Male Individualization?
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeological Heritage Values and Significance
Introduction
Overview: Erasing the Processual Traces of Archaeological Values
Key Issues: Evolution of Archaeological Values
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeology, Heritage and Globalization
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeological Heritage and Museum Interpretation
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Indigenous Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution in Archaeology and Heritage
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues: Current Debates Regarding Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Ethical Issues and Responsibilities
Introduction
The Core Ethic: Protecting, Obtaining, and Using Data
The Ethics of Destroying Archaeological Sites
The Ethics of Treating With “Looters” and “Traffickers”
The Ethics of Relations With Indigenous, Descendant, and Protective Communities
The Ethics of the Workplace and Society
Conclusion
Further Reading
Archaeology and Human Rights
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Repatriation of Human Remains
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Restitution of Collections - An Appraisal
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Conclusion
References
Looting and Illicit Trafficking of Archaeological Heritage
Introduction
Overview (With Special Focus on International Cultural Heritage Law from 1945)
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
The UNESCO 1972 Convention and Archaeology
Introduction
Overview: The Development of “Heritage”
Key Issues: The Understanding of Archaeology in the Context of the Convention and Foreign Policy
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeological Heritage Management
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Preventive Archaeology - Cultural Heritage and Land Planning
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Heritage and Sustainability
Introduction
Overview - Historical Evolution of the Link Between Sustainability and Cultural Heritage
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Relevant Websites
Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Conclusions
References
Archaeological Sites and Archaeological Site Parks in China
Introduction
Overview: Archaeological Site Protection in China
Key Issues: Protection and Display of Archaeological Sites in China
Summary and Future Directions
Further Reading
Economics and Archaeological Heritage
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Funding in Archaeology: Public, Private and In-Between
Introduction
Overview: Public and Private Funding
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Archaeology
Introduction: Archaeology and Engaging the Public
Overview: Archaeology and the “Crowd”
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgment
References
Professional Careers in Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeology and the Future
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
9780323918565v2_WEB
Front Cover
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Copyright
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 2A
CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 2A
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES
Editors in Chief
Editors
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Classification of Archaeological Sites
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Site Formation in Caves and Rockshelters
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Rock Art and Petroglyphs
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Shell Middens
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Hunting Traps, Jumps, and Kill Sites
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Agricultural Fields
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Settlements, Tell Formation
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Cemeteries and Necropoleis
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Site Formation: Conflict Sites
Introduction
Overview: Battlefield Signatures and Patterns
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Road and Transport Networks
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Treasures, Votive Artefacts and Offerings
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Quarrying and Building Stones
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Multimedia
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Mining, Beneficiation: Raw Material Appropriation
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues: Mining Practices as chaîne opératoire
Summary and Future Directions
References
History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques
Introduction
Overview of Historical Development
Key Issues: The Fundamental Nature of Excavation and Post-excavation Work
Summary and Future Directions
References
Multimedia
Survey
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Geophysical Prospection
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Airborne and Space-Borne Prospection
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Predictive Modeling in Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Stratigraphic Diagrams
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Mortuary Excavation and Recording Approaches
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Mapping Methods
What and Why Do We Map?
History of Site Mapping
Site Mapping Methods
Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Sampling Methods and Theory
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Stone, Mudbrick and Burnt Brick Structures
Introduction
Overview: From a Dwelling to a Remain
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Dry, Cold Excavations
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Waterlogged Sites
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Relevant Websites
Underwater Archaeology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Preservation of Archaeological Remains in Situ
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Archaeology and Cyberspace
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues and Future Directions
Summary
References
9780323918565v3_WEB
Front Cover
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Copyright
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 2B
CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 2B
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES
Editors in Chief
Editors
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Archaeological Materials: Challenges and Future Directions
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Paleolithic Raw Material Provenance Studies
Introduction
Historical Developments
An Integrated Approach
Interpretive Framework
A Palaeolithic Perspective: Diachronic Change and Macro-regional Variability
Case-Studies
Conclusions
Further Reading
Traceology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Ceramics: Stylistic and Functional Analysis
Introduction: Style and Function in Archaeological Research
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Ceramics: Chemical and Petrographic Analysis
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues: Petrographic and Chemical Applications for Solving Archaeological Questions on Ancient Ceramics
Summary and Future Directions
References
Ceramics: Organic Residue Analysis
Introduction
Overview: Preservation of Organic Components in a Ceramic Matrix
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Multimedia Annexes
Bone Tool Analysis
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues to Bone Tool Studies
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Chipped Stones and Debitage Assemblages
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Obsidian Sourcing by X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Ground Stone Tools and Vessels
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Jade and Precious Stones
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Beads and Pendants
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Metals: Primary Production
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Metals: Manufacture and Use
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Cementitious Materials
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Lime and Gypsum Mortars in Historic Construction
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Glass: Primary Production
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgements
References
Further Reading
Glazes
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Pigments as Archaeological Materials
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeological Science in Practice
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Forgeries and Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Human-Landscape Interactions
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgements
References
Social Impacts on Landscapes
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Geomorphology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Soil Micromorphology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Relevant Website
Taphonomy in Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Paleoclimatology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Archaeobotany: Wood and Charcoal Remains
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Archaeobotany: Plant Macroremains
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeobotany: Plant Microfossils
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeobotany: Microscopic and Molecular Techniques
Introduction
Overview: Selected Plant Remains From Archaeological Sites and Their Recovery Methods
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Archaeobotany: Plant Domestication
Introduction
Overview
Summary of Key Issues and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Archaeobotany: Crop Husbandry
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues and Current Debates
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Food and Feasting
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Fiber Artifacts
Introduction
Recovery and Conservation Protocols
Laboratory Methods
Analytical Methods
Raw Materials
Photography
Description, Compilation, and Interpretation
References
Further Reading
Textiles
Textiles and the Archaeological Record
Textiles and Society
Textile Technologies
Textile Structures and Patterns
Archaeological Finds
Significant Finds of Archaeological Textiles
Amplifying the Archaeological Record
Further Reading
Animal Domestication
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues: Current Debates on Animal Domestication
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Animal Management
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Vertebrate Zooarchaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issue: Biometry and Its Importance in Zooarchaeology
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Invertebrate Analysis
Mollusks as Ornaments, Artifacts, and Shell Money
Mollusks as a Food Source
Mollusks Used in Construction and Pottery Production
Textile and Textile Dyes
Paleoenvironment and Dating
Quantification
Other Invertebrates
Further Reading
Archaeoparasitology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Human Remains: Challenges and Future Directions
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Paleodemography
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Human Remains: Paleopathology
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Human Remains: Diet
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues: Non-destructive Skeletal Methods for Reconstructing Past Diet
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Biodistance Analysis
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Activity-Related Skeletal Changes
Introduction
Reconstructing Past Activities: An Overview
Key Issues: Types of ARSC—Potential and Limits
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Dental Anthropology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Epidemiologic Transitions
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Osteobiography: The Bioarchaeology of Individuals
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Bioarchaeology of Childhood
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Historical Bioarchaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues and Future Directions
Summary
References
Further Reading
Mummified Tissues
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Paleoanthropology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Relative Dating: Stratigraphy and Seriation
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Relative Dating: Combining Chronological Information
Introduction: Relative Dating Defined
Overview: Relative Dating in Archaeology
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Luminescence Dating
Overview
References
Further Reading
Building a Radiocarbon Chronology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Relevant Website
Archaeomagnetic Dating
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Website
Obsidian Hydration Dating
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Archaeological Dendrochronology
Introduction: Archaeological Dendrochronology
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant websites: Selected Online Dendrochronology Resources and Dendrochronology Software
Archaeogenetics
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Paleoproteomics
Introduction
Overview: History of the Method
Key Issues: Proteins in the Archaeological Record
Summary and Future Directions
References
Isotopic Analysis: Organic Remains
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Isotopic Analysis: Inorganic Remains
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Synchrotron Methods
Introduction
Overview of Synchrotrons and Techniques
Key Issues: Applications in Archaeology
Summary and Future Directions
References
Agent-Based Modeling
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Statistics: Part I - Exploratory Data Analysis
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Appendices A–C. Supplementary data
References
Further Reading
Statistics: Part II - Confirmatory Data Analysis
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Appendices A–C. Supplementary data
References
Further Reading
9780323918565v4_WEB
Front Cover
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Copyright
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 3
CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 3
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES
Editors in Chief
Editors
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Structure of Volumes 3 and 4: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania
Aim
Structure
Maps
Chronology
Individual Units
Africa, South: Human Origins
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, South: Earlier Stone Age
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues and Evolutionary Implications
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Africa, South: Middle Stone Age
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Africa, Tropical: Middle Stone Age
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, South: Later Stone Age
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Africa, North: Bronze Age
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, North: Neolithic and Predynastic Egypt
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues and Future Directions
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Egypt, Pharaonic
Introduction
Old Kingdom (3rd–8th Dynasty, c. 2686–2160 BC)
First Intermediate Period (9th–Early 11th Dynasty; c. 2160–2055 BC)
Middle Kingdom (Later 11th–13th Dynasty; c. 2055–1650 BC)
Second Intermediate Period (15th–17th Dynasty; c. 1650–1550 BC)
New Kingdom (18th–20th Dynasty; c. 1550–1069 BC)
Third Intermediate Period (c. 1069–664 BC)
Late Period (26th–30th Dynasty; 664–332 BC)
Further Reading
Africa, North: Medieval Ethiopia
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, North: Eastern Sahara
Introduction
Overview: Eco-geography and Climate
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Africa, Tropical: Pastoral Neolithic
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists
Further Reading
Africa, Tropical: Madagascar and Surrounding Islands
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary
References
Africa, Tropical: East African Foragers
Introduction
Overview: Defining Hunter-Gatherers or Foragers
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, South: Iron Age
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, West: Villages, Cities, and Early States
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, South: Late Holocene Forager and Farmer Interactions
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgements
References
Africa, South: Indian Ocean and Atlantic Connections
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions: Frontiers and Impacts
References
Africa, South: Ancient Chiefdoms and States
Introduction
Overview: Perceiving Complexity in Southern Africa
Key Issues: Resetting the Map
Summary and Future Directions: Can Chiefdoms and States Be Reimagined?
References
Africa, South: Precolonial Mining and Metallurgy
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, South: Ethnoarchaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, North: Historical Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, Tropical: Historical Archaeology: Revolutionary Practices
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Africa, Tropical: Swahili Archaeology
Introduction: Who are the Swahili?
Overview
Key Issues: Current Trends in Swahili Archaeology
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Africa, South: Historical Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
New World, Peopling of
Introduction
Climates, Environments, and Archaeological Records
Landscapes, Technologies, Economies, and Founding Populations
Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Connections
Epilog
Further Reading
Americas, South: Peopling Stage
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Americas, Caribbean: The Earliest Peoples
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Early Cultures of Middle America
Introduction
Dating and Chronology
The Path to Middle America
The First Paleoindian Migrations
The Late Paleoindian Period
The Origins of Middle American Art and Ideology
The Archaic Period in General
From Nomadic Hunting and Gathering to Village Based Farming Societies: Toward Explaining the Processes of Development
Further Reading
Peopling of the Caribbean
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, Mesoamerica: Archaic Period
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, Mesoamerica: Formative Period
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Early Cultures of the Central Andes
Introduction
Current and Past Environments
Climatic Changes During the Final Pleistocene
First Researches, First Milestones
The First Occupations (Before 10,000 BP)
Early Archaic: The Time of Specialized Hunters (10,000–8000 BP)
Middle Archaic: The Beginnings of a Production Economy (8000–5000 BP)
Further Reading
Archaeology of the North American Arctic
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Americas, North: Eastern Woodlands
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary
References
Americas, North: Hopewell Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues and Future Directions
Summary and Conclusion
References
Relevant Websites
Americas, North: Great Plains
Introduction
Palaeo-Indian Cultures
Plains Archaic Cultures
Plains Woodland Cultures
Plains Village Traditions
Southern Plains
Transition to the Historic Tribes
Historic Sites Archaeology
Further Reading
Americas, North: Indigenous Political Institutions
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
North America, Southwest
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
North America, Southwest: Anasazi / Ancestral Pueblo
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
North America, Southwest: Hohokam
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
North America, Southwest: The Mogollon
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
North America, Southwest: Ancient Peoples of the Four Corners Region
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
California and the Sierra Nevada
Ice Age Hunters
Early Holocene Diversification
Middle Holocene Elaboration and Innovation
Late Holocene Intensification
Late Holocene Specialization and Complexity
Summary
Epilog
Further Reading
Americas, Mesoamerica: Middle-Range Societies and States
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, Mesoamerica: Classic and Postclassic Stage
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, Caribbean: The Greater and Lesser Antilles and the Bahamas
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Amazon Basin
Interpretive Themes in Amazonian Archaeology
Research Methodology
History of Research at Sites
The Human Developmental Sequence in Amazonia
Further Reading
Americas, South: Andean Complexity
Introduction: The Archaeological Setting
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, South: Intermediate Periods
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Americas, South: Late Horizon
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
North America, Southwest: Exchange Systems
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, Mesoamerica: Pre-colonial Ritual and Religion
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgements
References
Americas, South: Pre-Columbian Exchange in the Andes
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, South: Pre-Columbian Metallurgy in the Andean Region
Introduction: The Emergence of Metallurgy in the New World
Overview
Key Issues: The Chaîne Opératoire of New World Metallurgy
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, Mesoamerica: Tarascan-Mexican Archaeometallurgy
Introduction: The Emergence of Metallurgy in Mesoamerica
Overview: The Chaíne Opératoire of New World Metallurgy
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Historical Archaeology in the United States
Roots of Historical Archaeology in the United States
Approaches and Subject Matter
Goals of Historical Archaeology in the United States
Time Periods, Issues, and Representative Sites
Disclaimer
Further Reading
Americas, Mesoamerica: Historical Archaeology
Introduction
Overview: Historical Archaeology in Mesoamerican Countries
Key Issues: Themes in Mesoamerican Historical Archaeology 2008–2021
Summary and Future Directions
References
Americas, South: Historical Archaeology
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Oceania: Peopling
Introduction: Inhabiting a Sea of Islands
Overview: Chronological Narrative of the Incremental Growth Model
Key Issues: Debates Regarding the Peopling of Oceania
Summary and Future Directions: Further Implications
Acknowledgments
References
The Human History of the Pacific Islands
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Historical Archaeology in Australia
Introduction
Archaeologies of Convicts
Archaeologies of Settlement
Archaeologies of Interaction
Archaeologies of Australian Cities
Archaeologies of Industry
Maritime Archaeologies
Future Directions
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
9780323918565v5_WEB
Front Cover
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Copyright
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 4A
CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 4A
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES
Editors in Chief
Editors
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Structure of Volumes 3, 4A and 4B: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania
Aim
Structure
Maps
Chronology
Individual Units
Between the Ural Mountains and Lena River: The Post-Glacial Stone Age in Northern Asia
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, East: Japanese Archipelago, Paleolithic Cultures
Search for the Earliest Evidence of Human Presence
Late Palaeolithic Assemblages
Further Reading
Asia, East: Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers
Definition
Chronology
End of the Jomon
Subsistence
Further Reading
Asia, East: Japan, Kofun to Heian (250–1185 CE)
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary
References
Further Reading
Asia, Northeast, Early States and Civilizations
Complexity in Inner Mongolia and Liaoning Province
Upper Xiajiadian
Eastern Dongbei and the Korean Peninsula
Bronze Age Korea
The State of Old Chosun
Korean States After Nangnang
Yayoi and Kofun Periods in Japan
Further Reading
Asia, East: Paleolithic Cultures
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures
Introduction
Environmental and Cultural Diversity in China
The Early Neolithic Period
The Middle Neolithic Period
The Late Neolithic Period
Conclusions
Acknowledgment
Further Reading
Asia, East: Social Complexity and Early States in Late Prehistoric China
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgment
References
Asia, East: China, Bronze Age Civilizations
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, East: Imperial China: Qin and Han (221 BCE–CE 220)
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, East: China, Medieval Period (220–960 CE)
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary
References
Asia, East: Imperial China: Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties (916–1644 CE)
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, Tibetan Plateau: Prehistory
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, Tibetan Plateau: The Tubo Kingdom
Introduction
Overview
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, East: Buddhist Remains and Cave-Temples in China
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary
Acknowledgment
References
Asia, Southeast: Islands
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgements
References
Further Reading
Asia, Southeast: Early States of the Mainland
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues: Early States
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Asia, South: Palaeolithic
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, South: Neolithic
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, South: Indus Civilization
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, South: Ganges Valley
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary
Acknowledgments
References
Asia, South: South India and Sri Lanka
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, South: Archaeology of Buddhism in India
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, Steppe, East: Paleolithic Kazakhstan
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Asia, Steppe, East: Neolithic and Chalcolithic Kazakhstan
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Bibliography (Translated)
Bibliography (Original Cyrillic)
Asia, Steppe, East: Bronze and Iron Age
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Asia, Steppe, East: Early Iron Age Pastoralist Cultures
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Bibliography (Translated)
Bibliography (Original Cyrillic)
Asia, Steppe, East: Medieval Cities, Religion and Textiles
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Further Reading
In English
In Chinese
In Japanese
In Russian
Asia, Steppe, East: Middle Ages (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan)
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, Southwest: Palaeolithic and Epi-Palaeolithic
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues: Key Themes and Diachronic Trends
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Asia, Southwest: Neolithic Onset of Modern Societies
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, Southwest: From Sumer to Babylon
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, Southwest: Iron Age (c. 1200–539 BC) Levant and Mesopotamia
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Asia, Southwest: The Persian Empires
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Asia, Southwest: Bilād al-Shām, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula – The Islamic Period
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
The Neolithic and Chalcolithic of West Asia
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Relevant Websites
Asia, Southwest: The Mountain Regions During the Iron Age
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Relevant Websites
Asia, West: Roman Eastern Colonies
Introduction
Brief History and Topography
The Nature of the Provinces
Archaeology of the Eastern Provinces
Conclusion and Outlook
Reference
Further Reading
Asia, West: Byzantine Empire
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Silk Roads
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Relevant Websites
Maritime Silk Road∗
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
9780323918565v6_WEB
Front Cover
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Copyright
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 4B
CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 4B
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES
Editors in Chief
Editors
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Structure of Volumes 3, 4A and 4B: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania
Aim
Structure
Maps
Chronology
Individual Units
The Bronze and Early Iron Ages in the Eurasian Arctic
Introduction
Overview: Metal Ages in the Eurasian Arctic
Key Issues of Arctic Archaeology: Metallurgy and Reindeer Domestication
Summary and Future Directions
References
The Paleolithic and Mesolithic Western Steppe and Forest Zone
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
The Late Stone Age Western Forest Zone, 7th–3rd Millennium BCE
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues: Subsistence, Settlement, People and Society
Summary and Future Directions
References
The Early Iron Age Western Forest Zone
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
References
The Western Forest Zone During the Transition From the Roman Times to the Early Middle Ages
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Scandinavia: Early Iron Age
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Scandinavia: (Late) Iron Age and Middle Ages
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
The Palaeolithic in the Western Steppe Zone
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
The Neolithic and Eneolithic in the Western Steppe Zone
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
Bronze Age Pastoralists in the Western Steppe Zone
Introduction: Regional Context
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Early Iron Age Nomadic Cultures of the Lower Volga, Lower Don and Southern Urals
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Western Steppe and Forest-Steppe in the Early Iron Age
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
The Western Steppe and Forest-Steppe During the Transition From the Roman Time to the Early Middle Ages
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
The Paleolithic of Temperate Europe
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
The Mesolithic of Temperate Europe
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Appendices 1–4. Supplementary data
References
The Neolithic of Temperate Europe
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
The Bronze Age of Temperate Europe
Concept of a Bronze Age
Bronze: New Technology
Continuity From Late Neolithic
Death and Burial
Rock Art
Monuments
Bronze Age Society
Further Reading
The Iron Age of Temperate Europe
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Further Reading
The Roman Period of Temperate Europe
Introduction
Overview: Regional Developments and Trajectories
Key Issues in Roman Temperate Europe
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
The Medieval Period of Temperate Europe
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Further Reading
The Post-Medieval Period of Temperate Europe
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Mediterranean: Neolithic
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Mediterranean: Iron Age
Introduction
Overview of Prehistoric and Iron Age European and Mediterranean Connectivity: From World-System Theory to House Society
Key Issues on East-West Relations: From Diffusionist Theory to Network Approaches
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
Further Reading
Mediterranean: Phoenicia
Introduction
Geographic Survey
Further Reading
Mediterranean: Greek Colonies
Introduction: General Observations
Greek Colonies and Settlements in the Mediterranean and Black Sea
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Mediterranean: Roman Period
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
References
Mediterranean: Medieval
Introduction
Overview
Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgment
References
Mediterranean: Post-Medieval
Introduction
Overview and Key Issues
Summary and Future Directions
Acknowledgments
References
INDEX
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
AUTHOR INDEX
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY SECOND EDITION
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY SECOND EDITION EDITORS IN CHIEF
Dr. Efthymia Nikita The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus
Professor Thilo Rehren The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus
VOLUME 1
Foundations, Methods, and Contemporary Debates SECTION EDITORS
Professor Peter F. Biehl Department of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, United States
Professor Maria-Luz Endere Faculty of Social Sciences, National University of the Centre of Buenos Aires Province, Buenos Aires, Argentina Institute INCUAPA – CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council), Olavarría, Argentina
AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON • NEW YORK • OXFORD PARIS • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier
Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, Netherlands, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, United Kingdom 50 Hampshire Street, 5th Floor, Cambridge MA 02139, United States Copyright Ó 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions. This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein). Notices Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. Practitioners and researchers may always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-323-90799-6 For information on all publications visit our website at http://store.elsevier.com
Publisher: Oliver Walter Acquisitions Editor: Fiona Geraghty Content Project Manager: Nitesh Shrivastava Associate Content Project Manager: Prashanth Ravichandran Designer: Miles Hitchen
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1 Contributors to Volume 1
ix
Editor Biographies
xiii
Foreword
xvii
Acknowledgments
xix
Cultural Ecology Mark Q Sutton and EN Anderson
1
Global Theories of Archaeology Arkadiusz Marciniak
10
Historic Roots of Archaeology Teresa S Moyer
20
History of Archaeology: The Last Few Centuries Margarita Díaz-Andreu
25
Afro-Brazilian Archaeology Lucio Menezes Ferreira and Marcos André Torres de Souza
36
Material Culture Studies Andrés Laguens
45
Philosophy of Archaeology Anton Killin
54
Processual Archaeology Ezra BW Zubrow
61
Post-Processual Archaeology Koji Mizoguchi
72
Social Theory in Archaeology Michael Shanks
84
World-Systems Analysis: Traditions and Schools of Thought P Nick Kardulias and Thomas D Hall
94
Agency in Archaeology Artur Ribeiro
100
v
vi
Contents of Volume 1
Anthropological Archaeology Christopher B Rodning
108
Archaeoastronomy Giulio Magli
114
Archaeological Science Thilo Rehren and Efthymia Nikita
123
Archaeology of Childhood Jane Eva Baxter
133
Archaeology of Cult and Religion David A Warburton
140
Archaeology of Enslavement Hayden F Bassett
162
Archaeology of Food Meriel McClatchie
168
Archaeology and the New Materialisms Louise Steel
176
Behavioral Archaeology Michael J O’Brien and Michael Brian Schiffer
184
Biblical Archaeology Neil Smith and Thomas E Levy
204
Cognitive Archaeology Marc A Abramiuk
210
Community Archaeology Helmut De Nardi and Laura McAtackney
219
Conflict Archaeology John Carman
226
Contextual Archaeology Brent Whitford
236
Digital Archaeology Kevin Garstki
245
Economic Archaeology Gary M Feinman
253
Environmental Archaeology Felix Riede and Marcello Mannino
260
Ethnoarchaeology Margaret E Beck
267
Evolutionary/Neo-Darwinian Archaeology Anna Marie Prentiss
277
Experimental Archaeology J Kater ina Dvor áková
284
Contents of Volume 1
vii
Feminist Archaeology Jana Esther Fries, Bisserka Gaydarska, Paz Ramírez Valiente, and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
293
Field Archaeology Åsa Berggren
305
Forensic Archaeology Ambika Flavel, Margaret Cox, and Daniel Franklin
319
Funerary Archaeology Christopher J Knüsel and Eline MJ Schotsmans
331
Gender and Queer Archaeology Uros Matic
342
Interpretive Art and Archaeology John H Jameson
358
Islamic Archaeology Katia Cytryn
370
Landscape Archaeology and Socio-Environmental Patterns Johannes Müller
383
Maritime Archaeology José Bettencourt and Juan Guillermo Martín
400
Marxist Archaeology Alessandro Guidi
413
Networks in Archaeology Jessica Munson
420
Phenomenological Archaeology Bjørnar Julius Olsen
429
Postcolonial Archaeology and Colonial Praxis Uzma Z Rizvi
438
Primate Archaeology Katarina Almeida-Warren and Alejandra Pascual-Garrido
444
Archaeological Ethnographies Yael Dansac
456
Identity and Power Rosemary A Joyce and Laurie A Wilkie
463
Gender and Heritage Almudena Hernando
469
Archaeological Heritage Values and Significance Margarita Díaz-Andreu and Ana Pastor Pérez
477
Archaeology, Heritage and Globalization O Hugo Benavides, Patricia Ayala, and María Fernanda Ugalde
486
Archaeological Heritage and Museum Interpretation Denise Pozzi-Escot and Mayali Tafur-Sequera
494
viii
Contents of Volume 1
Indigenous Archaeology George P Nicholas and Lindsay M Montgomery
505
Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution in Archaeology and Heritage Alicia Castillo Mena and Nekbet Corpas Cívicos
519
Ethical Issues and Responsibilities Thomas F King
529
Archaeology and Human Rights Andrés Alarcón-Jiménez
535
Repatriation of Human Remains Patricia Ayala and Jacinta Arthur
539
Restitution of Collections - An Appraisal Alvaro Higueras
548
Looting and Illicit Trafficking of Archaeological Heritage Ignacio Rodríguez Temiño and Ana Yáñez Vega
557
The UNESCO 1972 Convention and Archaeology Claudia Bastante
565
Archaeological Heritage Management Maria Ángeles Querol
574
Preventive Archaeology - Cultural Heritage and Land Planning Laura Brum Bulanti and Camila Gianotti García
581
Heritage and Sustainability Maria Luz Endere, Nahir Meline Cantar, and María Laura Zulaica
589
Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management Manuel de la Calle Vaquero and Maria García-Hernandez
597
Archaeological Sites and Archaeological Site Parks in China Weihong Liu and Jinpeng Du
606
Economics and Archaeological Heritage Ilde Rizzo and Luis Cesar Herrero Prieto
617
Funding in Archaeology: Public, Private and In-Between Elisabeth Niklasson
626
Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Archaeology Matthew J Seguin
636
Professional Careers in Archaeology Tomás Mendizábal and Jean-Sébastien Pourcelot
644
Archaeology and the Future Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg
652
CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 1 Marc A Abramiuk Anthropology Program, California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI), Camarillo, CA, United States Andrés Alarcón-Jiménez Departamento de Humanidades, Universidad el Bosque, Bogotá, Colombia Katarina Almeida-Warren Primate Models for Behavioral Evolution Lab, Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; and Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behavior, Universidade do Algarve, Faro, Portugal EN Anderson University of California, Riverside, CA, United States Jacinta Arthur Instituto de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Museo, Universidad Católica del Norte, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile; and Ka Haka Hoki Mai Te Mana Tupuna | Programa de Repatriación Rapa Nui, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Chile Patricia Ayala Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile; and Universidad de Chile, Centro de Estudios Interculturales e IndígenasCIIR, Santiago, Chile Hayden F Bassett Virginia Museum of Natural History, Martinsville, VA, United States Claudia Bastante University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom; and Diplomatic Service of the Republic of Peru, Peruvian University of Applied Sciences, Lima, Peru Jane Eva Baxter DePaul University Department of Anthropology, Chicago, IL, United States Margaret E Beck University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States
O Hugo Benavides Fordham University, New York, NY, United States Åsa Berggren Lund University, Lund, Sweden José Bettencourt Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas e Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CHAM e FCSH/UNL e UAç, Lisbon, Portugal Laura Brum Bulanti Departamento Interdisciplinario de Sistemas Costeros y Marinos, Centro Universitario Regional del Este, Universidad de la República, Uruguay Nahir Meline Cantar CONICET - Instituto del Hábitat y del Ambiente, Facultad de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Diseño, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina John Carman Bloody Meadows Project, School of History & Cultures, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom Margaret Cox Center for Forensic Anthropology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia Nekbet Corpas Cívicos Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Katia Cytryn The Institute of Archaeology and Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Yael Dansac Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium Manuel de la Calle Vaquero Department of Geography, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
ix
x
Contributors to Volume 1
Helmut De Nardi King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; and Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Bisserka Gaydarska Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom
Margarita Díaz-Andreu Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain; Institut d’Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona (IAUB), Barcelona, Spain; and Departament d’Història i Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Barcelona, Spain
Alessandro Guidi Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy
Jinpeng Du Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China J Kater ina Dvoráková EXARC Journal, The Netherlands Maria Luz Endere Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (UNCPBA), Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Instituto INCUAPA (UE CONICETUNCPBA) - PATRIMONIA, Olavarría, Buenos Aires, Argentina Gary M Feinman Negaunee Integrative Research Center, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, United States Lucio Menezes Ferreira Department of Anthropology, Federal University of Pelotas, Pelotas, Brazil; and Graduate Program in Archaeology, Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Ambika Flavel Center for Forensic Anthropology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia Daniel Franklin Center for Forensic Anthropology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia Jana Esther Fries Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Oldenburg, Germany Maria García-Hernandez Department of Geography, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Thomas D Hall Department of Sociology and Anthropology, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, United States Almudena Hernando Departamento de Prehistoria, Historia Antigua y Arqueología, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain Luis Cesar Herrero Prieto University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain Alvaro Higueras Independent Scholar, Yerevan, Armenia Anders Högberg UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden; and Palaeo-Research Institute, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa Cornelius Holtorf UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden John H Jameson United States National Park Service, International Committee on Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites (ICIP), ICOMOS, Savannah, GA, United States Rosemary A Joyce University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States P Nick Kardulias Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Program in Archaeology, The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, United States
Camila Gianotti García Departamento de Sistemas Agrarios y Paisajes Culturales, Laboratorio de Arqueología del Paisaje y Patrimonio, Centro Universitario Regional del Este, Universidad de la República, Uruguay
Anton Killin InChangE Program and Departments of Philosophy and Biology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany; and Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Kevin Garstki University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, United States
Thomas F King SWCA Environmental Consultants, Silver Spring, MD, United States
Contributors to Volume 1
Christopher J Knüsel PACEA, De la Préhistoire à l’Actuel: Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie, University of Bordeaux, Pessac, France Andrés Laguens Instituto de Antropología de Córdoba, CONICETUniversidad Nacional de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina Thomas E Levy Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability, Qualcomm Institute, University of California, La Jolla, CA, United States Weihong Liu Department of Cultural Heritage, Northwest University, Xi’an, China Giulio Magli Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy Marcello Mannino Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Arkadiusz Marciniak Faculty of Archaeology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna n, Poland Juan Guillermo Martín Laboratorio de Arqueología, Universidad del Norte, Colombia; and Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y Culturales, Panamá Uros Matic Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria Laura McAtackney Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland; and Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Meriel McClatchie School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Alicia Castillo Mena Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Tomás Mendizábal Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y CulturalesdAIP, Edificio de la OCA, San Felipe, Panamá Koji Mizoguchi Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, Nishi Ward, Fukuoka, Japan
Lindsay M Montgomery Department of Anthropology & Centre for Indigenous Studies, University of Toronto, ON, Canada Teresa S Moyer National Park Service, Washington, DC, United States Johannes Müller Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany Jessica Munson Department of Anthropology-Sociology, Lycoming College, Williamsport, PA, United States George P Nicholas Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada Efthymia Nikita Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus Elisabeth Niklasson Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom Bjørnar Julius Olsen Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway Michael J O’Brien Department of Communication, History, and Philosophy, Department of Life Sciences, Texas A&M University, San Antonio, TX, United States Alejandra Pascual-Garrido Primate Models for Behavioral Evolution Lab, Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Ana Pastor Pérez Institut d’Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; Departament de Història i Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; and Cultural Heritage Management Group, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain Jean-Sébastien Pourcelot Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá. Plaza Catedral, San Felipe, Panamá Denise Pozzi-Escot Museo de Pachacamac, Pachacamac, Perú Anna Marie Prentiss Department of Anthropology, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, United States
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Maria Ángeles Querol Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Paz Ramírez Valiente Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom Katharina Rebay-Salisbury Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria Thilo Rehren Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus Artur Ribeiro University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany Felix Riede Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Uzma Z Rizvi Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, United States Ilde Rizzo University of Catania, Catania, Italy Christopher B Rodning Tulane University, Department of Anthropology, New Orleans, LA, United States Michael Brian Schiffer Independent Scientist, Alexandria, VA, United States Eline MJ Schotsmans PACEA, De la Préhistoire à l’Actuel: Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie, University of Bordeaux, Pessac, France; and Centre for Archaeological Science, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia Matthew J Seguin Seguin Archaeological Services, Hamilton, ON, Canada Michael Shanks Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States Neil Smith Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability, Qualcomm Institute, University of California, La Jolla, CA, United States
Louise Steel University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, United Kingdom Mark Q Sutton California State University, Bakersfield, CA, United States Mayali Tafur-Sequera Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia Ignacio Rodríguez Temiño Nemesis, Association for the Research and Defense of Cultural Heritage Against Looting and Illicit Trafficking, Seville, Spain Marcos André Torres de Souza Graduate Program in Archaeology, Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil María Fernanda Ugalde Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador / Museum Rietberg, Zürich, Switzerland Ana Yáñez Vega Department of Administrative Law, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, Madrid, Spain David A Warburton Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China Brent Whitford Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo SUNY, Buffalo, NY, United States Laurie A Wilkie University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States Ezra BW Zubrow Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, United States; McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom; and York University, Toronto, ON, Canada María Laura Zulaica CONICET - Instituto del Hábitat y del Ambiente, Facultad de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Diseño, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES Editors in Chief Efthymia Nikita Associate Professor in Bioarchaeology, Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus Efthymia Nikita studies human skeletal remains in the Mediterranean from prehistoric times to the Middle Ages, examining health, diet, demography, and other important aspects of life in the past, often giving voice to people on the “historical fringe” such as women and children. She obtained a degree in Archeology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She held postdoctoral positions at the British School at Athens and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, as well as a Marie Sk1odowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Sheffield. She has published more than 95 scientific articles and book chapters, including the textbook Osteoarchaeology, which received an honorable mention from the Association of American Publishers for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Awards). She has also authored four open access guides to bioarchaeology and statistical analysis, which are used by thousands of scientists worldwide. She recently became co-editor of Elsevier’s Journal of Archaeological Science, and in 2022 she was awarded the Dan David Prize for her outstanding contribution to the study of the past. Alongside her scientific work, she has written an osteoarchaeology book for children and has coordinated the preparation of a book of educational activities for the archaeological sciences.
Thilo Rehren A.G. Leventis Professor in Archaeological Sciences, Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus. Thilo Rehren completed a Masters and PhD in Earth Sciences, before starting his professional career in 1990 at the newly established Institut für Archäometallurgie at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum in Bochum, Germany. In 1999, he was appointed to the new Chair in Archaeological Materials and Technologies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in London, UK, where he built a major international research group of postgraduate students and postdocs. Following a 5-year secondment to establish and lead UCL Qatar as a postgraduate training and research Centre of Excellence in Museology, Conservation and Archaeology, as part of Education City in Doha, Qatar, he joined the Cyprus Institute in 2017. For a decade, he served as Co-Editor in Chief for the Journal of Archaeological Science and has co-edited a good number of conference proceedings and topical volumes. His research focuses on the reconstruction and understanding of the technological processes related to the manufacture of metals, glass, glazes, and ceramics. For this, he combines concepts and methods developed by the materials and natural sciences in order to shed light on the tremendous achievements of past craftspeople and proto-engineers. He places particular emphasis on the integration of archaeological, scientific, and historical information and on investigating the correlation and cross-fertilization between different crafts and industries in order to understand the evolution of technical understanding within the wider setting of varied cultures and societies. He is proud of the nearly 40 PhD students and 15 postdocs he has had the privilege to supervise; most of them are now advancing archaeological sciences, including holding prestigious chairs and research positions at universities, museums, and research institutes worldwide. Thilo has an extensive publication record in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, often in cooperation with his students and even long after they became colleagues and developed their own research. He has served in numerous appointment and promotion committees and regularly acts as a peer reviewer for leading journals and national and international grant awarding bodies. In 2022, he received the Cyprus Research AwarddDistinguished Researcher. At home, he enjoys looking after eight cats.
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Section Editors Peter F. Biehl Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, United States Peter Biehl is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz. He received his PhD from the University of the Saarland in Germany and did his postdoctoral research at the University of California Berkeley. He has taught at universities in Buffalo, Halle, Freiburg, Cambridge, and Paris. His research focuses on the Neolithic and Chalcolithic in Europe and the Near East, climate change in the past, as well as museums and archaeological heritage. He has written and edited 10 books and more than 100 articles, book chapters, and exhibitions. He is a fellow of the American Council on Education (ACE), the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the German Archaeological Institute. He received the State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor’s Award for Internationalization and the University at Buffalo’s Distinguished Postdoc Mentor Award. He has been serving on the Executive Board and Oscar Montelius Foundation of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) and is currently the co-chair of the EAA Community on Climate Change and Heritage and the initiative for Social Archaeology and Climate Change (SACC). His and his students’ research has been funded by the ACLS, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Belgian American Educational Foundation, British Academy, European Union Leonardo DaVinci, Field Museum, Fulbright, MUSE, NSF, Public Humanities New York, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He has excavated at the Neolithic enclosure of Goseck in Germany, and the West Mound of the UNESCO world culture heritage site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He has worked with artists, musicians, and performers in innovative and collaborative projects including outreach programs with public schools. As director of the Marian E White Anthropology Research Museum at the University at Buffalo, he co-developed the critical museum studies master’s program. He is Academic Editor of PLOS ONE, editor-in-chief of SUNY Press Distinguished Monograph Series of the Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology, as well as on the boards of Archaeological Dialogues, Journal of Neolithic Archaeology, and Les Nouvelles de l’Archéologie. Peter Biehl would like to thank Jacob Brady for his editorial assistance in this project. Shadreck Chirikure Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science & British Academy Global Professor, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Shadreck Chirikure graduated with an MA in Artefact Studies (2002) and a PhD in Archaeology (2005) from University College London. His research work, past, present, and prospective, is focused on six main areas: (i) reconstruction of ancient technologies (e.g., metallurgy, ceramics, etc.); (ii) artefacts, technology, and innovation; (iii) integration of social science theories with scientific techniques to enhance effectiveness of scientific methods; (iv) history of technology; (v) application of scientific techniques to conserve artefacts and sites; and (vi) public engagement through heritage science including exhibitions. This work is pursued through excavations, museum-based projects, laboratory investigations (optical microscopy, SEM-EDS, EPMA, WD-XRF, (LA)-ICP-MS, etc.), and experimental work, bringing together natural and social sciences with humanities. In the process, Chirikure uses the results of discoveries in the field and the laboratory to develop new understanding, conserve heritage, and tackle global challenges. He is a recipient of several prestigious awards, a Fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Chirikure is the author of Metals in Past Societies (Springer, 2015) and Great Zimbabwe: Reclaiming a Confiscated Past (Routledge, 2020). He is Editor in Chief of the journal Archaeometry, Editor in Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African Archaeology, Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Anthropology, and co-editor of the Cambridge History of Technology.
Editor Biographies
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María Luz Endere Professor in Legislation and Cultural Resource Management, Faculty of Social Sciences, National University of the Centre of Buenos Aires Province, Buenos Aires, Argentina Senior Researcher, Program PATRIMONIA, Institute INCUAPA, National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Olavarría, Argentina María Luz Endere’s research focuses on heritage studies, particularly legislation and management, indigenous people’s rights on cultural issues, public perceptions, and sociocultural sustainability of cultural heritage. She obtained a degree in Law from the University of Buenos Aires, a degree in Archaeology from the National University of the Centre of Buenos Aires Province, an MA in Museum and Heritage Studies, and a PhD in Archaeology from University College London. She heads the Interdisciplinary Heritage Studies Program (PATRIMONIA) at the Institute INCUAPA. She has published more than 110 scientific articles and book chapters and 3 books. She was co-editor of the Journal Intersecciones en Antropología and is currently a member of the editorial board of several journals, including the International Journal of Cultural Property. She is the director of the UNESCO Chair in Archaeological Heritage and the Observatory of Cultural Heritage at the National University of the Centre of Buenos Aires Province. In addition to her research, she develops academic management activities, public outreach, and community support of heritage issues.
QIN Ling 秦岭 Associate Professor of Neolithic Archaeology and Archaeobotany at the School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, Beijing, China QIN Ling completed her PhD on Neolithic social complexity in the lower Yangtze River area. Her main research areas include Chinese Neolithic archaeology, field archaeology methods, archaeobotany, archaeological theory, and methodology. She has worked extensively on Neolithic excavations in China, jointly directing fieldwork in many sites at Zhejiang, Shandong, Shaanxi, and Henan. Since 2022, she is the Project Leader at the Tonglin city site at Linzi, Shandong province. Currently, she is also leading the subproject “Livelihood, Resources, and Technology in the Origin of Chinese Civilization” as part of the national research project “Research on the Origin of Chinese Civilization.” She is involved in several other national-level projects, including the major project of the Ministry of Education’s Key Research Base in Humanities and Social Sciences, “Technology and Civilization: Exploring the Formation of Prehistoric Chinese Civilization through Jade Handicraft Industry.” Her current research interests focus primarily on Neolithic jades in Eastern China, early agriculture developments in China, as well as the theory and practice of early civilizations study in a comparative perspective around East Asia.
Ulrike Sommer Senior Lecturer in European Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, United Kingdom Ulrike Sommer is a prehistorian who mainly works on the Early Neolithic of Southeast and Central Europe. She has excavated in Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania, Iraq, and Indonesia. Her current research project “Between the Mountains and the Flood” investigates the Neolithisation of North-West Romania in cooperation with the Museul Iudețean Satu Mare, Romania. Other research interests include lithic technology and lithic raw materials, archaeological theory, the history of archaeology, especially the relation between archaeology and nationalism, and archaeological taphonomy. She obtained her MA and PhD at the Department of Prehistory of Frankfurt University (Germany). She subsequently was Curator at the Open Air Museum Groß Raden (Germany) and worked for the Museums-Association in Lüchow-Danneberg (Germany). She has also worked in a Collaborative Research Centre on the formation of regional identities at Leipzig University (SFB 417). She has taught at Leipzig and Frankfurt Universities as well as at UCL. She is currently teaching courses on the Neolithic of Europe, European Prehistory, Artefact Studies, and the use of Organic Materials at UCL. She is cofounder of the German Workgroup on Archaeological Theory (now TIDA). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory, and she has published more than 70 articles and book chapters on Neolithic archaeology, taphonomy, and public archaeology, as well as 4 edited volumes on themes as diverse as archaeology and memory, the history of archaeology, archaeological theory, and national traditions in European archaeology.
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Dmitriy Voyakin Director of the International Institute for Central Asian Studies Director General of Archaeological Expertise Scientific Organization Member of the National Commission for UNESCO and ICESCO of the Republic of Kazakhstan
Dmitriy Voyakin began his professional career as a Research Scientist in 1997, subsequently advancing to the roles of Senior Research Scientist and ultimately Head at the Department of Documentation and Archaeological Conservation in the Institute of Archaeology MES, Almaty, Kazakhstan, a position held in earnest since 2005. He obtained a Master of Arts (1999) from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, graduating with Honors, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy (2010) from the Institute of Archaeology, Republic of Kazakhstan. He served as General Director of “Archaeological Expertise” LLP beginning in 2006 and took on the role of Director for the intergovernmental organization “International Institute for Central Asian Studies” in 2018. Simultaneously, he served as a Delegate to the World Heritage Committee (2014–2017) and as Secretary-General for Kazakhstan’s National World Heritage Committee (2014–2018). He is a contributing Member of the National Commission of the Republic of Kazakhstan for UNESCO and ICESCO since 2018. He has served as field director for more than 10 archaeological expeditions, including several with an international scope. These included permanent archaeological expeditions at Otrar, Kayalyk, Akyrtas, Taraz, Sygnak, Dzhan Kala, Dzhankent, Dzhuvara, the medieval Christian site Ilibalyk, and archaeological explorations at sites situated on the now arid seabed of the Aral Sea. He has published 21 books and more than 200 scientific papers. He functioned as a UNESCO regional facilitator for the Silk Road serial transnational nomination and played a principal role as author and executor in the establishment of archaeological park projects, specifically “Kone Taraz” (Ancient Taraz), “Ancient Shymkent,” and “Kultobe-Yassy-Turkestan.”
FOREWORD
Archaeology is a cumulative discipline; new data, facts, and knowledge are constantly being added to what little we know of the past, rather than just replacing old data and observations. In this sense, we do not see this 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology as a replacement of the 1st edition, published in 2008, and which continues to attract good citations every year (Fig. 1). Instead, we see this new edition rather as a 2nd volume, offering additional knowledge, data, interpretations, and discussions, often presenting new viewpoints, and looking at the archaeological record from different perspectives. While earlier facts and data remain valuable, increased knowledge enables improved interpretations, and old interpretations, sometime not more than prejudice and assumption passed on as orthodoxy, are finally becoming obsolete as new voices, concepts, and questions advance the discourse. Our ambition for the 2nd edition was to be as multivocal and inclusive as possible, to localize contributions and contributors, to enable a cross-cultural comparison. We are very grateful to the nearly 400 colleagues who with their entries made this a truly global work. The overall structure, the selection of entries, and the recruitment of contributors for this 2nd edition is the collective work of the Editorial Team, who shared the ambition for an encyclopedia in the spirit of an Archaeology of One World.1 The demographics of this team is no coincidence. Half of us are from continental Europe, and the others hail from Africa, Central Asia, China, and South America. While two are based in the United Kingdom and one in the United States, none grew up theredindeed, between us we have six different mother tongues. This multivocality is similarly reflected in the current academic affiliations of the 378 individual entry contributors. The largest number (69) is based in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom (47), the two traditional powerhouses of global archaeology; together with authors based in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, they make up about 35% of the total contributors. Continental Europe hosts in total 144 contributors, nearly 40% of the total, followed by 57 authors, about 15% of the total, being based in Asia. Some 27 authors are based in Latin America, roughly 7% of the total, while only 14 are based in Africa, just below 4% of all our authors (Fig. 2). Much could, and probably should, be written about this distribution, and why archaeology still is so overwhelmingly dominated by the Global North. One facet of this picture may suffice to highlight: our numbers refer to the current academic affiliations of the authors, and not their personal, or even scholarly, country of origin. A detailed study of the individual biographies would quickly highlight the strong flow of talent from the Global South to institutions in the Global North; thus, the picture is heavily skewed in
Fig. 1
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Annual citation rates for the 1st edition of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology, showing its ongoing currency as a scholarly resource.
Several of us were influenced in their formative years by the unforgotten Peter Ucko; we hope he would approve of our endeavor.
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Fig. 2 Heat map of the academic affiliation of the 378 individual contributors to the Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2nd edition. Both the United States and the United Kingdom benefit from significant inward migration of scholars born elsewhere. The map also reflects the dearth of professional positions in archaeology in much of Africa, in addition to the biased network of the editorial team.
favor of US and UK affiliations by the effects of different economic strengths of academic institutions. This goes directly hand-inhand with the differences in opportunities for successive generations of emerging scholars in different countries, rather than reflecting a somehow natural imbalance in talent among the different regions of the World. To hazard a guess, the heat map shows large swathes of Africa not represented by a single author, while there are probably more African-born archaeologists working in the United States and United Kingdom alone than in all of sub-Saharan Africa taken together. Indeed, several of them have contributed here, making their voice heard. Other important regions are woefully underrepresented, toodparticularly Arabia and Southeast Asia, and not for a dearth of archaeology or scholars! While much still needs to be done, we are confident that we have taken a decisive step in the right direction and achieved a diversity of contributors that would not have been possible a generation ago. This diverse representation contributes essential localized understandings of the archaeological record across geographies and time periods, allowing nuanced comparison of theories, methods, interpretations, and ethics in one place. Different regions of the world have their own traditionsdfor example, African, Chinese, Latin American, and so ondwhich collectively makes archaeology a very healthy discipline. Issues of ethics, access to materials, and availability of resources continue to bear on archaeological knowledge production and are also reflected in this 2nd edition. Undoubtedly, this global profile and the myriad of local issues presented offer readers an unparalleled opportunity to explore World Archaeology across its breadth and depth in one place. While this posed a lot of interesting challenges not only for the editorial team, but also for the technical team, we are glad we took on these challenges and felt it a mere inconvenience well worth the effort. We hope and trust that any issues arising from our ambition for a truly global representation of archaeology will be generously overlooked by the readers and reviewers of this volume. Some lamentable gaps remain in our coverage, something we hope will be addressed in the next edition, when times hopefully enable an even more balanced coverage, and sufficient freedom and support for scholars worldwide to devote time to sharing their unique knowledge, viewpoints, and experiences with a global audience. For now, we thank wholeheartedly those many colleagues who accepted our invitation to contribute entries to this Encyclopedia and made the whole project possible. Peter Biehl, Shadreck Chirikure, María-Luz Endere, Efthymia Nikita, Ling Qin, Thilo Rehren, Ulrike Sommer, Dmitriy Voyakin
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are most grateful to the Acquisition team of Elsevier for entrusting us the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology and for fully supporting our ambition for an inclusive and diverse team of Section Editors and contributors for this. We are grateful for the blessing that the editor of the 1st edition, Deborah M. Pearsall, gave us to take on this challenge, and for the high standard she set in the design and content quality; we are sure that the 1st edition will continue to be useful for future generations of scholars and retain its currency for many years to come. Mahmoud Mardini created some 150 maps for the new edition, ensuring consistency across entries in design and appearance; we are sure he learned much more about geography and global archaeology in the process than he ever thought he would! Our most sincere thanks go to the 378 contributors who have given their time and knowledge to write the entries; it is their scholarship and viewpoints that will help shaping the future of archaeology on a global scale, setting the agenda for future generations. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our team of Section Editors, for sharing our vision and shaping their sections, and then identifying and persuading the leading, and often the future leading scholars in each field within their section to contribute. They graciously handled the entries in their section through peer review and language edits, and often even full translation. We thank Ilia Kovalev for the translation of several Russian texts into English, too, done at short notice. We are most grateful for the ever-supportive technical team, led first by Rekha Nimesh and then by Nitesh Shrivastava and Prashanth Ravichandran, for managing the production through multiple rounds of page proofs and corrections and for their patience and persistence in guiding this project to a timely anddwe trustdsuccessful end. Efthymia Nikita and Thilo Rehren
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Cultural Ecology Mark Q. Suttona and E.N. Andersonb, a California State University, Bakersfield, CA, United States; and b University of California, Riverside, CA, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Basic Definitions Basic Principles Beginnings Key Issues Culture as an Adaptive Mechanism Traditional Knowledge Systems Controlling the Environment Cultural Ecology and Archaeology Summary and Future Directions References
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Definitions and brief historical context of the field of Cultural Ecology. Link between ethnographic approaches and archaeological problems to better enable archaeologists to study past human adaptations. The study of past human/environment interactions can provide the frameworks for solutions to contemporary problems, such as land use practices, technology, and pharmaceuticals.
Abstract Cultural ecology, a subdivision and approach in human ecology, is the anthropological study of the relationships and interactions, past and present, between humans, their culture, societies, and their physical environments. Cultural ecologists and archaeologists study many aspects of culture and environment, including what societies did to solve their subsistence problems, how groups of people understood their environment, and how they shared their knowledge of the environment.
Introduction Cultural ecology, a subdivision and approach in human ecology, is the anthropological study of the relationships and interactions between humans, their culture, societies, and their physical environments. As all societies, including past ones, interact with their environment, archaeologists study what past societies did to meet their subsistence and other basic needs, how they understood their environment, and how they shared their knowledge of the environment. Archaeologists look to discover both successful and unsuccessful adaptations to better inform contemporary practices.
Overview Basic Definitions Ecology is the study of how living things interact with their environments and in the 19th century it became a rapidly growing branch of biology. Cultural ecology is the study of how humans and their cultural groups relate to their environments (Sutton and Anderson, 2014). Culture, in anthropological usage (Tylor, 1871), refers to ideas, knowledge systems, communication systems, and behaviors that are shared in a group. The group is understood to be larger than a nuclear family and smaller than the human species, but it can be almost anything in between.
Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2nd edition, Volume 1
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Cultural Ecology
Groups defined by a suite of shared traits are generally called societies (aka “cultures”). Some larger societies may contain enclaves of other societies (ethnic groups) and/or specialized groups (e.g., subcultures). Models of past societies (archaeological cultures) are based on suites of archaeological traits. These divisions are deliberately left imprecise to allow easy reference. If we need to be technical about dividing humanity, we usually use language and geography. Culture is simply too broad and multivocal to be defined precisely. Thus, cultural ecology studies all the ways that learned, shared behavior influences and is influenced by the environment. Topics range from names for plants and animals to reconstructing the foodways of past societies.
Basic Principles First, ecology is a systems view of the world. Biotic realms are divided into ecosystems, in which all living things are related, directly or indirectly, by feeding, communication, competition, their physical (abiotic) environment, and other influences. Life forms are connected by food chains and webs such that all feeders in an ecosystem, including humans, are connected with each other. There is, fundamentally, only one ecosystem: the earth. All beings on earth are related, however indirectly, by food webs, pollution generated through metabolism, and the like. However, it makes considerable analytic sense to divide the earth into bounded subsystems. These can be defined by drainage systems (all the land drained by specific rivers), or by being bounded examples of particular environmental types. Examples of the latter are a desert like the Mojave with its own special biota, a rainforest like that of the Pacific Northwest that is separated from other rainforests, or a lake like Lake Baikal with a high level of endemicsdlife forms found only in a single place. Cultural ecologists are acutely aware of ecosystems. They must also analyze human social and cultural systems, such as local economic systems, communication networks, kinship and relationship links, and traditional rivalries. Ecology tends to focus on how organisms get nutrients, find shelter, defend against predators and diseases, and deal with natural fluctuations of weather and climate. It is directly concerned with demography, and thus with mating and reproduction, and with conflict. In humans, that means considerable attention to war. This view of humanity in terms of complex systems marked out by material flows has been influential in archaeology (e.g., Flannery, 1982). Living things have to reproduce or die out, and natural populations expand until limited by shortage of a particular resource. As Justus Liebig showed for nutrients, the scarcest necessary resource limits the population. If food is adequate except for, say, vitamin B12, the population will be limited to the level supported by that vitamin. On the other hand, sources of a given nutrient can be various. B12 is notoriously hard to find, being largely confined to fungi and those that eat them, but it is available in mushrooms, yeasts, fermented foods that have yeasts or related organisms in them, and animal foods. Traditional people have found an incredible variety of ways to satisfy the need for this vitamin, often by developing complex fermentation technologies. Protein, necessary in much larger quantities but much more widely found, can be gotten with equal ease from game animals, carrion, fish, insects, fungi (again), beans, peas, nuts, and other foods. Population growth is also limited by hard times: droughts, floods, fires, long cold periods, and the like. These have been important in the human past, and are studied by archaeologists. Research into past climates and their effects on human populations has become a major branch of archaeology (e.g., Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes, 2020). War was less studied than other demographic emergencies, but its connection with subsistence and population was explored. Results have been indeterminate; war is a complex phenomenon, defying simple explanations (see Turchin, 2016). Disease may be the most neglected demographic factor in the cultural-ecological literature as that subject has been left largely to medical anthropology. In addition, cultural ecologists record traditional and local knowledge that is of value to the wider world. Thousands of useful drugs used by westerners have been derived from traditional medicines, more are being tested and developed almost daily. Ancient crops of the Andes and Tibet, such as potatoes and barley respectively, have become important worldwide. Long-established land management techniques, such as used in Indonesia and Guatemala, are inspiring new ideas in the greater arena. The accumulated cultural knowledge of billions of people over tens of thousands of years is available and is a tremendous resource for our resourceshort world.
Beginnings The term “cultural ecology” was introduced by Julian Steward in his book Theory of Culture Change (1955). It was adopted quickly, with courses under that term being taught at major universities by 1960. By that time, studies of humans in their environments were fairly old. The field had been put on a historical and scientific footing by George Perkins Marsh in his classic Man and Nature (2003, orig. 1864), a book still well worth reading. By the 1930s, “social ecology” was a widely used term for human intergroup and groupenvironment relations. The term “human ecology” was introduced in 1907 for a more comprehensive, biologically grounded field. White (1949, 1959) argued for a materialist and evolutionary view of anthropology and directly influenced Steward and his students. Steward took a long view of the field, stretching back into prehistory. He also took a comparative view of cultural groups. A major part of his book was devoted to classifying human societies into four “levels of sociocultural integration”: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. For Steward, these were ideal types, useful for classifying societies but not intended as an evolutionary sequence. He was also aware that they merge into each other; there is no sharp break at any point in the sequence. “Band” referred to very small groups (typically of 50–100 people, sometimes called micro-bands), quite mobile, living by hunting and gathering wild foods, and sharing what they found and are often termed “foragers.” They are usually patrilineal, tracing
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descent through the father, but often matrilineal (through the mother) or bilateral (both lines stressed). Steward was aware of, but did not stress, the fact that bands often form parts of larger societies (macro-bands), up to 500 or more, that meet for rare ceremonies or at especially abundant food sources. His research on such groups was largely among the Great Basin Shoshone, who had been affected by contact with Euroamericans and had stopped meeting in the great pinyon-nut gathering sessions that had formerly brought hundreds together. The best-known band-level societies, from a cultural-ecological point of view, are the San and Hadza of Africa. The smaller and more isolated of the Indigenous Australian groups and the Ache’ and other foragers of South America are also well documented. Steward’s “tribe” was meant to refer to groups with sizable populations with a more complex political structure, typically a hierarchy with informal leaders and prestigious kingroups. The larger of the Indigenous Australian groups, as well as most Native American societies, early archaeologically known European societies, and many others worldwide fell into his definition. Today, however, “tribe” is rarely used in Steward’s sense, primarily because in the United States and Canada it has come to refer to legally defined entities with a formal political structure under national laws, while in the literature on Asia it usually refers to montane or forest minorities who have much more complex societies than Steward’s “tribes.” “Chiefdom” has fared better, being the subject of considerable research in archaeology as well as cultural anthropology. The term refers to an organized, settled society with hundreds to tens of thousands of people, with a formalized hierarchy normally involving ranked lineages: the descendants of one important figure have power over the descendants of less notable persons, and so on down to people of commoner or even servile status. There has only been some minor adjusting of Steward’s definition (Sutton and Anderson, 2014). There is often one elder or most important person in the dominant lineage who is a “chief,” hence the term. Chiefdoms range from the Northwest Coast First Nations and other complex Native American societies to the pre-state Hawaiians and other Polynesians, the Bronze Age societies of most of Europe, the maritime societies of Melanesia, and similar groups around the world (Many of the Asian “tribes” are actually chiefdoms). This term too has come under criticism, but defines a real type of society, as shown by Earle (1993). Also significant in a rather grim way is the finding by Turchin (2016) that chiefdoms and early states are particularly violent. They were densely populated and rich enough to have many conflicts, but had not developed the full legal systems of more complex states. The archaeological record shows an uneven but real fall in violence as states get more legally sophisticated and bureaucratized. “States” are very complex societies, defined by having a class system with elites separate from commoners. Usually, the definition rests on the elites being able to call up legitimate violence while the commoners cannot. However, most states allow anyone to exercise necessary violence in defense of self, family, and property, and most delegate much law enforcementdincluding use of forcedto local groups such as police. States typically have cities, formal architecture, bureaucracies, public services, organized religion, and some way of recording datadusually writing, but sometimes such devices as the quipus of the Inca, which recorded data by a system of knotted strings. Such societies also have specialized workers (at least in religion), cross-cutting groups and loyalties, and status hierarchies. “Civilization” has been commonly used to refer to state organizations, especially in the archaeological literature, but debates swirl around the exact definition of the word. In the premodern world, most states were ruled by royal dynasties, recalling the head lineages of chiefdoms. Cultural ecology was developed greatly by Steward’s students, a particularly brilliant and innovative group of people. Elman Service and, initially, Marshall Sahlins converted Steward’s types into an evolutionary orderdband to tribe to chiefdom to statedbut recognized that a society could move from more to less complex, skip a step, or otherwise avoid a mechanical progression from simple to complex (Sahlins and Service, 1960). Even with these recognitions, they saw ecological realities as causing people to learn more and more, increase populations, and thus be forced eventually to increase complexity, with foraging bands surviving only in remote and marginal environments. History and archaeology show that movement from one sociocultural level to anotherdeither up or down in complexitydis so common, and so varied in cause, that evolutionary schemes are rather rare today, though strong arguments for them are still advanced (Johnson and Earle, 2000). Sahlins went on to a less materialist form of theorizing, with work ranging widely over economics, politics, and thought-systems (Sahlins, 1972, 1976). Harris (1968) adopted a much more materialist view of ecology, looking at calories, protein, demography, and other biological mattersdthe classic subjects of ecology in its original form. He advocated a “research strategy” of beginning with these when trying to explain any cultural institution or change. This continues to be a useful strategy, but anthropologists have always been aware that people interpret the world in countless ways, underdetermined by biological factors. We all need protein, but whether we get it from beef, lamb, beans, yeast, fish, or any combination of foods depends on long and highly contingent cultural histories. Harris could explain much of the choice by what was easily available when a given society was developing, but Sahlins (among others) pointed out that this did not go far enough (Sahlins, 1976). Other Stewardians, Andrew Vayda and Roy Rappaport, studied war, religion, and farming in highland New Guinea. Rappaport (1968) showed that the complex interaction of pig-raising, sweet potato farming, and religion explained much of the timing of festivals: pig populations built up and were ultimately reduced by feasting at grand celebrations. The separation of “religion” from “subsistence” in earlier ethnographies had generally obscured the close and important connection of religion and ecology (Rappaport, 1971). This connection has been widely studied and Rappaport’s student Robert Netting became a leading exponent of the field. Netting (1986) wrote a valuable synthesis and carried out a worldwide cultural-ecological study of smallholder production that showed that small-scale traditional farmers were ecologically and economically extremely sharp, knowledgeable, and successful, in contradiction to stereotypes of “ignorant peasants” too common in the development literature (Netting, 1981, 1993; Netting et al., 1984).
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Another Rappaport student, Stephen Lansing, showed that a hierarchy of temples managed Bali’s irrigation system, managing excellent control by a combination of sensitive knowledge of local ecology and strong credibility such that their rulings were enforced. This remains one of the best demonstrations that religion and ecology go together, with religion in traditional societies often developing through feedback between social beliefs and ecological reality (Lansing, 1991; Lansing et al., 2017). Yet another Rappaport mentee, James Wood, has recently contributed a major work, The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming (2020) that brings the basic concerns of cultural ecology forward into the 21st century. Wood synthesizes cultural-ecological findings with related work in economics, biology, and history. Vayda, after documenting warfare in highland New Guinea, retired to take a longer look at the whole issue of cause and explanation in anthropology, producing a book that should be a required reading for ecological anthropologists, Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes (2009). Another student of Steward, Eric Wolf, went on from cultural ecology to invent the field of political ecology (Wolf, 1972), which has grown to an important field in its own right. Wolf’s fellow student and close associate Sidney Mintz studied sugar plantations in the Caribbean world, and traced their history, bloody with slave-trading, piracy, and war; his classic Sweetness and Power (1985) was influential far beyond anthropology, bringing cultural-ecological thinking to history, economics, and political science. By the early 1960s, cultural ecology had escaped from Steward’s world and been accepted across anthropology and archaeology. The first to propose a different research agenda was Frake (1962). His work centered on linguistics, from dictionary-making to studying how languages mix, and he was also concerned with improving ethnography. He thus urged anthropologists to be careful to get the exact meaning of words in other languagesdto get the “native categories.” This approach was influential on ethnobiology, the branch of cultural ecology that stems directly from Frake and his coworkers such as Conklin (1957). This field studies names for and uses of plants and animals in various societies. It involves, for instance, going through an area with local people, asking them the names of plants, collecting specimens for botanical identification, recording all uses and methods of preparation, and producing a monograph that satisfies Frake’s call for description that allows performance. This work has directly influenced archaeology through providing key information on plants, animals, and management systems that turn up in the archaeological record. That fact is due in some part to Stewardians such as Rappaport, but also to another independent developer of cultural ecology, Clifford Geertz. In Agricultural Involution (1963) Geertz recorded the tragic effects of Dutch colonial policy on Javanese agriculture: with stagnant technology, rising population, and increasing Dutch interference with the economy to advance Dutch interests above those of the Javanese, agriculture had become more and more labor-intensive, more productive per acre but not per worker, and more demanding of time without producing much more profit. It thus involuted. The term and the concept have been variously evaluated since, but what matters here is that Geertz added an interpretive dimension, based on a deep understanding of social processes and histories. For him, cultural ecology was a cultural group’s interpretation of their adjustment to surroundings, and the anthropologist’s task is to interpret their insights and knowledges (Geertz, 1973). Cultural ecology has merged over time with other approaches. Human ecology, largely a biological field, has taken increasing account of culturedboth the depth and extent of cultural learning and the range of cultural diversity. Human evolutionary ecology (HEE) has taken on broad Darwinian theories of human action. Initial focus on calories and protein, shared with Harris’ materialism, has expanded to concern for behaviors ranging from mate choice to language history. This has forced HEE theorists to take account of culture, resulting in biocultural models such as those of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd (e.g., 2005) that are conceptually close to Steward’s but have benefited from recent developments in biology. A number of other subfields have spun off from cultural ecology: historical ecology (and ecological history), spiritual ecology and ethnoecology, which has since been influential. The latter is close to Steward’s vision but with insights from political ecology and without Steward’s four categories of societies. Human evolutionary ecology has focused tightly on the application of Darwinian theory to human ecology. It thus looks far back in the fossil record, concerning itself with the progression from largely arboreal early ancestors in the genus Australopithecus to more bipedal and terrestrial forms and finally the birth of Homo. Homo developed from H. habilis, barely different from the Australopithecines, to H. erectus (in the broad sense), more or less an evolutionary stage term, referring to humans during the period when their bodies and brains increased to modern size. There followed a radiation of species with almost-modern brain size and, usually, more bony and rugged skulls than ours today. All these changes, and still more the behavioral changes that went with them, have led to speculation and thence to search for evidence in the fossil record. Comparison with contemporary hunting-gathering bands is standard. One conclusion of all this work is that the “paleo diet” was, in reality, anything that could be eaten and provide nutrition. Even deadly poisonous plants are widely eaten by foragers, who have learned ways to detoxify them.
Key Issues Culture as an Adaptive Mechanism The primary mechanism by which humans adapt to their environment is culture. Compared to biology, culture is an extremely flexible and rapid adaptive mechanism because “behavioral responses to external environmental forces can be acquired, transmitted, and modified within the lifetimes of individuals” (Henry, 1995: 1). Since Steward, cultural ecology has studied culture asdamong other thingsdan adaptive system that encodes useful knowledge on how to get food, shelter, and other needs. Each society, including archaeological ones, has a distinct adaptation and individuals in societies are born into a system operating within a given
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environment. Traditional societies tend to be more influenced by the “natural” environment while industrialized societies seem more influenced by socioeconomic and technological environments. As the natural (abiotic and biotic) and cultural environments change, a group must adjust and there is a constant interplay between cultural practices and biological adaptations. People within a society choose from a variety of solutions to problems, and as some solutions become unavailable, others present themselves. Each society has institutions and organizations and any specific solution to a problem must mesh with them. If the solutions are valid (adequate), the society survives. Of importance is the fact that there may be multiple sets of valid solutions. Some solutions fail and are abandoned while others may be poor but continue to be used with diminished viability. A common example today is monocrop agriculture, which goes back to early states in the Near East but now accompanies heightened risk from diseases, pests, climate change, urbanization, and other stressors that are less deadly to diversified systems. Different societies will use the same space in different manners and this use will be reflected in their settlement patterns across space and time. People, their activities, residences, work localities, facilities, and sacred places, are located across the landscape in culturally significant ways. Settlement pattern depends on a variety of factors; for example, hunter-gatherers would utilize a valley floor quite differently than farmers. Technology is the result of need, available materials, innovation, and influence from other societies. It is mostly through technology, rather than biology, that humans have adapted to virtually every ecosystem. Technology can be general (a hammer can be used for many tasks) or designed and used for specific tasks (a space suit). Complex technology had allowed for the colonization of areas that could not previously support human life, such as Antarctica, the ocean floor, and outer space. Another important cultural component is storage. While all plants and animals store energy (e.g., fat) within their bodies and many animals (e.g., squirrels) store food outside their bodies, storage by humans differs in two major ways: scale and technology. Most human groups utilize storage on a massive scale, and technology (e.g., milling, drying, roasting) plays an important role. Humans also “store” resources that are living, such as a herd of cattle. People often construct special facilities to store resources, such as granaries, cairns, silos, and warehouses. The role and scale of storage may have played a role in the development of complex societies (e.g., Testart, 1982; Binford, 1990). Humans also have a need to feel in control of their environmentsdto understand (or believe they understand) processes and to control them to at least some point. A great deal of cultural-ecological knowledge is tied up in understandings of natural processes. Some of these involve erroneous inferences (such as the widespread idea that earthquakes are caused by a giant animal moving underground). Some such inferences may not matter; willow bark tea relieves pain, whether one believes that the relief is due to spiritual power or to anti-inflammatory salicylic acid in the bark. Verified knowledge is apt to be more useful. On the other hand, social and political factors often influence knowledge and practice at least as much as utility does.
Traditional Knowledge Systems All societies, past and present, have obtained and categorized knowledge about their environments. The vast majority of such knowledge is passed verbally from generation to generation but its application would result in some archaeological signature. Many individuals have specialized knowledge relating to medicine, religion, or other fields. All societies use both empirical and nonempirical science. Anthropologists generally call nonemperical knowledge “religion,” but few traditional societies make the distinction. Often, nonempirical knowledge is gained by specific individuals under “special” circumstances, such as while under the influence of a drug. In some societies, such knowledge has an equal, and sometimes privileged, status with empirical knowledge. This ethnoecological (or archaeoecological) information (the classification and knowledge of the environment possessed by a society) is very extensive and includes information on virtually every scientific division in western science. The study of the classification, use, and knowledge of the biotic (living) environment (past and present) is called ethnobiology and is a major component of cultural ecology. It includes studies on human diet, classificatory systems, ritual, and the knowledge and use of plants and animals. The wealth of knowledge encoded in even the most “simple” society has proved to be vast and uncounted new medicines, foods, and industrial crops continue to be developed from traditional plant and animal sources. Agricultural practices are being reformed in many areas, due to the special knowledge of local people. The study of the native classification and use of plants is called ethnobotany. Plants are used for a great variety of purposes, including food, building materials, tools, textiles, decoration, among others. If one is dependent on plants for these purposes, one’s knowledge of plants would have to be considerable. A detailed understanding of plant locations, season of availability, general chemistry, durability, and biology is required for successful exploitation. Horticulturalists and agriculturalists require a more detailed knowledge of certain specific (domesticated) plants in order to understand growth cycles, nutritional requirements, pest control, and fertility. Inadequate knowledge could result in poor timing and decisions, resulting in crop failure. Ethnozoology is the study of the knowledge, use, and significance of animals (invertebrates and vertebrates). Such knowledge includes the biology, seasonality, reproduction, edibility, and utilization of animals. Some species may be used for food, some for skins, some for bone, some for poison, and for many other things. The more intimate the knowledge one has about different animals, the greater flexibility one has in using them. Ethnomedicine includes knowledge of setting broken bones and the like, but it involves more ethnopharmacology, the classification and use of plants, animals, and other substances for medical purposes. The field also includes the knowledge and use of substances to alter one’s reality (e.g., hallucinogenic drugs). In traditional societies, the people who specialize in medicine are often the same people who specialize in religion, and the two fields are often combined by a single practitioner.
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In addition to the biotic environment, all societies obtain and classify information on the abiotic (nonliving) environment, including both terrestrial and nonterrestrial elements. A knowledge of soils and soil types can be critical, especially for agriculturalists. Yet soil type can indicate the presence of other important resources, such as plants, animals, water, or minerals. Knowing, predicting, and controlling the weather is important in all societies. In deserts (e.g., Western Australia, southern Africa, and northern Africa) the ability to track rain is essential to knowing where water can be obtained and where animals are likely to be. Agricultural societies (including our own) place an even greater emphasis on weather and its control. All societies have some classification and explanation of the changing sky. Astronomical observations by traditional peoples have revealed regular patterns of celestial movement, such as of the sun and moon, and some not so regular occurrences, such as comets. Every society has some explanation for these patterns and occurrences and many incorporate them into belief systems regulating world renewal, agricultural cycles, and other important cultural phenomena. This is also true of past societies, and the study of the astronomy of past groups is called archaeoastronomy. For at least tens of thousands of years, art has been the way in which people have demonstrated how they feel about the environment. Art has portrayed not only animals and plants, but also cosmological schemes and symbolized religious philosophies. Ecologically related theorizing on myth, music and art includes the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1964–1971). Although many western scientists consider ethnoknowledge to be inferior, it continues to be expropriated by western companies and a large number of products, including medicines, foods, fibers, agricultural techniques, and philosophy have been adopted by western groups. There is now a serious concern regarding the intellectual property rights of the traditional peoples who amassed the knowledge (Brush and Stabinsky, 1996; Laird, 2002). As traditional societies disappear, much of their knowledge is lost. Recording such knowledge is a critical issue.
Controlling the Environment All societies employ practices designed to exert at least some level of control over their resources and environment whether through their ability to influence the supernatural, to change the course of a river, or through air conditioning. Control can manifest at several scales, from the management of individual plants to entire landscapes, and for a variety of maximizing interests, shortterm or long-term. The access to, and exploitation of, resources is determined by some factor, such as kinship or wealth, with some being individually owned and others being communally owned or open access. Generally, domestication is defined in relation to agriculture. In that context, a domesticated species is one in which humans have developed some intentional and detectable genetic control over a species, such that the domesticated form is different from anything in the wild. A more expansive definition of domestication could mean control in a more general sense. All societies have methods to exercise some control over, and so domesticate, their environment (whether these are effective or not is another matter). Technology is a factor, as someone with a bulldozer can impact the environment to a greater degree than someone with a stone axe. Some alteration of the environment is undirected, but much manipulation is planned and conducted for specific purposes. Active environmental manipulation is the purposeful, physical alteration of groups of species and of ecosystems, essentially the active manipulation of landscapes (e.g., burning, clearing forests, large-scale cultivation, damming rivers). Ritual activities designed to maintain the environment in its “domesticated” state, include world renewal ceremonies, fertility rituals, and even human sacrifice. Resource management is generally practiced on a smaller scale than environmental manipulation. Active resource management includes pruning plant species to enhance productivity or beauty. Most species are managed such that they remain “wild,” but intensive management can lead to domestication. Some animals are also actively managed. Another way to manage a resource, such as a water hole, is to limit access to it. Resources can also be managed through passive means. Some resources are managed ritually, as part of religious activities. In some cases, resources could be managed by social means, such as special family or clan relationships (e.g., totems) with some resource. In other cases, certain resources, such as meat or milk, may be avoided at specific times, such as only being consumed during ritual activities and so lessening the demand for that resource. Knowledge itself is a resource, managed both actively (through learning and experience) and passively (encoded into ritual). These skills center on the use of resources currently in the environment. If the environment occupied by a certain group contained many different ecozones, considerable skill and knowledge would be needed to exploit those ecozones. Retention of “old” knowledge may be a safeguard against bad times. Another way to analyze environmental manipulation and resource management techniques is through studies of decisionmaking. All groups and all individuals make decisions regarding their actions in any given situation. As all systems are dynamic, constant adjustment is necessary. We somehow assume that the process of decision-making is rational and well-thought-out, but bad decisions are common. People make poor decisions for a number of reasons, including incomplete information, reliance on emotion, or just plain error. Decisions are based largely on information (new or old). However, no one can possibly take account of all the things in one’s immediate environment. Economic theory assumes that humans act from “perfect information,” but this is never true. Anthropologists, therefore, must consider decision-making under the assumption of imperfect information. This, in turn, involves studying our simplifying premises: humans simplify, generalize, and assume that other people are more like us than they really are. In dealing with people, we routinely believe that they will do about as we would, even if their circumstances are different.
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The knowledge base of past and contemporary traditional peoples is usually very impressive; often greater than that of professional biologists working in the same area. The sheer quantity of information presents a major problem in systematizing, storing, and retrieving information. Before information can be used to make a decision, it must first be obtained, classified, and shared with others. To people who make their living on such resources and who depend on good decisions being made, resource information is a very high priority. Resource monitoring is one technique that everyone uses. People pay attention to the status of what is around them, the condition of resources, presence and absence of things, and opportunities. In many cases, people will gather information on specific resources. In addition to the data on the actual resource, one could consider information on travel time, social opportunities, and the like. Information is gathered constantly, both as an adjunct to what one is doing, or by conscious effort. Even when traveling to a specific place, hunter-gatherers will rarely travel in a straight line. By meandering, information regarding a variety of resources, such as the condition of plants and the movement of animals, can be gathered and processed. Scheduling, the planning of when to move and which resources to exploit, also requires good information. If two resources are available at the same time, a decision on which one to use may have to be made. If schedules are not adhered to, serious problems could result.
Cultural Ecology and Archaeology Steward already included archaeology in his view of the field; he was trained, like most of his generation of American anthropologists, in the “four fields”dcultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic anthropology. Archaeologists immediately found his work useful. Flannery (1972) published an early review of the field. The sociocultural types made a useful classification scheme, and those who believed they could imply cultural evolution tested such theories archaeologically (Results are still under debate.) More important was the focus on food, clothing, shelter, demography, disease, and other ecological topics, in contrast to the psychological and linguistic interests that dominated much of cultural anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s. Archaeologists had a new body of explanatory theory they could directly test in the field. An idea that influenced cultural ecology and archaeology was Ester Boserup’s theory (1965) that population pressure would stimulate intensification of agriculture and higher production. This has been evaluated over time and found wanting, but it has stimulated the best work on population and ecology, recently reviewed and extended by Wood (2020). Demography had already moved from cultural ecology to archaeology; the leading Mesoamericanist George Cowgill discussed Boserup and others in a major article (Cowgill, 1975). Archaeologists drew on cultural ecology in studies of climate relationships to change over time and other fields. Human ecology added studies of foraging efficiency, looking at such matters as travel costs, patch choice (Bettinger and Grote, 2016), preparation costs, and other practical variables. Many studies of cultural dynamics have examined collapse (e.g., Faulseit, 2016; Middleton, 2017). An early and widely-confirmed finding is that traditional people know exquisitely well what they are doingdfar better than outside interferers (see e.g., Geertz, 1963; Lansing, 1991; Wood, 2020 from the cited materials). They know the most effective ways to get what they want from often difficult environments. An example of cultural ecology in action is found in Maya studies. Reconstructing ancient Maya societies has benefited from deciphering Maya writing and other traditional means, but also from studying Maya settlement patterns, foodways, city planning, demography, and health. Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR), using lasers to see through rainforest canopies, has allowed discovery of an enormous number of new buildings, and even new cities, thus extending knowledge of settlement patterns and possible population sizes. Maya agriculture and forestry were adequate to support a dense population for centuries, in spite of a rainforest environment with thin soils. Cultural ecology reveals that this involved extremely thorough knowledge of where to plant, from probing the soil to ascertain depth to managing regrowth of old fields to maximize nutrient production in a short time (e.g., through maximizing growth of nitrogen-fixing plants). Water was trapped in reservoirs, sometimes dug into the ground. Terracing was used on slopes. The Maya knew a wide range of uses for plants and animals, from food to medicine to fiber to flea repelling. Detailed knowledge of local ecology was vital to sustaining their societies. The Maya system collapsed from around 900 CE, with drought, warfare, and probably other factors (Sharer and Traxler, 2005); lack of water for both drinking and farming was an ecological factor. The discovery of Cerén, a village buried by volcanic ash (like Pompeii) around 600 CE, has allowed reconstruction of a whole Maya ecological lifeway: neatly planted rows of maize and manioc, other crops such as the tuber Xanthosoma violaceum, medicinal herbs near the pole-and-thatch houses, pots with food residue, roadways, and everything one could wish to reconstruct a lost environment (Sheets, 2002). Tikal, one of the greatest Maya cities, has had its ecology brilliantly reconstructed (Lentz et al., 2015). It supported a large population (around 50,000 in the greater urban area) with intensive agriculture, relying on fertile soils in wetlands. Some of these wetlands were modified to serve as reservoirs. Dozens of plant species and many mammals, birds, fish, and other game supported the city. Drought eventually brought it down, drying up its supporting wetlands. Another well-studied world is that of Cahokia, the city now largely replaced by East St. Louis, Illinois. This site appeared around 1050 CE and eventually grew to an enormous size, with tens of thousands of people in the urban area (Pauketat, 2009). It was suddenly abandoned around 1350, for reasons under debate; the population apparently did not die out but dispersed to live in small settlements in surrounding areas. The city maintained itself by maize agriculture, supplemented by acorns, walnuts, hickory
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nuts, native seed crops such as sunflower and a quinoa relative, and a wide range of game and fish (Fritz, 2019). Settlement was dense in the urban core, rapidly fading to suburbs with farming and nut trees. Again, the ecology of Cahokia has been meticulously reconstructed by archaeologists. In East Asia, Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes (2020) provided a comprehensive archaeo-ecological study of the rise of states. Climate, especially the monsoon cycle giving dry winters and hot wet summers, is all-important, limiting agriculture in the dry northwest, causing cycles of drought and flood in the wet south. Rice was domesticated early on, and the development of the paddy system made it the most productive grain crop in the world. It could support huge cities with relatively little farmed area. It had to be supplemented by crops higher in nutritional value. Water buffaloes were usually important as plow animals. Settlement patterns, foodways, patterns of growth and disease, and everyday ecological behavior were all affected by the steady rise of rice and its associated domesticates.
Summary and Future Directions Cultural ecology has now been largely subsumed under the headings of human ecology and environmental anthropology and is rarely referred to as a separate field. Its many lessons have been absorbed into these broader fields and have gone far beyond them to influence profoundly the relatively new fields of environmental history, historical sociology, and environmental political science. One major point that comes almost entirely from cultural ecology is the biocultural view: the idea that to explain a cultural practice, one needs to look at its biological and environmental causes and effects as well as its cultural history. An example is fermenting milk with Lactobacillus to produce yogurt; it preserves the milk, eliminates the lactose that many cannot digest, and tastes good. Thus, it becomes a cultural practice. More complex is the Balinese use of temple networks to regulate irrigation, as noted above. Another distinctive contribution was the system of four levels of sociocultural integration, still widely used if somewhat controversial. Issues such as the origin of early states and the economic functioning of past chiefdoms have drawn heavily on Stewardian theory. A major contribution from ecologydbiological, social, or culturaldhas been the systems approach to understanding culture and economics. Where once we separated food studies into agriculture, distribution, nutrition, and cooking, studied by different people with very different training, we now see food systemsdnetworks that can be understood, managed, and improved only by looking at production, distribution, and consumption. This has allowed major progress in fighting famine, for instance. The contributions of ethnobiology and interpretive studies to anthropological recording, comparison, and analysis, including archaeological reconstruction, have also been substantial. Finally, cultural ecology was part of a general increase in studies of human-environment relationships, including the classic areas of food, shelter, reproduction, population growth or decline, disease, trade, power and hierarchy, and social control. Cultural ecology produced a way to examine these systematically over space and time, thus benefiting archaeology. Cultural ecology has now been absorbed into the wider fields of human ecology and environmental anthropology; the term is now rarely used. The enormous increase in research on subsistence agriculture and demography (Wood, 2020), ethnobiology (Anderson et al., 2011), religion and environment, cultural evolution, and other fields stemming in major part from cultural ecology, continues uninterrupted.
See Also: Evolutionary/Neo-Darwinian Archaeology; Human-Landscape Interactions; Social Impacts on Landscapes.
References Anderson, E.N., Pearsall, Deborah M., Hunn, Eugene S., Turner, Nancy J. (Eds.), 2011. Ethnobiology. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ. Bettinger, Robert, Grote, Mark, 2016. Marginal value theorem, patch choice, and human foraging response in varying environments. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 42, 79–87. Binford, Lewis R., 1990. Mobility, housing, and environment: a comparative study. J. Anthropol. Res. 46, 119–152. Boserup, Ester, 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure. Aldine, Chicago. Brush, Stephen B., Stabinsky, D. (Eds.), 1996. Intellectual Property Rights and Indigenous Knowledge. Island Press, Washington. Clift, Larry, d’Alpoim Guedes, Jade, 2020. Monsoon Rains, Great Rivers, and the Development of Farming Civilisations in Asia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Conklin, Harold C., 1957. Hanunóo Agriculture: A Report on an Integrated System of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Rome. Cowgill, George L., 1975. On causes and consequences of ancient and modern population changes. Am. Anthropol. 77, 505–525. Earle, Timothy, 1993. Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Faulseit, Ronald K. (Ed.), 2016. Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL. Flannery, Kent V., 1972. The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Systemat. 3, 399–426. Flannery, Kent V. (Ed.), 1982. Maya Subsistence. Academic Press, New York. Frake, Charles O., 1962. Cultural ecology and ethnography. Am. Anthropol. 64, 53–59. Fritz, Gayle, 2019. Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Geertz, Clifford, 1963. Agricultural Involution. University of California Press, Berkeley. Geertz, Clifford, 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, New York.
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Harris, Marvin, 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. Crowell, New York. Henry, Donald O., 1995. Prehistoric Cultural Ecology and Evolution: Insights From Southern Jordan. Plenum Press, New York. Johnson, Allen, Earle, Timothy, 2000. The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, second ed. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Lansing, Stephen, 1991. Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. gil, Fesenmyer, Kurt A., Chew, Lock Yue, 2017. Adaptive self-organization of Bali’s Lansing, Stephen, Thurner, Stefan, Chung, Ning Ning, Coudurier-Curveur, Aurélie, Karakas¸, Ca ancient rice terraces. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 114, 6504–6509. Laird, Sarah A. (Ed.), 2002. Biodiversity and Traditional Knowledge: Equitable Partnerships in Practice. Earthscan, London. Lentz, David, Dunning, Nicholas P., Scarborough, Vernon L. (Eds.), 2015. Tikal: Paleoecology of an Ancient Maya City. Cambridge University Press, New York. Middleton, Guy D., 2017. Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mintz, Sidney, 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin, New York. Netting, Robert McC., 1981. Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community. Cambridge University Press, New York. Netting, Robert McC., 1993. Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford. Netting, Robert McC., Wilk, Richard R., Arnould, Eric J. (Eds.), 1984. Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group. University of California Press, Berkeley. Netting, Robert, 1986. Cultural Ecology, second ed. Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, IL. Pauketat, Timothy R., 2009. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. Penguin, New York. Rappaport, Roy A., 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors. Yale University Press, New Haven. Rappaport, Roy A., 1971. The sacred in human evolution. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Systemat. 2, 23–44. Richerson, Peter, Boyd, Robert, 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Sahlins, Marshall, Service, Elman, 1960. Evolution and Culture. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Sahlins, Marshall, 1972. Stone Age Economics. Aldine, Chicago. Sahlins, Marshall, 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Sharer, Robert J., Traxler, Loa, 2005. The Ancient Maya, sixth ed. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Sheets, Payson (Ed.), 2002. Before the Volcano Erupted: The Ancient Cerén Village in Central America. University of Texas Press, Austin. Steward, Julian H., 1955. Theory of Culture Change. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Urbana. Sutton, Mark Q., Anderson, E.N., 2014. Introduction to Cultural Ecology, third ed. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD. Testart, Alain, 1982. The significance of food storage among hunter-gatherers: residence patterns, population densities, and social inequalities. Curr. Anthropol. 23, 523–537. Turchin, Peter, 2016. Ages of Discord. Beresta Books, Chaplin, CT. Tylor, Edward, 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. John Murray, London. Vayda, Andrew P., 2009. Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD. White, Leslie A., 1949. The Science of Culture. Grove Press, New York. White, Leslie A., 1959. The Evolution of Culture. McGraw-Hill, New York. Wood, James W., 2020. The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wolf, Eric, 1972. Ownership and Political Ecology. Anthropol. Q. 45, 201–205.
Global Theories of Archaeology Arkadiusz Marciniak, Faculty of Archaeology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna n, Poland © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview: Global Theories in Archaeology Key Issues Evolutionism Structuralism Marxism Systems Theory Summary and Future Directions References
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Outline of the theoretical context of the development of archaeology Translation of global theories into archaeological research paradigms and character of archaeological practice Presentation of archaeology as a genuinely modernist project Impact of global theories (evolutionism, structuralism, Marxism, and systems theory) on the development of the three research perspectives constituting modern archaeology (cultural, social, and biological) from a historical perspective
Abstract This entry presents an outline of the development of archaeological praxis in the context of major philosophical debates and scientific revolutions, in particular global theories. These are understood as big theories that have the ambition to propose coherent world views and adequate means of their recognition. Four such theories have been distinguished: evolutionism, structuralism, Marxism, and systems theory. These are responsible for the development of three major research domains constituting modern archaeology: cultural, social, and biological. An overview of these four global theories is presented along with the adoption of their major constitutive elements that shaped different archaeological paradigms and schools of thought pertaining to each of the three major research domains of archaeology as a discipline of modernism.
Introduction Archaeology was and remains a very diverse discipline. There were and are a number of different ways to practice archaeology. Some forms of archaeological thought and practice became more common than others. Some of them gained dominant status and took the form of archaeological paradigms. These were adopted across different research traditions and national schools and were practiced in different language domains. Archaeology developed in the context of major philosophical debates and the scientific revolutions in the decades that followed. While developing and defending its independent academic status, it was not divorced from the period’s intellectual climate and its various manifestations in the numerous research and national milieus in which it was practiced. The history of science from the second half of the 19th century onwards documents the evolution of various theories that shape the nature of research practice in the humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences. Throughout its history, archaeology has witnessed the emergence of a number of theories in the humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences that fundamentally changed the ways in which these domains were conceptualized and shaped all elements of the scholarly practices of all the disciplines belonging to these respective branches of science. Clearly, archaeology is not called upon to recognize differences and settle disputes between the different visions of the world invoked by competing theories. Instead, it treats them as a rich and ever-renewing reservoir of ideas and new conceptualizations of the components of the research process. They also allow the contemplation and conceptualization of the world that goes beyond the materiality of artifacts or archaeological objects. In this sense, theory has a direct and tangible impact on everything archaeology does and is. Verbal rejection of theory, therefore, is an endeavor that remains in the realm of a certain rhetoric and does not abolish the circumstances of theoretical saturation of the components of the research process that allow archaeology to be cultivated in all its dimensions, including their most practical and trivial. Every statement, assumption, and interpretation, without fail, is more or
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less charged with theoretical potential hidden in the concepts used to describe the past and to combine individual elements into larger narrative wholes relating to subjects and objects of archaeological endeavors.
Overview: Global Theories in Archaeology The definition of a theory is far from a consensus and is formulated differently in different research traditions (Johnson, 2010: 176– 177). Theories express some preconceived worldviews and a priori assumptions. Britannica defines theory as a “systematic ideational structure of broad scope, conceived by the human imagination, that encompasses a family of empirical (experiential) laws regarding regularities existing in objects and events, both observed and posited” (https://www.britannica.com/science/ scientific-theory; accessed Dec. 27, 2022). Theory is used to explain a group of facts about phenomena, usually by formulating hypotheses and scientific laws. When we talk about global theories, we refer to big theories that have ambitions to propose coherent world views and adequate means of their recognition. In the history of archaeology, one can distinguish four theories that played a decisive role in shaping the discipline. It resulted in the emergence of four distinct schools of archaeological thought and resultant research paradigms. These comprised evolutionism, structuralism, Marxism, and systems theory. They are responsible for defining the character of archaeological praxis leading to the emergence of three distinct, albeit intertwined, research perspectives: (i) cultural (evolutionism and structuralism), (ii) social (Marxism), and (iii) biological (systems theory). While looking retrospectively at the history of archaeology, these played the most important role in shaping archaeology and very much defined the ways in which the discipline is practiced today. In the history of archaeology, there were certainly other theories of more local character that had less significant impact upon archaeology and its modus operandi. These include phenomenology, the world-systems theory, structuration theory, and critical theory, among others. These four global theories got translated into archaeological theory and practice and were conceptualized in a particular way, leading to the development of distinct archaeological research paradigms. They are said to have coherence and integrity, but in reality they are archaeological manifestations of these theories, referring to various aspects of their research agendas explicitly or implicitly. Moreover, they did it differently in different local and pan-local traditions and national research milieus. As a result, this process resulted in the development of a variety of research practices, each of which was embedded to varying degrees in the original theory from which they were derived. Through time, these developments remained loosely related to these theories and are often referred to as their post-developments. Some of the theories inspired archaeologists at different phases in the history of the discipline, often so distant from each other that they have been referred to as neo-developments. The application and translation of concepts and categories originating from global theories in archaeology, and more generally disciplinary theoretical reflection in archaeology, has not been necessarily imbedded in archaeological praxis. However, interpretans that were specified in the realm of these global theories affected the research domains, shaping the underlying foundations of all the elements of the archaeological process. This is of profound significance as this process led to the emergence of a particular interpretandumda new quality and new subjectivity independent from the empirical research itself. Despite this fact that archaeological praxis is commonly carried out as if issues raised by these theories do not exist, and is itself often devoid of any theoretical/metahistorical reflection, the qualities of an interpretandum developed in the realm of different global theories shaped the conditions in which archaeology was and remains to be practiced. In this sense, archaeological theory is to study archaeological practice. The mechanisms of adoption of categories, concepts, procedures, and methods borrowed from the humanities as well as social and biological theories in archaeology are poorly recognized. This is a largely unstructured and intuitive activity. The most appealing elements of the respective theories are often invoked, which are not always the most essential, and the very reading of them often deviates from the intentions of their authors or the prevailing interpretations adopted by their original research milieus. Moreover, in applying and adopting them, these categories and concepts have often been given meanings that differ, sometimes significantly, from their original interpretation. This practice, which is not without a certain nonchalance, has often been criticized, probably rightly so, by philosophers of culture, sociologists, or biologists alike. Assessing the accuracy of the interpretations adopted is, of course, a legitimate way of talking about theoretical underpinnings of theories adopted in archaeology. However, the attempt aimed at performing a kind of exegesis of theoretical inspiration, in particular, determining the degree of its correctness and correspondence with the original, does not seem to be an overly creative and heuristically effective way of exercising theoretical reflection in archaeology. From the point of view of the history of archaeological thought, a more effective strategy seems to be to reconstruct archaeological interpretations of borrowed concepts and theoretical categories and demonstrate to what extent they changed the ways of practicing archaeology. They defined the ways in which archaeological research paradigms formed and how they shaped each and every aspect of archaeological praxis. Adoption of global theories in archaeology takes four forms: (1) translating the interpretans of world views proposed by global theories into archaeologically relevant categories and terms; (2) translating the research characteristics of global theories into archaeologically relevant methods and procedures shaping the character of the archaeology process; and (3) largely unintentional drawing on these theories, which ex post are given a sense of the changes; and (4) intuitive reference to fashionable parts of the world views advocated by global theories by unreflexively adding them to otherwise well-established archaeological practice. As a result of these intertwined processes, the character of global theories incorporated into archaeology in the form of archaeologically specific research paradigms is largely transformed and their constitutive elements are considerably modified. Hence, rather than identifying
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differences between the original theories and their archaeological manifestations, it is more justified to identify the characteristic features of the archaeological manifestations of these global theories in archaeological thought and praxis.
Key Issues Evolutionism Social evolutionism was developed at the beginning of the second half of the 19th century as a response to the work of Charles Darwin. Its main proponents were Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) in the US and Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) in the UK. It was based on the assumption of the unilinearity of the development of human societies and the homogeneity and uniformity of human nature, which remained constant over time. Human groups, in the course of their development, have arguably passed through successive phases, from the simplest to the most complex forms. Analysis of the process of change made it possible to distinguish stages of development. These were conceptualized in a number of ways, but they always took the form of normative and essentialist categories (Sanderson, 1990). The evolutionist vision of the nature of prehistoric man was most fully formulated in John Lubbock’s work Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages published in 1865. It was based on the assumption that all human groups go through successive stages of development, from “primitive” to “civilization.” Unilinear evolution was infinite and its successive stages more and more perfect. They were characterized by more advanced technology supported by an increasingly stronger human condition. The earliest societies, culturally as well as biologically and intellectually, therefore stood at a lower level compared to their more recent descendants. The initial stages of development were supposed to be those of people with childlike natures. Their development must therefore have meant maturation, which was used as a metaphor for cultural change (Dunnell, 1996: 54). Referring to Darwin, Lubbock argued that individual groups do not differ only because of their culture, but also because of their biological capacity to use it (Trigger, 2006: 173). This means that human communities should be seen as the result of simultaneous cultural and biological evolution. These two dimensions co-evolved and groups at a lower level of cultural development were also less biologically equipped. Social evolutionism provided the foundation for the development of archaeology as an independent scholarly discipline. Evolutionionary archaeology developed in a form that can rightly be regarded as its first research paradigm. Its main focus was to explain the evolutionary changes of European societies. The belief was expressed that the tribal groups living today correspond to the early stages of prehistoric communities in Europe, which, in the course of long-term development, transformed into modern societies with a marked social hierarchy. Given the unilinearity of the development of all groups, tribal communities were considered a reliable source for learning about the successive stages in human history. Evolutionary archaeology did not develop a reliable method for collecting and analyzing material culture (Trigger, 2006:208– 209). It was assumed that each element of material culture should be placed into predefined categories relating to and describing successive stages in the development of human groups. However, a straightforward method for assessing which artifacts are to correspond to successive stages in the development of human groups has not been developed. The scheme adopted was to prove that evolution was indeed supposed to have taken place. The passing of time was thus measured by successive periods, and these were distinguished on the basis of the distinctive characteristics of their objects (Dunnell, 1996:52). The analytical procedure adopted did not allow for the recognition of the heuristic potential of archaeological materials other than those derived from the model adopted earlier. As a result, the potential of material culture to reveal economic or technological behavior was not recognized. They were captured normatively and separated on the basis of a number of distinctive features. Thus, they were typological in nature and allowed for a block view of development, making progress present. While evolutionary archaeology in this format was restricted to its time, its legacy was long lasting. Its most significant consequence was the emergence of the culture-history schooldby far the most common way of practicing archaeology. Its origin can be traced back to the ethnological cultural-historical school originating from the work of Friedrich Ratzel and Leo Frobenius. They postulated the thesis of multidirectional development of culture, rejecting earlier evolutionist conceptions capturing it in terms of unilinearism (Mamzer, 2000:98). This multidirectional development led, as a result, to a significant cultural differentiation of human communities caused by different conditions of settlement and inhabitation of diverse natural environments. This process gained further prominence due to the movement of individual cultural elements between different areas taking the form of diffusion. Migration was considered the most important mechanism of culture change. Thus, the development of culture took the form of constant differentiation caused by the intermingling of different cultures due to migration, borrowing, or innovation. These external factors determined the rhythm of transformations, and the thresholds of different areas of culture that marked them provided the basis for separating homogenously recognized stages of development and determined the dynamics of replacing one with another. The cultures that differed in this way were characterized by different dynamics of transformation. This led to the emergence of significant spatial dissimilarities depending on the rate of reception and extent of innovations available in each area. The result of this process was the formation of a rich mosaic of cultures inhabiting diverse environments. The basic organizing concept of cultural-historical archaeology was culture. It is attributive in nature and is considered an integral and indelible element of human society. It consists of a series of norms and principles that are ideal in nature. It manifests itself in material culture, which has the character of epiphenomena of these norms, being their simple and isomorphic reflection. Cultures understood in this way were placed on a timeline and followed one another. Their recognition was the study of culture history. These considerations led to the concept of archaeological culture (Lech, 2000:156).
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Cultural-historical archaeology has developed a number of effective research tools to organize the rapidly growing archaeological sources in accordance with its theoretical assumptions. The detailed and systematic description of all categories of source materials captured in the form of types became a distinctive analytical procedure. It became the basic criterion for organizing archaeological materials in time and space, thus allowing for the separation of the ranges of their occurrence. An integral part of the research process was also the determination of the chronological position of these types using the methods of relative chronology, and later also absolute chronology, especially radiocarbon dating. Another distinct and much later adoption of evolutionism is neo-evolutionary archaeology. It emerged in the tradition of processual archaeology in the late 1970s as one of the attempts in the drive to nomothetize the discipline. The two most important proponents of neo-evolutionism were Leslie White and Julian Steward, who directly referred to the nineteenth-century legacy of Morgan or Tylor evolutionism (Trigger, 2006: 387). These ideas were later developed by Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service. These authors were proponents of a unilinear model of the development of societies. The most important inspiration, however, was White’s normative understanding of the evolution of cultural phenomena (O’Brien, 1996:1). In this form, it was adopted by early processualists, including Lewis Binford. The gradual differentiation of human groups was captured in an evolutionary scheme assuming the emergence of successive normatively understood groups called clusters, tribes (disjointed societies), chiefdom societies, and states. The neo-evolutionists argued that all societies went through successive phases of development of social organization. At the same time, it was assumed that a social group was a compact and homogeneous unit and its members shared commonly accepted rules, norms, and values. It was therefore a normative approach. In its modified version, three categories were distinguished: egalitarian societies, chiefdom societies, and state societies (e.g., Peebles and Kus, 1977:427), and the linear nature of the development of prehistoric society was rejected. The problem of the emergence and development of social complexity was widely discussed, referring in particular to the works of Service (1962) and Fried (1967).
Structuralism Structuralism is one of the most important theories of the humanities in the second half of the 20th century. It first appeared in linguistics, particularly in the works of De Saussure (1916, 2011). The main focus of linguistics became unconscious rules and grammar rather than concrete manifestations of speech. The goal of cognition was to identify the rules underlying various linguistic systems. Structuralism assumes that all people share certain fundamental structural characteristics and the nature of structures is a binary arrangement. Lévi-Strauss (1963) made a separation of several basic oppositions, such as female-male, culture-nature, day-night, or raw-cooked. In the version proposed by Dumézil (1970), dualism was replaced by tripartism. All structures can be described as a kind of “forms of forms”. Structure remains unconscious by humans and is characterized by internal organization and laws that ensure its self-control. Structure cannot be reduced to the sum of its elements, which defines the holistic nature of structuralism. As Leach (2012) said, the mind is more a collection of fixed patterns than a still unfinished product of continuous self-construction. The unconscious activity of the mind consists in the superimposition of forms, identical for all minds, on certain contents. Thus, the hidden structure is behind every custom and behind every institution. Manifestation of mental structures in extrasensory reality takes the form of message transmission (Descombes, 1980). This process is characterized by three features: (1) the code precedes the messagedthe sending of a message always involves coding the information and transmitting it (the code is always created by the user during the process of communication); (2) the code is independent of the message; the receiver can distinguish between what was said and what might have been said; and (3) the code is independent of the sender, and before the broadcast begins, the receiver knows everything that was actually said. Mental processes of categorization are responsible for creating the sign as the basis for categorization activities. De Saussure (2011) made a fundamental distinction between “langue” and “parole.” Langue refers to the system of codes, rules, and norms that organize a given language, while parole is the situated act of using this system by a single speaker. The element of langue was a sign consisting of two elements: the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié). Signifiant is an audible utterance or sound image referring to some concept or category while signifié denotes the reference point of this utterance. The relationship between the two elements is arbitrary, as it is the result of a certain convention. This arbitrariness is analogous to the relationship between words and things. The meaning of an object is recognizable because it is different from the meaning given to other objects. Thus, it is relational in nature, which means that a sign placed in isolation will be meaningless. There are two levels of a sign. The paradigmatic level refers to the sum of signs that an individual has at his disposal. The syntagmatic level, on the other hand, includes all the signs configured in a particular situation. Structuralism consists of seeking explanations for the system of interest in the hidden structure beneath it, which allows its deductive interpretation (Piaget, 1971). During the analysis, attention should be paid to the relations between signs and not to the signs themselves, keeping in mind that structures manifest themselves under different forms. Thus, the object of linguistic analysis should be a synchronic study of the dualistic structure of langue, which, being a product of the mind, have a universal meaning for Homo sapiens sapiens. In Dumézilian terms, on the other hand, this research will be concerned with the tripartite nature of the sign. Dumézil (1970) argues that the organization of the Roman pantheon was an integrated system of three functions: sovereignty, war, and fertility made present in the form of three gods: Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinius. This system was also manifested in a social order consisting of three groups: oratores, bellatores, and laboratores. Structuralism proved to be a very attractive research program, and there were quick attempts to apply it outside linguistics. A spectacular example of such application is the work of Lévi-Strauss (1958), who transferred the linguistic model to areas of interest in social anthropology, in particular the kinship and marriage system, totemism, and myth. The latter he put in terms of
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fundamental principles and laws operating at a deep level. This means that the human mind determines the formation of myths, which means that it is not people who create myths, but myths think themselves through people. Pierre Bourdieu’s works on the structure of the Berber household were equally momentous (e.g., Bourdieu, 1970). In them, the author argued that spatial organization is determined by deeply embedded structures and cannot be explained solely in terms of the realization of functional needs or technological solutions. Not much later, attempts were made to apply structuralism to the field of material culture. This happened thanks to the work of Roland Barthes (e.g., Glørstadt, 2000). There was a systematic extension of linguistic concepts to the non-linguistic field. This new field was treated like a language, which means that it could be subjected to linguistic type analysis. The assumption was made that structures in the non-linguistic area are analogous to sentence structures and acquire meaning by virtue of their ordering resembling the ordering of words in sentences (Wylie, 1982:40). Adopting this interpretation became the foundation of structural archaeology. It was based on the assumption that hidden structures manifest themselves in the form of configurations of various kinds of objects. As in the linguistic domain, they are a kind of superficial manifestation, themselves not being directly accessible, leaving them as if enclosed in a black box, to use Leach’s (2012) well-known metaphor. Material correlates, therefore, have meaning in the same way as words and their arrangement is orderly in nature, as is the placement of words in a sentence. Every material object is believed to be a reflection of immanent mental signs. The formal variety of material culture is structured by mechanisms from the mental level, which are instrumental in its generation. The meaning of material culture, therefore, cannot be reduced to the sum of the meanings of the individual elements that comprise it. It must be viewed as an integrated system of related elements. The research objectives of archaeology therefore focus on the search for the rules and structures hidden behind what is visible and observable. This approach made it possible to consider material culture as a system of meaning and to challenge its perception solely in a functional-adaptive perspective. Thus, structuralism discovered the “signability” of human reality, resulting from the construction of the human brain (present throughout culture and recurring in associations of symbol and meaning) and extended the signability of material culture to all human creations. Structuralist research has been oriented toward the search for order, symmetry, and other formal structures, which are referred to as surface structures. In particular, associations and oppositions were sought in various areas of material culture in an effort to reach their group-specific distributions. The methodology of structuralist research thus implies a formal analysis of material remains in order to search for binary oppositions (or trifunctionality in Dumézil’s version). Structural analysis is thus a combination of relations between formal (synthesis) and real (organization of space) structures and linking them to certain abstractions. Thus, it was par excellence an empirical analysis of the relations between different types of material culture taking the form of a comparative method. It was not feasible without a good and comprehensive knowledge of empirical materials. Hodder’s (1982) research in Nubia made it possible to recognize a number of oppositions such as clean to unclean, cattle to pig, male to female, clean to dirty, life to death. This means that pure to impure is like cattle to pig, this in turn like life to death, etc. Structural archaeology was a normative, deterministic, and ahistorical concept of a holistic nature. This was manifested in particular in the systematicity of its grasp and determination of the individual by structure (cultural codes). Its archaeological applications proved to be few, and it should be considered only a brief episode in the history of archaeological thought. In particular, it could not cope with the conceptualization of cultural change, the recognition of which is the immanent goal of archaeology. This was impossible because of the assumption made about the arbitrariness of the sign which precludes the possibility of capturing change. The episodic nature of the application of structuralism in archaeology is also due to epistemological problems. No reliable methods have been formulated to avoid speculative interpretation. However, the very emergence of structuralism in archaeology had farreaching consequences for the further development of archaeology, far beyond its literal application. According to Preucel (2006), the shift from language to text is a shift from structuralism to post-structuralism. The application of the text metaphor to material culture also marks the beginning of poststructuralism in archaeology. Poststructuralist archaeology, however, escapes simple definitions. It is exclusively embedded in the tradition of structuralism but combines elements of other traditions, in particular neo-Marxism and phenomenology. Post-structuralist archaeology was particularly interested in conceptualizing the conditions under which messages about the past are formulated. From the text of material culture, the archaeologist creates their own text. Self-reflection is necessary for this, allowing one to look at oneself as a discourse. It is necessary to recognize the conditions of the politics of discourse and the power structure within which the creation of messages about the past takes place. This means that the meaning of the past is situated in the present, for here its images are created. Moral, political, and social values guide and determine the issues addressed and the ways in which they are framed.
Marxism Marxism is one of the most important social theories of modernity. It captures the history of mankind in the form of successive stages, from the primordial stages to the final stage, which is communism. Development is largely linear in nature. Karl Marx considers human relations in the context of historical development and relates them to the conditions of existence, both social and economic. The accepted principle of historical materialism attributed the most important rank to economic factors, assuming that they determine all human actions and behavior. A dialectical interpretation of change was adopted. Marxism as a social theory has occurred and continues to occur in many forms. Giddens (1979) distinguished its several versions, which differ significantly from each other. In the classical interpretation of Marx and Engels, Marxism is taken as a theory of class division and class struggle. In another interpretation, it refers to the concept of human praxis postulating the need to
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consider social practices as an integral component of human needs. This position implies a rejection of viewing man as a passive object on the one hand, and as a subject equipped with unlimited free will on the other. A similar reading of Marxism focuses on the role and importance of labor in the development of human communities. It is understood as the result of human activity and the materiality of nature and, in a somewhat narrower form, it is grasped as a process of labor or economic activity. In another interpretation, Marxism is understood as a theory of social change determined by economic factors. It takes the form of economic and technological deterministic explanation and Marxism becomes cultural materialism. In another version, it takes the form of structuralist Marxism combining economic institutions with those of a political and ideological nature. Marxism is also sometimes understood as a reductionist theory of consciousness that treats the content of human consciousness as determined by material factors. Ideas are thus understood here as reflecting the material conditions of social life. Another interpretation of Marxism is its treatment as a theory of ideology. Despite major differences, all interpretations and figures of Marxism share a number of common features. These include, in the first place, reference to the works of Karl Marx which are considered its intellectual ancestor. Social reality is viewed dialectically, taking the form of a dynamic process. It is characterized by the unity of opposites of various individual and group interests, and opposition and conflict are considered necessary conditions for the occurrence of change and legitimization of the social order (e.g., Spriggs, 1984). The Hegelian dialectic can be defined in a simplified way as a state of relations between three elements. The initial thesis leads to the formulation of the antithesis. This process always occurs under conditions of conflict, which culminates in the formulation of a synthesis, which in turn becomes a new thesis that begins the next cycle. Thus, dialectics presupposes a unity of opposites realized under conditions of conflict and leading to a matching of existing elements. Hence, development has the character of continuous movement and its essence and driving mechanism becomes the struggle of opposites. They allow individuals and groups with opposing and conflicting interests to come together. They constitute a certain closed system and any change in it leads to changes in the structure of these relations. Change is a complex process of a qualitative and quantitative nature, and each form of social relations carries the seeds of its own transformation. These internal relations structure the social world, generate social change, and are responsible for its development and transformation. Thus, the dialectic provides a platform for abolishing the false oppositions between realism and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, object and subject, ideal and material, or more broadly, science and humanism, evolution and history, and determinism and relativism. The diversity of Marxism in time and space determined the diversity of inspiration of Marxist ideas in archaeology. There is no doubt that not all forms of Marxism equally influenced archaeological praxis. The first inspirations of great stature and far-reaching consequences came from the side of the classical forms of Marxism and referred to the theory of class division and class struggle. They were adopted in the 1940s and 1950s in the milieu of Central and Eastern European archaeology. Marxism in this form became the first social theory to appear in archaeology (Minta-Tworzowska, 1994). Renfrew and Bahn (1991) distinguished a number of distinctive features of Marxist archaeology. It has an evolutionary form referring to processes of long duration. It has a materialist character, referring to the existential dimension of human life, in particular the derivation of necessities. It captures society as a coherent whole, which consists of distinctive parts, and therefore has a holistic character. It has produced a typology of essentialistically viewed social formations corresponding to successive stages of development, including primitive communism, and ancient, Asian, and feudal modes of production. Social change is brought about by contradictions, so that an antagonistic vision of the world is presented. The system of knowledge and beliefs is recognized as an ideological superstructure, which remains determined by economic factors. Marxist archaeology was particularly keen to refer to the mechanisms of opposing interests and conflict, which were considered an immanent feature of social relations. They mainly concerned the relationship of power to relations of production, and the social organization of the assimilation and consumption of surplus. Referring to the classical interpretation of Marxism, two types of contradictions were assumed: (a) between forces and relations of production, and (b) between the interests of social groups. Forces of production were defined as including the means of production, particularly technology and the ecosystem, and the organization of production, primarily the organization of labor power. Relations of production, on the other hand, meant social relations in conjunction with the forces of production. They determine the ways in which the means of production are used within the framework of available technology. Contradictions between these elements are triggered by changes in the forces of production which leads to changes in style and ideology. The conflict of interests between groups, which were granted subjectivity under certain historical conditions, took place under conditions of their opposing interests. In the classical interpretation of Marxism, this conflict of interest occurred between social classes distinguished by virtue of their access to the means of production. In the early stages of the development of Marxist archaeology, this interpretation was applied even to prehistoric societies, in which it was difficult to prove the existence of classes as basic social subjects. The reception of Marxist thought in Western European countries took place in a different political and intellectual context. It developed under the conditions of inspiration by other currents of theoretical thought, and hence adopted a largely different character. Particularly important were Louis Althusser’s works on the theory of ideology devoted to such issues as manipulation in the creation of reality, resistance and domination, violence and cognition, or strategies of legitimization taking the form of naturalization, divine sanctions or appeal to the past. This tradition was an important inspiration for the emergence of neo-Marxist archaeology, which emerged in the early 1980s. Its homogeneity and distinct status are seriously questionable, and some authors are inclined to categorize it as part of a broadly defined post-processual archaeology.
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Neo-Marxist archaeology, inspired by the tradition of Althusser, has rejected the assertion that ideology is determined by economics. Instead, it is accepted that it masks contradictions and conflicts within social forces and relations, neutralizing injustices or even falsifying reality. This means that the opposing interests of various social actors usually remain hidden due to its masking role. Ideology thus becomes an imposed image of reality. It should therefore be regarded as an aspect of symbolic systems related to the accumulation of power in society. It thus takes the form of a repressive structure that becomes all-encompassing. Not only is there no escape from it, but it also remains unconscious and for this reason cannot be subjected to critical evaluation and interpretation. This means serious difficulties in reaching social reality per se because what appears to us is only its ideological image. Thus, one can conclude that there is no reality as such and everything is an ideology. Such a statement defines the heuristic goals of archaeology. Attempts to reach the past reality, in a situation of non-identity of the reality itself with the recorded representations, must be replaced by recognizing only the latter. In this situation, we can only talk about the study of various representations of reality, while it itself does not submit to viewing and cognition. Neo-Marxist archaeology borrowed from Marxism its understanding of matter. It is transformed by social practice or labor into an object of culture and by objectifying it, things become elements of social relations. Material culture thus becomes more than the simple result of labor, since it is a part of the labor process opening up to social relations. An important element in this process becomes technology that allows humans to use matter in such a way as to transform the natural world in pursuit of its social use. Things thus become instruments of labor when they become an element of labor relations (McGuire, 2008). Material culture thus plays an active role and serves to realize the various interests and intentions of social actors. Accepting the thesis of the active role of material culture means that it can no longer be understood as a passive reflection of reality. Its active nature also means that material culture can be used to mask various contradictions. It can also be actively used by social actors to symbolize and objectify reality, including thoughts and ideas. Its significance should always be considered in the historical dimension and so attention should be paid to its diachronic aspect. Marxism also drew attention to the practical implications of doing archaeology. It is understood as a type of social activity that takes place in the present, and hence its findings cannot abstract from this present context. In particular, archaeological data are neither natural nor objective and can be used for political purposes. Thus, any attempt to reconstruct the past requires taking into account the political context and the prevailing ideology at the time of creating images of the past. The relationship between knowledge and power should also not be forgotten, for knowledge serves the interests of those who produce, dispose of, and control it. Archaeology must also fulfill a number of other social obligations. Given these circumstances, the metaphor of writing the past, as opposed to reading it, is a more adequate description of the contemporary condition of archaeological practice. Among archaeologists, the so-called structural Marxism (e.g., Frankenstein and Rowlands, 1978; Gilman, 1981) was developed, inspired by French neo-Marxism. The main axis of conflict here runs between the interests of the social group and the forces and relations of production. It takes the form of structure, which refers to relations of production and appropriation that remain hidden outside the social relations between subject and subordinate or between woman and man (Hodder and Hutson, 2003:76). The second type of contradiction refers to structural incompatibility in which the means of production are in conflict with the relations of production. In particular, it refers to the ways in which the products of labor are appropriated. On the one hand, they need to form alliances to survive, while on the other they want to exercise control over their resources, which is not served by such cooperation. Technological development makes it possible for human groups to become increasingly independent. The formation of associations of groups with clearly defined goals is taking place, which reduces the need to form a number of these alliances (see Hodder and Hutson, 2003:76–77).
Systems Theory Systems theory is a conceptual framework assuming the relatedness of the component parts of a system with each other and with other systems (Wilkinson, 2011). A system is understood here as a functionally existing whole that consists of interconnected components. It is holistic in nature and presupposes the necessity of encompassing within its framework all the phenomena to which it applies. These are usually captured in the form of normatively defined subsystems (White, 1959). The individual elements of the system are functionally dependent on each other. The system should be closed, and its boundaries precisely defined. System refers to different levels of organization, such as cellular, individual, population, or species-wide. Changes within each component trigger a reaction from the others, causing the system to enter a state of imbalance. It is assumed that changes are most often caused by external factors. The system’s response to this situation is to seek a return to a state of dynamic equilibrium called homeostasis or equilibrium. It thus takes the form of an adaptive model. The system, while under the influence of stimuli, becomes unstable, after which it returns to equilibrium and thus adapts to the new situation triggered by the incident of this stimulus. Systems theory was introduced into archaeology through the work of early processual archaeologists, in particular Binford (1962), Flannery (1968), and Clarke (1968). It was believed that it would provide archaeology with a solid theoretical foundation, ensuring its status as a scientific discipline, and provide a reliable explanatory procedure. System in archaeology was most often used to conceptualize phenomena on a population scale. The belief was expressed that human society could be put into the form of a system consisting of a number of subsystems, such as economic, social, and ideological (Binford, 1962). Later works modified this initial interpretation by adding other components such as the environment, technology, subsistence, and the symbolic realm. Maintaining the general assumptions of systems theory, it was assumed that the elements of the system remained in a state of dynamic equilibrium in relation to each other, and a change in any of them triggered changes in the others. The system then
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returned to a state of equilibrium, but at a different level than the initial state. The causes of change came from outside. The passivity of the individual was assumed, determined by external factors to which it reacted in a mechanistic manner. Regardless of the detailed conceptualizations of the components of the system, systems thinking assumes the existence of separate and clearly distinguishable areas of prehistoric man’s life. Renfrew (2005:260–262) lists three major consequences of systems thinking in archaeology. The first was the introduction of elements of cybernetics. These include notions of systems that regulate complex organisms, in the form of equilibrium or homeostasis. They allow the conceptualization of responses to external and internal factors of social organisms, in particular the interaction and interdependence of their components in response to a stimulus. They also introduce the concept of input and output of the system and negative feedback in the relationship to excessive stimulus intensity. The development of complex organisms subject to constant change, modification, and adaptation is referred to as a system trajectory. This process can be subject to description and quantification of its component parameters. The second consequence of systems thinking was the development of ecological thinking with the emphasis on the ecological aspects of human group functioning. Another major consequence was the adoption of Ludwig van Bertalanffy’s interpretation of general systems theory. In particular, this concerns the conceptualization of system growth patterns. Exponential growth is unconstrained and characterized by rapidly increasing expansion. It was supposed to characterize earlier stages of human development. Meanwhile, logistic growth is slower and occurs under conditions of approaching population growth, reaching a level close to the limiting capacity of the environment, which means the ability to provide it with sufficient food. The adoption of systems theory, in addition to biological evolutionism, led to the development of Darwinian archaeology (Dunnell, 1996:63–64). This is non-essentialist in character, rejecting the construction of nominalist categories and concepts, which were then used to explain various issues in prehistory. Changes over time are in the nature of gradualistic development. The rationale for its application in archaeology is Darwin’s fundamental assumption that evolution takes place on phenotypes. The Darwinian theory assumes that (a) there is variation in organisms, (b) this variation is passed from generation to generation, and (c) some variants behave better than others depending on the environment they find themselves in (Leonard, 2008:68). This third element is called natural selection, which is done on phenotypic traits. These general rules apply to all social phenomena, leading to the complex nature of social reality. This process also occurs with regard to the behaviors and forms that material culture takes. When the transmission of certain behaviors and knowledge takes place within the same tradition, we speak of homology. In a situation in which it is generated independently, we deal with analogy. The purpose of Darwinian archaeology is then not to study the evolution of culture, but to study the evolution of cultural phenomena (O’Brien, 1996:1). It is meant to explain why traits and things take the form observed at a given time rather than to serve as a description of empirically recorded diversity. The need to move away from the notion of transformation to substitution is postulated. The main focus of Darwinian archaeology, therefore, is the study of the mechanisms of transmission and transmission of various elements from one generation to the next. It sets itself the goal of formulating a theory to capture the variables that relate to those cultural phenomena that ensure the efficiency of the functioning of human groups and, translated into the transmission of genes, have evolutionary values. It is then necessary to determine which objects and their characteristics relate to these variables, allowing the former to be recognized in archaeological materials. With regard to archaeology, it is assumed (Dunnell, 1996:64) that the starting point is (a) the empirical diversity of materials, (b) the continuous nature of this diversity and the cultural changes taking place as similar to natural changes, and (c) the change seen as selective rather than transformative and involving individual elements rather than entire forms. Thus, archaeological heritage can be viewed as a vast materialized differentiation created by the transmission of elements and their different rates of accumulation. Darwinian archaeology still has not reached a consensus on units to measure the effects of selection (O’Brien, 1996:14). Shennan (2002) considered memes to become the equivalent of genes as the unit of such transmission. The goal of the research investigation is to determine how small technological changes can have adaptive significance and produce important evolutionary effects (Leonard, 2008:73). The other areas of interest include mechanisms of cultural and biological inheritance, human life histories, the interpretation of cultural gender, and the development of hierarchical societies and social competition.
Summary and Future Directions All four global theories: evolutionism, structuralism, Marxism, and systems theory have shaped archaeology and made it the genuinely scientific discipline of modernism. Throughout decades of its history, it evolved into a peculiar three-legged academic domain. All three research perspectives: cultural, social, and biological, remain fully legitimate ways of practicing archaeology. However, some of them have a greater number of supporters and practitioners than others. Considering the historical prevalence of evolutionism in the history of the discipline, the cultural perspective was and remains the most popular way of practicing archaeology. This has been further reinforced by the trajectory of establishing its dominance, including the formalization of its structure, the emerging education regimes, and different forms of institutionalization, to mention a few. These developments led to an everincreasing number of professional practitioners, building up their inner circles and strengthening the sense of belonging to the modus operandi developed within the realm of evolutionism. The significance and impact of social and biological research perspectives worldwide remain less pronounced. This is due to the fact that the global theories, which gave rise to their development,
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emerged later than evolutionism. Hence, they were adopted in archaeology with some delay and got introduced into a discipline already strongly dominated by the cultural school. The permanence of these four major global theories in archaeological practice remains clearly visible across different research milieus. However, they remain largely fragmented, and their hitherto distinct elements are often mixed up with each other. They are loosely and usually uncritically taken away from the “tool box” of superficially defined concepts and categories. This tendency is further strengthened by the adoption of ever-growing methods and techniques, such as stable isotopes, aDNA, eDNA, lipids, to mention a few. Despite the crisis of theoretical thinking, the modernist heritage of archaeology remains unthreatened, and we will continue to provide the foundations for archaeological practices for quite some time as long as global theories remain the major reference points for the research practice, ensuring the social standing of academia. However, the dynamic developments in the humanities that try to threaten the modernist opus operandi may, in the future, reorient archaeological practice. The new ways of grasping the world, including network analysis, relational ontologies, a multispecies approach, or symmetric archaeology, have the potential to move the field of archaeology forward. This tendency may be additionally strengthened by new developments in the domain of heritage studies and contemporary archaeology, which evoke participatory means of exploiting the materiality of what is left behind from the past. The inevitable introduction of artificial intelligence into archaeology in the near future may further enhance these developments in a way that is now difficult to envision.
See Also: Philosophy of Archaeology; Post-Processual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Social Theory in Archaeology; World-Systems Analysis: Traditions and Schools of Thought.
References Binford, Lewis R., 1962. Archaeology as anthropology. Am. Antiq. 28, 217–225. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1970. The Berber house or the world reversed. Soc. Sci. Inf. 9, 151–170. Clarke, David L., 1968. Analytical Archaeology. Methuen, London. Descombes, Vincent, 1980. Modern French Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Dumézil, Georges, 1970. Archaic Roman Religion. With an Appendix on the Religion of the Etruscans. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Dunnell, Robert C., 1996. Evolutionary theory and archaeology. In: O’Brien, Michael (Ed.), Evolutionary Archaeology. Theory and Application. University of Utah Press, Utah, pp. 30–67. Flannery, Kent V., 1968. Archaeological systems theory and early Mesoamerica. In: Meggers, Betty J. (Ed.), Anthropological Archaeology and the Americas. Anthropological Society of America, Washington, DC, pp. 67–87. Frankenstein, Susan, Rowlands, Michael J., 1978. The Internal Structure and Regional Context of Early Iron Age Society in South-Western Germany, vol. 16. Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, pp. 73–112. Fried, Morton H., 1967. The Evolution of Political Society. Random House, New York. Giddens, Anthony, 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory. Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Macmillan, London. Gilman, Antonio, 1981. The development of social stratification in Bronze Age Europe. Curr. Anthropol. 22, 1–23. Glørstadt, Håkon, 2000. Freedom of speech is always freedom from the speech of others, or rather control of their silence. On Pierre Bourdieu and archaeology. In: Holtorf, Cornelius, Karlsson, Håkan (Eds.), Philosophy and Archaeological Practice. Perspectives for the 21th Century. Bricoleur Press, Göteborg. Hodder, Ian, 1982. The Present Past. An Introduction to Anthropology for Archaeologists. B.T. Batsford, London. Hodder, Ian, Hutson, Scott, 2003. Reading the Past. Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Johnson, Matthew, 2010. Archaeological Theory. An Introduction, second ed. Blackwell, Oxford. Leach, Edmund, 2012. Culture and communication. In: The Logic by Which Symbols are Connected. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lech, Jacek, 2000. Kultura archeologiczna: z dziejów jednego poje˛ cia. In: Tabaczynski, S. (Ed.), Kultury archeologiczne a rzeczywistosc dziejowa. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa, pp. 151–183. Leonard, Robert D., 2008. Evolutionary archaeology. In: Hodder, Ian (Ed.), Archaeological Theory Today. Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 65–97. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1958. Structural Anthropology. Basic Books, New York. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1963. The bear and the barber. J. R. Anthropol. Inst. G. B. Irel. 93, 1–11. Mamzer, Henryk, 2000. Archeologia kulturowo-historyczna a kontekstualizm. In: Buko, Andrzej, Urbanczyk, Przemysław (Eds.), Archeologia w teorii i w praktyce. Instytut Archeologii i Etnologii PAN, Warszawa, pp. 97–114. McGuire, Randall H., 2008. Marxism. In: Bentley, Alexander, Maschner, Herbert, Chippendale, Christopher (Eds.), Handbook of Archaeological Theory. Altamira, Walnut Creek, pp. 73–98. Minta-Tworzowska, Danuta, 1994. Klasyfikacja w archeologii jako sposób wyraz_ ania badan, hipotez oraz teorii archeologicznych. Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznan. O’Brien, Michael J., 1996. Evolutionary archaeology. An introduction. In: O’Brien, Michael (Ed.), Evolutionary Archaeology. Theory and Application. University of Utah Press, Utah, pp. 1–15. Peebles, Christopher, Kus, Susan, 1977. Some archaeological correlates of ranked societies. Am. Antiq. 42, 421–448. Piaget, Jean, 1971. Structuralism. Basic Books, New York. Preucel, Robert W., 2006. Archaeological Semiotics. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, M.A. Renfrew, Colin, 2005. Systems thinking. In: Renfrew, Colin, Bahn, Paul (Eds.), Archaeology. The Key Concepts. Thames & Hudson, London, pp. 259–268. Renfrew, Colin, Bahn, Paul, 1991. Archaeology. Theories, Methods and Practice, first ed. Thames & Hudson, London. Sanderson, Stephen K., 1990. Social Evolutionism. A Critical History. Blackwell, Oxford. De Saussure, Ferdinand, 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Payot, Paris. De Saussure, Ferdinand, 2011. Course in General Linguistics. Colombia University Press, New York. Service, Elman Rogers, 1962. Primitive Social Organization. Random House, New York. Shennan, Stephen, 2002. Genes, Memes and Human History. Thames & Hudson, London.
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Spriggs, Matthew, 1984. Another way of telling. Marxist perspectives in archaeology. In: Spriggs, Matthew (Ed.), Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1–9. Trigger, Bruce G., 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. White, Leslie, 1959. The concept of culture. Am. Anthropol. 61 (2), 227–251. Wilkinson, Lee A., 2011. Systems theory. In: Goldstein, Sam, Naglieri, Jack A. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development. Springer, Boston, pp. 1466–1468. Wylie, M. Alison, 1982. Epistemological issues raised by a structuralist archaeology. In: Hodder, Ian (Ed.), Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 39–46.
Historic Roots of Archaeology Teresa S. Moyer, National Park Service, Washington, DC, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues The Ancient World Directions From the European Renaissance Exploration and Observation Stirrings of Archaeology Summary and Future Directions References
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People in the ancient world collected evidence of cultures who lived before them. Scholars have used past cultures to justify modern political paradigms. Art history, classical studies, and other fields have contributed to the development of modern archaeology. Archaeology as it is known today developed from scientific methods in the 19th century.
Abstract This entry offers an overview of the historic roots of contemporary archaeology, beginning with the curiosity of cultural groups millennia ago in the people who came before them through the rise of the scientific approach in the mid-19th century.
Introduction The historical roots of archaeology lie in the curiosity of ancient cultures about the people who came before them and trace through the development of scientific methods to establish the discipline recognizable today. One finding of contemporary archaeology is that humankind has almost universally been curious about the past and has collected material evidence of it to suit various needs. Archaeologists do not agree on the major paradigms that characterize the development of archaeology. Histories of archaeology tend to slant away from the influence of women, indigenous groups, or local informants and prioritize the perspective of archaeologists and archaeological ways of knowing. The discipline today called archaeology comes from a conglomeration of slowlychanging ways of thinking in response to the testing of theories and new finds across the globe. The following discussion looks at the coalescence of archaeological thought from ancient times to the mid-19th century.
Overview and Key Issues The Ancient World Archaeology in recent times shows that ancient peoples recovered material remains of even earlier peoples and visited their monuments. Archaeologists speculate that ancient peoples interpreted the materials to support their cultural conceptions of time as known through tradition and mythology. Other cultures are known to have perceived antiquities as tangible links to, or proof of, sacred eras closer to the point of creation. No evidence exists that ancient people used systematic methods to excavate and record their finds, or that they sought to answer questions of time depth and cultural sequence. Yet the evidence of ancient artifacts in archaeological contexts outside their own indicates that the prehistory of archaeology reaches thousands of years into the past (Eydoux, 1971). The recognition of objects as culturally unfamiliar and time-distant was an important conceptual development in the earliest history of archaeology. For example, in eastern North America, the Iroquois of the 15th and 16th centuries AD collected projectile points, stone pipes, and native copper tools made thousands of years earlier. These artifacts may have been found in the course of daily activities.
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A number of cultures integrated ancient artifacts and monuments into their religious practices. The Aztecs of South America performed religious observances in the 16th century at Teotihuacán, a city inhabited in the first millennium AD. They buried ritual deposits, including Olmec figurines and valuable goods, in the walls of the Great Temple. Scribes in Egypt during the 18th Dynasty left graffiti that documents their visits to ancient and abandoned monuments. The first known collection of antiquities was amassed in Babylonia in the 6th century BC. It references a growing interest among the literate classes in the monuments and the written records of the past. Their interest lay in relationship to religious concerns about gods or heroes and their perceived representation of civilization in more perfect form at the time of creation. Many groups attributed artifacts to mythological sources. European peasants in the medieval period collected stone celts and stone projectile points. Some thought that the artifacts, also called “fairy arrows” or “thunderbolts,” were shot from the sky to injure humans. Europeans were also aware of prehistoric tumuli and megalithic monuments in their local areas. These places were plundered by people of all classes for treasures, holy relics, and for building materials. Historical records by way of the Bible, surviving histories of Greece and Rome, and traditions going back to the Dark Ages were the primary historical authority. These accounts were the driving force leading to the belief that the world was only a few thousand years old. The collection and preservation of holy relics during the Middle Ages was connected to such religious beliefs. Historians’ work with antiquities served political purposes. In China, historian Sima Qien, who wrote in the 2nd century BC, visited ancient ruins and consulted relics and texts when writing his history of ancient China, the Shi Ji. His influential account helped to unify the political and cultural trends of the time. A preponderant emphasis lay on written records and oral traditions to create narratives of the past. Greek and Roman scholars used written and oral sources, but were also influenced by religious practices, local customs, and civil institutions. The Greek historian Thucydides, however, concluded that graves dug on the island Delos in the 5th century BC belonged to the Carians because they contained armor and weapons akin to contemporary Carians. The Greek traveler Pausanias described the public buildings, art works, rites, and customs of different regions and the historical traditions associated with them. The Greeks and Romans kept relics of the past as votive offerings in their temples and graves, sometimes also opening graves to recover relics of past heroes. Ancient cultures integrated mythology, history, and artifacts into their practices. The collection and use of very ancient artifacts by past cultures demonstrates the ways in which material culture became an active component in shaping societal life.
Directions From the European Renaissance Beginning in the late 14th century, the cultural, social and economic changes related to the end of feudalism in northern Italy led scholars to seek precedents in earlier times for political innovations. During the ensuing Renaissance, scholars looked to literature of the Classical era to provide a glorious past for the emerging Italian city-states and to justify the increasing secularization of Italian culture. Popes, cardinals, and Italian nobility collected and displayed ancient works by the late 15th century. They also sponsored expeditions to search out and recover materials of commercial and esthetic value. Excavations at the Roman sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii were examples of such treasure hunts (Stiebing, 1994; Trigger, 2006). Scholars of the Renaissance era became critically familiar with the texts of ancient Greece and Rome. They saw that the past was different and separate from the present, but also that past periods should be studied on a relative basis. Renaissance ideas inspired by the Classical world spread geographically throughout Europe and the artistic and scholarly disciplines. These ideas inspired a surge in the arts and scholarly thought. A trend in the plastic artsdparticularly sculpture, but also paintingddemonstrated interest in humanism through artistic expression of nudity and human traits, such as dignity. Humanism as a philosophy developed as European societies began to choose between secular and religious views of the world. After the Renaissance, some antiquarians studied the local mounds and monuments of their own countries. Others traveled to Mediterranean and Near Eastern areas to investigate the origins of contemporary civilization. They returned to Europe with treasures for their wealthy patrons. Art history and Classical studies are two fields that grew from the pursuits of the Renaissance era as members of the nobility became collectors of Greek and Roman objects and valued them as art. Collectors looked on land and underwater for treasures, as seen in Italy. One of the earliest episodes of underwater treasure hunting was in the mid-15th century, when an avid collector named Cardinal Colonna commissioned the recovery of two sunken ships from the bottom of Lake Nemi. The ropes, however, were not strong enough to raise the ships, although some planks and a torso of a large Roman sculpture were recovered. The recovery of artifacts from ancient Italian sites in the early 18th century piqued interest in what else might lay beneath the surface. Engineer Rocco Gioacchino de Alcubierre, under orders from the king, opened haphazardly placed tunnels into the ancient town of Herculaneum beneath the lava left by Mount Vesuvius. He found paintings, mosaics, and other preserved features. He continued at Torre Annuziata in the 1740s, gaining substantial support when it was discovered to be the ancient city of Pompeii. Excavations continued in a treasure-hunting capacity at both sites for decades. The discipline of art history developed as a frame of analysis for ancient materials. Art history depended upon written records for the chronology and context of the changing styles of ancient works, but the field also brought the study of material culture into investigations of the past. Johann Winckelmann, a German scholar writing in the mid-18th century, established art history as a distinct branch of classical studies. Winckelmann outlined periods of Greek and Roman sculptural styles and described the factors influencing the development of Classical art. Art history provided an analytical framework for using material culture to study the ancient past. Classical studies became the mode of analysis stemming from expeditions to ancient Aegean sites beginning in the mid-18th century. Winckelmann had noted that most extant examples of Greek sculpture were actually Roman copies, which inspired the
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collection of authentic Greek works. British ambassador Thomas Bruce, also known as Lord Elgin, was granted permission by the sultan of Turkey to remove stones from Athens. His men removed many elements from the Parthenon and they were displayed in London in 1814. They became part of one of the first major controversies in the exhibition of archaeological materials. Some viewers protested the vandalism of the objects from their original sites, while others dismissed the sculptures as inferior to the Hellenistic-Roman style to which they were accustomed. Other excavations soon followed at Peloponnesus, the Acropolis at Athens, and the island of Aegina. Classical studies became the model for Egyptology and Assyriology. These fields drew on information recorded in the Bible about the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Near East as seen by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Travelers from across Europe documented their travels up the Nile River and around Cairo, but contributed little else to knowledge of Egypt. Discoveries by the French in the late 19th century made significant inroads to Egyptian archaeology. Scholars associated with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt collected Egyptian antiquities, which generated interest about the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Soon after, French engineers discovered the Rosetta Stone, a slab of basalt inscribed with translations of ancient languages. Jean Francois Champollion and others interested in linguistics took to the task of deciphering the hieroglyphics associated with the finds. Interestingly, observers of sites in Ethiopia and Sudan preferred to link the monuments with Egyptian culture, rather than on their own merit or as historically associated with African peoples to the south. The exposure of Egyptian antiquities excited the public’s curiosity and spurred further expeditions from other European nations to learn more. As a result, many sites were pillaged to build collections outside of the Near East before dedicated study could begin. The cultural regions of Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Asia Minor, or Persia did not at first glance seem to have grand monuments like those of Egypt. Travelers in the mid-16th century, however, reported seeing great mounds of earth covering the traditional sites of cities such as Nineveh or Babylon. Napoleon’s invasions also brought attention to the region, as it did to Egypt. Researchers such as Edward Daniel Clarke and Jean Louis Burckhardt searched for evidence of Biblical sites in the Holy Land. Clarke brought a healthy skepticism of traditional lore and tested sites to determine the physical locations of ancient cities. Others, like Edward Robinson, used investigations of the Near East to support a literal interpretation of the Bible. Linguists untangled the meaning of ancient sites with their deciphering of Mesopotamian cuneiform in the early 19th century. Their translations illuminated ancient political structures and genealogies. Slowly, a picture began to grow from the accumulated linguistic and material evidence. Scholars of the late 17th and 18th centuries referred to a staged system of technological progress suggested by Greek and Roman historians and philosophers of Classical times. This approach was embraced for archaeology beyond the Mediterranean. Information was organized for professionals and the public using the tiered system, such as J.C. Thomsen’s arrangement of the national museum of Denmark in 1819 according to the Three-Age system with the idea that the ancient inhabitants of Europe passed through technological stages of development characterized by their use of stone, bronze, and iron. This system dovetailed with then-current social paradigms that associated class and race with human development as a staged process. Methodologies for observing the natural world were also underway in the 17th and 18th centuries, but would not directly impact archaeology for another century or two. Few scientists saw a conflict between their work and the Bible, and fewer still challenged religious doctrine or the historical reliability of the Bible rather than fight the rest of the scientific community for credibility. Scholars throughout Europe worked to fit ancient finds into the paradigm that the world was only about 6000 years old. On the other hand, geologists made headway in chronological thinking and methodology in their attempts to understand fossils. Large fossils were at first interpreted within mythological confines to be unicorns, giants, dragons, or even the remains of creatures killed during the Biblical flood. Robert Hooke, a geologist working in the mid-17th century, saw that fossils differed from strata to strata and suggested that they could inform a chronology of the Earth that stretched before the book of Genesis. Nicholas Steno also noted that successive strata contained different flora and fauna, but demonstrated that these types of materials existed together in the same environment at the same time. Scientific methodology in the natural sciences would bring coherence to archaeology and inspire theoretical conceptions of the past, as well.
Exploration and Observation The exploration of Africa, the Americas, and the Far East expanded Europeans’ anthropological knowledge. Little anthropological data had been collected from these areas. Changes in archaeology were influenced by a literary approach to anthropological writing, but hindered by the deep acceptance of theological explanations for natural and cultural phenomena (Stiebing, 1994; Trigger, 2006). These factors, coupled with the exoticism of regions that were new to European explorers, led to “armchair speculation” of the origins of the new peoples being met and the shape of their lives. Europeans began to explore the coast of Africa below Morocco in the 15th century. Portuguese merchants returned with stories of fabulous kingdoms and cities in the interior of Africa. By the 16th century, African civilization had entered a troubled period as a result of economic decline, the overseas slave trade and invasions from other nations. Despite earlier accounts to the contrary, Europeans convinced themselves that African culture had never become civilized and could thus justify their imperialism. Europeans accepted Herodotus’ and others’ accounts of Ethiopia because its pyramids, temples, and reliefs were akin to those visited in Egypt. Europeans refused to accept the idea of a complex Sudanese culture or that southern Africans could create substantial monuments, despite reports in the mid-16th century of gold mines in the midst of masonry fortresses. Medieval Arab writers commented on rich trade in gold, ivory, animal skins, and iron from large cities along the eastern coast of Africa, which led some scholars to connect the region with the Biblical city of Ophir and to King Solomon’s mines.
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Explorers from Europe were also seeing ruined cities in the Far East as they began to settle ports for trade. Robert Knox, a Dutch seaman, published an account of Anuradhapura on the island of Ceylon. His report made readers aware that the jungles held ancient evidence of civilization from times before the Europeans arrived. In 1790, a peasant plowing a field near Nellore in India stumbled upon the remains of a small Hindu temple that contained a pot filled with 2nd-century AD Roman coins and medals. This was an unusual event, as much of the archaeological work consisted of exploration and documentation of visible temples and monuments. European explorers in the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries offer some of the first accounts from a historical perspective on the New World, its people and the landscape. Exploration of the Americas resulted in important academic findings and philosophical quandaries for Europeans. Willey and Sabloff (1993) characterize the era of exploration and recovery of information from foreign places as “the speculative mode of thought.” The explorers encountered new peoples and cultures, as well as unusual landscape features. They recorded ethnographic information and began rudimentary investigations. Theological interpretations dominated the discussions. Collections of archaeological data took place incidentally to these pursuits. The expeditions also collected documentation of Native Americans’ interests in history, such as chronicles, genealogies or historical statements. These accounts have been preserved in the original or in post-Conquest copies. Most of the projects collected data that related to larger, exploratory trends in the “natural scientific” spirit. Such work fed speculation about the natural and cultural makeup of the American continents and interest in exploitable natural resources. Explorers to South America from Spain described the lives of the Aztecs and the Maya at the time of the Conquest. A few writers, such as Bernardino de Sahagan and Diego de Landa, also demonstrated approaches and questions that today could be considered archaeological. They were the forerunners of men and women in the late 18th and 19th centuries who asked when events took place and what had happened in conjunction with their descriptions of Native groups and ancient ruins. Governmental directives ordered a number of expeditions from Europe to the Americas, such as the 16th-century trek of Diego Garcia de Palacio to the Maya site of Copan, Honduras, and of Antonio del Rio to Palenque, Mexico, in the 19th century. Missionaries also collected information. Bishop Diego de Landa and Fray Bartoleme’ de las Casas in the 16th and 17th centuries wrote about archaeological ruins and the history and way of life of the Mayan culture of Chichen Itza and other sites. As Europeans investigated the Americas, they included in their reports of natural discoveries the indigenous peoples, natural resources, flora, and fauna. Although archaeology per se was not practiced, in these early centuries of the “contact period” many explorers did collect anthropological information that would inform future archaeological investigations. Priests and administrators who accompanied the Spanish Conquistadores to Latin America in the 16th and 17th centuries took accounts of American Indians. These accounts offer archaeologists today important information about these civilizations. Explorers such as Giovanni de Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier recorded information of ethnographic value, as well. The expeditions returned to Europe with information for speculators, ideas for settlements, natural specimens, and cultural souvenirs. The scholars of North America, operating within a theology-centered worldview, began to speculate on the indigenous peoples’ origins. Theories postulated that the so-called “Indians” might descend from Iberians, Carthaginians, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Canaanites, and Tartars, or even came from the vanished island of Atlantis. Most hypotheses reflected the cultural values, biases, or predilections of different groups of settlers. Some early Spanish settlers, for example, did not believe that the “Indians” had souls and, thus, they could not be human beings. This justified their program of exploitation. The Spanish Crown, however, insisted that the Roman Catholic Church proclaim “Indians” as human so the government could assert its right to govern them. This also meant that Christians were forced to grapple with the “savages” as people who also descended from Adam and Eve. Theological interpretations, however, were challenged by the increasingly influential scientific inquiries. Non-scientific conjecture, or armchair speculation, weighed in on topics such as the mounds of North America, or the developmental sequence for “primitive” cultures. Such early speculations expressed the cultural views of the European explorers and immigrants and began to fan curiosity about the past of the New World. Through the 19th century, the Enlightenment concepts of reason and progress sustained a belief that progress was inherent in the human condition. The settlement of North America by Europeans forced the issue as the intelligentsia conjectured about topics such as theological explanations of natural and cultural phenomena, the exotic realm of the unexplored New World, and an immediate need to create a heroic history for the new land. In the late 18th century in North America, ethnocentrism pervaded colonists’ cultural values toward Native peoples, whom they perceived to be savage and separate in origin from the builders of the mounds. Reports by the Spaniards of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, the public works of the Incas, or the other great achievements of the Indians of Middle and South America lent further doubt to Europeans and European Americans that the mounds of North America were capable of revealing such civilized places. Observations by De Soto’s party, for example, described the indigenous peoples as building and using mounds in the southeastern United States, but this information was conveniently forgotten. In North America, the “myth of Moundbuilders” posited that a “lost” civilized race built the mounds and ruins, but disappeared long before Europeans came on the scene. Europeans in the New World did not believe that the “Indians” were capable of building the mounds, particularly in comparison to what they judged as the grand public works of the Indians of Middle and South America. Racial myths eclipsed religious ones as justification for action against the “Indians,” who were widely seen to be brutal and warlike in nature and incapable of significant cultural development. By the beginning of the 19th century, two basic positions had emerged regarding the origins of the mounds: either the Moundbuilders and the “Indians” (or their direct ancestors) were one and the same people, or the Moundbuilders, whose hypothesized origins were as varied as those first proposed for the peopling of the New World, were an ancient race who had died off or moved away, to be replaced by peoples with whom Europeans had contact.
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While others speculated about the origins of the earthworks, who built them, and why, Thomas Jefferson, a member of the American Philosophical Society, acted on the problem by investigating a small burial mound near the Rivanna River on his Monticello property in Virginia. The result was one of the first controlled, stratigraphic excavations in the world. This project has led to some call Jefferson the “father of American archaeology.” Such endeavors shaped national politics by informing policy with data about indigenous peoples.
Stirrings of Archaeology Archaeology is known in contemporary times as scientific methods carried out to test and explore theories about the past. During the first third of the 19th century, the interdisciplinary elements of archaeology began to come together (Daniel, 1976). Discoveries by geologists decades earlier were revisited by their professional counterparts in the 1830s, who began to appreciate the significance of flint artifacts observed in geological strata. Lyell revolutionized geology with his depositional theories. Boucher de Perthes announced the discovery of artifacts in deep geological strata and concluded that they had great antiquity. The findings of geologists stirred great controversy because such antiquity of humans flew against Biblical theology and prevailing belief. The concept, however, was the nucleus for Paleolithic archaeology. Geologists’ observations of strata superimposed over each other and containing archaeological materials led to the important discovery of stratification, which enabled archaeologists to look at questions of time depth. Questions about time began to change armchair speculation and antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. Of course, as we have seen, interest in the meaning of time, albeit in a broader sense, has been the root of archaeology centuries ago. By the 1830s, the major questions addressed through archaeological materials had to do with ordering the contemporary world. Class, race, and politics were still influenced and inspired by monuments and materials of past “great” civilizations. Scientific inquiries into race by S.G. Morton influenced the attitudes of anthropologists toward Native Americans. Morton compared skulls from North American Indians with similar relics derived both from ancient and modern tribes, to understand their origins. The writings of Englishman Henry Lubbock significantly influenced American evolutionary archaeology, known also as prehistoric archaeology. He, too, took an evolutionary approach that attributed American Indians with biological inferiority over European-descended Americans. Scientific analysis of antiquities and osteological specimens thusly addressed theories about the history and peoples of America. The findings were interpreted to construct a national identity favoring the circumstances of European Americans (Patterson, 1995; Willey and Sabloff, 1993). The rise of science (which began in 18th-century rationalism), industrialism of Europe and America, and the expansion of power to unexplored or exotic regions all contributed to the development of archaeology. Other forerunners largely dismissed speculation and began to consider methodological questions, such as how to pose problems, to excavate, to present data, and to answer questions in a rigorous manner. J.J.A Worsaae (1821–85) articulated that burial goods were associated by their usage at the same time and that they were placed in the burial at the same time. Worsaae also recognized the importance of careful excavation and recordkeeping and, significantly, that the primary purpose of excavation was to gather information on humankind’s history and development rather than to gather specimens for museums and private collections.
Summary and Future Directions The beginnings of archaeology as it is recognized today as a series of methods and logical sequences began centuries ago. The recognition of a need for a conceptual shift from speculation to adequate recording and mapping of archaeological sites began in the 18th and 19th century. By the 1840s, the fields of anthropology included archaeology, ethnology, physical anthropology, and linguistics; these were seen as separate disciplines, but all were concerned with cultural evolution and the study of indigenous peoples. The historical roots of archaeology run deep through centuries of human curiosity about the past and in each other. Further investigations into the historic roots of archaeology might be undertaken in existing archaeological and archival collections. For instance, technological developments in materials analysis may provide insight into the collection and redistribution of artifacts that people collected. Study may also be conducted into the possibility of new interpretations of old historical or archival documents that may provide a different perspective on the development of archaeology as it is known today.
See Also: History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Philosophy of Archaeology; Post-Processual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology.
References Daniel, Glyn, 1976. A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology, second ed. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Eydoux, Henri Paul, 1971. In Search of Lost Worlds: The Story of Archaeology. World Publishing Company, New York. Patterson, Thomas C., 1995. Towards a Social History of the United States. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, Fort Worth. Stiebing, William H., 1994. Uncovering the Past: A History of Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Trigger, Bruce G., 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Willey, Gordon R., Sabloff, Jeremy A., 1993. A History of American Archaeology, third ed. W.H. Freeman and Company, New York.
History of Archaeology: The Last Few Centuries Margarita Dı´az-Andreua,b,c, a Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain; b Institut d’Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona (IAUB), Barcelona, Spain; and c Departament d’Història i Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Barcelona, Spain © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Precedents Antiquities and the Emergence of the Modern State (1789–1870s) Archaeology and Nationalism (1870s–1945) The Archaeology of the Cold War (1945–1989) The Archaeology of Neoliberalism (1989–Today) Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Key Points
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To understand the development of archaeology as a professional discipline, it is essential to contextualize it in the political, social, and economic setting of the time There are several main areas in which archaeologists are professionals: universities, museums, archaeological heritage services and development-led archaeology The integration of women into the profession was slow and mainly dates from the 20th century onwards Classical archaeology and the archaeology of monuments were the first types of archaeology to attract world-wide attention Archaeological tourism has been one of the main ways the public has learned about archaeology The Cold War influenced the international archaeology networks formed at the time Neoliberalism has profoundly affected the profession of archaeology in the last three decades
Abstract This entry proposes a synthesis of the history of archaeology over the last few centuries, dividing the narrative into five major periods. Professionalism is discussed in four areas: universities, museums, archaeological heritage services, and developmentled archaeology. The political context of interest in the past and the social base of archaeology is explained by discussing political doctrines such as nationalism, and suggesting the increasing integration of women into the discipline. The relationship between archaeology and the public is examined and the effect of neoliberalism on archaeology is analyzed.
Introduction This entry proposes a synthesis of the history of the study of past remains in the last two millennia, focusing mainly in the last 2 centuries. This historical overview is divided into five periods, paying attention to the different areas in which archaeology became professionalized: museums, universities, archaeological heritage services, and development-led archaeology. Although a higher attention to Europe is given in the earliest periods, the account tries to be as integrative as possible, including information of archaeology in all continents. The political, social, and economic context of archaeology is used as a way of understanding the development of the discipline. Nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, the social base of those interested in the past and inclusion of women into the discipline, and the growing importance of theory in archaeology are all elements discussed. The effect of the Cold War, post-colonialism, the increasing importance of indigenous rights, community archaeology, and the impact of neoliberalism is also analyzed.
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Overview and Key Issues Precedents The term “archaeology” was first used by the Athenian historian Thucydides (c. 460–400 BCE) to mean the study of ancient things. In his texts, he made it clear that he was interested in the physical remains of the past, trying to learn about the past through them. The attraction for ancient ruins can also be seen in the broadly contemporary historian and geographer, Herodotus (484–c. 425 BCE), and later in other classical authors such as Pausanias (c. 110–180 AD). This explains why symbols of past authority, such as the Egyptian obelisks, were moved to the capital of the Roman Empire. The interest in ancient objects has also been documented in 1st century BCE China (Schnapp and Kristiansen, 1999), when the historian Sima Qian collected ancient sacrificial tripods and studied their epigraphic inscriptions as a direct historical source. The curiosity about and study of ancient objects fluctuated throughout the different dynasties, but somehow never fully disappeared. Thus, one of the charms of traveling during the Song period (960–1279 CE) was visiting famous sites, including ancient ones. Equally, although very marginally, the appeal of ancient objects continued in Europe during the Middle Ages (Schnapp, 1996a: chapter 1). A fascination for the past, especially the Classical past, first emerged at the end of the Middle Ages in Italy. It developed and expanded throughout Europe during the Early Modern period, i.e., from the European Renaissance to the Enlightenment. From the 15th to the 18th century in Europe, the small, weak kingdoms of the medieval period gave way to strengthened monarchies with expanded territorial and economic power. The language of antiquity substituted the primacy the religious discourse had enjoyed in previous centuries. Antiquity helped express the new times and its study and aesthetics were firmly embraced by both intellectuals and the authorities. The first excavations were carried out in 15th century Rome, although decades earlier Petrarch (1304–1374) was already arguing that the reading of the ancient authors should be helped by the study of ancient ruins and objects. The popesdwho held the political power in Romedemployed many humanists, while commissioning the most extensive exploitation of antiquities known until that time in the city (Bignamini, 2004; Hollingsworth, 1994: 245–58). The sites were excavated as if they were quarries where prestigious materials and works of art for new buildings, gardens, and urban landscapes could be obtained. This interest was also seen in other parts of Italy. In Florence, for example, the Academia Platonica was founded by Cosimo de Medici in 1438, following the example of Plato’s Academia in Antiquity. Soon after, a similar institution was opened in Naples by Alfonse V, king of Aragon and Naples. Antiquarianism led to the appearance of collections of antiquities that were displayed in the form of cabinets of curiosities in many churches, as well as increasingly in the homes of the wealthy. These had a miscellaneous collection of objects, including exotic animals, unusual stones, and other collectables (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; Impey and MacGregor, 2000). Aristocrats from the highest echelons and even monarchs were not exempt from this enthusiasm for amassing collections of rarities and, on some occasions, they also hired antiquarians to organize them. Notable among these were Olaus Magnus in Sweden, Athanasius Kircher in the Vatican, and John Leland in England. As can be seen in this selection, the taste for collecting antiquities was not limited to the parts of Europe reached by the Roman Empire and those with classical ruins, but also beyond it. Thus, the historical and artistic value of Antiquity and its remains was applied to other types of antiquities such as Runic stones and prehistoric mounds that had nothing to do with the Greek or Roman classical past. This acknowledgment led to the creation of the first university chair of archaeology in Uppsala in 1662 (Klindt-Jensen, 1975: 26). As in Northern Europe, in other parts of the world beyond Europe, historical remains were seen as witnesses to the pasts of their own territories. This was the case of the Spanish colony of New Spain (including present-day Mexico) where monumental ruins attested the glory of the pre-Columbian era. There, the construction of a triumphal arch to welcome the new Spanish viceroy led the creole Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700) to argue that local motifs should be used to adorn it. He explained that “the love we owe our country enjoins us to cast aside fables and to seek out more convincing subjects with which to adorn this so triumphal portal” (in Bernal, 1980: 52–53). He took an interest in the archaeological site of Teotihuacan, where he started to excavate the Pyramid of the Moon in 1675, perhaps the first archaeological site to be dug on the continent (Bernal, 1980: 50; Schávelzon, 1983). In the final decades of the 18th century, both in the European imperial metropolises and in the colonial world, much of the emphasis on antiquities was led by learned societies. Two of them were the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences) of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) (1778) and the Asiatic Society of India (1784). The latter aimed to encourage “inquiry into the history and antiquities, the arts, sciences and literature of Asia”, as the subtitle of the first volume of its journal explicitly stated. This publication was issued annually from 1788 with the title of Asiatick Researches. In Indonesia the museum of Jakarta was established around this time (Djojonegoro, 1998). In Italy, the excavations of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabia, mainly from the late 1730s, fostered further interest in antiquities. Together with Rome, those sites, especially the first two, became the uncontested pilgrimage destinations on the Grand Tour (Black, 2011; Sweet, 2012). This was a journey of discovery of several months undertaken by young men (and some women) from the social elite of many European countries, especially Britain. The main destination of such a journey was Italy, and one of its principal aims was the study of the classics. Experiencing the ancient monuments and objects retrieved from Antiquity was considered an essential milestone on the road to a cultured and educated adulthood. The desire to acquire mementos of the experience led to the creation of a huge market in antiquities centered on Rome, despite successive and inefficient decrees aimed at putting an end to the export of antiquities (Díaz-Andreu, 2007: chapter 2).
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Antiquities and the Emergence of the Modern State (1789–1870s) The 19th century saw the emergence of both the political ideology of nationalism and of archaeology as a professional discipline. The origins of the former can be found in the late 18th century and the emergence of the modern state. As a political doctrine, nationalism appeared in the era of the revolutionsda series of periods of political unrest experienced in many countries from the 1770s on that led to the idea of replacing the monarchy as the backbone of the state with the nation. Thus, from then on it would be considered possible to have a state without a monarch, i.e., to be ruled by a Republican political system. This was not only seen in Europe (the French Republic, for example), but also in some of the newly independent states such as the United States and, later, in most of the Spanish territories in the Americas. The acceptance of the political concept of the nation turned history into a pivotal field of knowledge, given that the historical roots of the nation legitimized its very existence. Old buildings, ruins, and past objects acquired a new value in this framework as the material witnesses of the nation. This new, key function of history and its icons explains the appearance of university chairs in fields such as history, history of art, historical architecture, and archaeology. Examples of this type of university chair, which were usually personal and in most cases were abolished once vacated, were those of Caspar Reuvens in Amsterdam (1818), Champollion in Paris (1837), Ludwig Ross in Athens (1847), and John Marsden in Cambridge (1851). The newly gained importance of history also led to an opening up of access to the very few museums that had appeared in the previous period, for example the British Museum, and the creation of new ones by, for example, nationalizing royal collections such as that of the Louvre. Thus, from 1807, “any person of decent appearance” was admitted to the British Museum up to a limit of about 120 a day. This led to a considerable increase in visitorsd13,000 between May 1807 and April 1808 (Altick, 1999: 242). Both museums displayed antiquities from the classical lands, portraying their nations as the natural heirs to the classical civilizations. Throughout the first decades of the 19th century, many national museums containing some antiquities were opened (Brno, Budapest, Copenhagen, Graz, Prague, and Sibiu). Many of them had been inspired by the Museum of French Monuments, an institution established at the time of the French revolution with the aim of storing the remains from the destruction of churches and other historical buildings, a selection of which was put on display to earn funds for the maintenance of the collection (DíazAndreu, 2007: 322). The important factor about this latter museum was that, in contrast to the larger museums (the Louvre or the British Museum), the antiquities on display reflected the history of the nation itself. This was revolutionary as it showed pride in the antiquities of a people’s own territory. The organization of the collection of national antiquities at the Museum of Antiquities of Denmark by Christian J. Thomsen (Gräslund, 1987) led to the establishment of the three-age system for the subdivision of prehistory into the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. Eventually this scheme was accepted for the arrangement of collections all over the world. The increase in museums throughout that period was also helped by legislation and the importance educated leisure was acquiring (Díaz-Andreu, 2020a: chapter 3). The iconicity of the monuments of the past led to the aspiration of preserving them for the future and the birth of what we would now call archaeological heritage management. One of the first places where this could be seen was in Rome, where the Colosseum was repaired in 1806, followed by other monuments, including the Arch of Titus and a section of the Via Sacra near the Forum, from 1812 to 1824. A list of public ancient monuments was drawn up with information about their condition and, if needed, an estimate of the cost of their repair. All this had been preceded earlier in the century by the establishment of posts for specialists, such as Antonio Canova and Carlo Fea, to manage antiquities (Ridley, 1992). In France in 1833, the post of General Inspector of Monuments, in association with a Commission of Historical Monuments, was set up (Choay, 2001: 96; Schnapp, 1996b: 53–54). One of the roles of the inspector was to compile inventories of archaeological and artistic monuments (see also Kreienbrink, 2012 for Germany). Thanks to France’s influence in the world, this idea was later copied in other countries (Díaz-Andreu, 2007: chapters 11 and 12). Investigating and writing about ancient monuments became a patriotic duty for some intellectuals, while this interest was channeled through socialization projects such as the establishment of associations fully or partly dedicated to antiquities. Among the earliest societies set up in this period, we can include the Society of Antiquaries of Edinburgh (1780) and its sister organization in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (1813), both in Britain. In Denmark, the earliest to be established appears to have been the Royal Nordic Society of Antiquaries in 1825. The following two decades saw a marked increase in the number of associations, including the following: the Société Française d’Archéologie (1834), the British Archaeological Association (1843), the Archaeological Institute (1843), the Austrian Geschichtsverein für Kärnten (Kärnten Historical Society), and so on (see more examples in Díaz-Andreu, 2007: 474–476). Beyond the few professionals, the social base of archaeology was made up of clerics, army officers, doctors, teachers, and businessmen, as well as members of other sciences that shared some interest in archaeologydarchitects, geologists, botanists, palaeontologists, and anthropologists. To these we have to add colonizers and explorers in the colonized world. Most were men, although there were also a few women (for example, Dotte-Sarout, 2020; Gänger, 2014). Studying antiquities became part of the school curriculum (Richard, 1994; Smith, 1976), although it was through leisure that many learned about them. This was made possible thanks to the development of means of transport and the tourist industry. For those who could not travel very far, popular exhibitions and world fairs became the way of accessing this knowledge. The Egyptian Hall organized by Giovanni Baptisa Belzoni that opened in London on May 1, 1821 for a year represents an early example (Fagan, 1975: 240–245). Of greater importance were, from 1851, the world fairs. In them, whole archaeological monuments were reconstructed, and small exhibitions featuring original pieces were organized and visited by large numbers of curious members of the public (Díaz-Andreu, 2020a: chapter 3). The way in which Europeans, especially those from the imperialist countries, perceived antiquities became the model of how to look at the ruins and archaeological objects found in other parts of the world. Because of the importance of the Classics, the ancient
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monuments of the newly constituted countries became part of their national histories, as happened in Greece (Voutsaki and Cartledge, 2017), Mexico (Achim, 2017), and Peru (Pillsbury, 2014). In the formally, and informally, colonized areas of the world, the European gaze also centered on the archaeology of the Great Civilizations, including those of the Ottoman Empire, especially Greek archaeology (Marchand, 1996), and the monuments of Algeria (Effros, 2018; Oulebsir, 2004), India (Roy, 1996), and Indonesia (Eickhoff and Bloembergen, 2019), to give just a few examples. In contrast, the archaeology of non-monumental peoples remained largely undocumented (Díaz-Andreu, 2020a: chapter 10).
Archaeology and Nationalism (1870s–1945) The principle of nationalism as the basis for the political organization of the world continued to expand throughout the last decades of the 19th century to become definitively established as doctrine at the end of World War I. In archaeology, this process was reflected in the reinforcement of the discipline’s professionalization in the three types of institutions already mentioned: universities, archaeology museums (or museums with archaeological collections), and archaeological services. The earlier preeminence of the archaeology of the Great Civilization was continuously eroded by the archaeological study of other periods. This resulted in the appearance of professional prehistorians in the early years of the 20th century and led to a first university chair in the subject being granted at the University of Berlin to Gustaf Kossinna in 1902. When women were allowed to attend universities (which in most countries was between the 1890s and World War I), the first female students appeared in the classroom. However, despite having gained access to higher education, field training was not available to them and there are explicit comments about this in at least one book (Droop, 1915: 64). This means that for the whole of this period, fieldwork was largely a male endeavor, although there were exceptionsdwomen who usually either worked on their own or together with other women (Adams, 2010; Coltofean, 2014; Stroszeck, 2019). Droop’s book on Archaeological Excavation was one example of something else that happened in higher education at that timedthe appearance of the first archaeology handbooks for university students (in addition to Droop’s book, see, for the British case Burkitt, 1921; MacCurdy, 1924; Munro, 1913). Learning about a nation’s own past was also introduced into primary and secondary education, and the first school visits to archaeology museums and in situ archaeological sites are dated to this period (Boudart, 2011; Gerbod, 1982; Rodríguez Temiño et al., 2015). The number of museums continued to grow, filling many countries with a network of state, provincial, local, and private museums. Many state museums still endeavored to display classical objects and statues, while increasingly widening the scope to include not only Roman, Greek, and Egyptian antiquities, but also remains from the archaeology of Great Civilizations around the world (Aguirre, 2005; Caygill, 1992; Stevenson, 2019). The increase in institutions led to a need for a growing number of curators to care for their collections. Among them was the first woman curator, the German archaeologist Johanna Mestorf (Kieburg, 2013). Before the end of the century, the first on-site museums had opened. These included the Curzon Museum of Archaeology at Mathura (India) (1874); that of the Roman cemetery of Carmona in Spain (1885) (Rodríguez Temiño et al., 2015), and at Knossos (Crete, Greece), the latter reconstructed to a great extent by Arthur Evans (MacGillivray, 2000). Whole or partial reconstructions of monuments were also shown in museums, such as at the newly-opened site museum at Delphi in 1903 (Colonia, 2006: 17). In some cases, however, only plaster casts were shown (Baptiste, 2013; Foster, 2015; Frederiksen and Marchand, 2010; Iannantuono, 2022). Moreover, some sites were completely recreated; for example in the United States where the Anasazi Cliff Dwellings of Manitou Springs were rebuilt in an area near Colorado Springs, about 350 miles from the actual location (Lovata, 2011: 197). Archaeological sites were also occasionally used for theatrical performances and other events. Examples of this are the amphitheater of Pompeii (Italy) in 1884 and the theater of Mérida (Spain) in 1933. Public interest in archaeology was fed by an increasing number of news items in newspapers and magazines, and novels that fantasized about information discovered by archaeologists. The general population also gained much information about the past through tourism, with tours of archaeological sites, printed guidebooks (some of them written by archaeologists themselves), stamps printed with archaeological themes, and a growing postcard industry (Díaz-Andreu, 2020a: chapters 4 and 5). This potentially increased the risks for the conservation of archaeological sites as, until the development of the souvenir market, many tourists attempted to take home memorabilia in the form of small pieces of the monuments they were visiting. This led to archaeological sites being fenced off and entrance fees being charged. In Egypt these were already in place by the end of the 19th century (Gregory, 1999: 134). State and provincial governments were responsible for enclosing the sites (Cleere, 1989: passim; Keay, 2011; Sengupta and Lambah, 2012). To the national heritage preservation efforts, it is important to add international agreements such as the International Committee for Intellectual Collaboration (MCI) of the League of Nations in 1922 (Swenson, 2016), which was behind the Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments of 1931 (Jokilehto, 1986: chapter 20). Internationalism was not restricted to international bodies, and it had a marked influence in this period. This includes international congresses (Babes and Kaeser, 2009; Díaz-Andreu, 2012: 245–248), international networks for the exchange of archaeological objects (Arnold, 2012), and correspondence, thus creating invisible colleges, alliances, and networks (Díaz-Andreu, 2008; Kaeser, 2016; Roberts et al., 2020). Heritage offices also increasingly took control of who could excavate and, taking advantage of the development of excavation techniques (Fagan, 2005; Jensen, 2012; Lucas, 2001), a series of rules was increasingly being imposed (Podgorny, 2015). The way in which interpretations were being made changed during this period as archaeology became swept up in the radical changes in the way scientific enquiry was understood. It was argued that knowledge had to come from evidence and, therefore, it should have an empirical basis and be objective. Moreover, facts had to be verifiable and subject to testing, and experimentation needed to follow methods akin to those developed by the natural sciences (Van Riper, 1993: chapter 7). Terms like evidence began
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to appear in book titles such as Thomas Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (Huxley, 1863 (1990)) and Charles LyeIl’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (Lyell, 1863 (2003)). Principles, laws, and theories were also mentioned by Pitt Rivers when he discussed the evolution of cultural forms (Pitt Rivers, 1868:435–436). 19th century positivism led to a focus on methods, as seen in the creation of new posts such as the John Rankin Lectureship (very soon turned into a Chair) of Methods and Practice in Archaeology at the University of Liverpool. London Professor Flinders Petrie wrote a volume on Methods and Aims in Archaeology (Petrie, 1904) with a chapter, for example, on “Systematic archaeology.” At the start of the 20th century, a new interpretative approach became increasingly established in the professiondculturehistory. If evolutionism looked at how archaeological objects had transformed over time, culture-history sought to understand which of the many different types of cultural elements coincided in the same area at the same time and interpreted this as the evidence of a cultural group. This concept was used in Germany and other countries from the very end of the 19th century. In 1929, Gordon Childe defined archaeological culture by stating that “we find certain types of remainsdpots, implements, ornaments, burial rites, house formsdconstantly recurring together. We will call such a complex of regularly associated traits a ‘cultural group’ or just a ‘culture’” (Childe, 1929: v–vi). After the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the end of World War I the following year, the Western world became increasingly divided between the communist and democratic worlds, the latter gradually being replaced by right-wing dictatorships. The communist block was formed by the newly born USSR, a federal union of the territory that had previously been occupied by the Russian Empire. That state made it illegal to investigate the ethnic roots of contemporary groups in the late 1920s, with some academics losing their posts, being arrested, prosecuted, and exiled (Shnirelman, 1996). This led to the abandonment of any interpretations that implied migration and diffusion in order to favor autochthonism. Archaeological cultures were rejected, and scholars instead studied socio-economic formations. Museums also changed their narrative to emphasize the glorious building of socialism (Shnirelman, 1996: 230–232). The dictatorships that governed Italy and Germany from the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, also influenced archaeological interpretations. The regimes’ interest in the past meant that many positions became available, and the profession went through a funding bonanza (Barbanera, 2015: chapter 6; Hassmann, 2000). In Italy the state promoted anything related to the Roman period and exalted the Romanità, a malleable concept used by the fascist “imperial” propaganda as an opportunistic way of conveying fascist ideology and legitimising Mussolini’s power by rooting it in the past. Archaeologists working in the Roman period received much funding and this led to some progress in new excavation techniques such as freezing the soil of the original site of the Ara Pacis to allow it to be excavated (Elsner, 1996: 32). Large areas were also excavated in sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum. Yet, the attention received by the Roman period was detrimental to the study and even to the preservation of the remains of later periods (Dyson, 2006: 178–179). The disregard for non-Roman archaeology took also place in the Italian colonies such as Libya, with a clear lack of funding for the Greek sites of Cyrenaica in contrast to the intense archaeological activity occurring in Tripolitania (Rekowska, 2013). In contrast to Italy, in Germany the study of the prehistoric period was encouraged. Two rival institutions tried to control it, the Amt Rosenberg, that depended on the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the increasingly influential Ahnenerbe of the SS. German archaeology also paid attention to the Greek past in excavations such as Olympia. The political context of archaeology, however, came with strings attached in terms of the quality of data recovery of excavations undertaken under pressure, and the message that had to be transmitted to the public, both in archaeological interpretations and museum displays (Arnold, 2008; Arthurs, 2012; Hassmann, 2000). After World War II, dictatorships continued to influence archaeology in many countries in Europe (Díaz-Andreu and Ramírez Sánchez, 2004; Gomes, 2010), Asia (Zoh, 2019) and Latin America (Funari, 2002; Politis and Curtoni, 2011; Troncoso et al., 2008).
The Archaeology of the Cold War (1945–1989) At the end of World War II, there was a brief period of cooperation between the main countries that had won the war, as shown by the creation of the United Nations at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Five months later, at the Potsdam Conference, the good feelings between the United States and Soviet Union had soured, and those countries were soon wrestling over areas of influence. The first major conflict was the Korean War of 1950–1953, for which two opposing military alliances were set up: NATO and the Warsaw Pact. That conflict was short, but it would soon be followed by the two-decade-long Vietnam War (1955–1975). The division of the world into two major and clearly separated blocks was graphically represented by the term “Iron Curtain.” This political context influenced archaeology, as it hampered relationships between archaeologists on either side of the divide. During this period, the archaeology of the USSR went from promoting autochthonism and ethnic nationalism under strict ideological control (Shnirelman, 1996) to returning to the diffusionist and migration paradigms in the 1950s (Klejn, 2012). In the 1960s and 1970s, despite being under surveillance, Soviet archaeologists were able to increase contacts with their peers in the West (Iakovleva, 2016: 155– 157). Similar developments occurred in other areas under Soviet influence, such as Czechoslovakia (Turek, 2018), Germany (Coblenz, 2000), and Poland (Boguszewski, 2018; Milisauskas, 2017). Regarding the territorial extension and social basis of archaeology, in this period professionals grew not only in quantity but also in the number of countries in which they were based. Furthermore, a timid but solid integration of women was taking place. Indeed, archaeology developed in some countries at this time, including some Soviet republics, such as Kazakhstan and Moldova (Klejn, 2012: chapter 6), and many African countries (Ardouin, 1997), especially after decolonization (Díaz-Andreu, 2018: 15–19). Everywhere, amateurs continued to play an important role, although the process of making archaeology a more scientific (and less amateurish) discipline, which had already begun in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was definitively consolidated in this period. The generation of archaeologists who had fought in the war had experienced firsthand the success of science as a tool at the service of
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the war effort. The belief in science was the basis of the so-called second scientific revolution in archaeology. One of the fields in which it was mainly noted was chronology, with the advent of radiocarbon dating in archaeology (Delley, 2015; Taylor, 2000). Archaeologists also collaborated with palynologists, zoologists, geomagnetists, physicists, and members of many other sciences. This took place not only in Europe and North America, but also in other areas of the world, as shown by the establishment of an Institute of Palaeobotany at Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh, India) in 1946 (Jha, 2005) or the development of what we would now call archaeological science in the USSR (Bulkin et al., 1982: 282–283). In this auspicious atmosphere, in 1958 Archaeometry became the first interdisciplinary journal in the field. Soon after, the publication of Science in Archaeology (Brothwell and Higgs, 1963) marked how this new way of doing archaeology was reaching the university curriculum. Nevertheless, specialists did not have it easy to begin with, as they were labeled as engaging in “auxiliary sciences” and not proper archaeology (Díaz-Andreu and Coltofean-Arizancu, 2021). Scientific archaeology was increasingly imposed by newly established funding bodies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States and Switzerland (Delley, 2015; Neumann et al., 2010), or similar bodies elsewhere. The attention paid to science came hand in hand with a marked interest in theory. “The pace of change in the 1950s was fast and furious,” explained William A. Longacre in an article about theories on the archaeology of the American Southwest (Longacre, 2000: 292). From the mid-1940s and in the 1950s, a few archaeologists suggested new ways of undertaking archaeology with proposals that included processual interpretations, settlement archaeology, statistics, ethnoarchaeology, and a view of culture as an extrasomatic means of adaptation. In 1958, the book Method and Theory in American Archaeology (Willey and Phillips, 1958) was a good reflection of this mood. All these new perspectives were packaged as New Archaeology by Lewis Binford (1962), whose charisma attracted an enthusiastic group of students at the University of Chicago, where he taught in the early 1960s. The expansion of American universities taking place at that time meant that these students soon became academics themselves at other influential universities (Díaz-Andreu, 2020b; Trigger, 2006: chapter 6). In Europe, the new approach was called Analytical Archaeology (Clarke, 1968, 1972) and then Processual Archaeology, a term only popularized from the editions dated 2000 and after of the popular student handbook Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practices (Renfrew and Bahn, 2000). Although it had already appeared in the 1930s in the United States with the New Deal (Means, 2015), development-led archaeology (with earlier versions known as rescue, salvage, or preventive archaeology) saw a marked increase after World War II, partly due to the reconstruction effort and the continuing rate of construction. This occurred in the United States (Davis, 2010), the United Kingdom (Rahtz, 1974), France (Schlanger, 2017), Norway (Iversen, 2012), Japan (Nespoulous, 2017), and many other countries. Some years later, in the 1960s and 1970s, it continued its global spread to include other countries ranging from El Salvador (Albarracín-Jordan and Valdivieso, 2013: 69–73) to Turkey (Dissard, 2019). Rescue archaeology changed into Archaeological Resource Management and Archaeological Heritage Management in the 1970s, although another term that also appeared at the time was Public Archaeology. In a book with the latter title, McGimsey (1972) explained that,
Our generation cannot postpone the decision to work toward this preservation, for the forces of destruction are multiplying and gaining momentum. The next generation cannot study or preserve what already has been destroyed . Spot checks in Arkansas indicate that twenty-five percent of the known sites have been destroyed within the past ten years. In a five-year period (1960–1964) an estimated 703,000 acres in Arkansas were newly cleared McGimsey (1972: 3).
He argued the need for a well-designed management of archaeology that could count on a professional body of archaeologists and the appropriate legislation for what would soon become commercial archaeology.
The Archaeology of Neoliberalism (1989–Today) Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1991, respectively, and today (2022), archaeology has undergone a profound change, mainly due to the imposition of neoliberalism as an economic and political system (Aparicio Resco, 2016). According to David Harvey, Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes human well-being and can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade Harvey (2005: 2).
As markets self-regulate, the state should withdraw from areas previously under its control and promote deregulation and privatization. The impact of this ideology on the humanities is obvious, given that their benefit to the market is unclear and they are therefore not promoted. Basically, as they cannot prove their economic value, they are unsuitable for sound funding, at least to the level of the applied-science fields. The effect of this system in universities is the decline in number of professors, the closure of departments (BBC Yorkshire, 2021; Dean, 2015), the imposition of research assessment biased against the humanities (Dean, 2015), and
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the ever-increasing demands on professors in all three areas: teaching, research, and administration (Barnés, 2019; Smith and Wilson, 2020). Commercial or development-led archaeology is the beneficiary of this period, and it could be said that more sites are excavated today than at any other time. This is the case in Europe thanks to the Valletta Convention (1992), by which an increase in resources for what was still known as rescue archaeology was agreed for both public and private development schemes. The convention was justified by ill-defined social and cultural values. As its Article 2 puts it:
There is an increasing demand by members of the public to have access to their past. This is a demand for an identity and is a fundamental right of peoples. It can only be met by specialistsdarchaeologistsdwho can interpret the data and assist the public in gaining access to its heritage.
In practical terms, the Valleta Convention integrated European archaeology into urban and regional planning policies, turning archaeologists into consultants for land developers (Council of Europe, 1992). Much has been written about the consequences of the convention and its implementation (Olivier, 2014; van der Haas and Schut, 2014; Willems, 2007). The way in which the Valletta Convention developed followed the neoliberal logic, as the archaeologists are not paid for by the state (or very rarely), but rather by the builders (Webley et al., 2012). In other parts of the world, the evolution of development-led archaeology took a similar route, although the issue of indigenous peoples marked these changes. The process had already started, as can be seen from a diverse set of events. One of these was the emergence of Action Anthropology in the United States in the 1960s, a development linked to anthropology professor Sol Tax (Stapp, 2012). Other elements leading to the current situation were heritage-led, such as the Burra Charter of 1979 in Australia. The impossibility of adapting the Venice Charter to heritage protection led to the tailoring of this new agreement in which social value (Johnston, 1992) appeared for the first time as one of the parameters for the preservation of sites. This has had subsequent influences in Europe, as seen in the Faro Convention, in which people and human values are placed at the center of cultural heritage (Council of Europe, 2005). Much earlier than this, in the United States, the turning point came with the proclamation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 (Fine-Dare, 2002). This led to further developments (Jameson, 2004) and was followed by additional legislation in many other countries in the Americas (Arnold and Yapita, 2005; Endere and Ayala, 2012; Siegel and Righter, 2011). Archaeology has indeed become a contested field in many if not all parts of the world (Silverman, 2011). The public is still interested in archaeology, as can be seen from the maintenance of museums and sites open to the public. One of the key developments of this period has been the World Heritage List. Although it was created in 1972, the earliest idea was to select a very small number of sites for world preservation (Cleere, 2012). Having multiplied many times that number, in the framework of neoliberalism, the WHL has been turned into a seal of quality that ensures large numbers of visitors to a site. Although issues such as indigenous and local population rights are on the agenda, large corporations and the most powerful states in the world are steering much of what is taking place in the selection process (Meskell, 2018). Beyond this elite group of sites on the list, archaeological tourism elsewhere is seen as a way of making archaeology sustainable. Archaeology has also showed an increasing desire to reach the general public and indigenous groups through the development of what began under the name public archaeology (Ascherson, 2000), but was soon supplemented by community archaeology (Marshall, 2002), a movement that has spread to many areas of the world such as Latin America (Corrales Ulloa and Badilla Cambronero, 2016) and Africa (Schmidt and Pikirayi, 2016; Tully, 2009). It is now an established field with its own publications, one of these being the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage. The spirit behind this social and community base was also reflected in the creation of a new archaeological association, the World Archaeology Congress (WAC), whose first meeting took place in 1986, and indeed its delegates influenced some of the aforementioned changes. The WAC was not the only challenge to the oldestablished congresses, as other similar conferences, including those of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) in Europe, also appeared and to some extent played a similar role (Kristiansen, 2004; Novakovic, 2013). Others, such as the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), appeared later, in 2012, and are of a more specific nature. One of the major challenges archaeology has gone through in the last decades has been taking into account indigenous rights to their own past (Mamyev, 2014; Picas, 2021; Watkins and Nicholas, 2015; Zubieta and McDonald, 2021). This section would not be complete without a mention of archaeological theory. In the 1980s, New/Processual Archaeology was becoming old (Embree, 1989: 30). It was challenged in the United Kingdom by the next theoretical wave, first called “interpretative” and then “post-processual” archaeology (Hodder, 1982), although this new theory never constituted a coherent movement. While one could say the same about the previous theoretical waves, post-processual theory increasingly looked like a recipe book with ingredients such as critical theory, neo-Marxism, post-structuralism, and feminism, an assortment that was seen with positive eyes. As Robert Preucel commented,
Postprocessual archaeology is a label that actively resists definition. At its most basic level, the term refers not to a unified program but, rather, to a collection of widely divergent and often contradictory research interests. If anything can be said to unite these archaeologies, it is that most share a common dissatisfaction with the standard positivist paradigm, a concern for recapturing the distinctive human qualities of the past, and a preoccupation for the uses of archaeological knowledge in the present. Preucel (1995: 147).
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As the author mentioned, post-processual theories did not necessarily oppose those of processualism, but meant “a fuller exploration of process through a consideration of historical context” (Preucel, 1995: 148). What post-processual archaeology has managed to do better than its predecessor has been to address social and ideological matters and to engage with the public role for archaeology in contemporary society. This complementarity, however, is not reflected in the current handbooks, including that mentioned above, Renfrew and Bahn’s Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practices, although, as Ian Hodder mentioned a few years ago, it was time to move on (Hodder et al., 2007: 224–225). Theory also influenced the way in which gender is now analyzed, not only in past societies but also in the discipline itself. Influenced by the #MeToo movement, there is an increasing claim for halting sexual harassment in academia to make archaeological practice a safe place to work (Voss, 2021a,b).
Summary and Future Directions The overview of the history of archaeology presented in this entry could easily grow into a whole volume or two, and even in this case there would be elements and perspectives that would be missing from the account. An effort has been made to expand beyond Europe, for many supposedly world histories of archaeology have been too Eurocentric in their outlook. Yet, the author’s experience will always influence the way an account is laid out. Knowing about the history of the discipline is key for a critical understanding of the disciplinary past and the roots of many disciplinary practices today. Where is archaeology going? What will future historians of archaeology say about the decades ahead? Archaeology has the fortune of being placed in between the humanities and the sciences and this may prevent it from the ill-fate of the other disciplines within the humanities field (Engell, 2023). Some see the future with optimistic eyes, especially in relation to research and funding (Kristiansen, 2014). Moreover, the increasing importance of cultural heritage also places archaeology in a favorable position with regard to its long-term prospects. Yet, there is no doubt that the discipline will be facing challenges regarding its relevance in a changing world marked by migration, social and political tensions. It will be the role of the younger members of the current and of incoming generations to steer through all these obstacles and sustain the discipline in time to come.
See Also: Archaeology and the Future; Historic Roots of Archaeology.
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Further Reading Chakrabarti, Dilip K., 1988. A History of Indian Archaeology From the Beginning to 1947. Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi.
Afro-Brazilian Archaeology Lucio Menezes Ferreiraa,b and Marcos Andre´ Torres de Souzab, a Department of Anthropology, Federal University of Pelotas, Pelotas, Brazil; and b Graduate Program in Archaeology, Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues African Slavery in Brazil Spiritual Practices and Rituals Interpretive Streams Afro-Catholicism The Living World of Spirits Cultural Creativity Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Key Points
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Review of the state-of-the-art of Afro-Brazilian archaeology Advances on spiritual practices and ritual studies; and cultural creativity studies Afro-Brazilian agentive action Spiritual practices and cultural creativity as a means for contesting social control and for engagement with the hostile worlds of slave regimes Afro-Brazilian people reconstructed their pluralistic cosmologies in different Brazilian regions through Afro-Catholicism, Candomblé and Batuque Enslaved people created a rich and diversified set of material expressions and new artifacts
Abstract In the last twenty years, Brazilian archaeologists have been bearing fruitful results for advancing our knowledge about African diaspora. They have scrutinized a broad spectrum of subjects: plantations’ slave quarters, urban spaces, cemeteries, religious houses, and past and contemporary maroon settlements. With research covering most regions of Brazil, archaeologists have also provided various platforms for interdisciplinary analyses and collaborative scholarship. In this entry we take up the challenge of reviewing the arc of African diaspora archaeology in Brazil, addressing the advances undertaken in the last two decades, exactly on those areas in which we have seen some of the most recent developments: spiritual practices and ritual studies; and cultural creativity. Discussing both issues, we will emphasize the Afro-Brazilian agentive action, drawing our attention to spiritual practices and cultural creativity as means for contesting social control and for engaging with the hostile worlds of slave regimes.
Introduction African diaspora archaeology has become a well-established research interest in the United States from 1960s onwards (Orser, 2010). Dealing with the processes of Africanization of the Americas, to use a term coined by Knight (2010), African diaspora archaeology has widened its scope as well as broadened the avenues and methods to study many issues: the genesis and changes in cultural identity processes, significance, and diversity; the materialities built to gear enslavement, surveillance, and oppression; the different ways of enhancing self-liberation, and resisting slavery and social control; the critical race theories; the material culture associated to African cultural inheritance, its creativity, and perseverance, and so on (Weik, 2020). Archaeological studies of African diasporic contexts have spread to Caribbean and South American regions from the 1990s onwards (Singleton and de Souza, 2009). Regarding South America, archaeologists have been revealing many particularities of the material lives of African enslaved people in Argentina (Shávelzon and Zorzi, 2014), Peru (Weaver, 2021), Colombia (Oliveros, 2013), Suriname (White, 2010), and Ecuador (Moreno, 2018), but the archaeological literature is still fairly limited to date on these countries (Brooks and Souza, 2020). Specifically in Brazil, however, in the last twenty years Brazilian archaeologists have been
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bearing fruitful results for advancing our knowledge about African diaspora. They have studied basically the same issues under investigation by their counterparts in the US as well as scrutinized a broad spectrum of subjects: plantations’ slave quarters, urban spaces, cemeteries, religious houses, and past and contemporary maroon settlements (Symanski, 2016). With research covering most regions of Brazil, archaeologists have also provided various platforms for interdisciplinary analyses and collaborative scholarship (Ferreira, 2015). Studies on Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices and rituals, for example, have grown dramatically in the last years, opening new paths for investigations which increasingly attract the attention of scholars from different fields of Latin American studies (Sampeck and Ferreira, 2020). In this entry we take up the challenge of reviewing the arc of African diaspora archaeology in Brazil, addressing the advances undertaken in the last two decades on those areas in which we have seen some of the most recent developments: spiritual practices and ritual studies, and cultural creativity. Discussing both issues, we will emphasize the Afro-Brazilian agentive action, drawing our attention to their spiritual practices and cultural creativity as means for contesting social control and for engaging with the hostile worlds of slave regimes. To do so in a way that hopefully proves useful requires that we focus on the African slavery in Brazil and its deepest inheritance.
Overview and Key Issues African Slavery in Brazil African slavery has a long and complex history in Brazil. Africans and their descendants have been present throughout Brazil, as well as in Latin America, since the early 16th century, contributing materially to its cultural and ethnic matrices. Following Portuguese colonization in 1500, African slavery continued in Brazil until the official emancipation in 1888. Brazil was undoubtedly the major importer of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. Colonizers and their heirs bought and sold approximately 45% of the total of 11,500,000 Africans who disembarked in slaving ports in the period between 1501 and 1875. Thus, landowners, rural and urban oligarchs, and aristocrats systematically exploited 4,800,000 Africans and their descendants (Eltis and Richardson, 2010: 23) in a great variety of activities, crafts, and works, both in rural and urban contexts. Enslaved labor in plantations, and in the urban centers as well, produced astounding amounts of wealth that fueled capitalist expansion and the internal colonialism schemes of Brazilian and Latin American elites (Grandin, 2014). Of course, plantations were not the only locale of African and Afro-Brazilian labor (neither were in American and Latin American worlds), but besides the astonishing profits acquired with the slave trade, the apparently insatiable thirst for labor on plantations was the principal reason for the coerced transport of enslaved Africans to Brazil (and of course to other American and Latin American regions). A considerable part of Afro-Brazilian life was spent, and lost, in the many plantations spread throughout different Brazilian regions. To mention only some of them: from the 16th century onwards, the sugar cane, cacao, tobacco, and cotton plantations in Northeastern Brazil; from the 18th century onwards, the mining sites and coffee plantations in Southeastern Brazil; from the 18th century onwards, the beef jerky plantations in the grass plains of Southern Brazil; last but not least, as early as the beginning of the 16th century, sugar cane plantations were built in the productive environments of the Amazon Forest. The wealth generated by the plantation world, that is, by the system of slavery, enabled the Brazilian elites (like other upper classes across the Americas) to prompt urbanization processes, the centralization and reproduction of their political power, as well as to allow them to foment liberal ideologies about their own freedom as a contraposition of the condition of slavery. As Brazil became a leading source of sugar in the late 16th century, Pernambuco, Salvador da Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro emerged as the leading markets for slaves brought directly from Africa. Central Africa was then the major source of slaves for Brazil, as it was basically for all of the Americas (Eltis and Richardson, 2010). Those major ports were also transit points for enslaved Africans sold on to the mining sites of Minas Gerais and Goiás, especially from the first half of the 18th century. By the end of the 17th century onwards, the Northeastern region of Brazil explored a new slave trade route to the Mina Coast, making West Africa the major source of captives working on the plantations of Northeastern Brazil. Rio de Janeiro maintained its prominence on the Central African route until 1850, when the Brazilian government prohibited the slave trade (notwithstanding the illegal commerce of captives, which continued at least until 1875). For this reason, Congo and Angola became the principal regions where new captives were abducted to the hard labor on the Brazilian plantations. However, the Brazilian intraregional slave trade was also an important source of slaves, in some Brazilian regions mixing captives who came from both Central and West Africa. This was the case, for example, of Southern Brazil, where landowners, due to their connections with the slave trade organized at the Montevideo port, brought many captives from Southeast Africa too (Eltis and Richardson, 2010; Grandin, 2014). It is important to emphasize that Brazil won its independence from Portugal in 1822 but held the Afro-Brazilian people in bondage until 1888. Therefore, the nation building process in Brazil was erected under the coercive and violent system of slavery. Colonial traces of this history can be found in contemporary Brazilian society. Brazil is a society still marked by ongoing structural racism, 134 years after slavery’s abolition. Slavery’s deepest inheritance still endures in the form of state violence, differential access to the guarantees of citizenship, social and economic policies marked by inequality, and by tangibly racial impacts on Afro-Brazilian people. This deep inheritance of slavery “haunts” the archaeological studies on African diasporic contexts in Brazil. Given the long history of African slavery in Brazil, archaeologists must recognize it as a diachronic process and understand the long-lasting consequences of slavery for contemporary Brazilian society. Archaeologists working in African diasporic contexts cannot ignore the consequences of forced migration, colonialism, enslavement, and racism that forged the Brazilian society. We must remain open to what
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Afro-Brazilian archaeology can tell us about the complexities of slavery in the past while recognizing the political resonance and power of such research in the present struggles for social justice and antiracist activism.
Spiritual Practices and Rituals Since Thompson (1983) coined the term “Black Atlantic,” we know that fluidity and movement were, and still are, crucial in making sense of Afro-American spirituality. Previous scholarship has argued that Africans reconstructed their pluralistic spirituality in Latin America. Their religious practices, rituals, and beliefs survived the middle passage and were reconstituted under enslavement. A thorny issue remains, however: we can say that Africans invented new spiritual practices in Brazil and in all of the Americas. African inventiveness created fluid, flexible, and absorbing religiosities in American contexts. Heterodoxy, mixture, and spiritual exchanges abounded in everyday life.
Interpretive Streams Scholars have been dealing with the intricate realm of African spirituality in the Americas walking through two interpretive streams. In the first place, inspired by cultural anthropologists, they have moved beyond concepts about creolization to investigating strategies of community building and cultural reinvention accomplished by Africans in American contexts. As we saw above in relation to the Brazilian case, historians have argued that the slave trade in different periods captured people from specific African locations, who were sent to particular regions (Hall, 2005). Some scholars, therefore, have highlighted that Central and West African populations, where most of the enslaved people came from, shared cosmologies, spiritual practices, and beliefs (Ogundiran and Falola, 2010; Thornton, 2016). They consider that Afro-Latin American people tended to affiliate according to their linguistic and cultural affinities, building broader ethnic identities called “nations.” The second interpretive stream asserts that Afro-Latin American spirituality arose from multiple sources that have tangled from common ontological foundations. This perspective allows us to pinpoint the specificities of Afro-Latin American spirituality in particular contexts where enslaved people shaped local religiosities in enduring and meaningful ways. Candomblé in Brazil, Santería in Cuba, and Voodoo in Haiti had deep roots in Angolan Catholicism as well as in Yoruba and Fon religions, especially the Orishas and Voodoos from Nigeria and Dahomey. There were also rich precedents of the Candomblé in the ethnic cluster EweGen-Aja-Fon. Circulating throughout the Atlantic, African gods and their materialities spread to Europe, the Caribbean, and North and South America, and even returned to Africa in modified forms (Parés, 2007). This approach also considers that the Orishas, in the Atlantic diasporic processes, were resignified in Latin America; some Orishas gained more prominence than they sometimes possessed in Africa (Bastide, 1985). In Afro-Latin American contexts, Orishas became signs of resistance and subversion of the conditions of captivity, signifiers of collective protection, and prosperity. As enslaved people confronted the unknown and sought to shape their lives, they recreated lost words and reconstructed new religions, which engaged with Catholicism as well.
Afro-Catholicism African and Afro-Latin American people did not fully incorporate Catholicism. They reinterpreted Catholic symbols in terms of their own ontologies. Religion provides a compelling lens for observing the interchange of ideas that circulated in the Atlantic world, while simultaneously inviting reflection on the pluralism of cosmologies in the unfolding trajectory of African-based religiosity. The Christian proselytizing movements, both Catholic and Protestant, caught up Afro-Latin American spirituality and contributed to a “circum-Atlantic Afro-Christian culture” (Catron, 2016: 2). Catholicism was practiced in Central and West Africa since the 15th century. By 1486, Portuguese missionaries were active in West Africa and in the Kingdom of Benin. The fast-spreading Catholic values reached the Kingdom of Lunda and Angola, and the Kingdom of Kongo had created its own forms of Christianity, a local interpretation characterized by the matching of African deities and Christian saints (Thornton, 2016). To say it poetically, the Atlantic was like a river of two currents wherein the flows of gods, their artifacts, and rituals emanated from both shores, prompting the circulation of artifacts and rituals. Afro-Brazilian people were able to rejoin their ancestor memories constituted in the long-term history between Africa and Brazil, reasserting both the Catholic spirituality and the practices informed by notions related to African deities, ancestor spirits, and forces of nature. Incorporation of Catholic materialities was very typical on both sides of Atlantic. Sometimes Afro-Brazilian people were sewing up spiritual threads that they already spun in Central Africa. The crucifixes, for example, were long considered a minkisi (power-objects) by West Central Africans, particularly by the Congolese people (MacGaffey, 2000). Thus, Afro-Brazilian people were capable of creating their own expressions of Afro-Catholic devotions. These devotions included the exchange with saints, on physical possession of spirits (Parés, 2007), on festivals, processions, and popular veneration of saints. A plethora of materialities were entangled by Afro-Brazilian people to embody protection, to enhance luck, or to open good paths: medallions, amulets, talismans, religious iconography, and rosaries. They were valued both in the Americas and Africa, and, like the crucifixes, the rosaries were particularly popular power objects employed as a strong materiality. Brazil had fertile soil for the flourishing and transforming of Afro-Catholic ontologies. Institutions such as the Spanish American cabildos de nación and Catholic lay brotherhoods dubbed as irmandades in Brazil were some of the most effective incubators of AfroLatin American ritual traditions. The so-called Black Churches (Igreja dos Pretos in Portuguese) were organized in Latin America since the 16th century, but they were originally created in Portugal and Spain from the 15th century onwards, where Africans influenced broadly Iberian forms of Catholicism. In some parts of Brazil, the enslaved people from Central Africa brought with them the LusoAfrican Catholicism, or what Roger Bastide conceptualized as Africanized Catholicism (Bastide, 1985). Catholic brotherhoods
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formed political networks of solidarity, facilitating the purchase of manumissions, medicines, and food, and even supporting maroon communities. We are now starting to know some Afro-Catholic practices in Brazilian archaeological contexts. The archaeological assemblage from Valongo Wharf, in Rio de Janeiro, contained several Christian crucifixes and catholic medals related to spiritual and magical practices derived from Central African cosmologies (Lima et al., 2014). de Souza (2011) uncovered in the slave quarter of the sugar plantation São Joaquim, in Goiás, a copper crucifix associated to a dark quartz crystal, a pervasive materiality appearing in many archaeological sites occupied by enslaved people in Americas, suggesting an African spiritual practice intended for personal or collective protection. Camilla Agostini identified ceramic pipes decorated with pearly motifs, like rosaries, probably used by slaves and free Afro-Brazilians congregated at the Our Lady of the Rosary Black Churches in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais (Agostini, 2018). Camilla Agostini also discussed the discovery of a key and a polished stone buried under the door of an illegal slave trader’s house from the São Paulo coast. She argues that enslaved people buried these objects as a way to conjure spirits and to protect themselves and the landowner. In addition, Agostini found in the great house’s middle area some fragments of ceramic panhandles crafted in phallic shapes. Agostini stated that this find could encode both Afro-Catholic and Orisha’s ceremonial practices. Indeed, the phallus is a symbol both of Orisha called Eshu and of the catholic saint called São Gonçalo. Their symbol is a phallus because they are usually depicted as the agentive powers of sexuality, fertility, and abundance. Brazilian Archaeology’s contributions to Afro-Catholicism are fairly limited to date. However, we now have some material evidence on how Afro-Brazilian people entangled Catholicism according to their own ontologies and transformed it in creative ways. Neo-catholic spiritual practices and rituals settled on Brazilian plantations and urban centers have been revealing the same inventive logic.
The Living World of Spirits The few archaeological examples of Afro-Catholic practices in Brazil show how difficult it is to disentangle the materiality mess and the different sources of Afro-Latin American spiritual practices. A difficult task faced by archaeologists is how to retrieve the spiritual meanings from quotidian objects and materials (Fennell, 2011). African diaspora archaeology has an especially important role to play in investigating the relationships between materiality and meaning in contexts of physical struggle for self-liberation. Plantation worlds, archaeological contexts of laboring and domestic environments, reveal ways in which the built environment was crafted to organize production and control. However, those same contexts show that no matter how adamant the social control was, enslaved people managed to act beyond containment. We know that the practice of burying various classes of objects in domestic environments has a spiritual connotation, entangling things, humans, gods, and the world of spirits. It has been interpreted as a form of resistance against captivity and as a means by which African enslaved people defined themselves and understood their relations with life, health, and death (Fennell, 2011: 33–36). In the United States, perhaps the most evocative example is the discovery of minkisi spirit bundles in houses associated with enslaved people on the East Coast (Leone et al., 2014; Fennell, 2003). Brazilian archaeologists have retrieved evidence of Afro-Latin American spiritual practices and rituals in different contexts. Luis Symanski uncovered in Mato Grosso, under the foundation of a sugar mill’s great house, a material arrangement of a plate with a coin laid down at its center, which he interpreted as evidence that the enslaved people deliberately buried those items to cast a spell on the sugar mill’s owner (Symanski, 2007). In the slave quarters of a coffee plantation in the Paraíba Valley, Southeastern Brazil, Symanski found a deposit of pieces of iron slag, white clay, quartz flakes, and one quartz core. These materials show connections to Central African cosmology regarding the role of iron and beliefs in a blacksmith’s power, a cosmology that played an important role in stimulating the overt rebellions that spread through the Paraíba Valley during the first half of the 19th century (Symanski and Gomes, 2016). Salvador, in Bahia, is the setting of great Afro-spiritual archaeological contexts. Luciana Novaes carried out underwater research in the Água dos Meninos Bay, which she classified as a sacred site made of an impressive submerged iron sculpture attributed to Eshu. This invisible sculpture was an ingenious and elaborate mode of landscape appropriation and control undertaken by enslaved people and their descendants (Novaes, 2017). Samuel Gordenstein examined Candomblé rituals in 19th century religious houses (terreiros in Portuguese) from Salvador. His archaeological excavations of the house basements found at the ground level some altars, glass bottles, beads, nails, and four inverted gardening pot bases, a material set buried to plant axédthat is, materials, including plants and liquids, used to emulate the energies related to Candomblé gods and to protect religious houses (Gordenstein, 2016). Other Brazilian studies have recovered evidence of spiritual practices involving glass beads, many body ornaments, ceramic pipes, earthenware vessels, and amulets (Lima et al., 2014; Lima, 2016). One of the most evocative studies about Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices was undertaken by Tania Andrade Lima in a collective refuse area located near a fountain in downtown Rio de Janeiro (Lima, 2016). This study evinced an astonishing material culture related to the African spiritual practices dating between the end of the 17th century and the middle of the 18th century. The archaeological assemblage includes amulets whose origin was attributed to West Central Africa; depictions of the Bakongo cosmogram, cut into Portuguese earthenware in spiral motif; ritual objects, such as a whale backbone with a dikenga cross, and ceramic smokers, which still characterize the contemporary African-based religious rituals; finally, a small clay head with red slip painting, possessing a similar form as that found by Christopher Fennell in Loudoun County, Virginia (Fennell, 2007). This impressive small clay head was interpreted by an elderly yalorixá (clergywoman) as a materiality that entangles the ritual initiations in Candomblé (Fig. 1).
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Fig. 1 Details from a small head figure found in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Left: frontal view showing the face; right: upper view showing the head with a band and dots painted in white. Modified from Lima, 2016; Photography: Orlando Grillo.
Archaeological research carried out by Lucio Menezes Ferreira at the beef jerky plantations in Pelotas, Southern Brazil, has assessed the living world of spirits. The archaeological work at the São Jão Beef Jerky plantation revealed the foundations of a slave house (senzala in Portuguese) contiguous with another one whose facade is preserved. In addition to the midden area, there was a ritual context made of a large deposit of iron fragments, a padlock, and a key buried together in one of the senzala’s foundation sectors. We have interpreted this particular assemblage at São João through comparisons with the Africanist literature as well as via ethnographic research that we have been doing in collaboration with local clergymen and clergywomen affiliated with Batuque, the local name for the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. Our collaborators classify this find as part of Ogun and Eshu worship, suggesting that the enslaved people of São João buried these materials in an act of “planting axé” (Fig. 2). The interpretation of the cluster of irons and a padlock and key as an offering to Ogun and Eshu is consistent with wider discussions concerning the African diaspora and the meanings of the Orishas’ transposition to the New World. The transatlantic slave trade and the emergent plantation societies acted as corridors for the diffusion of African deities that shaped spiritual practices of enslaved Africans in Latin American environments, while simultaneously transforming the nature of the Orishas themselves. This can be seen in the case of the Orishas Eshu and Ogun. Eshu is usually represented as a god who drives the movement of creation. As the intermediary between earth and sky, he acts as a “hermeneutic,” translating the Orishas’ language for humans. His symbols are the key and the padlock because he can open and close the paths of human lives. By contrast, Ogun is the inventor of metalworking, creating iron tools for agriculture and weapons for war. He ensures the continuity of life, as a community cannot establish, live, or protect itself without Ogun and his knowledge. The technical knowledge for iron production is not only a secular activity but also involves sacred processes (Schmidt, 2009): to be a blacksmith requires specialized knowledge of the various elementsdwater, air, heat, clay, fuel, and irondthat make up creation. The resulting worked iron was the substance of wealth, skill, and work in the cosmologies of Central and West Africa, locations where some of the enslaved
Fig. 2 Alves.
Ritual deposit found in the slave house foundations at the São João plantation, Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul. Photography: Aluísio Gomes
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laborers of São João came from. Iron gained new significance in contexts of New World enslavement, with its connections to selfliberation (Symanski and Gomes, 2016) and Ogun’s metamorphosis to a warrior in Afro-Latin American contexts. Together, Ogun and Eshu thus formed a point of articulation and organization in face of the hardships of diaspora and slave regimes.
Cultural Creativity An aspect that has been successfully explored in Afro-Brazilian archaeology concerns the creative and flexible use of material resources (de Souza, 2013). Contrasting with what has been usually considered, different lines of evidence have indicated that enslaved people in Brazil actively engaged in the development of strategies that allowed them to overcome, at least in part, the limitations imposed on them, creating a rich and diversified set of material expressions. Beyond the acquisition of items from the owners’ hands without direct onus, a variety of strategies have been identified, which can be read from the perspective of risk management (Young, 1997). One strategy involved their inclusion in the local economies and the acquisition of items directly on the market. An example of participation in the economy comes from the investigation carried out by Souza (2016) in the slave quarters from a sugar cane plantation in Central Brazil, where he found parts of weapons that were probably used to supplement the diet or for the informal sale of meat and hides, which were typical in this region. He also found items related to animal transport, which allowed the enslaved persons greater mobility and more efficient transportation of goods. Evidence of acquisition of items directly in the market has been found particularly in ceramics. For instance, Symanski (2006) identified in the slave houses from a sugar cane plantation located in western Brazil, disparate tableware items with patterns that were not repeated at the great house, which, according to him, suggests the individual purchase of these objects by the enslaved individuals themselves. As relevant as this information is, the fact that the decorative patterns of these ceramics, which were minimally decorated or hand-painted in the colors brown, yellow, orange, and green forming geometric patterns, matches with an African aesthetic. Therefore, it is feasible to consider that in assuming some control for the acquisition of items necessary for their daily activities, the enslaved communities made use of their own cultural references and ultimately challenged the order that was being imposed to them. Another material strategy involved the production of utensils and tools that aimed to meet their daily needs. Discussions in this regard have focused especially on locally produced clay pipes and pottery. The analysis of a nineteenth-century pottery production center in São Paulo showed that the structuring of this production was complex and involved both free and enslaved people (Agostini, 2010). Despite the diversity of individual backgrounds involved in this production, it is clear that the captives imprinted their own references on the formation of these items, especially in their decorations (Fig. 3; Souza and Agostini, 2012; de Souza, 2018; Symanski, 2012). Different lines of evidence, which include physical-chemical and macroscopic data (Symanski, 2006), have also indicated the domestic production of pottery in maroons. Evidence of the occasional production of lithic artifacts has also been found in urban contexts (de Souza, 2013). Another type of evidence includes the production of buttons from animal bones, which has been found in cosmopolitan cities such as Rio de Janeiro (Lima, 2003). Other items, such as basketry, which is known through documentary records to have been widely used in the daily routines of enslaved people, certainly complemented this ensemble. A third strategy that seems to have been relevant in the past involves the recycling of objects. To date, two categories of recycled items have been identified archaeologically: glass and metal, both found in contexts clearly related to enslaved people. Recycled glass includes evidence of chipping marks produced in order to create functional edges. These artifacts have been conspicuously found in different regions and periods, suggesting their widespread use (Fig. 4; Lima, 2016; de Souza, 2016; Santos Júnior and Costa, 2020). Evidence of recycled metals comprises objects produced to serve as adornments and tools. In a military facility used during the Paraguay War (1864–1870), circular withdrawals were found in sword scabbards that were probably used to produce adornments (de Souza, 2013). Considering the limitations of the archaeological record in relation to perishable materials, a greater repertoire can be expected. A last strategy concerns petty theft, which can also be understood as risk management. This type of strategy, which is very difficult to detect archaeologically, was suggested by the presence of the bones of juvenile individuals of pig and ox found in the refuse of
Fig. 3
Locally produced pipes from Central Brazil with African influenced designs. Modified from Souza, 2018.
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Fig. 4
Recycled glass found in the slave house at the São João plantation, Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul. Drawing: Gustavo Peretti Wagner.
a slave quarter in a Jesuit farm, along with other faunal remains. Since it would be economically incoherent to sacrifice an animal that is in its infancy, this evidence was interpreted as possibly indicating theft (Symanski and de Morais Junior, 2016). Overall, these strategies indicate that, contrary to what is usually acknowledged, Afro-Brazilians could make new artifacts from diversified material resources. It is worth noting that, as argued by Souza (2013), these different strategies could be combined, creating a rich universe of possibilities. Many of these solutions were adopted by the enslaved people in order to overcome the rigorous limitations imposed on them by a deeply unequal system. Other solutions may have been adopted because they offered a natural solution to their daily needs. Both cases, which overlap and complement each other, were not fortuitous strategies, requiring specific repertories of knowledge and practice that were inherent to each group and organized through socially structured routines.
Summary and Future Directions James Scott (1990) argued that rituals are the “weapons of the weak.” Ritual and spiritual practices create an anti-structure, an agentive action that embodies a counter-hegemony in the face of political strategies of domination, exactly what James Scott (1990) defines as “hidden transcripts.” Archaeologists have the appropriate skills to address crucial issues about dynamic movements and dialectical processes that have entangled Afro-Latin American people and things in spiritual practices, rituals, and cultural creativity. From this perspective, Brazilian archaeologists have been offering a stunning view of material memories of Afro-Brazilian rituals, spiritual practices, and different material strategies used by the enslaved people in their daily life. Archaeological studies about Afro-Brazilian diasporic contexts have an epistemological common ground. Brazilian archaeologists have been employing multiple methodologies to understand the Afro-Brazilian daily life, spiritual practices, and rituals in their own ontological terms. They have been considering that, as in many other societies, African and Afro-Latin American communities constituted themselves in their own terms, making use of particular cultural references and forms of social constitution. In the spiritual dimension, they recognized themselves as part of nature, whereby rocks, animals, rivers, and objects have their own spirits. In this regard, it is important to note that spirits are embodied in such African and Afro-Latin American ontologies: there is no transubstantiation and there is no external divide between the human and the non-human. This understanding of the world underpins, for example, the axé of the Yorubadthat is, the materialities used to drive the circulation of energies that connect all beings and for powerful spiritual commands that make things happen (Thompson, 1983: 15). Materials in these ritual contexts have efficacy and agency, possessing their own powers and capacities based upon spiritual intentionality or intervention (Ogundiran and Saunders, 2014). Brazilian archaeologists have been showing that Afro-Brazilian daily and spiritual practices were used to actively establish a sense of place and control over the landscape and, ultimately, over their own lives. Brazilian archaeologists have detailed the subtleties of enslaved people’s everyday resistance and how they constructed their own landscapes by drawing attention to more nuanced forms of human-thing entanglements and cultural creativity that often occurred in unexpected and hidden ways. Archaeology’s ability to uncover hidden rituals and to reveal cultural creativity has the potential to be an active, crucial discipline in African diaspora studies about resistance processes and the current fight against racism.
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See Also: Historic Roots of Archaeology.
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Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World. University of Press Florida, Gainesville, FL. Fennell, Christopher, 2011. Early African America: archaeological studies of significance and diversity. J. Archaeol. Res. 19, 1–49. Ferreira, Lucio M., 2015. A global perspective in maroon archaeology in Brazil. In: Marshall, Lydia (Ed.), The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL, pp. 375–390. Gordenstein, Samuel L., 2016. Planting axé in the city: urban terreiros and the growth of Candomblé in the Nineteenth-Century Salvador, Bahia. J. Afr. Diaspora Archaeol. Herit. 5 (2), 71–101. Grandin, Greg, 2014. The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. Metropolitan Books, New York. Hall, Gewndolyn M., 2005. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, CA. Knight, Frederick C., 2010. Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650–1850. New York University Press, New York. Leone, Mark P., Knauf, Jocelyn E., Tang, Amanda, 2014. Ritual bundle in colonial Annapolis. In: Ogundiran, Akinwumi, Saunders, Paula (Eds.), Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IA, pp. 198–215. Lima, Tania A., 2003. E os “invisíveis” aparecem na Praça XV: ofícios mecânicos e escravos urbanos no Rio de Janeiro, século XIX. In: Paper presented at the XII Congresso da Sociedade de Arqueologia Brasileira, São Paulo. Lima, Tania A., 2016. A meeting place for urban slaves in eighteenth-century in Rio de Janeiro. J. Afr. Diaspora Herit. 5 (2), 102–146. Lima, Tania A., Souza, Marcos A.T. de, Sene, Glaucia M., 2014. Weaving the second skin: protection against evil among the Valongo slaves in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. J. Afr. Diaspora Herit. 3 (2), 103–136. MacGaffey, Wyatt, 2000. Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IA. Moreno, Daniela C.B., 2018. Collaborative archaeology to revitalize an Afro-Ecuadorian Cemetery. J. Afr. Diaspora Archaeol. Herit. 7 (1), 42–69. Novaes, Luciana C.N., 2017. O Exu submerso: uma arqueologia da religião e da diáspora no Brasil. Prismas, Paraná. Ogundiran, Akinwumi, Falola, Toyin, 2010. Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IA. Ogundiran, Akinwumi, Saunders, Paula, 2014. On the materiality of Black ritual. In: Ogundiran, Akinwumi, Saunders, Paula (Eds.), Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IA, pp. 1–27. Oliveros, Johana C.M., 2013. Transformações na paisagem cultural contemporânea de uma povoação de origem quilombola na costa norte da Colômbia, San Basilio Palenque, séculos XIX e XX. In: Agostini, Camilla (Ed.), Objetos da Escravidão: Abordagens sobre a Cultura Material da Escravidão e seu Legado. 7 Letras, Rio de Janeiro, pp. 105–128. Orser Jr., Charles E., 2010. Twenty-First-Century historical archaeology. J. Archaeol. Res. 18, 111–150. Parés, Luis N., 2007. A Formação do Candomblé: história e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia. Editora da Unicamp, Campinas. Sampeck, Kathryn, Ferreira, Lucio M., 2020. Delineando a arqueologia Afro-Latino-americana. Vestígios: Revista Latino-Americana de Arqueologia Histórica 14 (1), 140–168. Santos Júnior, Everaldo D., Costa, Diogo M., 2020. Artefactos en vidro en la Amazonia colonial. Revista de Arqueología Histórica Argentina y Latinoamericana 14 (2), 9–30. Schávelzon, Daniel, Zorzi, Flavia, 2014. Afro-Argentine archaeology: a case of short-sighted academic racism during the early twenty-century. J. Pan Afr. Stud. 7 (7), 79–92. Schmidt, Peter R., 2009. Tropes, materiality, and ritual embodiment of African iron smelting furnaces as human figures. J. Archaeol. Method Theor 16, 262–282. Scott, James, 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Singleton, Theresa, de Souza, Marcos A.T., 2009. Archaeologies of African diaspora: Brazil, Cuba, and United States. In: Majewski, Teresita, Gaimster, David (Eds.), International Handbook of Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, pp. 449–469. Symanski, Luis Claudio P., 2006. Slaves and Planters in Western Brazil: Material Culture, Identity and Power. Doctoral dissertation. Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Symanski, Luis Claudio P., 2007. O Domínio da tática: práticas religiosas de origem Africana nos Engenhos de Chapada dos Guimarães (MT). Vestígios: Revista Latino-Americana de Arqueologia Histórica 1 (2), 7–36. Symansky, Luis C.P., 2012. The Place of strategy and the spaces of tactics: structures, artifacts, and power relations on sugar plantations of West Brazil. Hist. Archaeol. 46 (3), 124–148. Symanski, Luis Claudio P., 2016. Introduction: archaeology of African diaspora contexts in Brazil. J. Afr. Diaspora Herit. 5, 63–70. Symanski, Luis Claudio P., de Morais Junior, Geraldo P., 2016. Alimentação, socialização e reprodução cultural na comunidade escravizada do Colégio dos Jesuítas de Campos dos Goytacazes (RJ). In: Soares, Fernanda Codevilla (Ed.), Comida, cultura e sociedade: arqueologia da alimentação no Mundo Moderno. Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, pp. 95–112. Symanski, Luis Claudio P., Gomes, Flávio S., 2016. Iron cosmology, slavery, and social control: the materiality of rebellion in the coffee plantations of the Paraíba Valley, southeastern Brazil. J. Afr. Diaspora Archaeol. Herit. 5 (2), 174–197. Thompson, Robert F., 1983. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Vintage Books, New York.
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Thornton, John, 2016. The kingdom of Kongo and Palo Mayombe: reflections on an African-American religion. Slavery Abolit. 37 (1), 1–22. Weaver, Brendan, 2021. “The Grace of god and the virtue of obedience”: the archaeology of Slavery and the Jesuit hacienda systems of Nasca, Peru, 1617–1767. J. Jesuit Stud. 8, 430–453. Weik, Terry, 2020. Enslavement and emancipation. In: Orser Jr., Charles E., Zarankin, Andrés, Funari, Pedro Paulo, Lawrance, Susan, Symonds, James (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology. Routledge, London, pp. 133–149. White, Cheryl, 2010. Kumako: a place of convergence for maroons and amerindinas in Suriname, S.A. Antiquity 84 (324), 467–479. Young, Amy L., 1997. Risk management strategies among African-American slaves at Locus Grove plantation. Int. J. Hist. Archaeol. 1 (1), 5–37.
Further Reading Agostini, Camilla (Ed.), 2013. Objetos da escravidão: abordagens sobre a cultura material da escravidão e seu legado. Editora 7Letras, Rio de Janeiro. de Souza, Marcos A.T. (Ed.), 2013. Arqueologia da Diáspora Africana no Brasil. Vestígios: Revista Latino-Americana de Arqueologia Histórica 7 (1), 1–219. Ferreira, Lucio M., 2002. Ancestral Technologies: Afro-Brazilian archaeology and its contributions to the material history of Latin America. Colon. Lat. Am. Rev. 31 (4), 599–606. Ferreira, Lucio M. (Ed.), 2020. Arqueología de la diáspora africana en Sudamérica. Revista de Arqueología Histórica Argentina y Latinoamericana 2 (14), 1–125. Ferreira, Lucio M., 2021. Arqueología de la diáspora africana en Sudamérica. Revista de Arqueología Histórica Argentina y Latinoamericana 2 (15), 1–115. Orser Jr., Charles E., Funari, Pedro Paulo (Eds.), 2015. Current Perspectives on the Archaeology of African Slavery in Latin America. Springer, London. Santos, Vanicléia S., Symanski, Luis Claudio P., Holl, Augustin (Eds.), 2019. Arqueologia e história da cultura material na África e na diáspora africana. Brazil Publishing, Curitiba.
Material Culture Studies Andre´s Laguens, Instituto de Antropología de Córdoba, CONICET- Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Material Culture Studies in the History of the Discipline Processual Archaeology Material Culture Studies in France Post-processual Archaeology Material Culture Studies Today Material Culture and Symmetrical Archaeology Material Culture and Assemblages Material Culture and Materiality New Materialism Things and People in Entanglements Material Culture, Body, and Gender Ontologies of Material Culture Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Definition and scope of material culture studies Archaeology and material culture in the history of the discipline Material culture in evolutionism and in idealistic perspectives of culture Material culture and technology in processual archaeology The proposal of the symbolic dimension of material culture in post-processualism Material culture studies in archaeology outside the Anglo-Saxon world Relational and posthumanist perspectives on material culture Current discussions in the archaeology of material culture and materiality
Abstract Material culture studies encompass a plurality of different disciplines and methodologies united by an interest in studying people’s relationships with things, independent of time and space. They were defined as such in the 1990s, largely due to the rethinking of anthropology and archaeology about materiality. This entry reviews how archaeology, from its beginnings, studied material culture from different perspectives, emphasizing various aspects depending on the theoretical frameworks of each moment. The current tenets of archaeology regarding material culture, its ways of understanding and studying it, and how this study reveals the complex, fluid, and relational nature of material culture are synthesized.
Introduction Material culture studies encompass a plurality of different disciplines and methodologies united, even in their differences, by a common interest in studying the relationships between people and things. Such is the multiplicity of dimensions encompassing these relationshipsdas well as the things themselvesdthat a single discipline could not cover them. Many disciplines also study these relationships from particular perspectives and theorizations, such as engineering, architecture, art, design, philosophy, and others. In this sense, material culture studies do not form a single discipline but are undisciplined and therefore do not have a discipline-specific methodology, nor is therednor do they aspire to achieveda unified theory of material culture. Although material culture studies were not proposed as such until the 1990s, archaeology certainly has played an important role and, in part, was one of the disciplines that contributed to conceptualizing material culture studies as a space of academic interest.
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Material culture has been a key axis of archaeology since its beginnings as a discipline, with a long history of studying people’s relationships with things. To understand what material culture studies are about, it is essential to consider initially what is meant by material culture since it is a controversial concept, and with connotations that material culture studies themselves try to overcome, such as some implicit dualisms or oppositions like material vs. immaterial, cultural vs. natural, material vs. ideal. In what follows, we will discuss how material culture has been understood in archaeology, what ideas it encompasses, and how we may overcome the limitations of the concept. We will see how material culture has been understood in the history of the field from academic currents from different parts of the world, especially Europe, North America, and South America (the latter place from where this entry is written), to end with the challenges posed by the new perspectives that archaeology is addressing at present, and how they affect the conception of material culture or materiality in general.
Overview and Key Issues Material Culture Studies in the History of the Discipline Material culture, in its most basic sense, refers to the part of the world made by humans, from minor artifacts such as a needle or a projectile point to larger and more complex ones, such as a house, a city, a factory; in short, the whole universe of things that surround us and with which we interact daily. Some have considered it as the materialization of culture. However, this definition is limited to the inanimate and artificial part of the world, leaving aside other things not made by humans but with which we also interact. In turn, it refers to a traditional idea of culture as an exclusively human property, which can be divided into immaterial or intangible aspectsdsuch as speech, beliefs, forms of social organization or kinship, feelings, social and political relations, etc.dand material aspects, that is, its hard side, product and medium of those intangible ones. During several decades of the first half of the 20th century, this was a way of understanding material culture in the context of several theoretical positions in archaeology and anthropology, which not only artificially separated the material from the immaterial but also placed the former in a subordinate position. What was important was the social, the immaterial dimensions of culture in general, and material culture, besides being a by-product of them, was a means to approach them archaeologically. Nineteenth-century evolutionism did not directly use the term material culture but referred to it as arts, techniques, or technology; however, its conception of the relationship between humans and things was the same. For authors such as Edward B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer, in England, or Lewis Henry Morgan, in the United States, who laid the foundations of evolutionism in anthropology, the complexity and mastery of artifacts were traces and evidence of the progressive development of humanity; in short, of the progressive separation of humans from nature. Methodologically, the arrangement of artifacts by classes and increasing degrees of mastery and complexity supported this hypothesis, while at the same time artifacts became markers of time, defining the great stages of the evolution of humanity, such as the Paleolithic and Neolithic, which are still valid today. Material culture enhanced the exceptionality of the human species, and was concrete proof of the progress of humanity; it was also considered subject to the same natural laws of change and transformation of universal evolution and, concomitantly, viable for scientific study. Toward the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, other social theories rejected the evolution of culture. Still, they continued to share an idealistic view of culture that emphasized culture’s immaterial or mental aspects. Likewise, several of the assumptions and criteria of evolutionism remained methodologically valid. Material culturednow a term used explicitly to distinguish material products from ideas or abstract elements such as kinship, language, politics, etc.dcontinued to be a reflection of society and a by-product of human action, although now not as proof of its progressive development, but of its history. From the point of view of material culture, patterns in artifacts and their styles were the concrete products that reflected ideas or cultural norms widely shared by the peoples of a society, or more specifically, by a particular folk. Similar material cultures implied a shared culture among different societies. With these criteria, the study of the distribution of features and artifacts in space allowed the delimitation of cultural areas, a powerful concept in anthropology and archaeology throughout the Americas, which, despite important conceptual and theoretical criticisms, is still in force today with fewer culturalist nuances. In archaeology, defining cultural areas previously required the characterization of particular cultures through their repertoire of material culture to compare them afterward with others and search for elements in common. Despite the rejection of evolutionism, it is remarkable how this reconstruction of archaeological cultures broadly followed the same enumerative criteria as Taylor’s definition of culture: a complex totality that included beliefs, arts, customs, etc. The description and enumeration of material culture made it possible to reconstruct several of these aspects or to infer others partially. Thus, the works of the time characterized the culturesdor peoplesdfrom their settlement patterns, funerals, economy, beliefs, etc., and material culture was one more item. The latter could be divided into different categories that were informative of other dimensions of culture, such as weapons, technology, and esthetics. This association of material culture with a people had a strong influence on the definition of regional ethnic identities and nation-states and supported many political actions, particularly in Europe during Nazism. In line with the interests of mid-20th-century anthropology, especially in the United States, during the 1940s and post-World War II, archaeology became involved in studies of cultural change: how cultures changed, the processes of acculturation and diffusion. These concerns went hand in hand with the geopolitical interests of North American expansion and the study of forms of change. The conception of culture as a set of mental norms was central to the archaeological work of the time, including the development of specific analytical techniques to study change, such as ceramic seriation. Material culture reflected gradual, imperceptible,
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and unconscious changes for its bearers, the causes of which were inter-ethnic relations or cultural contacts and the diffusion of ideas, especially from cultures with greater creative and innovative potential that influenced others from the same or another cultural area.
Processual Archaeology A completely different perspective on material culture was put forward in the 1960s as a critical reaction to culturalist and enumerative views. The rethinking was a revolutionary change in the way of doing and understanding archaeologydand with it material cultured, driven through Lewis Binford in the United States in what became known as New Archaeology or processual archaeology. Material culture was no longer the reflection of mental patterns, nor was it subject to principles of change, but it was an active element in the adjustment of societies to their environment or, in New Archaeology’s terms: the adaptation of cultural systems to the environmental system (Binford, 1962). Specifically, this was achieved through technology, the intermediary between both systems. The concept of material culture was left aside, not only because it involved an idea associated with the theoretical line with which the New Archaeology disagreed, basically normative archaeology or North American cultural history, and therefore with the culturalist connotations implied, but also because it was not operative for a conception of culture where nontechnological aspects, such as art or styles, for example, did not have a primary functional sense in the adaptation to the environment. On the other hand, anthropology had left aside the interest in material culture; it could even be said that it was forgotten since what mattered was how societies were structured, being interested in topics such as political organization, kinship, economy, power, and where the participation of material culture in them was not considered. Although new archaeology referred to itself as anthropology, it postulated the inaccessibility of these dimensions of culture from archaeological remains due to methodological limitations, but not because of the characteristics of the archaeological record itself. The latter was significant in terms of material culture since it assumes that the archaeological record is an effect of the cultural system at work, and the principles relating the materiality of the record to its formation through the dynamics of the system’s functioning in the past had to be sought. One of the ways of doing this was through studies of the processes of formation and transformation of the record, from its present state to the dynamics that generated it; another was through ethnoarchaeology: studying contemporary cultural systems in operation and analyzing how they generated archaeological records. Importantly, material culture had an informative potential limited by theory and methodology but not by its material qualities per se. Unlike traditional evolutionary archaeology and culturalist archaeology, where material culture was vestigial, material culturedspecifically technologydwas an active part of the processes of shaping, adjusting, and changing cultural systems. The main goal of archaeology was to understand the functioning of these systems and to search for the universal laws that explained them. In turn, material culture reflected these systems at work, albeit in a limited way. The focus was on processes, not as historical processes of a succession of changes, but as adaptive processesdhence its denomination as processual archaeology. This was set within a framework associated with neo-evolutionism, which took up some of the principles of evolutionism, especially its mechanisms of change, variability, and selection, emphasizing materialism and human energy transformation processes. Rarely was material culturedor technologydso detached from humans as it was then: technology ended up being something alien to the subjects and subjected to the general laws of the systems. Material culture or technology could fulfill various practical and adaptive functions and was manipulated for such purposes by people, but, in the end, what mattered was the cultural system and its laws behind the artifacts and the individuals. The supposed objectivity of archaeology and the idea of material culture as a means of adaptation postulated by processualism were widely accepted in the academy of many countries, and much of world archaeology still follows its precepts, although updated by the criticisms received. Particularly in Latin America, it was very important during the military dictatorships (e.g. in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Peru) from the mid-1970s until the return of democracy in the mid-1980s, since it was considered a neutral science, objective and without political commitment to society. This was in contrast with the Latin American Social Archaeology (Arqueología Social Latinoamericana) of the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Marxist in orientation and committed to regional social processes and native peoples, where material culture was an expression of their identities and history, strongly linked to the present (Politis and Pérez Gollan, 2004). While processual archaeology was expanding its presence worldwide, other theoretical currents were developing different perspectives on material culture at the same time. On the one hand, historical archaeology in the United States; on the other hand, French archaeology with a longer and independent tradition of the use of the concept of material culture; both of them of structuralist inspiration. Historical archaeology in the USA, which had never abandoned the idea of material culture, opted for a framework in which material culture responded to rules and codes, which, although they resulted in material patterns, were not explained in functional or adaptive but in social and historical terms. In the late 1970s, Deetz (1977) equated material culture with language, as the former also responds to structures and rules governing material objects’ forms. Along the same lines, Glassie (1975) proposed to study colonial houses as material culture, introducing ideas about artifactual competence, as a series of built-in rules or structures, in the same way as speech and linguistic competence, and also subject to change and innovation, which through performances are materialized in artifacts. Individuals acquire these competencies in their experiences in the material world, which they reproduce, modify or change based on the rules learned and incorporated into practice. These proposals were ground-breaking, and they were followed several decades later by archaeology, especially in England.
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Material Culture Studies in France In a similar vein, French archaeology put forward an idea of material culture linked to social practices, the body, and techniques. The concern with material culture was always present in the social and human sciences in France, much used in history. In French sociology and ethnology, an important area of interest was the study of techniques and technology, from which archaeology was also nourished. Inspired by Marcel Mauss’s techniques of the body, André Leroi-Gourhan developed in the 1960s (initially proposed in the 1940s) a theory of material culture and technology based on a biologicist perspective, with an eye on the social (Leroi-Gourhan, 1965). He saw techniques as part of evolution and ontogenesis but characterized by another form of codified transmission of motor behaviors: memory. Unlike animals, where memory is inscribed in the genes and instincts, humans find it in the body. It is a memory that at the same time is social and individual, inscribed in the body through socially incorporated motor habits and objects, the latter the material products of those memories. In addition, and fundamentally, it is inscribed in language, which evolutionarily implies a separation of the word in relation to the object. These memories ensure, from generation to generation, the transmission of operational chains that allow the survival and development of the social group. It is a unique property of humans to locate their memory outside themselves, in society, and material culture. These relationships between memories, technical or operative behaviors and tools are combined in a critical element: technical gestures. Technical gestures have to do with the mechanical properties of the body and movements and, above all, with the hand’s modes of action, such as a series of elementary hand or manipulation gestures, such as grasping, gripping, pressing, translation, rotation, etc. One thing to note is that with technology, the hand ceases to be a tool and becomes only a motor; there is a “liberation of the hand,” as Leroi-Gourhan argued, as liberation from the limitations of the body, and where tools broaden the spectrum of technical gestures and the possibilities of influencing matter. Very importantly, technical gestures are inscribed in social and individual memory. As such, they are like the elementary unit of the operative chains of the different kinds of technical behavior, which are concretized in the tools and objects produced. It should be noted that Leroi-Gourhan, as early as the 1960s, overcame the oppositions material-spiritual, nature-culture, human-animal, instinct-intelligence, and opted for continuity between the human and the non-human, the discontinuities being due more to questions of degree and anthropocentrism than to real differences. In part, this is why the analysis of operational chains has become so important in recent decades. These were revived by Pierre Lemonnier in the 1990s when he postulated the need for an anthropology of technology, and more recently, they have been revitalized by archaeology and material culture studies, as it provides a tool in line with more current positions on the latter. Operational chains propose the analysis of objects from the sequence of actions, from obtaining the raw material to the finished object (without being interested in its use and subsequent abandonment, unlike the behavioral chains of processual archaeology), where the ways of doing and social representations of each society are revealed. In these ways of doing, there is a constant interplay between technical gestures, knowledge or know-how, the body, and operative behavior, so there is no clear separation between object and subject, and both are modified and reconsidered in the execution of the operative chains. Knowledge and ways of understanding the world and materials are also at stake in know-how, from their physical properties to forms of categorization, symbolization, and social meanings. Leroi-Gourhan’s work had little contemporary impact in the Anglo-Saxon world since it was translated very late, in contrast to France, where it was the foundation of current thinking on material culture. It was, and still is, very influential in South American archaeology in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, where the French tradition in technology studies has always been very important, especially in studying hunter-gatherer lithic technology.
Post-processual Archaeology The theoretical and epistemological changes that took place in the humanities and social sciences toward the end of the 1970s and later were soon taken up by archaeology, specifically by British archaeology and a generation of young archaeologists for whom these theoretical turns did not find an echo in a science with positivist and universal aspirations. On the contrary, the approaches questioned the nature of science and the possibilities of objective explanations and were based on understanding archaeology as a social science, and not necessarily as anthropology, with another way of understanding society and, in particular, individuals. Moreover, this implied a different position concerning the present, critical of the socio-politics of the discipline and its role as a producer of knowledge. In this perspective, the material culture was not mere objects external to humans, reflecting their adjustments to the environment, but an active part of the social world, loaded with meanings and ideology, with significance in particular historical contexts. The material culture was subject to negotiation and interpretation and was part of the structuring of the society and people. Concerns about technology were left aside and the concept of material culture was revitalized with a new perspective, differentiating and distancing itself from processual archaeology. Ian Hodder, an academic at Cambridge at the time, was the main driving force behind this radical change in archaeology, in what became known as post-processual archaeology, both in the sense of being a proposal that surpassed processual archaeology and in the sense of its affinity with postmodern perspectives (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, also in Cambridge then, were critical in proposing this new way of understanding and practicing archaeology (Shanks and Tilley, 1987). Hodder had been expressing his dissatisfaction with the postulates of New Archaeology since the late 1970s, and his ethnoarchaeological work in Kenya among the Baringo was key in that he not only perceived the symbolic dimensions of material culture but also did ethnoarchaeology where the native conception of objects influenced the construction of theory. Material culture was loaded with meanings, and its symbolic dimension participated in establishing spatial identity boundaries and gender differences. This implied a significant conceptual change in material culture and the forms of people’s relationship with it: material culture was loaded with meanings, subject to rules and codes but specific to each society, and as such, it was subject to interpretation.
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Although it could have certain similarities with language, as a system of signs and syntactic and semantic rules, its meanings were not univocal but depended on the context and the role of individuals as interpreters. In this last sense, it was also postulated that material culture could be like a text and participate in narrative forms of society. Material culture, in turn, participated in the structuring of individuals and society, in a reciprocal relationship, as both structuring and structured: material contexts and material culture were part of the context of socialization of people, but, in turn, people had the capacity to negotiate and modify the very structures in which both participated. However, structures are not understood as systems, patterns, or styles but as the codes and rules according to which societies, individuals, and their interrelationships are produced and reproduced. And here, individuals were a key element: very much in line with the postmodern and humanities positions of the 1990s, as well as the neoliberalism of the time (despite the more radical political position of the post-processual archaeologists), the importance of the individual, the individual will, and not the collective interest or the social, prevailed. However, even in this primacy of the individual, of subjects as agents, post-processual archaeology advocated the rupture of dualisms, such as subject-object and individual-society. Although it maintained the tension that exists in the concept of material culture, it can be thought that, on the one hand, its use was strategic as a way to differentiate itself from the emphasis on technology in processual archaeology, and on the other, to show its affinities with the humanities. The conceptual shift that post-processual archaeology meant began to expand in the 1980s and had significant echoes, which continue to grow today, opening a spectrum of possibilities toward other ways of doing archaeology, of conceptualizing the world and people, and, in particular, material culture, in which many of the current proposals have their roots. Its impact was progressively so important that, despite its low receptivity in the United States, it came to influence processual inspired archaeology, enabling the possibility of new questions that the New Archaeology had forbidden, in a hybridization that looks at the past with a more social perspective, and where the terms material culture and materiality are increasingly used. In Latin America, post-processual archaeology accompanied the decolonial movements, and had had more impact on the practice of archaeology in Argentina and, to a much lesser extent, in Chile, Peru, and Brazil. However, it has revitalized the generation of local archaeological theory in several South American countries. From the point of view of the conception of material culture and its role concerning individuals and material contexts, it has been of particular importance in the archaeology of the recent past of dictatorial regimes in South America, especially in the archaeology of the forced disappearances of people in Argentina during the 1970s.
Material Culture Studies Today Post-processual archaeology meant an opening toward the plurality of interpretations of the past, as well as changes in the conception of the social and individuals, the recognition of the complex and fluid relationships of people with things, and redefined the role of archaeology in the present. In a significant way, it also opened the way to a plurality of archaeologies and to conceptions of material culture that expanded from the symbolic dimension of things to other facets of people’s relationships with things, such as the mutual constitution of subjects and objects, the agency of things, and various other material aspects of human existence in general. These positions opened the way for material culture studies to be understood as such, along with theoretical changes that co-occurred in the humanities and social sciences. In the latter, there was a growing interest in things themselves, as in the case of the theory of things, as well as in the relations between people and things and the constitution of the world, as in the case of the studies of Science, Technology and Society, and the strengthening of the line of material culture studies that had been developed at University College London. Linked to the latter, a milestone in the orientation toward material culture studies was the creation of the Journal of Material Culture in 1996, edited by Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley, who, in the journal’s introductory editorial, described material culture studies as the investigation of the relationships between people and things independently of time and space, one of whose richness was precisely not to be limited to a particular discipline, but a plurality of studies with a shared focus on the material aspects of human existence, using a diversity of theories and methodologies. Other pre-existing journals dealt with material culture (Material Culture Review/Revue de la culture matérielle, created in Canada in 1976, or Techniques & Culture, created in Paris in 1976) but, unlike these, which did so from a more restricted approach, the Journal of Material Culture did so in a way that contemplated the complex, fluid and relational nature of material culture. In turn, from an explicitly political and critical stance on the world, a greater appreciation of the material basis of the social condition of life could lead to its transformation. While material culture studies were originally posited as being concerned with the relations of people to things, many of the subsequent theoretical developments have focused on things themselves and even beyond relations with humans. In line with post-processualism, an important concern remains the individuals and not so much the social in relation to the material world, mainly based on the mutual constitution between things and persons. This has nuances since theories such as Actor-Network Theory, the theory of assemblages, or the theory of entanglement consider how things and people in their mutual relations make up broad and dynamic collectives, one of which is even the social. For its part, the ontological turn in anthropology and archaeology in recent decades also reconsiders the relationship between the individual and the collective. It calls into question some ideas about material culture from the point of view of other theories about the world. In what follows, we develop these points in more detail.
Material Culture and Symmetrical Archaeology The Norwegian archaeologist Olsen (2003) made a critical point within material culture studies: archaeology, despite being the study of material culture in all times and places, had forgotten about things. While material culture was the focus of archaeology’s
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research from its beginnings, in reality, it always used it as a vehicle to get to other things. Things represented different dimensions of culture as something other than itself: evolution, economy, adaptation, mind, meanings, ideology, etc., but archaeology had never really been interested in things themselves, in the materiality of social life. Thinking about things in themselves implies an ontological shift in the way we understand reality and humans in what is considered a flat ontology: thingsdthe entire material culturedare on a par with people; they are other entities with real existence in the world, along with humans, plants, animals and other non-artifactual things. This is a perspective that decenters humans and puts them on the same plane as things. That does not mean that all beings in the world are the same, but rather it emphasizes relationships without prejudging some as more important than others. Nor does it mean that all societies have a flat ontology, but it does mean that we cannot impose our conception of material things and people’s relationships with them. It is precisely through the ways of relating to things, and of things to each other, that we can understand the material culture of others. This is the axis of the proposal of symmetrical archaeology, inspired by the Actor-Network Theory, a theory initially born from the studies of science, technology, and society, and the role of objects and other non-humans in the construction of knowledge and subjects, promoted by Bruno Latour, in France, and John Law, in the United Kingdom. Actor-Network Theory breaks with the dualisms of mind and matter or nature and culture. It affirms that people and things are mixed in heterogeneous networks, where agency is decentered from individuals and is distributed in the collective made up of humans and things. These networks, in their interactions, have agency and produce effects, among them, the social. An object is also an effect of an arrangement of relations, that is, the effect of a network, and it remains as such as long as those relations do not change. On the other hand, there are no isolated objects, no objects without relations: objects themselves are networks of relations and, at the same time, part of different networks of relations, both heterogeneous and of varied temporalities.
Material Culture and Assemblages In a similar line of thought, also assuming a flat ontology, objects and material culture, in general, can be understood as assemblages: heterogeneous and dynamic arrangements of things and people of different spatial and temporal scopes, which produce effects. One of these effects is materialization. In their most basic definition, assemblages are compositions that act (Harris, 2017). They are compositions whose parts can be physical components, such as things and people, but also include signs, gestures, symbols, and all kinds of other elements, which are assembled or united but can also be separated since assemblages are not fixed (like networks) but are always becoming. In that becoming, there are no fixed essences, but there are processes of individuation where certain kinds of things are formed in certain circumstances. An object is the materialization of a process, where, as parts of the assembly, objects and persons are made and unmade, and none of them have stable essences; they are not immutable mobiles but are contextually and historically contingent entities. As Gavin Lucas argues (Lucas, 2012), materialization is not about the matter of things per se, nor is what is materialized something above or outside the material (such as ideas, meanings, etc.) but about qualities always inherent in the matter itself, only some of which are actualized when they enter into relation. From the point of view of material culture, and like symmetrical archaeology and Actor-Network Theory, here, too, humans are decentered from the wefts of relationships in a position akin to current posthumanist theories, breaking at the same time with traditional dualisms and oppositions, such as nature-culture, organic-inorganic, material-ideal, etc. In this rupture, it is crucial how matter is considered from the point of view of its vitality and animation, as something that exceeds us and that always has something in reserve, of which only part of it is put in relation, as the New Materialism proposes (see below). Although the theory of assemblages generalizes in terms of a way of understanding reality, whatever it may be, in this entering into relation, each assemblage’s particular history and development are important. In terms of material culture, this is important since it means trying to approach the material culture of each society in its terms, something that current ontological approaches underline.
Material Culture and Materiality These views on material culture and relationships with people have been emphasizing the concept of materiality and materials, displacing the use of the concept of material culture. In its basic conception, materiality refers to the physical properties of material things, be they artifacts, houses, mountains, or landscapes. It may also refer to a generalized property shared by certain entities in the world. In this sense, materiality would be one of the ways of being of things, a mode of being, as opposed to immaterial others. These are modes of being independent of humans since they exist beyond perceiving them or having experiences with them. And here we come to a critical point of the current discussion: whether materiality is something given, homologous to physicality, and independent of humans, with which one can interact; or whether materiality is a meaningful category for people, insofar as it participates in interrelations with humans, and, therefore, is something of a social nature. In the first case, it would be a matter of brute materialitydwhich is also studied by non-social disciplinesdbut which can influence or affect humans, for example, in selecting a raw material suitable for knapping. In this case, the properties of materials offered by things and perceived by humans according to particular contexts are of interest. This position is held by Ingold (2007), who prefers to speak of materials and not of materiality. In the second case, the materiality of things is of interest because it is part of the conformation of networks or assemblages beyond the things themselves, insofar as they are relational objects that, when they enter into relation, have effects, one of which is the mutual constitution of objects and subjects; it is an active materiality. If we go into detail, the differences between the two positions can be subtle since, ultimately, from the point of view of material culture studies, there are always people involved, and there are always relationships between humans and things. But, in the former, things and persons maintain an ontological distinction; in the latter, there is a different ontology of things and persons, which are on par.
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Ingold argues that we should study materials with their properties, how they participate in the flow of life and the world, and how we engage with them. By materials, he means the stuff with which things are made. We can engage with the hardness of a rock, touch it, have a sensation, and perceive its color and temperature, but not its materiality. That is to say, we do not relate to its materiality, but as materials are in permanent flux, continuous generation, and transformation, we join that flow of materials as humans. Far from being the inanimate substance conceptualized by modern thought, materials are the active components of a world in formation. Things are in life: they are alive and active because the substances that compose them continue to be carried along in the circulations of the environment that surrounds them. And in these flows of life, humans are no exception, and all participate in the environment, in an endless unfolding, in an ecology of things (Ingold, 2012). Archaeology and material culture studies should follow these flows, let themselves be carried along by the materials, and see where they take them: see what concepts are behind them, what processes, what categorizations, what ways of relating and co-constituting themselves, and basically, of creating worlds. One way of doing this is through the operational chains of the French line, precisely because of the involvement that is implied between the materials and their properties, together with the body, the technical gestures, a know-how, where the actions are modified in the process of becoming until they end in the object made. This same idea of the operative chain could be said to imply an active or performative definition of materiality, which does not mean that there is no previous definition of its properties, but that materiality is something that unfolds in the doing, in the interrelation, more following the second position regarding what materiality is. The same operative chain could be considered a process of materialization. Moreover, it is a doing that can be regarded as socially situated since it involves social memory and individual memory, which is actualized insofar as it is a social practice. From this point of view, materiality is fundamentally a relational process, not a kind of substance nor a property of things. What matters are the relationships between entities and the types of entities that exist.
New Materialism This same line of thinking of materialization as a process is found in the postulates of the New Materialism, a theoretical line in philosophy and the humanities, which proposes a new ontology for things or materials. New Materialism also shares with Ingold the vitality of materials: life is not an exceptional quality, but there are vital processes, becomings, in both objects and subjects, where materials also can act, not only as agents but as things that do things, that produce effects, alter the course of events. It is about vibrating matter, as Bennett (2010) argues. Also, along similar lines to Olsen’s postulations, the new materialisms are interested in giving material factors their due in shaping society, rethinking the nature of matter and the place of humans in the material world, as Coole and Frost (2010) argue. New Materialism finds inspiration in the advances of the natural sciences in the 20th century, especially the new physics and biology, which have rethought the structure of matter, in combination with a posthumanist orientation, together with material realism, the ontological dissolution of dualisms in a relational perspective, where things are not reducible to their components. Matter is recognized as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways. Materiality is more than mere matter: it is an excess, outside, vitality, relationality, or difference, which makes matter active, self-creative, productive, and unpredictable. Matter is not, but it becomes. Thinking about material culture in terms of new materialisms and relationships with people opens new perspectives and questions. In the interrelationship of people with things, it is not only the perceived properties of materials that are brought into play according to social categories and ways of understanding the world but also that these materials are vibrant in themselves, actively participate in interactions with people and other things, they make things, materialize as well, with different effects and affectations on other materials and people. From there, the panorama of people’s relations with things becomes more complex, the boundaries between people and things and their mutual agency become even more blurred, and the webs of relations become more complex. As Conneller (2011) proposes, a simple operational chain is no longer sufficient to keep track of materials and interrelationships with humans; multiple chains, conceptualized as rhizomes, are necessary.
Things and People in Entanglements In the 2010s, Ian Hodder proposed a multiple perspective on relationships with things with the concept of entanglement, which considers the intertwining of things and humans with each other along multiple connections or strings and the overall interdependence generated between them (Hodder, 2012). The idea is that humans depend on things (which needs no further clarification), that things depend on other things (anything depends on other things to be made, used, repaired, or discarded; some depend on others in chains of interdependence and involve many different actors), that things depend on humans (things are not stable: they are changeable, wear out, break, etc. and entangle humans in care relationships, for example), and that humans depend on humans (which also needs no further clarification). In these mutual dependencies, complex networks of relationships or entanglements are formed, and humans are caught in a double bind: they depend on things that rely on them. This double bind is because material things are unruly and follow physical, biological, and chemical transformation processes, or the flows of life in Ingold’s terms. The proposal shares something of Actor-Network Theory’s heterogeneous networks, Ingold’s meshes and flows along lines, and even assemblages. However, it differs because it is a disordered, unbounded, relational totality, fundamentally, of matter, energy, and information flows. As for things, in particular, it is not only about objects or elements of material culture. Humans are also entangled with things such as ideas, thoughts, emotions, and desires, as well as larger-scale phenomena such as institutions and bureaucracies. Things are also understood relationally, and for their study, it is important to consider all the threads that contextualize things to explore the
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full heterogeneity of relationships. Exploring things implies knowing the conditions of their existence to expose the entangled threads that produce them. In Hodder’s words, entanglement teaches us to look away from what is the immediate object of study and to explore the networks of dependencies that limit and drive the human condition.
Material Culture, Body, and Gender The materiality perspective in material culture studies also broadened the multidisciplinary views on the subject, such as the idea of the human body as material culture or the studies of gender and technology or materiality and feminisms. These are not yet developed in depth in the archaeology of material culture, except for technology and gender, as Marcia-Anne Dobres (2010) has done. Bioarchaeology is putting forward the idea of the body as material culture, taking into account current approaches to the mutual construction of things and people, and the recognition of current social theories that the body is a social construction. Thus, for example, Sofaer (2006) asks what the boundaries between bodies, objects, and contexts are. In turn, bodies are also hybrids of flesh and things and have a material biography, which must be considered. And, if gender is also a construction, materiality also influences that construction and the body and should be considered. Postmodern and posthumanist thought also influenced feminist theory, breaking with dichotomies and recognizing the construction of gender, but, as Alaimo and Hekman (2008) argue, and as happened in archaeology, given the emphasis on language, discourse, and culture, materiality was largely forgotten, especially that of the body. There is in feminist theory a material turn, a material feminism, especially since the approaches of New Materialism, which takes into account non-human agency and explores the relationships between the natural, the human and the non-human. Material feminists also have a relational gaze and explore the interaction of culture, history, discourse, technology, biology, and the environment, treating all in tandem. Although there is a well-established feminist archaeology, a look at materiality and gender has yet to be developed in depth.
Ontologies of Material Culture Undoubtedly, the material culture studies of the last decades have been changing the conception of things, as well as of people and the social, proposing new ontologies of the material, which have broken with the traditional ways of understanding material culture. It is indeed an ontological turn in anthropology and archaeology, as has happened in other disciplines recently. But unlike other disciplines, the ontological turn in anthropology contemplates the possibility of other non-Western or academic ontologies for studying material culture. A variant of the ontological turn, known as social ontology (Alberti, 2016) proposes taking native ontologies as theories about the world, and placing them on a par with our own, to enter into dialog with them and see how far we can go in understanding and conceptualizing the world and those of others, as the Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro (2014) argues from his theorizing on Amazonian perspectivism. From the point of view of material culture in archaeology, it implies trying to understand material culture in terms of the society we are working with, as much as possible, considering local native ways of understanding things, thinking about the archaeological record from there, in combination with our theories of material culture. This implies a dialog with our theories or ontology, as well as a process of translation of native theories about the world and things. If the native ontology is unknown, it invites an open dialog with the archaeological record with other non-Western ontologies, such as Phillippe Descola’s proposed modes of relation and identification of animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism (Descola, 2013). One of the results of this dialog is that many of our concepts about things can be subverted, de-centering Western ontology. Such is the case, for example, when one thinks that most native ontologies consider things, potentially or in fact, to be animate and can be human persons or subjects. If that is so, it challenges what kind of relations will be sought between persons and materiality if, in native terms, we are dealing with social and not material relations. Also, it makes us rethink our idea of the person, subject, or individual.
Summary and Future Directions In summary, the concern for material culture has always been present in archaeology, but especially since the formation of material culture studies as a plural field of inquiry, the study of the relationship between people and things has made significant advances, all contributing to a better understanding of what it is to be human. These studies also show day by day how complex and multifaceted objects are. Theories sometimes seem to be opposed, or academic disputes make some ideas prevail over others, however, as a whole, we can glimpse the multiplicity that is the material, which at the same time is adaptation, is a symbol of something else, has agency, is unstable, exceeds us, generates dependence, has vitality, and many other characteristics. With material culture studies, objects ceased to stand in place of other things, from merely symbolizing and communicating to acting on their own and affecting people, rescuing their dynamism and omnipresence, along with their silent power. This opens up new horizons in the future for material culture studies and archaeology, especially in two aspects: the relational and emergent perspective of things, on the one hand, and the importance of archaeology in trans-disciplinary studies, on the other. This is evident in the growing studies in archaeology from posthumanist proposals (Fernández-Götz et al., 2021), resulting in new developments. These studies of material culture not only have effects on other fields of research but are also challenging the limits and definition of the domains of archaeology itself. Research on the recent past in different countries, on issues such as the victims of the Spanish Civil War, the daily life of soldiers during the Falkland Islands or Malvinas War, or the forced disappearance of people in Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Kosovo, South Africa, or Angola, for example, where it is not only a question of recovering the victims of genocide, but also personal objects, clothing, objects of torture and killing, which from a relational perspective are
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assembled in the recovery of material memories and the vindication of human rights. Studies on ruins and their enchantment (López Galviz et al., 2017), from a viewpoint centered on their materiality beyond humans, are also rethinking conceptions of people’s relationships with things. In turn, the challenge posed by these new views is leading material culture studies to experiment with new methodologies, such as slow archaeology (Mol, 2021) or the role of vagueness and ambiguity in archaeological interpretation (Marila, 2017) as tools for approaching other people’s relationships with material culture. In short, as Holbraad (2011) argues, the rise of the preoccupation with things in the last 20 years could be traced as a trajectory of attempts to erase the line that separates things from people. If initially anthropology and archaeology separated humans from things, today, the path is the opposite. And although, in some cases, it may seem that just as archaeology had previously forgotten about things, now it seems to have forgotten about people, this is not the case since, in the end, what is being proposed is a different ontology of what is understood by people and by things.
See Also: Archaeological Materials: Challenges and Future Directions; Archaeology and the New Materialisms; Processual Archaeology.
References Alaimo, Stacy, Hekman, Susan (Eds.), 2008. Material Feminisms. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Alberti, Benjamin, 2016. Archaeologies of ontology. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 45, 163–179. Bennett, Jane, 2010. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, Durham and London. Binford, Lewis R., 1962. Archaeology as anthropology. Am. Antiq. 28, 217–225. Coole, Diana, Frost, Samantha, 2010. New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, Durham and London. Conneller, Chantall, 2011. An Archaeology of Materials. Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe. Routledge, New York. Deetz, James, 1977. In Small Things Forgotten. An Archaeology of Early American Life. Doubleday, Anchor Books, New York. Descola, Phillippe, 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. The Chicago University Press, Chicago. Dobres, Marcia-Anne, 2010. Archaeologies of technology. Camb. J. Econ. 34, 103–114. Fernández-Götz, Manuel, Gardner, Andrew, Díaz de Liaño, Guillermo, Harris, Oliver J.T., 2021. Posthumanism in archaeology: an introduction. Camb. Archaeol. J. 31, 455–459. Glassie, Henry, 1975. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia. The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Harris, Oliver T.J., 2017. Assemblages and scale in archaeology. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27, 127–129. Hodder, Ian, 2012. Entangled. An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things. Wiley Blackwell, Oxford. Hodder, Ian, Hutson, Scott, 2003. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Holbraad, Martin, 2011. Can the Thing Speak? Open Anthropology Cooperative Press. Working Papers Series #7. Ingold, Tim, 2007. Materials against materiality. Archaeol. Dialogues 14, 1–16. Ingold, Tim, 2012. Toward an ecology of materials. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 41, 427–442. Leroi-Gourham, André, 1965. Le geste et la parole. La memoire et les rythmes. Albin Michel, Paris. López Galviz, Carlos, Bartolini, Nadia, Pendleton, Mark, Stock, Adam, 2017. Reconfiguring ruins: beyond Ruinenlust. GeoHumanities 3, 531–553. Lucas, Gavin, 2012. Understanding the Archaeological Record. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Marila, Marko, 2017. Vagueness and archaeological interpretation: a sensuous approach to archaeological knowledge formation through finds analysis. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 50, 66–88. Mol, Eva, 2021. “Trying to hear with the eyes”: slow looking and ontological difference in archaeological object analysis. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 54, 80–99. Miller, Daniel, Tilley, Christopher, 1996. Preface. J. Mater. Cult. 1, 5–14. Olsen, Bjornar, 2003. Material culture after text: re-membering things. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 36, 87–104. Politis, Gustavo G., Pérez Gollán, José A., 2004. Latin American archaeology: from colonialism to globalization. In: Meskell, Lynn, Preucel, Robert W. (Eds.), A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Hoboken, New Jersey, pp. 353–373. Shanks, Michael, Tilley, Christopher, 1987. Re-constructing Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sofaer, Joanna R., 2006. The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics. For a Post-structural Anthropology. Univocal Publishing, Minneapolis.
Further Reading Buchli, Victor, 2004. Material culture: current problems. In: Meskell, Lynn, Preucel, Robert W. (Eds.), A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Hoboken, New Jersey, pp. 179–194. Johannsen, Niels, 2012. Archaeology and the inanimate agency proposition: a critique and a suggestion. In: Johannsen, Niels, Jessen, Mads Dengsø, Jensen, Helle Juel (Eds.), Excavating the Mind: Cross-Sections Through Culture, Cognition and Materiality. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, pp. 305–347. Meskell, Lynn, 2005. Introduction: object orientations. In: Meskell, Lynn (Ed.), Archaeologies of Materiality. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Hoboken, New Jersey, pp. 1–17. Mohan, Urmila, Douny, Laurence (Eds.), 2021. The Material Subject. Rethinking Bodies and Objects in Motion. Routledge, Oxon. Witmore, Christopher, 2014. Archaeology and the new materialisms. J. Contemp. Archaeol. 1, 1–44.
Philosophy of Archaeology Anton Killina,b, a InChangE Program and Departments of Philosophy and Biology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany; and b Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Concepts Confirmation Explanation Ethics Key Issues Summary Funding Statement References Further Reading
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Analysis of central archaeological concepts Confirmation, explanation, and ethics in archaeology New work in philosophy of archaeology Interdisciplinary research and synthesis
Abstract Philosophy of archaeology considers philosophical questions about archaeology and applies the analytic toolkit from philosophy to reach answers. Philosophers of archaeology (and philosophically-oriented archaeologists) examine the nature of archaeological knowledge, standards of evidence and modes of inference, the principles that underlie aspects of the discipline (such as the classification of archaeological materials), archaeology’s mode of explanation, conceptual analyses of core archaeological concepts, and ethical issues stemming from archaeological investigation, such as ethical concerns over the discovery, analysis, transportation, and display of archaeological finds. Whether archaeology is a science (and whether there are any laws of archaeology), how it relates to history, and which methodological frameworks and strategies produce desirable epistemic successes are also examined in philosophy of archaeology.
Introduction Philosophy of archaeologydas it is with the philosophical investigation of other fields of inquirydconsiders philosophical questions about archaeology and applies the analytic toolkit from philosophy to reach answers. Philosophers of archaeology (and philosophically-oriented archaeologists) examine the nature of archaeological knowledge, standards of evidence and modes of inference, the principles that underlie aspects of the discipline (such as the classification of archaeological materials), archaeology’s mode of explanation, conceptual analyses of core archaeological concepts, and ethical issues stemming from archaeological investigation, such as ethical concerns over the discovery, analysis, transportation, and display of archaeological finds. Whether archaeology is a science (and whether there are any laws of archaeology), how it relates to history, and which methodological frameworks and strategies produce desirable epistemic successes are also examined (Salmon, 1982, 2008; Wylie, 2002). Archaeologists and philosophers of science among others have produced explanatory narratives of the evolution of various features of human social and cultural life: the evolution of language, religion, kinship, music, cooperation, morality, and so on. While this often draws on lines of evidence from biology, comparative psychology, and ethnography, archaeological and palaeoanthropological data is also utilized both to constrain and bolster theorizing (Sterelny, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018; Hiscock, 2014; Killin, 2017; Planer, 2017; Planer and Sterelny, 2021) and contribute to broader interdisciplinary syntheses (e.g., d’Errico et al., 2003; Morley, 2013). Philosophers of science have also turned to archaeology (as well as geology and palaeontology) to provide a philosophy of the historical sciences (Currie, 2018, 2019) and to support naturalist reasoning in metaphysics (Killin, 2021a). At the intersection of
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archaeology and cognitive science, evolutionary cognitive archaeology has recently generated a lot of philosophical interest. Given that cognitive archaeologists select a model from the cognitive sciences, there is philosophical discussion of theory choice, theoretical pluralism, sample diversity, as well as of modes of inference from material traces to the mind (e.g., Currie and Killin, 2019; Malafouris, 2021; Pain, 2021; Killin and Pain, 2021, 2022; Wynn and Coolidge, 2021).
Overview Philosophical work concerning archaeology has, for the most part, focused on four areas of inquiry: explicating concepts central to the discipline, the nature of confirmation, archaeological explanation, and ethical concerns. This section provides a brief overviewdrecapping and expanding upon Salmon (2008). More recently, however, the set of topics explored by philosophers (and philosophically-oriented archaeologists) has greatly expanded and diversified. A selection of contemporary issues is provided in the next section.
Concepts A key goal of analytic philosophy is the analysis of concepts. For example, a concept central to archaeology is “artifact”, and this concept has generated much philosophical discussion. A standard definition would distinguish artifacts as objects modified by an intentional agent for some purpose from so-called “natural objects”. This definition recalls Aristotle’s distinction between existence by nature and existence by craft; an artifact, on this understanding, is a product of the craftsperson. Preston (2020) outlines the three necessary and jointly sufficient criteria for something to count as an artifact according to this notion. Accordingly, an object is an artifact if and only if it was intentionally produced (so, by-products of intentional actions such as wood shavings during woodworking do not count), involving modification of materials (an intentionally selected, although unmodified, pebble does not count, even if it makes for a great skimdor paperweight), and produced for a purpose (intentional but purposeless chipping away or doodling does not produce an “artifact”). However, as Salmon (2008) argues, modern archaeology requires a more expansive definition. First, Salmon argues that for archaeologists seeking to explain past social and cultural behavior, the term “artifact” should also apply to (say) a stone selected and used for some task even if it was unmodified. Second, Salmon suggests that “artifact” should also apply to constructed spatial relationships among objects, despite the fact that these are not material. A further issue concerns intentionality: the term “artifact” should presumably apply to (say) Oldowan stone tools even if the hominins who produced those tools lacked the requisite “intentionality”, a vexed issue in evolutionary cognitive archaeology. According to one influential enactivist framework (Malafouris, 2020), Oldowan tools were not “thought about” by their producers and users prior to actiondrather, thinking occurs “through” the toolsdand it is an open question as to whether this constitutes intentional thought. Since good definitions should not be too broad or too narrow, and also should not be too vague, defining central concepts can be challenging. Of course, in practice, definitions of concepts like “artifact” need only be theoretical: not analyses of the general concept held by most competent users of the term (whom philosophers call “the folk”), but stipulations to conceptually “carve out” the phenomena of significance to the researchers at handda pragmatic rather than primarily ontological carving, not necessarily revealing anything about the fixed essence of things. As a function from facts or states of affairs to an ontological category, an archaeological concept of artifact may therefore pick out a theoretical notion that is itself, not without irony, artificial. Dipert (1993), for example, distinguishes instruments (unmodified, naturally occurring objects used for some purpose, such as a stone used as a hammer), tools (intentionally modified objects for some purpose) and artifacts (tools which were also intended to be recognized as tools). Skepticism about the project has been noted too. Sperber (2007) argues that “artifact”, as a theoretical term, cannot be usefully defined: given that modification and function admit of continua of cases, any attempt to pinpoint what counts as artifactual will be stymied by counterexamples and the intermingling of biology and culture (consider, e.g., the biological and cultural functions of socalled “biological artifacts” such as sun-tans). Sperber’s discussion is couched within a general conceptual monism, the goal being to analyze “the” concept of artifact, and if that will not work, to eliminate it from serious theoretical discourse. This might not discourage a conceptual pluralist about artifacts, however. According to conceptual pluralism, there are multiple, non-equivalent, legitimate concepts of “artifact” useful for archaeological investigation; their usefulness in the discipline is what legitimizes them, and so other than operationalizing these concepts, all we need do is use our terms carefully and transparently to avoid confusion and cross-talk. (The same has been argued about concepts of species in biology, though that debate contains its conceptual monists and eliminativists too.) Preston (2013), however, has advocated for a conceptual broadening in a different way, in line with eliminativism, though without explicitly eliminativist commitment. Preston opts for the broader term “material culture” and simply avoids use of the term “artifact”. She justifies this move on several grounds: that human interaction with the environment is not neatly categorized into interactions with artifacts and interactions with non-artifacts, that by-products of intentional action enter into human practices in meaningful and significant ways, and that central concepts of a disciplinedsuch as artifact in archaeologydshould remain openended to avoid “epistemic distortion”. She claims that defining “the mind” too tightly would have precluded the extended mind debate (Clark and Chalmers, 1998) in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, for example (Preston, 2020).
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Confirmation Confirmation is a topic central to much philosophy of science. A claim is “confirmed” by making good the relation between the evidence for a claim and the truth of that claim. The “New Archaeologists” of the 1960s and 70s were concerned, among other things, with establishing archaeology’s scientific credentials (e.g., Watson et al., 1971). They advocated for a vision of archaeology as a science, the adoption of more rigorous scientific methods, and the epistemic strategy of hypothesis confirmation. Rather than gathering data without a prior hypothesis, describing assemblages, and searching for patterns (as was the general strategy), the New Archaeologists advocated for testing data against predictions that followed deductively from a hypothesisdthe “hypotheticodeductive” method as discussed by Popper and other philosophers of science of the eradand if the predictions were found to be right then the hypothesis was corroborated. If not, it was disconfirmed. A Bayesian model of confirmation in archaeology, though along the lines of the hypothetico-deductive method, was advanced by Salmon (1982). Rather than dealing with certainty, this strategy deals with considerations of prior probabilities. A hypothesis’s prior probability is its probability before a test of its predictions (which may follow with some probability from the hypothesis, rather than deductively) and which could be based on a number of factorsdthe outcome of earlier tests of the hypothesis, the probability of the causal mechanisms conjectured, how the hypothesis “fits” with other established hypotheses, and the like (Salmon, 2008). Of course, many practicing archaeologists use sophisticated statistical reasoning, counterfactual reasoning, or other approaches that do not match the hypothetico-deductive approach. Scientific progress does not entail adherence to one philosophical framework of confirmation. For example, Cleland (2001, 2002, 2013) develops a “smoking gun” framework, according to which hypotheses can be confirmed abductively by discriminating evidence: new data supporting one hypothesis and working against the others. Jeffares (2008) provides a discussion of the role of regularities building upon this general framework. Currie (2018) prefers a “ripple” model. Evidence of an event over time becomes “dispersed” (its causal descendants become more numerous and heterogeneous), but material traces may also become faint and gappy as evidence decays; mid-range theory is required to make sense of the informativeness, strength, and interrelatedness of the dependencies between traces and the eventdthis accounts for the retrievability of the past from a trace or set of traces. But mid-range theories are local and heterogeneous, rather than general principles. So, archaeologists, like many other historical scientists, are often in practice “methodological omnivores”, and can triangulate toward epistemic success by means of a variety of approaches (Currie, 2018).
Explanation A key goal of philosophy of science is to understand scientific explanation. According to the New Archaeologists, archaeological explanations could be made scientific if rendered as deductive-nomological explanations, the model of explanation advanced by Hempel in the 1940s. According to this model, explanations of an event are a description derived (or can be shown to be derived) from a deductive argument with premises comprising at least one universal law and statements of initial condition. (To contrast: Hempel characterized historical narratives as “explanation sketches” as they were not deduced in part from a law or law-like premise.) Consider, as Salmon (2008) does, this toy example: “inserting a penny in place of a blown fuse restores electrical current by citing the initial condition that the penny is made of copper, along with the universal law that all copper conducts electricity” (p. 1816). However, laws are not commonplace in archaeology. This led philosophers of science to consider their theories of scientific explanation in the context of archaeology among other special sciences (for the same is also true of biology and psychology). Initially, some found Hempel’s other, inductive-statistical model of explanation useful: a model utilizing statistical (rather than universal) laws and allowing for probabilities, a model Hempel thought better suited to the social sciences (see also Salmon, 1982). Distinguishing different types or modes of explanation has also generated discussion. Three representative examples are diffusionist, systems, and structural-functionalist explanations. Diffusionist explanations explain such features of past societies as technological innovation and cultural change by searching for traces of sources, external to the society, of a trait or idea, and then tracking the spread of that trait or idea across time and space. Systems explanations are “dynamic descriptions”. These focus on multiple, interacting causes, including positive feedback mechanisms which bolster some features (enabling change within the system) and negative feedback mechanisms which maintain stability even when there are pressures for change. Salmon (2008) characterizes systems explanations as “neo-functionalist”, though departing from structural-functionalist modes of explanation (which stem from anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown’s influence) in at least three important ways: “(1) They [systems explanations] treat the archaeological record on a par with historical documents as a source of evidence. (2) They provide a mechanismdpositive feedbackdto explain change. Although structural-functional explanations recognized negative feedback mechanisms, such as joking relationships that maintained social stability through the release of tensions, they could not account for beneficial changes in societies and tended to regard any change as harmful. (3) Systems explanations emphasize the significance of humans’ physical environment as well as their social environment. A central tenet of the new archaeology is that societies cannot be considered in isolation from the physical surroundings that both shape and are shaped by them” (Salmon, 2008, p. 1816). The emerging trend to apply a perspective from niche construction theory and gene-culture co-evolution in producing archaeological explanations is continuous/consistent with this mode of explanation. Not all archaeologists and philosophers of archaeology follow the New Archaeologists into a scientific, “processual” archaeology. Drawing a sharp distinction between scientific and humanistic investigation, Hawkes (1968, 1971), for one, was unsettled
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by the perceived “de-humanization” of what many considered a humanistic, historical endeavor, rather than a scientific one dealing with laws or law-like regularities. Hawkes and similarly-minded archaeologists worried that individual achievements and human freedomdtargets of archaeological investigationdwere undermined by the scientific approach. “Post-processualism” came to designate a methodologically diverse cluster of archaeologists preoccupied with symbolism and the cultural functions of symbolic behavior in prehistoric human societies. Among other goals, post-processualists aim to distinguish function from style and study the stylistic features of cultural remains. Interpretation of stylistic features is often governed by broad principles or distinctions, such as the distinction associated with anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss between the culturally transformed (“cooked”) and the natural (“raw”). This strategy, although “interpretative” rather than “explanatory”, nonetheless appeals, even if implicitly, to alleged general laws. The New Archaeologists, however, criticize such lines of inquiry for lacking empirical support and depending on questionable anthropological theorizing. Gero (2007), however, argues for a more reflective and discursive discipline, one which makes a feature of the ambiguities of archaeological evidence and interpretation: “an archaeology that interrogates the past instead of advancing conclusions as exclusively and exhaustively final and ‘right’” (Gero, 2007, p. 313). Gero’s critics may point out that scientific explanations in archaeology are usually given as such, even if polemically articulateddthat it is always implicitly understood that some new discovery or paradigm shift could shake up what was once thought true. That would be correct, generally, but it misses Gero’s point about potential benefits of epistemic humility and conscious reflection. Barrett (2016) sees archaeology’s potential to be “an enquiry into the full chronology and global extent of humanity’s place in history” (Barrett, 2016, p. 134), that is, understanding how material conditions enable ways of being human: “An engagement with an archaeological record often prompts the need to explain its formation. An engagement with the material conditions of human possibility on the other hand prompts the desire to understand those conditions” (p. 137). Along these lines, Currie (2019) distinguishes two “businesses” of archaeology: “the business of uncovering, explaining, and understanding the actual history of the past; . the business of interrogating the past to understand the conditions of human existence . These two accounts need not be mutually exclusive” (Currie, 2019, pp. 61–62).
Ethics It is difficult to provide a concise yet substantive overview of ethical considerations relevant to archaeologists, as in a sense it is its own research program, deserving of its own full discussion. Therefore, see Bahn (1984) for a classic text which serves as an excellent introduction, and see Scarre (2003) and Wylie (1996, 2005) for further discussion. Salmon (2008) considers the basics of utilitarian thinking for archaeology. A wide range of ethical concerns are reviewed and debated in Scarre and Scarre (2006), Vitelli and ColwellChanthaphonh (2006), Scarre and Coningham (2013). For an introduction to the broader discussion of cultural heritage ethics, see Matthes (2018). In a critical discussion of archaeological and cultural heritage sites as tourist destinations, Scarbrough (2021) considers ethical issues that impact the wider public as well as archaeologists, governments, corporations, and beyond. Ethics (and the normative, more broadly) is also a target of archaeological investigation. For a discussion of archaeology’s role in elucidating the ethical lives of past societies, see Ribeiro (2021), and for the archaeological record’s potential to shed light on the evolution of normativity, see, for example, Shipton et al. (2021) and Birch (2021).
Key Issues This section surveys a selection of recent publications exploring current issues of relevance to the intersection between archaeology and philosophy. Of necessity, the selection will be concise and somewhat idiosyncratic. That said, it should suffice not only to introduce several key contemporary debates but also demonstrate the breadth and diversity of issues pursued. In recent years researchers have become increasingly interested in the origins and evolution of a variety of aspects of human social and cultural life that are distinctive to our species, like language, religion, the arts, morality, and human social structure. Take for example the “open” social organization of living and ethnographically known human forager groups, and contrast this with the “closed” social organization of chimpanzees and bonobos, our species’ closest extant cousins. Sterelny (2021) addresses the puzzle of how open social organization could evolve from closed social organization, on the plausible assumption that our evolutionary ancestors lived in closed social worlds along the lines of chimps and bonobos. If the ancestral social world was one in which suspicion and distrust toward non-members of one’s own group was the norm, it is difficult to see how an open society could get off the ground. Robert Layton’s ecological model explains this as a result of changes in foraging practices which triggered community expansion, and then fractionation as the group gets increasingly large and subgroups break off. Sterelny develops this model by adding to it lessons learned from Bernard Chapais’s kinship and band-aggregation research, the core idea being that an expanded sense of kin recognition played the role of proximate mechanism, facilitating continued affiliation between individuals across the new groups who might not interact too regularly. Methodological challenges due to the nature of archaeological evidence are given explicit consideration. This kind of investigation is thus paradigmatic of a recent trend in philosophy of science to utilize the empirical as raw material for philosophical theorizing and seek more local, less generalized and abstract explanations. Philosophers and archaeologists alike have long been interested in behavioral modernity, the origins of psychologically and behaviorally “modern” humans. Once thought to be a product of a great leap forward, a creative explosion, a cognitive revolution around 40,000 years ago as evidenced by the stunning rock art in the European caves of the Upper Paleolithic, gradualist theories of behavioral modernity now dominate (McBrearty and Brooks, 2000; Sterelny, 2011). Davies (2021), for example, reviews the
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evidence for placing behavioral modernity around 150,000 years ago (and its origins/onset somewhat earlier), and considers the relevance to the debate of cooperation and practical reasoning, tools and hunting, and arguments from the “absence of evidence”. What counts as symbolic thought and its evidence are often at stake in debates concerning behavioral modernity. As Davies points out, symbolic thought is, however, an ambiguous and oft-contested notion. Planer (2021) aims to shed some light, and distinguishes what he takes to be several distinct notions/analyses of “symbolic cognition” and “symbol” that could often be conflated. Meneganzin and Currie (2022) provide a philosophical account of the behavioral modernity debate in terms of investigative disintegration and shifting explanatory weight, as the debate refocused from its primary concern with the innate suite of human cognitive capacities to social and demographic features of ancient human environments. Philosophers and archaeologists have also been interested in characterizing and assessing the epistemic merits of various methodological and conceptual strategies. Historically, debate has centered around the “ethnographic analogy”, that is, the use of data from contemporary (or in some cases, near-contemporary, historically known) human populations in order to epistemically license inferences to past populations (Salmon, 1982, ch. 4; Wylie, 1985). Currie (2016) ties this debate to the scientific use of comparative data more generally, such as in evolutionary biology, in which the use of data from extant populations plays a central role in the well-developed practice of generating knowledge about the biological past. This is not a free pass to indulge in ethnographic analogy, of course; Currie considers the ways in which particular analogical inferences might be justified when they are supported by empirically testable, local (less general) theories. Nyrup (2021) argues that analogical reasoning can produce epistemic goods even in cases in which the analogy misses its mark, as analogical reasoning has the potential to make clear the difficulties involved in archaeological interpretation and explanation. Beyond discussion specific to analogy, Routledge (2021), for example, examines the use of scaffolding and concept-metaphor in archaeological theorizing. Distinguishing archaeological inquiry that is contextualized (bolstered by scaffolding and background knowledge) from non-contextualized, Turner and Turner (2021) provide a critique of an infamous conspiracy theory. Philosophers have analyzed the ways in which lines of evidence carry epistemic support for hypotheses. Downes (2021) addresses an increasing tendency to privilege genetic data as the primary or sole arbiter of archaeological controversies (cf. Reich, 2018). Downes draws on fellow philosopher Alison Wylie’s conception of “trading zones” (Wylie, 2000) which sees archaeology as a discipline as somewhat disunified though productively so: different archaeologists marshal evidence and reasoning from a variety of related disciplines in their efforts to interpret and analyze the archaeological record and thereby reconstruct aspects of past societies. For Downes, genetic data is a crucial key to unlocking the past, and ancient DNA techniques an important tool, but nevertheless, archaeological debate concerns a much broader and more varied set of core controversies than that which can be settled by techniques from genetic research. Downes argues for an “epistemically respectful” cross-disciplinary practice. Moreover, Mallory (2021) addresses the use of reconstructed languages as a source of evidence about past cultures, that is, “linguistic paleontology”, and the controversial status of this method of inference in archaeology. He argues that the case against it has been overstated and considers how it can be brought to bear on the Indo-European homeland problem (i.e., the debate over where Indo-European languages originated). Finally, philosophers and archaeologists have also been interested in characterizing the modes of inference archaeologists have engaged in. In the context of cognitive archaeologydwhich Currie and Killin (2019) characterize as trace-based reasoning, inference from physical traces (such as Palaeolithic stone tools) to mental/cognitive features of past societiesdminimal-capacity inferences have been distinguished from causal-association inferences. Minimal-capacity inferences draw a conclusion about cognitive capacity via some independently plausible model from the cognitive sciences which speaks to the capacities required to produce or use a technology. The appearance of a technology in the record (say, Levallois tools) is then taken to be evidence of that theoretically necessary capacity in the past (say, long-term working memory; see Wynn and Coolidge, 2004). Causal-association inferences on the other hand build an inference to capacity not via some explicit cognitive model, but through causally associated factors (which may or may not be formalized into an explicit mid-range theory). For example, costly signaling theory suggests that the laboriously crafted mammoth ivory flutes of the Upper Palaeolithic (Conard and Malina, 2008) indicate that music really mattered to the societies which made them, and indeed that the ivory flutes themselves suggest something of cognitive significance, for otherwise the time, energy and resources would not have gone into creating them when bird-bone flutesdwhich were prevalentdcould have been crafted more easily and could have fulfilled the same musical function (Killin, 2018, 2021b). Pain (2021), moreover, distinguishes minimal capacity inferences from cognitive transition inferences. Such an inference takes us from two sets of technologies from different time periods to the evolution of some cognitive capacity: a capacity that is evidenced in the later technologies, according to some cognitive model, but not in the earlier technologies. Pain applies this framework to Coolidge and Wynn’s influential work on behavioral modernity (Coolidge and Wynn, 2018). The characterization of cognitive archaeology as trace-based reasoning has been questioned (Malafouris, 2021) for not accommodating enactivism, an approach to the mind which takes the knapping process itself (and other actions with tools) to be constitutive of the intentions (and other marks of the mental) of which cognitive archaeologists aim to provide accounts.
Summary Philosophy of archaeology continues to concern itself with the “traditional” questions of the fielddthe explication of archaeological concepts, confirmation, explanation, and ethical issuesdas well as explore new ground at the interdisciplinary intersection of philosophy and archaeology, cognitive science and evolutionary theory. It is both concerned with “first order” questionsde.g.,
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“how did language evolve?”, “when did behavioral modernity set in?”dand “second order” questionsde.g., “by what methods of inference and explanation do we answer first order questions?”, “how do various lines of evidence weigh in on debates over first order questions?”. Philosophers of archaeology are also among those producing interdisciplinary syntheses of empirical work in order to provide narratives of human prehistory, human evolution, and what it is to be human.
Funding Statement This entry was partially completed while the author received funding as part of the project “Individualisation in Changing Environments” from the programme “Profilbildung 2020”, an initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany. It was also partially completed during the author’s Lilburn Research Fellowship, supported by the National Library of New Zealand and Lilburn Trust. The responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the author. The author declares no conflict of interest.
See Also: History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Phenomenological Archaeology; Social Theory in Archaeology.
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Reich, David, 2018. Who We Are and How We Got There: Ancient DNA Revolution and the New Science of the Past. Pantheon, New York. Ribeiro, Artur, 2021. Social archaeology as the study of ethical life: agency, intentionality, and responsibility. In: Killin, Anton, Allen-Hermanson, Sean (Eds.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp. 215–234. Routledge, Bruce, 2021. Scaffolding and concept-metaphors: building archaeological knowledge in Practice. In: Killin, Anton, Allen-Hermanson, Sean (Eds.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp. 47–63. Salmon, Merrilee H., 1982. Philosophy and Archaeology. Academic Press, New York. Salmon, Merrilee H., 2008. Philosophy of archaeology. In: Pearsall, Deborah M. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Vol. 3. Elsevier/Academic Press, San Diego, California, pp. 1812–1818. Scarbrough, Elizabeth, 2021. Are archaeological parks the new amusement parks? UNESCO world heritage status and tourism. In: Killin, Anton, Allen-Hermanson, Sean (Eds.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp. 235–261. Scarre, Chris, Scarre, Geoffrey (Eds.), 2006. The Ethics of Archaeology: Philosophical Perspectives on Archaeological Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Scarre, Geoffrey, 2003. Archaeology and respect for the dead. J. Appl. Philos. 20, 237–249. Scarre, Geoffrey, Coningham, Robin (Eds.), 2013. Appropriating the Past: Philosophical Perspectives on the Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Shipton, Ceri, Nielsen, Mark, Di Vincenzo, Fabio, 2021. The Acheulean origins of normativity. In: Killin, Anton, Allen-Hermanson, Sean (Eds.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp. 197–212. Sperber, Dan, 2007. Seedless grapes: nature and culture. In: Margolis, Eric, Laurence, Stephen (Eds.), Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 124–137. Sterelny, Kim, 2011. From hominins to humans: how sapiens became behaviourally modern. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci. 366, 809–822. Sterelny, Kim, 2012. The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sterelny, Kim, 2014. A Palaeolithic reciprocation crisis: symbols, signals, and norms. Biol. Theor. 9, 65–77. Sterelny, Kim, 2016. Cumulative cultural evolution and the origins of language. Biol. Theor. 11, 173–186. Sterelny, Kim, 2018. Religion re-explained. Relig. Brain Behav. 8, 406–425. Sterelny, Kim, 2021. The origins of multi-level society. Topoi 40, 207–220. Turner, Derek D., Turner, Michelle I., 2021. “I’m not saying it was aliens”: an archaeological and philosophical analysis of a conspiracy theory. In: Killin, Anton, AllenHermanson, Sean (Eds.), Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp. 7–24. Vitelli, Karen D., Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip (Eds.), 2006. Archaeological Ethics, 2nd ed. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD. Watson, Patty Jo, LeBlanc, Steven, Redman, Charles, 1971. Explanation in Archaeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach. Columbia University Press, New York. Wylie, Alison, 1985. The reaction against analogy. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theor. 8, 63–111. Wylie, Alison, 1996. Ethical dilemmas in archaeological practice: looting, repatriation, stewardship, and the (trans)formation of disciplinary identity. Perspectives on Sci. 4 (2), 154–194. Wylie, Alison, 2000. Questions of evidence, legitimacy, and the (dis)unity of science. Am. Antiq. 65, 227–237. Wylie, Alison, 2002. Thinking From Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. University of California Press, Berkeley. Wylie, Alison, 2005. The promise and perils of an ethic of stewardship. In: Meskell, Lynn, Pells, Peter (Eds.), Embedding Ethics. Routledge, London, pp. 47–68. Wynn, Thomas, Coolidge, Frederick L., 2004. The expert Neanderthal mind. J. Hum. Evol. 46, 467–487. Wynn, Thomas, Coolidge, Frederick L., 2021. Situating the archaeology in cognitive archaeology. In: Henley, Tracy B., Rossano, Matt (Eds.), Psychology and Cognitive Archaeology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Study of the Human Mind. Routledge, New York, pp. 11–26.
Further Reading Chapman, Robert, Wylie, Alison (Eds.), 2015. Material Evidence: Learning From Archaeological Practice. Routledge, New York. Chapman, Robert, Wylie, Alison, 2016. Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology. Bloomsbury, London. Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 2021. Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, 2nd ed. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Killin, Anton, Allen-Hermanson, Sean (Eds.), 2021. Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Springer, Cham. Kosso, Peter, 2001. Knowing the Past: Philosophical Issues of History and Archaeology. Humanity Books, Amherst, New York. Krieger, William Harvey, 2006. Can There Be a Philosophy of Archaeology? Processual Archaeology and the Philosophy of Science. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD. Sterelny, Kim, 2021. The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Processual Archaeology Ezra B.W. Zubrowa,b,c, a Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, United States; b McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom; and c York University, Toronto, ON, Canada © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Contextual History The Philosophical Underpinnings The New Archaeologist Overview and Key Issues What are the Tenets of Processual Archaeology? The Importance of Classical Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Ethnography and Experimental Archaeology in the New Archaeology The Role of Systems Theory The Role of Statistics, Simulation, Mathematics, and Databases The Role of Environment and Ecology The Contribution of Paleodemography and Networks ArchaeometrydThe Hard End of Science Dating Material Science and Characterization Sampling and Prospecting Conservation and Museums Role of Biological, Palynological, and Paleogenetic Data Role of Geoarchaeology Cognitive Archaeology Summary and Future Directions: What Happened, Where Did It Happen, What is Happening, and What Will Happen References
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Processual Archaeology is the “scientification” of archaeology. It added “how and why” to the traditional archaeological questions of “what, when, and where”. It requires the use of verified data to test explicit theories, ideas, and hypotheses. Archaeology must be problem oriented, multi-disciplinary, and methodologically innovative.
Abstract Processual Archaeology was and is about “scientification” and “process”. It is the framework in which much of the worldwide archaeology is done. Developing from the optimistic rationalism of the post-WWII era, it added “how and why” to the traditional archaeological questions of “what, when, and where”. It requires the use of systematic and certified knowledge to test explicit theories, ideas, and hypotheses. Archaeology must be problem oriented, multi-disciplinary, and methodologically innovative. This entry discusses the philosophical underpinnings, the tenets and the roles of classical, historical, and experimental archaeology, the importance of ethnography, the roles of systems theory, statistics, simulation, mathematics, databases, environmental, ecological, and demographic studies. Since archaeometry is the hard edge of processual archaeology, the contributions that dating, material science, conservation, sampling, prospecting, biological, palynological, paleogenetic, geoarchaeological and cognitive research provided are reviewed.
Introduction Processual archaeology is about adding “how” and “why” to “what,” “where,” and “when” in archaeology. Most importantly, it is the explicit acceptance of scientism.
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Contextual History Processual Archaeology was and is about process. It was and continues to be a broad framework in which archaeology is done. To understand it, one must understand the times and the context in which it developed. The post-World War II era was an era of fundamental optimism though interspersed with Cold War fears. It resulted in a strong belief in the ultimate success of rationality, the value of science and the positive material and social effects of technology. One only needed to remember the use of radar and sonar, the early uses of computers in encryption and decipherment, and the atomic bomb for assurance regarding the ultimate triumph of rationality. This optimism manifested in the development of new institutions such as the United Nations (October 1945, San Francisco), the World Bank (July 1944, Bretton Woods), and the World Health Organization (April 1948, Geneva). Everyone knew the application of science and technology was central to this process. Everyone knew the results of this new rationality were the “post war boom” of the 1950s and the higher standards of living. It was reinforced demographically with the decrease in child mortality, the conquering of such diseases as polio and malaria, more children (baby boom), and the rise of the suburbs. Changes took place in the educational and research areas as well. The soldiers came home to a different world created by the new production and technology. Their jobs had disappeared and they needed to be educated for the new reality. The need for an educated population was clear and governments reacted in order to make it possible. The GI Bill1 and its international counterparts not only meant a marked increase in the number of students but an unmet demand in the number of institutions to teach them. New schools, new universities, expanded curricula and subjects offered became the new normality of the 1950s. New departments were created and old departments were sub divided. Social Science departments became Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, and Sociology departments. Similar changes were taking place in research. From the sole researcher, there developed largescale research laboratories at universities and corporations such as the Stanford Research Institute (founded in 1946) or the IBM research labs (founded in 1962) with integrated researchers working on large scale organizationally decided problems. The Cold War and the Space Race accelerated all these trends. Educators in the US and other countries realized that in order to compete on the world stage, they would need to change how education was taught in the elementary, middle, and secondary schools. The new education emphasized not only “what,” “when,” and “where” but “how” and “why.” A new curriculum was developed beginning with the “new mathematics,” the “new physics,” the “new biology” and the “new chemistry.” It is not too surprising that eventually the students who were brought up in this mind set of the “how and why” would eventually turn to other fields creating the “new archaeology.” It was this “new archaeology” which became known as “processual archaeology.” It generated serious opposition among some of the older practitioners who did not see archaeology as a science at all. As I think back more than seventy years to the origins of processual archaeology, there are some signposts along the way. They are neither in chronological order nor are they a complete list:
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A Study in Archaeologyd(Taylor, 1948) Radiocarbon Datingd(Libby, 1952) The use of statistics and computers in Archaeologyd(Cowgill, 1964) Archaeological Perspectivesd(Binford and Quimby, 1972) Analytical Archaeologyd(Clarke, 1968) The BordesdBinford debated(Bordes, 1972) Studies of Social Structured(Hill, 1970; Deetz, 1965) Negative test of the Wittfogel hypothesisd(Adams, 1981) A wide diversity of systemic, ecological, demographic, and archaeometric studies
We will consider these later. But first let us look at the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of processual archaeology.
The Philosophical Underpinnings Archaeology was in a particularly difficult position because of the new rationality. One reason was that it had always been situated in between history, the fine arts, literature and the humanities on one hand, and among geology, biology, chemistry, engineering and the other STEM sciences on the other. Archaeology had developed rapidly and was quite analytically sophisticated in answering the questions of “where” and “what” and was becoming better and better at answering the question of “when” with the development of the dating revolution beginning with Libby’s 1946 radiocarbon dating. Accuracy was being substantiated with dendrochronology. There had been little controversy regarding determining where artifacts and features were located in the ground or what they were or even when, but the archaeological world had no agreement on “how” or “why.” Although sometimes they had problems with the “when,” the real problems and controversies took place regarding the “how” and “why.” For archaeologists in the humanities tradition after identifying, locating, dating, and recognizing the culture to which the artifacts belong, the explanations of “how” and “why” essentially were three. They were: (a) the culture was a continuation of a previous tradition; (b) it was created using the “great man” paradigm, that is, exceptional individuals such as “great individual craftsmen, artists, or specialists”; and 1 The GI Bill was and is a program to provide educational assistance for returning servicemembers. By 1952 more than 8 million US WWII veterans took advantage of the program.
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(c) it was the result of the same phenomena as in our own societydi.e., ethnographic analogy. Frequently archaeological interpretation was based upon personal interpretation. In fact, there were articles published that suggested that the only way to verify an archaeological interpretation was to trust it upon the reputation of the archaeologist who excavated the site and who wrote the report. Older and better-known archaeologists were more trusted than others and thus their interpretations of “how” and “why” should be accepted even if they did not know as much as younger archaeologists (Thompson, 1956). In short, they believed reputation trumped scientific knowledge. In contrast, the new, younger, processual archaeologists wanted to make it clear it was not experience nor intuition that determined veracity. Rather, it was the same hypothetical deductive experimental methods that the rest of the sciences used.2 Prior to processual archaeology, the fundamental function of most archaeology was to find the past and to place the findings in space and time or time-space systematics. There was an overall historical record from the stone age to modern times and archaeology had to fill in the gaps. It was a type of “gapsmanship” in which previous cultures, sites and artifacts were the jigsaw pieces. In contrast to the increasing emphasis on “how” and “why” in science with explicit studies of the hypothetical deductive and inductive methods, archaeology, was relying on a version of Boasian empiricism that if there were enough ancient sites, features, and artifacts then the ideas would somewhat magically appear out of the data. Somewhat surprisingly, processual archaeologists decades later would use advanced statistical techniques in a somewhat similar way with the difference of independent confirmations. The processual archaeologists were faced by a problem. Of the sciences, geology and archaeology have problems of uniqueness and non-repetitive behavior. There is only one Vesuvius and one Pompeii. Therefore, how does one get repetitive results that verify your hypothesis? The solution was twofold. One method was to increase the generalization of the hypothesis so that there were multiple cases. The other was to divide the unique find into multiple parts and test the hypothesis on each part independently. This is also relevant for the processualists who would use formal induction as part of their theoretical stance.
The New Archaeologist There is a philosophical basis for processual archaeology. It is derived from the debate over past reality. First, was there measurable reality? Second, could the past be perceived? Third, did the past belong to that measurable reality? Fourth, if so, could it be understood by using the scientific method? For processual archaeologists the answer to each of these questions was yes. They turned to the philosophers of science for clarification, reassurance and for support in understanding scientific theory and explanation. Notable among them were Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Robert Braithwaite, and others such as George Homans. They concluded although reality was real, the best that one can do is use the scientific method to provide provisional knowledge that will change as science progresses. One of the strongest philosophical advocates of this view was Thomas Kuhn. He argued that the history of the scientific process and thus the history of scientific knowledge was essentially a dialectic. Processual archaeologists hitched their wagon to science, its explanations, its methodology, its observations and its results. Along the way they entered into scientific skepticism. It was not enough to make a statement about the past. One had to demonstrate the event with observable and measurable data. Everything was to be questioned. This led to numerous vociferous debates in the classrooms, the hallways, laboratories, and even the bedrooms.3 They expanded to the professional meetings, the journals, and the book publishers.4 The skepticism of the validity of previous work was frequently misconstrued to be attacks upon the previous studies and upon particular individuals (such as Haury and Griffith). It was not. Rather, it was a recognition that no matter how good the work was, if it did not conform to the requirements of the scientific method, it needed to be questioned.
Overview and Key Issues What are the Tenets of Processual Archaeology? a. The world is real and knowable. b. The past may be empirically perceived, described, observed, and measured. c. Archaeology is a science and thus, 1. Interpretation, aesthetic appreciation, and history are secondary purposes; 2. It answers questions about “what,” “when,” “where,” “how,” and “why” about the past. d. Culture is a system with multiple subsystems 1. An economic or subsistence subsystem;
Incidentally it was in the processual archaeologists’ self-interest to find new methods of determining veracity for they were generally one to two generations younger than their archaeological opponents and could not hope to win in the experiential arena of probative archaeology. Among the most famous of these were between Sally and Lewis Binford. 4 William Woodcock, an editor at Academic Press, was a strong proponent of the “new archaeology” and helped make sure it was published. 2 3
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Processual Archaeology 2. A social subsystem; 3. An ideological subsystem. One may make correlations between the subsystems to develop and test hypotheses. Theoretically, one needs to explain prehistoric events and processes with the use of material culture. Explanations and methodologies must conform to scientific adequacy criteria. Scientific practice seems to complement and is broader than scientific method. Hypothesis formulation leads to tests and the acceptance, alteration, or rejection of hypotheses. 1. Absolute certainty is not necessary but explanations, theories, and hypotheses must be adequately confirmed; 2. Confirming prediction is a method of hypothesis testing. Since archaeology is not a fully axiomatized science, some hypotheses will depend on the theories and explanations from other sciences such as biology, geology, material science, ecology, etc. Scientific theories, hypotheses, and data will change as scientific paradigms change. The crux of processual archaeology’s procedures is that hypotheses and possible explanations are formulated tentatively and then tested empirically. Archaeological cultures, societies, sites, features, and artifacts are data. Most empirical phenomena from past cultures really are incorporated in a system of regularities that can be described in terms of general and/or statistical laws such as evolution or diffusion. Archaeologists deal with material culture but are not limited to it. Data must conform to explicit “quality control” standards. Excavation and survey techniques are problem determinant. Taxonomies are problem determinant. Hypotheses are to be deduced from theories or induced from the data. Prehistory, history, and archaeological events are not unique if taken from an appropriate scientific perspectivedExplanations of particular events tend to be of smaller scientific value than explanations of classes of events. Archaeology is not limited by time periods or space. 1. It is inclusive temporally of Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Classical, Historical, Ethnographic, and Present; 2. It is inclusive globally and spatiallydterrestrial, underwater, outer space. The archaeological record is not devoid of information about nonmaterial features of past societies. The problem must precede the test. Simulations may be simplified explanations.
Regarding these tenets, there are significant differences in viewpoints among the “new archaeologists.” The spectrum ranges from “minimalists” through “mediumists” to “maximalists” with practitioners falling all along the spectrum.5 The minimalists claim that all of archaeology is a single field, a single domain. There should be a single “macro-theory,” such as “evolution,” and a single methodology, such as the deductive hypothetical method in which there is a cycle among theory, deduced hypotheses and observational verification. In short, they proclaim a single overarching theory and axiomatic system. The observational domain must be well defined, well bounded, and has defined criteria for observation including independent confirmation of measurements. On the opposite end of this spectrum, the “maximalists” relax these strictures suggesting that different theoretical frameworks are appropriate for different domains. For example, various economic (including Marxism), psychological (including Freudianism) and anthropological theories (including Levi Straussism) have been used. They suggest that there are other equally formal methodologies by which one may obtain hypotheses, such as formal induction with independent testing. In some ways, this apparent diversity reflects the balance between simplicity and complexity in explanation. Too much simplicity and one hopes that more complexity provides better understanding. Too much complexity and one wishes for simplicity. So, it will not surprise the reader that perhaps the most successful in terms of popularity were those archaeologists who proposed “middle range theories” such as Lewis Binford and Michael Schiffer. But ultimately, simplicity and parsimony were considered better.
The Importance of Classical Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Ethnography and Experimental Archaeology in the New Archaeology As archaeologists began to ask the questions of “how” and “why,” they recognized the problems of a domain that was replete with fragmented, incomplete, and missing data. So, they turned to fields that could fill the holes in the data and provide insights into the answers of these questions. Among these were Classical (Dyson, 2006) and Historical archaeology (Leone, 2016) where there were contemporary texts not only describing particular events but relating the motivations of the participants as well as their fears and trepidations. In addition, they turned to cultural anthropological ethnographies (Wait et al., 2018) as well as social geography (Green et al., 1978), sociology (Geary and Klaniczay, 2013), psychology (Renfrew and Zubrow, 1994) and economics (Haas and Tol, 2017) for explanations.
5 In fact, some will fall in different places depending upon the problem and even depending upon when in their career they aredperhaps the best known of these would be the gradual and then complete maximalism of Ian Hodder ending in his almost complete disavowal of the tenents of processualism.
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As more and more archaeologists realized the shortcomings of modern ethnographies, particularly due to the increasing lack of interest in material culture by cultural anthropologists, they began doing their own ethnographies. Among the most prominent are Longacre’s work on ceramics and in the Philippines (Longacre and Skibo, 1994), and the Yellen-Binford controversy regarding hunting and gathering societies (Gould and Yellen, 1987) as well as many less famous ones. The strengths and limitations of ethnographic analogy were far more important to archaeologists than ethnographers. It is the use of anthropological data that informs the reconstruction of prehistoric societies. In the early 1970s, William Rathje came to the University of Arizona as a young faculty member having graduated from Harvard. He fit into the group of young faculty including William Longacre, Keith Basso and Herman Bleibtreu and a set of “processual archaeology graduate students” including Mark Leone, P. Bion Griffen, David Tuggle, Michael Schiffer, myself, and others. By 1972, he was beginning to formulate the “garbage” project. It was intellectually located right between ethnography and archaeology. General principles from the Garbage Project were used for prehistoric societies while archaeological analysis of modern garbage was used to test the reality of modern social practices (Rathje et al., 2013).
The Role of Systems Theory There were several areas in which systems theory impacted on processual archaeology. At least two versions of systems theory need to be considered. The first is based on mathematics, engineering and general systems theory. It begins with the understanding that most phenomena can be formally described as a system consisting of inputs, outputs, components and relationshipsds (I,0,c,r). The other is based upon Wallerstein’s world systems theory. General Systems Theory (GST) derived from the University of Chicago’s depression emphasis on interdisciplinary research and was an attempt to explain all systems in all fields of knowledge. Originally described by von Bertalanffy for biological systems (Bertalanffy and LaViolette, 1981), it claimed all phenomena are systemic and that each system informs the behavior of complex phenomena and thus contributes to a general understanding of all sciences. Bertalanffy together with Anatol Rapoport, Ralph W. Gerard, and Kenneth Boulding at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study (1954), began discussing the creation of a “society” that eventually became the International Society for Systems Science. The field rapidly developed with the addition of other theorists William Ross Ashby, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, C. West Churchman, Talcott Parsons, Frederick Gearing and Nikllas Luhmann. Important subjects were considered including the nature of complexity, self-organization, self-reproduction, connectionism, adaptation, and chaos. Major contributions were made by Ashby, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and Heinz von Forester. All would eventually be worked upon by processual archaeologists. Odum passed these ideas into energetics, thermodynamics and ecology. This intellectual framework was essential to the rise of ecology in processual archaeology. All of these innovations were being bolstered by the rise of computing and eventually the internet. Computers based upon systems were the physical manifestations of the success of the new ideas. New computational tools such as advanced statistical and simulation techniques made possible what previously could not be done. They confirmed the importance of thinking from a system perspective. Perhaps, one of the most important concepts was that if culture could be described as a system with three subsystems -ideological, social, and economic, then if one had information in one of the subsystems, the impact into another could be traced. Thus, the processual archaeologists could demonstrate that a change in ideology could be seen in the social structure (Deetz, 1965) or in the economy (Little, 1987). Processual archaeologists used deviation minimizing and deviation amplifying systems to explain phenomena (Zubrow, 1971). Analysis of homeostatic systems eventually culminated in modeling cultural evolution as punctuated equilibrium systems (Ben-Yosef et al., 2019) and there were sophisticated systemic studies of complexity and diversity (Bintliff, 2004). Wallerstein’s world system theory focused on changing a national perspective to a “whole” world system. It meant that analyses considered such processes as the division of labor from the perspective of the whole rather than from the perspective of each component. Although “whole world systems theory” is not as popular in processual archaeology as general systems theory, it has been gaining ground. There are a set of devoted followers and they have made at least two important contributions with the applications of the core/periphery and the longue durée concepts (Harding, 2013). The longue durée was originally developed by Fernand Braudel out of his wartime experience and was being presented to the public just as processual archaeology was gaining ground in the early 1960s. It was rapidly incorporated into the processual tool box.
The Role of Statistics, Simulation, Mathematics, and Databases The counting of sites, features and artifacts has a very long history in archaeology. There are lists and tables of artifacts in reports as old as Aubrey’s descriptions of Stone Circles, Alcubierre’s reports on Pompeii, and Schliemann’s at Troy. With the general increase in the “scientification” of archaeology, researchers and students began to bring far more sophisticated skills to archaeology. One area was mathematical in the broadest sense of the word. It included pure and applied mathematics, statistics, database creation, and simulation as well as extensions into such important innovations as GPS and GIS systems. Processual archaeology used control charts, capability, tolerance, symmetry, ANOVA, variability predictive analysis, multivariate analysis including cluster, principal component, correspondence, discriminant and factor analyses. Not surprisingly, because time is so important for archaeology, it applied time series, autocorrelation and Fourier series.
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The use of statistics to describe sites and to understand cultures was suggested by scholars as early as W. W. Taylor (Taylor, 1948). He argued in his seminal Study of Archaeology that many archaeologists were not doing what they claimed. Furthermore, by the use of multiple strands of evidence through a conjunctive approach, they could associate all the various cultural features, artifacts, and other evidence with each other and thus derive a full explanation. Given the computing power of the time, he was unable to do what he proposed. However, 25 years later when processual archaeologists began using correspondence analysis, discriminant analysis and factor analysis, they were essentially using Taylor’s conjunctive approach. Spatial statistics are an important part of processual archaeology. GPS and GIS systems (Kvamme, 2005) are now part of most research projects and government regulatory operations. Haggett’s techniques for locational analysis were employed by processual archaeologists who also used Löschian landscapes and central place theory. Pathway analysis investigated parts of the archaeological record that had not been emphasizeddtrails, roads, and rivers. Regional analysis, piggy backing on Walter Isard’s work, broadened the scope of archaeological projects and the use of site catchments provided regional economic input/output analyses (Roper, 1979). The US National Center for Geographic Information (NCGIA) has been at the forefront of such work. It was founded in 1989 and continues as a multi-institution, multidisciplinary research consortium. Processual archaeology was part of the original grant application.6 As computing and the more efficient ability to handle large amounts of data were established, archaeological databases began to be developed. There was a long tradition of maintaining archaeological records in private offices. Archaeologists gathered collections of data at sites, on surveys and stored them on paper in laboratories, library archives and in museums. It soon became apparent that the consolidation into a more complete, a more effective, and more coherent whole was necessary to recognize prehistoric cultures through comparison. The digitalization of data made the early acceptance of databases a suitable tool for processual archaeologists. Although archaeological data was still on Hollerith cards and magnetic tapes, when Bachman suggested an integrated database system, processual archaeologists were among the first non-engineers to follow him. In the 1960s they were using his Integrated Data Store (IDS) based on a network model. By the early 1970s, they were using a hierarchical model for data structuring and the big innovation was the use of relational databases developed by Ted Codd. In the 1980s, Standard Query Language (SQL) mostly developed by IBM, became normal and distributed database systems and parallel computing meant that much larger databases could be operationalized. Processual archaeologists could now ask the same questions using the same query system on different databases. It was a big increase in efficiency for one could ask the same question to archaeological databases in Europe, North or South America without having to learn new languages. In addition, object oriented databases were beginning to be used. In the 1990s, techniques for data mining and decision support were created. After 2000, very big data storage systems were developed with increasing use of parallel computing systems as well as “not only SQL” languages (noSQL). These provided far broader querying. Post 2010 found large data warehouses with massively parallel database systems as well as multi-core mainmemory databases. Generally speaking, the growth of large-scale archaeological databases has been based in the offices of governmental regulators such as national departments of antiquities or national and state historical offices. They are also found in cultural resource management companies. There are archaeologists who believe that modern archaeology needs to have its theory and methodology organized around “big” data (Kristiansen, 2014). Others, such as Maurizio Forte see “big data” as simply one part of the digital revolution (Forte and Murteira, 2020). Simulation has a long past in archaeology. In fact, as Chris Evans and Robin Boast pointed out, before there were mathematical or digital simulations, archaeologists often used physical models to simulate archaeological sites and processes. However, with the development of processual archaeology, the use of simulations became common. A simulation is a model that imitates the action of a system allowing one to understand the components and processes and to test different scenarios or process changes. Frequently, they are simplified so that one may understand the processes without complicating the research with interfering variables or extraneous processes.7 One of their uses is to provide a method of testing hypotheses derived from theories including those from general systems theory. They could range from simple simulations of exchange systems to tests of complex hypothetical and behavioral processes that make up the cultural system as a whole. One may classify simulations into two types: population or agency. The population simulations had components which calculated units that were groups and their behavior. The agency simulations used individuals as units. As computing power increased, the tendency was to move to agency simulations because one could always aggregate individuals into groups but one could not disaggregate groups back into individuals. There are advantages and disadvantages to each and both processual and post processual archaeologists used both. However, more of the processual archaeologists tended to use population simulations while post processualists used individuals. In both cases, simulations have been used in a wide range of archaeological work. Examples include down the line exchange model simulations by Wright and Zeder who use a random walk technique. Zubrow did simulations for survey and sampling systems. Prehistoric spatial organizations were simulated by Ammerman, Matessi, and Cavelli-Sforza and by Hodder and Orton. More complex processes were simulated by Ammerman and Cavalli Sforza in order to explain the spread of village farming economy from the Near East. Decision models were simulated by David Thomas. He used ethnohistoric subsistence behavior of hunting and gathering Shoshonean bands in the Great Basin to explain prehistoric behavior. Costopoulos, examining sub-and arctic hunting behavior, took a different track simulating what the impact of differential memory would be on
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The author was part of the original team that wrote the proposal. The author was part of the original team that wrote the proposal.
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hunting outcomes. Renfrew, as early as 1972 simulated positive feedback in conjunction with punctuated evolution models to understand Aegean culture change. While Renfrew was looking at the positive side of cultural growth of prehistoric societies, others were looking at their failure. The collapse of the Classic Mayan society was simulated by Hosier, Sabloff and their colleagues, while Zubrow attempted to simulate the fall of Rome using a modified version of Jay Wright Forrester’s dynamic urban model. There were attempts to simulate the dynamics of the relationships between prehistoric population growth and the environment. One example was Zubrow’s carrying capacity model and simulation (Zubrow, 1971). A more developed system was created at Leiden called Homininspace.8
The Role of Environment and Ecology Processual archaeologists saw a close connection between environment and society because they were not only population-based and behaviorist but because they recognized the role of subsistence studies and analyses in answering the questions of “how” and “why.” Furthermore, the concepts of system were not only being centrally applied in both areas but in geology and physical geography as well. Odum, an early founder of ecology, defines it as examining the environment and the processes impacting it as a system. Graeme Clark and his students at Cambridge established a school of thought in England oriented to ecological, environmental, and economic studies. These were exemplified by his 1952 book Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis and the excavations at Star Carr. As archaeology began to do larger and more multidisciplinary projects, many investigated the environment and ecology. One of their focuses commonly called the “origin of agriculture” was actually far broader and was about the determinants and consequences of agricultural development. Braidwood’s Iraq Jarmo project and Kenyon’s extended Jericho project examined Old World’s wheat and barley, while Macneish and Mangelsdorf studied the development of New World’s maize, squash and beans. Similar emphasis on ecology and the environment was also taken up by the origin of sedentism and civilization in the Old World. Studies by Hole, Flannery and Neely in the Deh Luran Plain and Robert Adams near the Tigris and Euphrates were complemented in the New World by Stuart Struever and his colleagues in the Illinois Valley. Turning to earlier periods in prehistory, Binford began a series of projects on ecological aspects of hunting and gathering. By the end of the 1960s Americanist archaeology was almost entirely dominated by the ecological approach. Large multidisciplinary research projects were beginning to be replicated in large multi-disciplinary field schools that focused on teaching students how to do problem-oriented research. In the United States, there were three that were hotbeds of processual archaeology. These were Paul S. Martin’s Southwestern Archaeological Expedition8 and the University of Arizona’s Grasshopper. The third was the Kampsville/Koster field school in Illinois. Young processual archaeologists emphasized the ecological relationships between cultures and their biophysical environments; between subcultures within a larger cultural system; and between different cultures occupying the same geographic region. This led them to build on the early settlement pattern studies such as Willey’s and Chang’s and to undertake large scale settlement pattern analyses. Taking up the ecological concept of hunting ranges, Vita-Finzi and Higgs proposed to processual archaeologists that since prehistoric societies practiced territorial behavior when exploiting landscapes, catchment analysis would be a productive methodological tool (Vita-Finzi et al., 1970). It was adopted throughout the world and became one of the fundamental tools of processual archaeologists interested in paleo-ecological or paleo-economic studies.
The Contribution of Paleodemography and Networks Another area upon which many of the processual archaeologists concentrated was paleodemography. Understanding population sizes and dynamics was fundamental to understanding how a society interacted with its environment and, indeed, with other aspects of society. Hunters behave differently than urban dwellers. Paleodemographers focused on how to estimate population sizes, their structure, and their movements. Consequently, there were studies on migration, age structure, kinship, density, growth, fertility, mortality, risk, survival, density, and urbanization. These appealed to processual archaeologists, because first and foremost, the questions could be asked precisely, the interacting variables were well structured, and they were domain limited. For example, for demographers and archaeologists mortality did not have shaded meanings. Death means death and there are no other interpretations. There tended to be considerable use of mathematics and modeling in paleodemography. Thus, almost all the practitioners, Hassan, Shennan, Bocquet-Appel, Diachenko, Gamble, Goodman, Mellars, Nelson, Porcic, Schacht, Yellen, and Zubrow were processual archaeologists of one type or another. Processual archaeologists also often concentrated on studies of networks. Similar to paleodemography, the domain is well structured (Peeples, 2019) and thus makes it relatively straightforward to study. Processual archaeologists have examined social and kin networks, trade and economic networks, energy and information networks. They have done studies of visualization, shortest path, redundancy and uncertainty, network centrality, preferential, directed and non-directed routing, optimal paths, network barriers and failures, numbers of nodes and edges as well as border issues, to name a few.
8 https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-projects/archaeology/homininspace-%E2%80%93-a-large-scale-simulation-system-for-hominins-inthe-past.
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ArchaeometrydThe Hard End of Science Archaeometry encompasses the methodological and technical areas of scientific archaeology. Processual archaeologists made use of an extensive archaeometric tool kit that was independently and concurrently developing. However, they also contributed to its creation-producing new tools and stimulating the creation of others or new applications.
Dating The creation of new dating techniques revolutionized archaeology (Aitken, 2014). Previous techniques of relative dating using the law of supposition in stratigraphic contexts and seriation were soon augmented by absolute dating -in particular, various forms of radiometric dating. Originally suggested by Boltman in 1907, it was Libby’s use of C14 in the 1950s and 1960s that made it into a standard archaeological tool. This was rapidly followed by Uranium-lead, Potassium–argon, and Uranium–thorium and Fission track dating. Similarly, processual archaeologists used luminescence dating. Trapped ionizing radiation is released by heat or in the case of optically stimulated luminescence, light. The luminescence signal emitted is then used to calculate a date. Making use of the variation in tree ring growth caused by the annual variation of precipitation and temperature, dendrochronology was used to create master date lists that went back millennia. Tree rings could also be used in prehistoric climate analyses (Fritts, 1976). When obsidian is used to make prehistoric stone tools, the width of the hydration of the cortex caused by oxidation on exposure to air is the basis of obsidian hydration dating. Better results are possible by higher precision Infrared Photoacoustic Spectroscopy (IR-PAS) and by Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy (SIMS) (Liritzis and Laskaris, 2021).
Material Science and Characterization Processual archaeologists recognized that if they could accurately characterize the materials of which artifacts were constructed, they could learn how items were made, and why the makers made the production decisions that they did. Characterization techniques that were created in the developing field of materials science were imported (Henderson, 2013). Initially, they concentrated on metals and their ores and ceramics. Some of the tools that are used in these characterization studies are XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) in its non-portable and portable forms, Neutron Activation Analysis, Inductive Coupled PlasmadMass Spectrometry and Fourier TransformdInfrared Spectroscopy. For mineralogical analyses, the use of thin sections became standard in the discipline. Microscopy has developed from optical through scanning electron microscopes. Magnification has increased from approximately 1000x to more than 1,000,000x. Examples of applications in archaeological studies include X-ray diffraction microscopy, optical microscopy, polarized light microscopy, Particle-induced X-ray emission, and scanning electronic microscopy (Schreiner et al., 2007).
Sampling and Prospecting Since processual archaeologists were interested in more than the oldest or the most beautiful, they recognized the importance of distinguishing techniques to make sure their surveys and excavations were actually representative of the site, the town, or the society. Sampling was a statistical technique to ensure representation. On the other hand, they also needed to develop better techniques to do “goal oriented” excavations or surveys when one needed to find the largest storage area, etc. The latter was termed prospecting. Processual archaeologists used a wide range of sampling techniquesdsystematic, random, stratified, random stratified, aligned and non-aligneddwhen excavating and surveying (Orton, 2000). They recognized that they needed to consider absent, missing and non-existent data, which are not the same thing. Sometimes one may use interpolation (Robinson and Zubrow, 1999). As objects, features, and sites are found, the probabilities of discovery change and many archaeologists used Bayesian statistics to make use of these changing probabilities (Otárola-Castillo and Torquato, 2018). Similarly, some processual archaeologists used geo-statistical techniques to find particular types of sites. The author and John Harbaugh, a geologist, borrowed various mining prospecting techniques such as Kriging to find archaeological sites. Remote sensing in archaeology began long before processual archaeology. For example, in 1927, Alfred V. Kidder, of the Carnegie Institution, hired Charles and Anne Lindbergh to fly and photograph archaeological sites in the Four Corners and the Upper Rio Grande. There was a large increase in the use of remote sensing which did not require excavation. Aerial photography became far more common (Bourgeois and Meganck, 2005). More and more information was able to be obtained from higher and higher elevations. Lindbergh’s photographs are from less than 1000 m elevation; Zubrow used U2 images in the 1960s at 26,000 m; and, in this millennium, the Corona Satellite images are taken at elevations between 150 and 450 km. Satellite images are frequent tools today (Lasaponara and Masini, 2012). The use of inexpensive drones has dramatically changed the nature of aerial survey and recording (Risbøl and Gustavsen, 2018). Other forms of remote sensing that were used by archaeologists include Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), Electrical Resistance (Schmidt, 2013), Magnetic ProspectingdMagnetic Susceptibility and seismography (Skinner, 1974).
Conservation and Museums Another scientific aspect of processual archaeology is found in museum and artifact conservation. Archaeometric tools such Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (Gritton and Magalousis, 1978), Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (Zlateva et al., 2003), Laser-induced Breakdown Spectroscopy and Holographic Interferometry are used to characterize artifacts to make sure that repair and conservation techniques are appropriate. Also holographic exhibits and computerized reconstructions of artifacts and sites have been utilized in museums and on the internet (Torres-Martínez et al., 2016). Bible and Zubrow are now working on developing new uses of immersive virtual reality and artificial intelligence applications in archaeology.
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Role of Biological, Palynological, and Paleogenetic Data The use of biological research as part of archaeology predates processual archaeology. There were early studies of prehistoric environments using paleontology. In the sixties, a major increase in studies took place fueled by Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai Gorge and other early hominid excavations (Tobias, 1973). Simultaneously, there was an explosion in palynological studies. These were used to understand and reconstruct environments (Bottema, 1999), culture-environment interactions (Coyle McClung, 2013), economic subsistence, climate change (Fletcher et al., 2007) as well as dating (Hjelle and Lødøen, 2017). In the last 20 years, there has been a revolution in archaeology with many previous ideas being revaluated. Processual archaeologists have welcomed the changes. They recognize that new techniques will result in the disproving of once proven hypotheses as new data and new precision become available. This shift has been the result of the increasing ease and decreasing cost to do genetic and paleogenetic studies (MacEachern, 2013). There have also been innovations in obtaining DNA and RNA (Richards et al., 1993). Many of these studies are concerned with the nature of gene flows and the social processes that cause them (Thomas, 2006). Other studies reconstruct domestication (Gifford-Gonzalez and Hanotte, 2011) and hominid evolution (Johansson, 2013). Much paleogenetic research is also reevaluating the spread of prehistoric societies (Mellars et al., 2013). Another scientific research method adopted by processual archaeologists utilizes isotopes. At the atomic level, isotopes are ingested or inhaled into the organism. They can be detected and separated by small differences in mass. Once in the body, their retention is determined by a wide variety of variables. Isotope studies (Stantis and Kendall, 2022) have been used for reconstructing prehistoric diet and mobility, as well as subsistence practices.
Role of Geoarchaeology Geology has a long history in archaeology. Processual archaeologists recognized it as a critical tool and ancillary field to archaeological science. Thus, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s various universities began teaching classes on geoarchaeology. For example, John Harbaugh and the author jointly taught one for several years at Stanford University beginning in 1973. Today, according to the American Geological Society, there are at least 15 graduate programs providing degrees in geoarchaeology in the United States9 and similar numbers in England and at least a few in the rest of Europe.10 Research applications include, but are not limited to, sedimentation rates in lakes, ice cores (Eichler et al., 2017), magnetic susceptibility in lake/marine sediments (Aidona and Liritzis, 2012), and very importantly the validation of dating techniques by measuring radioactivity variation.
Cognitive Archaeology One of the major criticisms of processual archaeology was that it was behaviorist and population based. This criticism was raised by what came to be called the post processualists (Hodder, 2013), who followed the French post modernists - Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and others. According to these post-modernist archaeologists, processualists were unable to address what the motivations of individuals were. Furthermore, they criticized the processualists for believing in reality rather than recognizing reality was only interpretation (Johnson, 2004). Thus, for post processualists archaeology was a matter of the individual researcher’s interpretation, and the definition of artifacts, features, and sites was fluid. It depended upon who did the research and who was reading the research. Colin Renfrew and the author decided that there should be a scientific and behaviorist answer to these criticisms. Cognitive archaeology was the explicit answer to these criticisms. One could understand motivation and psychological aspects of prehistoric archaeology through the same principles that one could understand population, subsistence, or trade. Major research concerns the appearance of Homo erectus when brain size increased by 100%, the enhancement of human memory 200,000 years ago and changes that enabled language and music. The development of archaeoacoustics is a byproduct of cognitive archaeology. Another area is the evolution of causation. There presently are three tier and seven tier models. Evidence for the origin of religion has been found and there are scholars describing it as the indirect impact of the “see-saw” effect. Bible and Zubrow are studying the use of artificial intelligence and immersive virtual reality.
Summary and Future Directions: What Happened, Where Did It Happen, What is Happening, and What Will Happen Processual archaeology began in the intellectual ferment of the 1960s. It had been in the air for a while though, thus it is hard to say exactly when and where it began. Did it begin with Taylor, Spaulding, and Binford in the New World and Clarke and Renfrew in the Old World? No, that is far too simplistic for there were too many people around the world discussing the ideas in the 1960s. In 1971, I reviewed the archaeological literature referring to the changing view of the archaeological perspective for the Annual Review of Archaeology. My conclusions then were that there was clear evidence of the new processual archaeological paradigm changing the discipline but that it was only in process and had not replaced the older historical paradigm completely. A new set of classics did not yet exist. However, there was increasing interest in environmental and ecological analytics as well as an increasing problem orientation. These were clear harbingers of what was to come. 9
https://community.geosociety.org/geoarchdivision/resources/gradschoolguide. https://www.master-and-more.eu/en/master-of-geoarchaeology/.
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Fifty years later, I am reconsidering the same topic. The breadth and importance of processual archaeology has grown exponentially through the decades. New classics exist. Important problems have been solved. It is taught in the universities, in the high and even elementary schools: it is shown in the museums and in the art galleries; it is communicated in the academic journals, and the popular magazines; found on the internet and in social media; seen in the popular tv as well as in Hollywood and Bollywood movies. There are computer games. Processual archaeology has a universality to it. It is the same universality that science has. This essay has only briefly touched on the various topics. However, for processual archaeology as a whole, several generalities stand out. First, processual archaeology did become an important paradigm of archaeology worldwide. It spread from its original centers so that a great deal of archaeology that now takes place is processual even if it is not necessarily labeled as such. It tests hypotheses, uses the scientific method, tries to answer the questions of “how” and “why” as well as “what,” “when,” and “where.” It uses a wide range of scientific tools and methods, some of which have been delineated here. Post-processual archaeology, which was a post-modernist response to processual archaeology, similarly became an important paradigm. However, what is now clear is that post processual did not replace processual archaeology. Although intellectually in direct opposition to processual archaeology, the two paradigms uncomfortably co-exist without any sign of one replacing the other. In fact, all three paradigms historical, processual, and post processual, are not only being practiced but all three are increasingly simultaneously being practiced. Processual archaeology is science in archaeology. It has not replaced nor has it been replaced by the other paradigms. It was, is, and seems that it will continue to be at the center of archaeological research for the foreseeable future.
See Also: Anthropological Archaeology; Archaeology and the New Materialisms; Behavioral Archaeology; Cognitive Archaeology; Evolutionary/NeoDarwinian Archaeology; Historic Roots of Archaeology; History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Marxist Archaeology; Postprocessual Archaeology; Social Theory in Archaeology; World-Systems Analysis: Traditions and Schools of Thought.
References11 Adams, Robert M., 1981. Heartland of Cities : Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Aidona, Elina, Liritzis, Ioannis, 2012. Magnetic susceptibility and radioactivity changes of aegean and ionian sea sediments during last glacial/interglacial: climatic and chronological markers. J. Coast. Res. 28 (2), 342–353. Aitken, Martin Jim, 2014. Science-Based Dating in Archaeology. Routledge, London. Ben-Yosef, Erez, Liss, Brady, Yagel, Omri A., Tirosh, Ofrir, Najjar, Mohammed, Levy, Thomas E., 2019. Ancient technology and punctuated change: detecting the emergence of the Edomite Kingdom in the southern levant. PLoS One 14 (9), e0221967. Bertalanffy, Ludvig Van, LaViolette, Paul A., 1981. A Systems View of Man. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Binford, Lewis R., Quimby, George I., 1972. An Archaeological Perspective. Seminar Press, Princeton, NJ. Bintliff, John, 2004. Time, Structure, and Agency: The Annales, Emergent Complexity, and Archaeology. In: Bintliff, John (Ed.), A Companion to Archaeology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, New York, pp. 174–194. Bordes, Francois, 1972. A Tale of Two Caves. Harper & Row, Manhattan, NY. Bottema, Styze, 1999. Landscape archaeology and reconstruction of the Mediterranean environment based on palynology. Leveau y otros 9–16. Bourgeois, Jean, Meganck, Marc, 2005. Aerial Photography and Archaeology 2003: A Century of Information. Papers Presented During the Conference Held at the Ghent University, December 10th–12th, 2003. Academia Press. Clarke, David L., 1968. Analytical Archaeology. Methuen. Cowgill, George L., 1964. Statistics and sense: more on the Purum case. Am. Anthropol. 66 (6), 1358–1365. Coyle McClung, E., 2013. A Palynological Investigation of Land-Use Patterns in First Millennium AD Ireland. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast. Deetz, James, 1965. The Dynamics of Stylistic Change in Arikara Ceramics. University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL. Dyson, Stephen L., 2006. In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Yale University Press. Eichler, Anja, Gramlich, Gabriella, Kellerhals, Thomas, Tobler, Leonhard, Rehren, Thilo, Margrit Schwikowski, M., 2017. Ice-core evidence of earliest extensive copper metallurgy in the Andes 2700 years ago. Sci. Rep. 7 (1), 1–11. Fletcher, William J., Boski, Tomas, Moura, Delminda, 2007. Palynological evidence for environmental and climatic change in the lower Guadiana valley, Portugal, during the last 13,000 years. Holocene 17 (4), 481–494. Forte, Maurizo, Murteira, Helena, 2020. Digital Cities: Between History and Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Fritts, Harold C., 1976. Tree Rings and Climate. Academic Press, Amsterdam. Geary, Patrick J., Klaniczay, Gábor B., 2013. Manufacturing Middle Ages: Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Brill, Leiden. Gifford-Gonzalez, Diane, Hanotte, Oliver, 2011. Domesticating animals in Africa: implications of genetic and archaeological findings. J. World Prehistory 24 (1), 1–23. Gould, Richard A., Yellen, John E., 1987. Man the hunted: determinants of household spacing in desert and tropical foraging societies. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 6 (1), 77–103. Green, David R., Haselgrove, Colin, Spriggs, Matthew, 1978. Social Organisation and Settlement: Contributions From Anthropology, Archaeology and Geography. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford. Gritton, Vance, Magalousis, Nicholas M., 1978. Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy of Archaeological Ceramic Materials. ACS Publications, Washington, DC. Haas, Tymon C.A. D., Tol, Gijis W., 2017. The Economic Integration of Roman Italy: Rural Communities in a Globalising World. Brill, Leiden. Harding, A., 2013. World systems, cores, and peripheries in prehistoric Europe. Eur. J. Archaeol. 16 (3), 378–400. Henderson, Julian, 2013. The Science and Archaeology of Materials: An Investigation of Inorganic Materials. Routledge, London. Hill, James N., 1970. Broken K Pueblo; Prehistoric Social Organization in the American Southwest. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. Hjelle, Kari L., Lødøen, Trond K., 2017. Dating of rock art and the effect of human activity on vegetation: the complementary use of archaeological and scientific methods. Quat. Sci. Rev. 168, 194–207. Hodder, Ian, 2013. Post-modernism, post-structuralism and post-processual archaeology. In: Hodder, Ian (Ed.), The Meanings of Things. Routledge, London, pp. 92–106. 11 The publisher’s editorial policy limited the number of bibliographic citations. The interested reader will find the complete set of references on Research Gate and Academia under the Author’s Name and the title References for Processual Archaeology.
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Johansson, Sverker, 2013. The talking Neanderthals: what do fossils, genetics and archeology say? Biolinguistics 7, 035–074. Johnson, Amber L., 2004. Processual Archaeology: Exploring Analytical Strategies, Frames of Reference, and Culture Process. Praeger, Westport. Kristiansen, Kristian, 2014. Towards a new paradigm? The third science revolution and its possible consequences in archaeology. Curr. Swedish Archaeol. 22 (1), 11–34. Kvamme, Kenneth L., 2005. There and back again: revisiting archaeological locational modeling. In: Mehrer, Mark W., Wescott, Konnie L. (Eds.), GIS and Archaeological Site Location Modeling. CRC Press, London, pp. 23–55. Lasaponara, Rosa, Masini, Nicola, 2012. Satellite Remote Sensing: A New Tool for Archaeology, vol. 16. Springer, Berlin. Leone, Mark P., 2016. Critical Historical Archaeology. Routledge, London. Libby, Willard F., 1952. Radiocarbon Dating. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Liritzis, Ioanna, Laskaris, Nikolaos, 2021. 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Post-Processual Archaeology Koji Mizoguchi, Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, Nishi Ward, Fukuoka, Japan © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview: Modern, Post-modern, and Post-processual Archaeology/Archaeologies Key Issues The “Post-modern Shifts” and Post-processual Archaeologies Shift to the Contingency-Complexity Concept/Theory-Based Ontology Shift to the Hermeneutical Epistemology Shift to the Relativist-Anti-evolutionary-Minority-Oriented Worldviews Intended and Unintended Consequences of Post-processual Archaeology The Geography of Post-processual Archaeology Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References
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Situate post-processual archaeology in the discursive space of contemporary society. Analytically describe post-processual archaeology’s constitutive characteristics as the consequences of shifts from the Modern to the Late-/Post-modern epistemic-ontological horizon. Investigate how the post-processual movement impacted the ways in which archaeology is practiced in different parts of the world. Evaluate the impact of the inception of post-processual archaeology/archaeologies on Archaeology generally and considering what the future holds for archaeology after it.
Abstract This entry situates post-processual archaeology in the discursive space of contemporary society and analytically describes its constitutive characteristics as the consequences of shifts from the Modern to the Late-/Post-modern epistemic-ontological horizon. I describe how these shifts were implemented as concrete archaeological practices and examine the intended/ unintended consequences generated by them. Then, I investigate how the post-processual movement impacted the ways in which archaeology is practiced in different parts of the world. The entry concludes by evaluating the impact of the inception of post-processual archaeology/archaeologies on Archaeology generally and considering what the future holds for archaeology after it.
Introduction As a disciplinary category, “post-processual archaeology” can be characterized by its lack of concrete constitutive characteristics in its definition other than its “coming after processual archaeology.” It is extremely loosely defined regarding its objective, theory, methodology, and subject matter. However, regarding the matrix of the actually-adopted objectives, theories, methodologies, subject matters, ontological and epistemological stances and worldviews that can be recognized in its working examples, postprocessual archaeology can be grasped as a substantive assemblage of practices that belong to the epistemic-ontological horizon described as the “late-/post-modern” (the post-modern hereinafter for simplicity). To concisely outline what post-processual archaeology is, how it emerged, and in which direction it is heading, we must elucidate what the “modern” epistemic-ontological horizon is and how it differs from its post-modern counterpart. Then, we investigate how the constitutive characteristics of post-processual archaeology are coupled with those of the post-modern epistemic-ontological horizon, and with the structure of the post-modern social formation and the discursive spaces it generates. We do this by investigating what forms the shift from the modern to the post-modern generated concerning ontology, epistemology, and world views, and what changes those “post-modern shifts” bring to how archaeology is practiced. Next, we examine the concrete practices that generate these constitutive characteristics and the consequences that result from them in the form of post-processual
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“archaeologies.” As the historical trajectory through which the post-modern social formation has come about varies globally, how post-processual archaeology has been adopted/rejected varies accordingly. Therefore, we investigate the geography of postprocessual archaeologies. Finally, we evaluate the impact of the inception of post-processual archaeology/archaeologies on Archaeology and consider what the future holds for archaeology after it. Relevant works are so numerous, it is impossible to cite them all. Therefore, the minimum number of works published during the early post-processual movement representing important concepts are cited, and listed at the end.
Overview: Modern, Post-modern, and Post-processual Archaeology/Archaeologies Descriptions of the modern epistemic-ontological horizon are innumerable. Here, we characterize the modern with (1) its broad functionalist teleology-based ontology, (2) its logical-positivist epistemology, and (3) its Enlightenment concept-based worldview. The functionalist teleology-based ontology assumes that social entities’ modes of operation and reproduction are regulated by certain preexisting rules or “structures.” This regulation ensures that respective operations and modes of reproduction contribute to the stable existence, operation, and reproduction of the social whole. In its sophisticated versions (e.g., second-order cybernetics), the self-observation and self-reflection of their own performance by respective social entities brings contingency and uncertainty (i.e., “historical” elements) to the trajectory of change of the social whole, leading to the inception of Complexity theory. However, in its traditional versions, such trajectory is perceived as predictable as the deviation from the trajectory of the stable existence of an entity, caused by internal or external factors, is regulated by other entities that reduce deviations to keep the stability of the whole. In general systems theory, such regulatory operations are conceptualized as “feedbacks.” In addition to the deviation-reducing operations by other entities/”systems,” called “negative feedbacks,” the operations that amplify the deviation until a new state of stability is gained by the whole, called “positive feedbacks,” are added to the model. Such attempts of theoretical-conceptual sophistication make it possible to explain the change/transformation of society as the result of continuous adaptation by the social whole to internal and/or external, and to socio-cultural and/or non-socio-cultural/natural changes (Clarke, 1968). However, the contingency induced by human individuals and their intentional/strategic decisions and actions that can contradict the deviation-reduction or the deviation-amplification operations that the structure of the whole needs to sustain its stable state, is not given attention other than being treated as “bias-making factors.” This basic, ontological understanding of human beings as non-creative and in a state of being ultimately determined by external factors characterizes the modern epistemic-ontological horizon and supports its logicalpositivist epistemology. The logical-positivist epistemology is based upon the (theoretical-operational) reduction of the complexity of the world, the total whole of what can happen, to the form of verifiable/falsifiable propositions. The significance of a proposition is determined by its deductibility to empirical (externally observable) facts. Thus, the propositions on something not externally observable/that cannot be made externally observable are regarded as mere metaphysics and hence meaningless/unimportant. Subsequently, the ideal propositions for the logical-positivist are on physical phenomena that can be mathematically described. Therefore, the complexity of what human individuals think and do must be deduced to what can be observed externally and described as the effect of something that can also be observed externally. The logical-positivist epistemology is coupled with the functionalist teleology-based ontology; these mutually support one another. The theoretical-operational ignorance by this epistemological-ontological complex of humans’ intentionality/creativity/ ability to think and act strategically and sometimes “irrationally” derives from the fact that those human creative capabilities often contradict the functional self-preservation of the social whole. This metaphysically-derived ignorance aligns with a central principle of the logical-positivist epistemology that operationally recognizes only externally observable (ideally mathematically describable) propositions as significant; the symbol/meaning-based/mediated operation of human minds cannot be observed externally nor quantified. These two constitutive characteristics of the modernd(1) the functionalist teleology-based ontology and (2) the logicalpositivist epistemologydare further coupled with (3) the Enlightenment concept-based worldview. This derives from the amalgamation of a stable hierarchical order-based social formation, Eurocentric world systems, and the belief in human ability and rationality supported by the accumulation of scientific world knowledge. The emergence of Eurocentric world systems was a historically contingent event significantly based upon Europeans’ supreme maritime navigation technology in the 15th and 16th centuries and the geopolitical and economic context. However, the mutually accelerating processes/phenomena of the development of science and technology, capital accumulation, the emergence of the bourgeois which quickly formed a new economically and politically powerful class, the growth of colonial powers and markets, and the modernization of the Christian religion culminated in the formation of scientific disciplines and the emergence of ideas of social engineering and improvement. These factors combined generated a world view placing Europe centrally in a hierarchical spatiotemporal configuration of race-based human categories and socio-cultural groups. Accordingly, Europe had the obligation and right to enlighten peoples, educating and disciplining them more the farther they lived from Europedthe center of human progress and the distributor of knowledge, goods, and capital. The Enlightenment concept/world view is structurally coupled with (1) the functionalist teleology-based ontology and (2) the logical-positivist epistemology on the following grounds. The amalgamation of the modernization of Christianity and the accelerated development of sciences nurtured teleological-evolutionary understandings of the world which presupposed the maintenance of stability and continuous improvement as the intrinsic nature of things and beings in the world. If an entity remains unstable or in the state of stasis, this should be perceived as wrong as its state and inferior to things that are stable/improving, and needs
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intervention. Such interventions were supposed to be undertaken only by the Enlighteneddthe Europeans (European higher-class men)dwho were supposed to be properly and exclusively equipped with accumulated empirical knowledge (i.e., Scientific knowledge) as to how things could lose their stable states and could regain stability. Further, things that are in their respective natural states (state of stability) would improve themselves by increasingly efficiently adjusting to their respective environments. To contribute to such a project, empirical knowledge on things’ stable states and maintenance mechanisms had to be systematically gathered and formulated into cause-effect mechanistic propositions that were cumulatively verified and sophisticated. The structural coupling of those three constitutive characteristics of the modern social formation and its epistemic-ontological base formed Modernity’s “technology of governing”, that perpetuated the domination of (1) the functionalist teleology-based ontology, (2) the logical-positivist epistemology, (3) the Enlightenment concept-based worldview, and thus, European natural scientific knowledge, masculinity, and other similar frameworks over all other epistemic and ontological frameworks and worldviews. The post-modern epistemic-ontological horizon, in which post-processual archaeology was born and is situated, emerged from the situation in which the modern epistemic-ontological horizon becomes increasingly detached from its contemporary social formation and its reality and increasingly becomes untenable/unsustainable. The geopolitical stability based upon the Cold War equilibrium sustained/was sustained by stable politico-economic “blocs” (e.g., “Western Capitalist” and “Eastern Socialist” blocs), that further sustained the feasibility of the functionalist teleology-based epistemology. After World War II, many former colonies became independent, with various degrees/speeds of de-colonization. However, the Cold War equilibrium locked these countries in bloc-based politico-economic systems, allowing dictatorial governments to establish in many of these countries, preventing genuine decolonization and the deconstruction of colonial center-periphery relations. The end of the Cold War marked the fullfledged beginning of globalization and the post-colonial era that led to the emergence of a multipolar world and the fragmentation of value systems, world views, and senses of reality. Through such a dramatic transition of epistemology, ontology, world views, and social formation,
• • •
the functionalist teleology-based ontology was replaced by the contingency-complexity concept/theory-based ontology, the logical-positivist epistemology by the hermeneutical epistemology, and the Enlightenment concept-based worldview by relativist-anti-evolutionary-minority-oriented worldviews.
Further, these “shifts,” rather than “replacements,” generated the reality horizon that is variously described as late-modern (emphasizing continuity) or post-modern (emphasizing discontinuity). Post-processual archaeology is a reaction/response by archaeology as an academic discipline/discursive space/system to these shifts and the emergence of the post-modern reality horizon, and, because such a reaction necessitated the deconstruction of the monopolizing-universalizing tendency/directionality/intentionality of the modern reality horizon, post-processual archaeology had to constitute itself as a matrix of various versions of (1) the contingency-complexity concept-based ontology, (2) the hermeneutical epistemology, and (3) the relativist-anti-evolutionary-minority-oriented worldviews (Bapty and Yates, 1991; Hodder, 1989, 1995; Shanks and Tilley, 1987a,b). Therefore, post-processual archaeology is, in fact, post-processual archaeologies. Postprocessual archaeology was/is a movement comprising innumerable mini-“paradigms” (by paradigm is meant here an assemblage of certain objectives and subject matters and ways to observe, record, analyze, and make sense of them) that are differentiated with the above-mentioned, innumerable “post-modern shifts.”
Key Issues The “Post-modern Shifts” and Post-processual Archaeologies Here, we examine the contents of those shifts that were materialized as post-processual archaeologies.
Shift to the Contingency-Complexity Concept/Theory-Based Ontology Active Individuals The contingency-complexity concept/theory-based ontology initially introduced the concept of human agents as “active individuals.” In the functionalist teleology-based ontology, human individuals were treated as passive phenomenal units/nodes situated in a network of cause-effect connections/edges, heuristically assumed not to have any power or potentiality to deviate from what the network allows. Besides, it was rare that human individuals were allocated any power or potentiality to initiate forces to make the other phenomenal units/nodes in the network react to and change themselves. Thus, human individuals were theoretically predetermined to have no potentiality to cause contingent deviations to the systemic trajectory through which archaeological phenomenal units (i.e., human individuals, various human groupings, and the material traces of their behavior) were formed and transformed. The introduction of the concept of active individuals (Hodder, 1985) enabled archaeologists to deconstruct both functionalist and teleologist logics. The functionalist logic ignored and dismissed the significance of the attributes and their variables which did not “functionally” contribute to the maintenance of the stable state of the entity of which they were parts. Alternatively, the functionalist logic forcefully discovered “functions” in all the studied attributes. The functionalist logic presupposes a stable state as the norm of every entity, and any destabilization is destined to be solved in the form of restabilization. The concept of active individuals recognizes the creativity of humans who always have potential to do things differently from before; differently between them;
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differently from the norm; and in ways that destabilize groups of various contents, natures, characters, and scales to which they belong/of which they comprise. Here, they can do so intentionally/strategically, out of boredom, or just accidentally. The choices made by active individuals are always informed by their experiences and their memory traces, preserved both in discursive and nondiscursive/embodied manners, but they have the potential to ignore precedents and to do things differently from before. Active individuals can execute their actions with the intention of destabilizing pre-existing norms and change/transform themdeverything that active individuals did could have been otherwise. These implications of the active individual concept effectively deconstructed the functionalist logic and teleological ontology by introducing the sense of contingency and complexity in human thoughts, acts, and their consequences, (re)introducing the notion of history as the sequence of contingent episodes/events. History, in the functionalist teleology-based ontology, was the description of trajectory which can be simulated and predicted if those who observed it were properly informed of the entity’s structure, contents, and the potential destabilizing factors. The concept of active individuals gave rise to an alternative view of history as a sequence of events in which individuals interpret, reflect, and act based on their personal experiences, memories, and material circumstances in unique ways. Giddensian Practice Theory and Its Implications The deconstruction of any pre-existing frameworks, including ontological ones, however, must come with an alternative framework; an alternative view is not enough. The concept of active individuals, as its primitive form stands, cannot explain how the sociality of society (i.e., stable patterns of social interactions) emerges/is generated. To remedy this fundamental ontological problem, a broad practice theory framework, particularly the sociologist Anthony Giddens’ and the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s version (Bourdieu, 1992; Giddens, 1984), was introduced. We focus on Giddensian practice theory because we can explicitly relate many significant operational characteristics of post-processual archaeology to Giddensian concepts. Giddensian practice theory’s core conceptual models are: (a) the duality of structure and (b) the stratification model of act and consciousness (Fig. 1). a) The duality of structure: Giddens defines structure as consisting of “rules and resources.” The human agent acts, interacts, and communicates by mobilizing anything which can be differentiated and recognized by the agent and fellow agents. Some attempts at acting, interacting, and communicating work (i.e., someone’s interactive/communicative act is responded to by others’) and others do not. The ways that worked are repeatedly enacted and institutionalized as rules, and the range of mobilized things, regardless of material, scales, natures, and characters (including minute bodily actions, noises/sounds aurally made, words, mobile-portable material items, immobile-large material items, buildings, landscapes, etc.), is narrowed and stabilized. An element of sociality emerges as a set of such rules and resourcesd repeatedly drawn upon in actions, interactions, and communicationsdand the existence of such sets enables social order to exist. Another aspect of sociality empowers individuals to act based on reflection and decision-making, drawing on their shared experiences and memories (that constitute the rules and resources partially but significantly). The ability to use complex language facilitates the monitoring of the (intended and unintended) outcomes of thoughts and actions, enabling individuals to differentiate and express available options and ultimately make choices. Thus, there always and intrinsically exists/is generated the possibility that the choice could have been different, leading to
Fig. 1
Duality of structure and the stratification model of act and consciousness. After Giddens, 1984, reformulated by the current author.
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different consequences, despite/because of the existence of structures (as rules and resources). That is the fundamental source of human creativity and activity, making human actions, interactions, and communications as choices and decisions, regardless of whether they are consciously or sub-consciously made. Therefore: • structures as rules and resources exist in the form of the memory traces of past choices, • structures are referred to/drawn upon in the action, interaction, and communication of the agent, who can strictly enact how they were executed before or can do them differently, and • the consequences, regardless of their being intended or unintended/unexpected, and their reflections are added to the repository of memory traces, constituting/reproducing the rules and resources and enabling the agent to think and act. In short: • the structures enable and constrain the creativity of the agent and the contingency which the creativity of the agent intrinsically generates, and • the agent transforms and sustains them. b) The stratification model of act and consciousness: The “repository of memory traces,” where structures virtually exist, Giddens argues, constitutes the “practical consciousness” stratum of human consciousness. Practical consciousness is routinizedembodied knowledge, and some memory traces constituting it are the traces of originally “discursive” (i.e., language-driven/ articulated) decisions/acts which become routinized and embodied through their recursive enactment. Monitoring the consequences of an action mostly happens in the “discursive consciousness” stratum. Some elements/components of this stratum are referred to discursively in deciding how to act, whereas the others are being gradually transformed into that of practical knowledge. Here, the boundary between the discursive and practical consciousness strata is blurred and constantly shifting. There also exists the stratum of the “unconscious,” comprising instincts obtained through human evolution and influencing the working of both the practical and discursive consciousness. The relationship between the discursive and practical consciousness is of vital importance and has many constitutive implications for post-processual archaeology. As many memory traces constituting practical consciousness are traces of initially consciously/ intentionally taken actions, interactions, and communications, they were conducted by mobilizing/being mediated with certain resources. If such actions are effective and become repeatedly enacted, connection between the actions and the resources becomes mutually dependent/constituted. Further, when conscious/intentional actions, interactions, and communications become routinized, their recursive enactment is made possible/led by the presence of such resources. Here, certain resourcesdbodily actions, aurally made noises/sounds, words, mobile-portable material items, immobile-large material items, buildings, landscapes, and so ondlead/direct/instruct people to act in a certain way, because their practical consciousness/knowledge and those resources are mutually dependent/constituted. In summary, the Giddensian concepts of the duality of structure and the stratification model of act and consciousness effectively explain and outline why sociality arises despite the “could have been otherwise” nature of human agency and its actions, leading to the inherent and intrinsic contingency and complexity of society. Archaeologies Emerged From the Shift to the Contingency-Complexity-Based Ontology/The Introduction of Giddensian Practice Theory Here, we examine how the shift was materialized in new genres/mini-paradigms, i.e., post-processual archaeologies, in archaeology. The introduction of predominantly Giddensian practice theory radically altered archaeological approaches to issues broadly concerning social hierarchy, power, and dominance. Archaeologies of power, domination, and resistance: Power, commonsensically, is understood as the acts (by someone)/effects (of these acts) that constrain/limit someone else’s acts to a certain (narrower) range. Often, the range to which someone else’s acts are constrained/limited is determined by someone else. This concept of power premises the pre-existence of a social hierarchy; the higher-ranked in a hierarchy impose their will upon the lower-ranked in their choices and doing (and thinking) things. This also leads to the presumption that power does not exist without hierarchy. Noteworthy here is that the emergence and sustenance of a hierarchy are caused and made possible by the monopolization of power; the relationship between power and hierarchy, as perceived in this commonly-held conceptual framework, is causally circular. The introduction of the concept of the duality of structure and the hierarchical model of act and consciousness radically altered the explanation and understanding of power. Power, here, is understood as an “emergent” faculty/property/phenomenon. In the concept of the duality of structure, actions, interactions and communications constitute an arena where a range of thought- (mental and bodily) and feeling-units, expressions, actions, and material and immaterial resources are networked. Through their sequential/ punctuated continuation, the range becomes stabilized, allowing the enactment of the structure to become routinized/automated. Differential accesses to/mobilization of the resources can differentiate actors into distinct categories. This differentiation emerges through the recursive enactment of a certain mode of the above-mentioned networking that constitutes practical consciousness. Practical consciousness is the knowledge of how to go on with people, things, thoughts and feelings, and differential access to/ mobilization of the resources by different categories of actors (even if differences are connected, for instance, to uneven wealth distribution) would not be perceived by the actors as hierarchical differences nor as the limitation of freedom. In other words:
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power functions to enable/facilitate actions, interactions, and communications to continue,
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power can emerge through the reproduction of actions, interactions, and communications generating differential accesses to/ mobilization of resources by different actors, culminating in the emergence of different categories of actors in “hierarchical” relations, and power both constrains and enables and the constraining often is not perceived by the actors as enforcement.
This transformation of the concept of power/domination also alters our view on the possibility of resistance. That a certain set of resources are linked to certain thought-/feeling-units to form a network/system (sustained as “practical consciousness/knowledge”) which reproduces hierarchical social relations/relations of dominance means that the intentional replacement of resources or change in how resources are mobilized/linked to certain thoughts-/feeling-units might deconstruct the hierarchical relations/relations of dominance. Archaeological material items of any scale and nature/character (ranging from micro artifacts/eco-facts through to landscape features to the heavenly bodies) could be mobilized (inasmuch as they could be perceived by humans) as the above-mentioned resources, and the thought-/feeling-units to which they were linked, and the mode of actions, interactions, and communications through which they and material items were networked can be approached by examining how they co-exist in archaeological contexts of various scales and natures/characters. Comparing the outcome of such contextual analyses with that of the archaeological reconstruction of the categorization of human individuals/actors and the configuration of the categories (i.e., non-hierarchical, hierarchical, and heterarchical) and its changes/transformations, various examples and patterns of the sustenance/reproduction of the relations of dominance and challenges against it are revealed (Miller and Tilley, 1984; Tilley et al., 1995). Landscape/phenomenological archaeologies: Broad landscape archaeologies, phenomenological archaeology in particular, wellexemplify the above-mentioned research framework and significantly expand the scope and interpretive power of the structurationist research and investigative repertoire (Tilley, 1994). Agents/active individuals occupy certain time-space locales and move through them by navigating through sets of such locales that vary across daily, seasonal, annual, and life-course cycles. Different resources-sets and thought-/feeling-units are networked differently among locales, and the physical structure of the locales (physical, visual, and other sensory features) are mobilized for, mediating, constraining, and enabling actions, interactions, and communications. Moving through “time-space paths” of various spatio-temporal scales, the subjectdthe potentiality to think and do things in the world as the totality of the consciousness and the physical ability of the agentdis continually de-centered (linked to and entered into the relations of the mutual constitution with shifting sets of resources) and recentered (the habituation of a certain mode of networking at a specific locale) (see Fig. 1). Additionally, the landscape represents a palimpsest of all dynamic factors that have occurred over a long period of time. Phenomenological-landscape archaeology contributes a long-term transformative perspective to Giddensian practice theoryoriented post-processual archaeology, which is inherently inclined toward synchronic-contextual analysis. Embodied archaeologies: As the site of such habituation, the body and somesthesis (the faculty of bodily perception) are organically coupled with practical consciousness, and hence enable and constrain how human individuals act, interact, and communicate. Body partsdwhere various material and non-material differences/resources and thought- and feeling-units are networkeddare utilized as material/sensory signifiers to map out the spatio-temporal distributions of various social/socialized relations, including:
• • •
between human individuals/groups, between human individuals/groups and material/non-material differences/resources, and between material/non-material differences.
The conceptualization of the role/position of the body in the socialization of those types of relations laid the foundation for embodied archaeologies (Joyce, 2005). Seeds of “relational archaeology”: As discussed in the Landscape/phenomenological archaeologies section, by moving through the timespace path of daily life and networking/being networked with a set of material and non-material differences/resources and thought-/ feeling-units at each time-space station in the time-space path, the subject is de-centered, placing everything, including mental and material phenomena on equal footing in the causal network of world phenomena. This conceptual modeling deconstructs the Cartesian dichotomies of subject-object, mental-material and the uneven distribution/attribution of causal powers between them. In tandem with the Neo-Marxist/Althusserian deconstruction of the priority of the infrastructural factors (i.e., the development of the means of production and the contradiction between the force and relations of production) in the explanation of the stability and change of society, the Giddensian notion of the “de-centering of the subject” (see Fig. 1) effectively flattened the relationship between analytical units that can be differentiated in one’s archaeological investigation, making their identities relationally-constituted. Although, in Giddens’s theory itself, the analytical and interpretative emphasis was placed upon the “re-centering” of the subject and the mechanism through which a certain mode of momentarily stable causal relations is generated/caused/enabled by the re-centering, the introduction of Giddensian practice theory as an element of the shift to the contingency-complexity-based ontology laid the foundation for relational/flat ontology-based archaeologies (Crellin et al., 2021).
Shift to the Hermeneutical Epistemology Archaeology as a Situated Field of Practice in the Present The shift to the contingency-complexity-based ontology made the contextualization of the horizon in which the explanation and understanding of past human thoughts, deeds, their consequences, and traces took place inevitable. If we refer to the Giddensian
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model of the duality of structure as a constitutive characteristic and faculty of society and its reproduction, the worldview in which, the perspective through which, the methods with which, and the gadgets/machines with which we investigate our subject matter (archaeological material phenomena of various natures and scales), are authoritative/allocative resources that we mobilize in acting, interacting, and communicating by drawing upon certain rules that constitute our practical consciousness formed and transformed through our doing archaeology. Therefore, any observation we make about a certain archaeological material and its relations/correlations with other materials and any meanings we attach are constituted through our experiences of our own lifeworlds, and, hence, historical. Here, how we observe things, make things observable to ourselves, and make sense of spatio-temporal correlations amongst what we observe are situated in the ever-changing network of material differences and thought-/feeling-units that are formed and transformed through our actions, interactions, and communications and situated in contemporary society (Shanks and Tilley, 1987a). A material item with certain chemical and physical characteristics is transformed into a certain different material if exposed to a certain chemical and/or physical intervention. This transformation can be repeated endlessly by anyone, anywhere, anytime while the chemical and physical conditions stay constant. However, what intervention we choose and how we observe the transformation can vary among active individuals with different intentions and desires to intervene. What we can observe and how vary by what method we choose and what machines/gadgets we use/are available. What transformation occurs is determined by what intervention we make and how we observe the process of transformation when the observation itself involves an intervention to what we observe. When the subject matter is a human being, obtaining causal repeatability and predictability becomes even more challenging as human beings are self-reflective/reflexive and can monitor the outcome of events, acknowledging their contextual circumstances and the agents involved. They can choose to act differently if a previous outcome was undesirable or for no particular reason. The most significant characteristic of human agents is their ability to always act otherwise (Giddens, 1984). Inevitability of Hermeneutical-Interpretative Acts The practice of archaeology is conducted by active individuals/human agents to make sense of the practice of past human agents by studying the material traces of their acts. Four types of indeterminacy must be dealt with. 1) To make sense of them in the form of connecting those static traces to the dynamic thoughts and actions which produced/left them behind, we must refer to the acts of human agents and their material traces that are taking place and are observable in the present and investigate what relations/connections exist between the acts and their traces. Before making sense of the recognized/ observed relations/connections, we have to choose which observed relations/connections we refer to. This is the indeterminacy that derives from the choice of analogical (mostly ethnographic) parallels. 2) Indeterminacy is also generated in the choice of how to make sense of the acts of human agents and their relationships with material traces in the presentdhow to interpret chosen ethnographic parallels. This is the indeterminacy that derives from theoretical/methodological choices informed by the ontological stances/world views adopted by those who make such choices. 3) Indeterminacy is also generated by connecting the consciousness/intentions of past agents with their physical deeds which left material traces; the active individuals of the past themselves would not have clearly grasped the intentions/meanings of their deeds discursively. 4) Indeterminacy is also generated in the interactions and communications between past human agents, as they could not directly perceive the thoughts and consciousness of one another. Shanks and Tilley famously gave them the term, the “fourfold hermeneutics”dthe temporal sequence of interpretative choices that must be made in dealing with the indeterminacy of the above (Shanks and Tilley, 1987a). Consequences of the “Hermeneutical Turn” This deconstruction of the logical-positivist epistemology by proactively accepting the involvement of interpretative indeterminacy in our making sense of the past through our archaeological practice can be described as the “hermeneutical turn.” The hermeneutical turn makes archaeologists realize/accept that archaeology is a field of social practice in which various indeterminacies are generated through inevitable choices made by active individuals/human agents both in the past and in the present. These choices are inevitably laden with value commitments that vary between the individuals/agents because their ontologies and world views differ. It implies that the value-free/completely objective archaeological practice is impossible and that every archaeological practice bears social responsibility; the consequences of value-committed practices, which can be good or bad for different categories of people, must be reflexively/reflectively monitored to enhance their goodness and reduce their badness as far as publicly funded social practices need to be as such (Mizoguchi and Smith, 2019; Ucko, 1987). Because of the hermeneutical turn, archaeologists realize there is no singular Archaeology with capital A. The turn showed us that our practice, which produces knowledge comprising disprovable propositions, differs and changes as our ontological states/statuses differ and change. This means there only exist “archaeologies” which are laden with respective value-commitments and respective social responsibilities.
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Shift to the Relativist-Anti-evolutionary-Minority-Oriented Worldviews The Realization of Inevitable Plurality and Multi-Vocality and the Recognition of the Significance and Validity of Indigenous Knowledges, Methods, and Theories The realization of the inevitable intervention of indeterminacy in various levels of our archaeological practice as a scientific practice led to the realization that, although the obtainment and sustenance of scientific validity and rigor are still possible through making one’s propositions refutable/falsifiable, archaeology comprises the above-mentioned fourfold hermeneutical horizons/fields where human actions, interactions, and communications and how to make sense of them from their material traces/expressions are always challenged and negotiated. These realizations deriving from the hermeneutical turn further led to the recognition of inevitable plurality in the original meanings of material culture and the outcome of past archaeological investigations. Further, the consideration and debate concerning where from, and how such plurality derives led to the recognition of the significance of multi-vocality. A significant recognition brought by the fourfold hermeneutics is the ever-present possibility of change as the individual/active agent thinks, feels, and acts and in the condition in which this takes place. Here, thinking, feeling, and acting in historically different conditions would generate different ways of acting, interacting, and communicating with others and making sense of them and the world. Different historical contexts constitute different ontological and epistemological stances and they are equally valid. This realization effectively deconstructed the enlightenment ontology and epistemology and the Euro-centric worldview upon which they were based. Instead, the significance and validity of indigenous knowledges, theories, and methods of making sense of/engaging with material and immaterial world(s) that are equal to that of modern science became recognized (Smith et al., 2022). This opened up archaeology to influences from broad post-colonial studies. Under the shared influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s version of practice theory with social anthropology (Bourdieu, 1992), archaeologists’ modes of involvement in indigenous communities increasingly shifted from that of external observers to that of stakeholders critical of their own Euro-centric biases and sympathetic to indigenous rights and struggles (Lydon and Rizvi, 2010; Mizoguchi and Smith, 2019; Smith et al., 2022). Minorities, Power, and Resistance This encounter with broad post-colonial studies introduced Cultural Studies to archaeology (Gnecco and Ayala, 2011; Lydon and Rizvi, 2010). Cultural Studies focused on deeply understanding how material and non-material elements of contemporary culture were enmeshed in the system of dominance and discriminationdthe constitutive pillar of western late-capitalist societies. In this system, people are differentiated and hierarchically and stereotypically categorized with their created connections with various material and non-material symbols/signifiers imbued with equally hierarchically-structured meaning systems. Such connections are created and articulated through the elite/dominant group’s discourses/social lives and derive from specific versions of colonial and other historical memories that are sustained and/or invented through them. Minorities/discriminated groups (e.g., members of the LGBTQ community and peoples of color) can often only live by situating themselves in the very systems that discriminate and oppress them. Cultural Studies invented and developed sophisticated narrative devices to challenge the system and methodologies to reveal how this system of domination-discrimination reproduced itself. It also revealed resistances organized by the oppressed through intentionally and/or practically creatively re-appropriating the very symbols that were mobilized by the dominant (Turner, 2002). As Cultural Studies itself was highly influenced by broad practice theory frameworks, the theoretical and methodological devices invented in Cultural Studies and Post-colonial Studies could be naturally adopted by archaeologists who had already embraced practice theoretical frameworks of Giddens and Bourdieu, drawing their attention increasingly to the mechanism of the reproduction of systemic-symbolic dominance and ways to resist it by subtly mobilizing various resources, increasingly sensitizing archaeological approaches to material culture methodologically and theoretically. Deconstruction of Evolutionary Thinking The amalgamation of these shifts/trends culminated in the attitude of grasping historical processes as sequences of unique episodic phases. Each phase was characterized by a unique mode of the networking of material and non-material resources/media, actions, interactions, and communications, and feeling-/thought-units that formed and reproduced social institutions, organizations, and systems. The relationship between such phases was understood as a transition caused by contingent factors. Accordingly, the concept of evolution was criticized as an artificially universalizing model laden with the remnants of colonial-enlightenment ideology (Shanks and Tilley, 1987a,b).
Intended and Unintended Consequences of Post-processual Archaeology Those “post-modern” shifts and the trends in archaeology they generated led to A) the vast reduction of the spatio-temporal scale of archaeological study, or the “synchronic-contextualization” of archaeological perspectives, B) the tendency to neglect/ignore long-term patterns and their explanations, C) rising interests in contemporary material culture, D) de-hierarchization/flattening of relations among material, non-material, physical and mental phenomenal factors in archaeological explanation/understanding, and
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E) the politicization of archaeology. (A) and (B) are organically related. The deconstruction of evolutionary thinking discouraged archaeologists from dealing with longterm phenomena. Long-term-oriented study inevitably emphasizes systemic-structural causation on the transformation of patterned behaviors. In contrast, post-processual approaches emphasized episodic-strategic interventions in various social relations, particularly those related to domination and resistance. This trend was further encouraged by the above-mentioned (E) politicization of archaeological practice, leading archaeologists to recognize the inherently value-laden nature of their work and to engage in politically informed activities to counteract discrimination and oppression. Further, to make such activities meaningful and persuasive, archaeological narratives that could provide concrete political activities/movements with parallels that practitioners can refer to and mobilize for sophisticating and legitimizing their strategies were desired. The increasing significance of daily micro-scale political activities/”life-politics” as a realistic means of organizing meaningful interventions for contemporary political issues enhanced the trend. Most of such issues were related to our value systems and identities which were constituted and embodied through our daily lives and our recursive enactments of normative behaviors, and therefore were short-term and micro-scaled. Naturally, archaeologists were motivated to produce archaeological narratives concerning past daily lives and the constitution and reproduction of identities and practical knowledge through them. (C) was related to and motivated by (A) and (B). Pioneering works of modern material culture studies already existed with varying degrees of intentions of investigating what material culture patterns can tell us about ourselves (Gould and Schiffer, 1981). Post-processual archaeology-oriented modern/contemporary material culture studies explicitly focused on the material culture-mediated constitution/construction of the habitual way of life and its sense of reality, imbued with subtle conflicts between the dominant and subordinate and the majority and minorities. Actual acts in such conflicts were mediated with and conducted by mobilizing material culture items of various scales and characters. The potentiality of most mundane/minute material culture items in the resistance/challenges by the subordinate/minorities against the dominant/majority was given particular attention. As a prominent and significant consequence, the trend blurred the distinction between archaeological and social anthropological material culture studies (Buchli and Lucas, 2001). The aforementioned trends have heightened archaeologists’ sensitivity to investigating the causality of both archaeological pattern formations and social formations. The Cartesian dichotomies between the nature and culture and the subject and object were deconstructed in terms of the existing and concrete content categories and of causal units, leading to the flattening/dehierarchization of the relationship between archaeologically recognizable material differences as the material traces of causal factors. Some case studies emphasized the intentional/strategic action by the individual agent. However, others emphasized the decentering of the subject (i.e., the constitution of the discursive and practical consciousness of the individual and its physical mediation in its activities as the networking of potentially infinite material and non-material factors), meaning any factor can cause any action as long as it is connected to other factors through the act of the agent. An unintended consequence of this trend was, as mentioned above, the later rise of relational /flat ontology-based archaeologies (Crellin et al., 2021). All of those trends/transformations that took place through the progression of the “post-processualization” of archaeology made the awareness of the social responsibility of conducting any archaeological practice as default, leading to the (E) ultimate politicization of archaeological practice (Ucko, 1987).
The Geography of Post-processual Archaeology Since its inception, post-processual archaeology has expanded its “sphere of influence” globally; or, as the “post-modern shifts” and the elements of post-processual archaeology that are the archaeological expressions/embodiments of the former suggest, we are doing archaeology in the “post-processual phase.” “Globalization” continues to enhance the effects of those shifts but to various extents worldwide, making different elements of post-processual archaeology more accepted in one region than others. Globalization means different things for different schools of thought; here, I define it as the unity of phenomena caused by the ever-expanding network through which people, things and information move at ever-increasing speed, leading to the shrinkage of time-space distances between causes and effects in human, material, and information terms. Since its beginning, the shrinkage has continued and is still continuing, creating dichotomous pairs of factors such as domination-resistance, destruction-creation/innovation, suffering-benefits, and so on, experienced by peoples of different regions with different intensities and mixtures. Different ratios of mixture between the factors constituting each pair are correlated to different modes of living and doing archaeology. To describe differential modes of acceptance of different elements of post-processual archaeology, I map such modes in a four quadrant diagram, with the following X and Y axis (Mizoguchi, 2015) (Fig. 2): X axis: access to capital and sources of wealth, þ easy: – difficult Y axis: self-identification, þ easy: – difficult I chose these factors because Xddifferential accessibility to capital and sources of wealthdconstitutes the economic condition for the archaeological discursive formation and Yddifferential difficulty of acquiring self-identity/identitiesdconstitutes the sociocultural/political condition for archaeological discursive formation. The first quadrant is occupied by countries such as Germany where capital and sources of worldwide wealth are accumulated and people can acquire their identity relatively easily because of their nation-state building process without being colonized. I must hastily add that there exist various identities, co-existing in one person, such as gender-, sexuality-, age-, occupation-, ethnicity-based, and so
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Fig. 2 Four quadrant diagram mapping different modes of “living and doing archaeology”. (X axis: access to capital and sources of wealth, þ easy: – difficult; Y axis: self-identification, þ easy: – difficult). From Mizoguchi, 2015.
on. Here, the concept “identity” is used to include these broadly and I speak about the ease or difficulty of acquiring and securing them. In such a condition, typically seen in many European countries, the reconstruction of big events and processes in human history, such as the origin and development of farming, civilizations, and so on, appear to be strong motivation for doing archaeology, and the invention, development, and rigorous application of both traditional and highly advanced scientific methods constitute an important pillar of archaeological practice in the first quadrant regions of the world. In these regions, the relevance of post-processual archaeology and the significance of certain of its elements are understood and accepted, but none become mainstream. In recent years, the increasing availability and decreasing cost of aDNA and strontium isotopic analyses have led to what is referred to as the Third Scientific Revolution in archaeology (Kristiansen, 2021). This trend reinforces the traditional focus in the first quadrant of reconstructing major events in “European” history, such as the beginning of the Bronze Age resulting from population movements from the Yamnaya cultural area in present-day Ukraine. This shift appears to signal a revival of Culturehistorical archaeology. Works derived from post-processual archaeology critique this trend by highlighting its potential consequences, such as promoting oversimplified views on the relationship between material culture and human groups, which can lead to various forms of discrimination (Frieman and Hofmann, 2019). Given the ongoing economic challenges and the increasing problems associated with migrant crises and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the role of post-processual archaeology as a critical voice in academia and society is growing in significance. The second quadrant is occupied by countries such as African nations, where the acquirement of self-identity is relatively easy as they define themselves as the colonized, through ancestral genealogies, and tribal/ethnic/cultural affiliations. The situation is made complicated because those factors have been and still are engineered and distorted by outside stakeholders. Access to capital and sources of wealth remains highly difficult and is engineered to remain so. Their colonial past, forced modernization, struggle for independence, and ongoing struggle for basic human rights make the creation of discourses supporting class and ethnic struggles and struggles against neocolonialism prominent agendas in archaeological practices conducted there. Accordingly, the effect of postprocessual archaeology in the second quadrant regions is strongly felt in its promotion of postcolonial theories-orientated and Cultural Studies-inspired approaches (Lydon and Rizvi, 2010). The third quadrant is occupied by countries such as those in Latin America, where the process of acquiring self-identity is complicated due to the ambivalent relationship toward the former colonizing nations. Complex relationships between the majority population, such as the Mestizo of Spanish-speaking countries, and indigenous peoples add nuanced difficulties to the process of self-identification. Access to capital and sources of wealth is improving but remains challenging. In this context, Marxistinspired theories and practices for civil struggle against corrupt governments, large international corporations, and the forces of globalization are prominent agendas in archaeological practice due to the lingering influence of their colonial past, ongoing ties with their former colonizing nations, and ongoing economic difficulties. Additionally, the complex trajectory of change in selfidentification that many indigenous communities have experienced and continue to experience, has led to a strong interest in the study of resistance against imposed dominant identity- and value-systems by subtly altering the authoritative-original meaning of material culture items. The emphasis on the power and potential of micro-interventions in daily practices to transform society in post-processual archaeology resonates with these interests, leading to an increasing number of innovative case studies (Gnecco and Ayala, 2011). The fourth quadrant is occupied by countries such as the US and the UK, where capital and sources of wealth are highly accumulated, but the acquirement of self-identity is difficult. The deepening of post-industrial social formation, backed by neo-liberal ideologies, mean the ontological base of one’s identities is always shifting and fluid. This makes self-identification a subject of
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conscious, strategic pursuit, and makes people aware that the acquirement of self-identity is political. Here, deepening neo-liberal lifeways and widening socio-economic divides are resulting in the differentiation of various post-processual archaeological themes relating to a life-political agenda. This is the most significant reason why the post-processual “movement” emerged in these fourth quadrant regions and became mainstream there. Under the circumstances of the continued advancement of the aforementioned trend, the pace of differentiation of post-processual archaeological themes is further accelerating. It is now imperative that we not only focus on proposing new frameworks, but also properly consider how existing post-processual approaches can be improved to address new challenges (Ribeiro, 2016).
Summary and Future Directions Post-processual archaeology has never been a paradigmatic package of clearly defined objectives and well-formalized theoretical and methodological frameworks. Instead, post-processual archaeology was, and is, a movement that is the aggregate of reactions by archaeologists to the onset of post-modern conditions that inevitably took the form of de-constructing the epistemicontological stance upon which processual archaeology was based. Thus, post-processual archaeology is post-processual archaeologies. Here, we are practicing archaeology in the post-processual “phase.” The epistemic-ontological shifts that led to the situation also affected how those who claimed to advocate themselves for processual archaeology were doing archaeology. One significant unintended consequence of this is the vast expansion of the range of models for bridging archaeologicallyrevealed material culture patterns and concrete human feelings, thoughts, and deeds and giving them explanations/understandings (Hodder, 1982a,b). The models adopted in processual archaeological case studies for this bridging tended to focus on functionalunintentional/latent adaptations to large-scale non-social or social-institutional/systemic changes. The models adopted in postprocessual case studies incorporated non-functional/symbolic-intentional/strategic interventions to various extant modes of social relations in their bridging model-building. Subsequently, the causation (the explanation and/or understanding) of archaeologically-recognizable material culture patterns became vastly sensitized and, arguably, enriched. This sensitization also made it possible to accept indigenous knowledges-based causation of material culture patterns as equally valid as their Western Scientific equivalents (Mizoguchi and Smith, 2019). This sensitization resulted significantly from the realization of the inevitable value-laden-ness and political commitment in archaeological practice, democratized the discursive space of archaeology, and caused the tremendous diversification of what archaeology can/is socially/academically accepted to do. This diversification includes the differentiation of genres in archaeology which are specialized in considering how archaeology should play active/transformative roles in the contemporary world. This trend enhanced the self-reflective/reflexive power of archaeology as a discipline; the post-processual archaeology movement has made considering how archaeological practices should be socially responsible a default requirement of contemporary archaeological practice. This sensitization came with the weakening of rigor in keeping verifiability/falsifiability of archaeological models. Postprocessual archaeology’s emphasis on the “understanding” of archaeological patternsdthe reconstruction of the emic meanings attached to the patterns by those who produced/left behind/experienced them (Hodder, 1982a)dmade archaeologists less interested in examining statistically significant correlations between human action-derived variables and systemic-institutional and non-social/natural process-derived variables to specify the (functional) cause of the pattern formation. Instead, post-processual causation, tended to advocate the discovering of “contextual parallels”dthe ethnographic/contemporary social participatory observation cases in which comparable correlations between human acts and material culture patterns are recognized. Rarely is the comparableness rigorously examined, nor is it easy to verify with any statistical or other objective means. The lack of verification and the insufficient obtainment of falsifiability are often justified by the argument for the inevitability of value-laden-ness/value-committed-ness in the choice of “contextual parallels,” and legitimized with the importance of committing to social justice through practicing archaeology. This means that if you have two ethnographic-contextual parallels that are equally referable and coherent, with varying degrees of verifiability or falsifiability in the validity of inferential comparison, you should choose the one that is more useful or powerful in advancing social justice through archaeological practice, if I may oversimplify (Mizoguchi and Smith, 2019; Shanks and Tilley, 1987b). The tremendous diversification of what archaeology can do, instigated by post-processual archaeology, also implies the diversification of how archaeology should use its potential for transforming contemporary societies and the world in better directions. Post-processual archaeology, as a politicized archaeological movement, was initiated by shifting the focus of archaeological investigation from the systemic explanation of the (long-term) stability (and change) of society and its institutional-functional conditions to the understanding of the (short-term) changeability of society and strategic actions that make social change possible. However, as long-term threats to humanity’s survival such as Climate Change gather urgency and we strongly feel the need to situate short-term threats such as the rise of various discriminations and fundamentalisms, terrorism, and war, the dichotomies between systemic-institutional analysis and the analysis of intentional-strategic action, and between the study of long-term transformation and that of short-term, episodic change become not only meaningless but also harmful for imagining archaeologies truly relevant to contemporary issues. The politicization of archaeology, one of the constitutional characteristics of the post-processual movement, ignited the abovecharted chain reactions that significantly transformed the epistemic-ontological horizon of archaeological practice. Within that transformed horizondcharacterized as the post-processual phase in archaeology in this entrydthat began sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we have been doing archaeologies and expanding our archaeological imaginations in terms of theory,
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methodology, technique, objectives, and the subject matter of archaeology. Thanks to post-processual archaeology, we do our archaeologies with awareness of their relevance and significance for contemporary societies and we practice our archaeologies by consciously and proactively choosing one’s epistemological-ontological positionality, theoretical stance, methodological package(s), objective(s), and subject matter(s) while considering their socio-political implications to contemporary societies and the world. Most importantly, the inception of post-processual archaeology fundamentally diversified and expanded those horizons of choices, a revolution in archaeology in the genuine sense of the term. Building upon this revolution, it is crucial that we continue to nurture our archaeological imagination by continually broadening our array of options with regard to our epistemologicalontological positions, theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, objectives, and subjects of inquiry in archaeology, all the while considering and scrutinizing the socio-political implications and outcomes that arise from our choices.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Sander van der Leeuw, Gina Barnes, Ian Hodder, and Colin Renfrew for their advices and inspirations which formed my basic grasp of the post-processual phase in the history of archaeology, in which we are still doing archaeology. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (grant no. JP20H01350)
See Also: Global Theories of Archaeology; History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Processual Archaeology; Social Theory in Archaeology.
References Bapty, Ian, Yates, Timothy (Eds.), 1991. Archaeology After Structuralism: Post-Structuralism and the Practice of Archaeology. Routledge, London. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1992. The Logic of Practice. Polity Press, Cambridge. Buchli, Victor, Lucas, Gavin (Eds.), 2001. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. Routledge, New York. Clarke, David, 1968. Analytical Archaeology. Methuen, London. Crellin, Rachel, Cipolla, Craig, Montgomery, Lindsay, Harris, Oliver, Moore, Sophie, 2021. Archaeological Theory in Dialogue: Situating Relationality, Ontology, Posthumanism, and Indigenous Paradigms. Routledge, New York. Frieman, Catherine, Hofmann, Daniela, 2019. Present pasts in the archaeology of genetics, identity, and migration in Europe: a critical essay. World Archaeology 51 (4), 528–545. Giddens, Anthony, 1984. The Constitution of Society: The Theory of Structuration. Polity Press, Cambridge. Gnecco, Cristobal, Ayala, Patricia (Eds.), 2011. Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology in Latin America. Routledge, New York. Gould, Richard, Schiffer, Michael (Eds.), 1981. Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us. Academic Press, New York. Hodder, Ian, 1982a. Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hodder, Ian (Ed.), 1982b. Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hodder, Ian, 1985. Postprocessual archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8, 1–26. Hodder, Ian, 1989. Post-modernism, post-structuralism and post-processual archaeology. In: Hodder, Ian (Ed.), The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression. Unwin Hyman, London, pp. 64–78. Hodder, Ian, 1995. Theory and Practice in Archaeology. Routledge, London. Joyce, Rosemary, 2005. Archaeology of the body. Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (1), 139–158. Kristiansen, Kristian, 2021. Towards a new paradigm?: The third science revolution and its possible consequences in archaeology. Current Swedish Archaeology 22 (1), 11–34. Lydon, Jane, Rizvi, Uzma (Eds.), 2010. Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology. Routledge, New York. Miller, Daniel, Tilley, Christopher (Eds.), 1984. Ideology, Power and Prehistory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mizoguchi, Koji, 2015. A future of archaeology. Antiquity 89, 12–22. Mizoguchi, Koji, Smith, Claire, 2019. Global Social Archaeologies: Making a Difference in a World of Strangers. Routledge, New York. Ribeiro, Artur, 2016. Archaeology will be just fine. Archaeological Dialogues 23 (2), 146–151. Shanks, Michael, Tilley, Christopher, 1987a. Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Shanks, Michael, Tilley, Christopher, 1987b. Social Theory and Archaeology. Polity Press, Cambridge. Smith, Claire, Pollard, Kellie, Kanungo, Alok, May, Sally, Lopez Varela, Sandra, Watkins, Joe (Eds.), 2022. The Oxford Handbook of Global Indigenous Archaeologies. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Tilley, Christopher, 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Berg, Oxford. Tilley, Christopher, Rowlands, Michael, Miller, Daniel (Eds.), 1995. Domination and Resistance. Routledge, New York. Turner, Graeme, 2002. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (3rd Edition). Routledge, New York. Ucko, Peter, 1987. Academic Freedom and Apartheid: The Story of the World Archaeological Congress. Duckworth, London.
Social Theory in Archaeology Michael Shanks, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Social Archaeology and Social Theory Social Theory as Praxis A Pragmatist Perspective on Social Theory in Archaeology Beginning Purpose and Project Legacies Orientations Metanarrative Frames Brief Deliverable Project Management Method Social Theory and Modernity Concepts in Archaeological Social Theory Society and Culture Social Organization and Social Order Social Complexity Summary and Future Directions Looking Forward Conclusion References
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Orthodox accounts of social theory in archaeology focus upon abstract schools of thought and thought leaders. This oversimplifies complex debates. Social theory is best treated in pragmatist terms as a key component of archaeological practice; what archaeologists do. In this approach, often associated with science studies, the concepts of social theory are a tool kit for building archaeological knowledge. It is vital to understand that the concepts of social theory have a long history as a means of understanding the experiences of modernity, such as rationalized industry and the imperialist nation state, especially as they developed in Europe from the 17th century, prompting concerns of social change and governance. A field of concepts of social theory is outlined in terms of how useful it can be in attending to the aims and objectives of contemporary archaeologists, rather than as abstract and objective means of representing the past.
Abstract Social theory in archaeology is conventionally summarized as different schools of thought (paradigms and isms), usually associated with thought leaders in the discipline, that aim to reconstruct past societies. Involved are questions of social ontology (askingdwhat is society and its components?), and epistemology (askingdhow might we come to know societies?). In contrast, this contribution avoids the description of schools of thought and, following a pragmatist line, treats social theory in archaeology as a key component of thoughtful practice; what archaeologists do. The components of practice such as opening brief, orientation, deliverable, frame, and project management are related to social theory. The concepts of social theory are argued to form a tool kit mobilized in archaeological research. A major section outlines some key concepts of social theory, including society, culture, systems, networks, agency, power, identity, personhood, and complexity.
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Introduction An ongoing debate in archaeological theory concerns the object and objective of archaeology. A key concern is with the role of artifacts, objects, things in society, culture, history. Many, if not most, archaeologists aim to describe, understand, and even explain what remains of the pastdsites, landscapes, artifacts, and other material traces, faunal, floral, and geological, for exampledby connecting them to the people that generated them or were associated with them in their activities. Considerable resources are dedicated to specialized techniques used to understand material remains, such as in the analysis of ceramics and metal or in the retrieval and sequencing of ancient DNA. Arguments continue to be made, as they have been in the last two decades, that the material worlds inhabited by people are primary components of the human experience, not just secondary effects. Some advocate a less anthropocentric outlook that focuses as much upon other species and ecological relationships as upon human activities, or define a decentered human experience distributed through relationships with other species, things, and environments. Involved here is the very definition of what it is to be human. Nevertheless, there is an orthodoxy that the main focus of archaeological research should be people. People live collectively in societies with shared cultural values, and so such a human-centered archaeology needs to deliver accounts of past societies and the changes they underwent. This is often called social archaeologydarchaeology focused upon people in societies. And a social archaeology implies social theory. Let me begin with a quick summary of a conventional perspective on social theory in archaeology as it stands in the early 2020s.
Overview and Key Issues Social Archaeology and Social Theory Since the very beginning of the discipline archaeologists have been able to identify patterning in the distribution and character of sites, artifacts, and material remains across geography and through time. Much effort has been devoted to establishing this patterning, the what, the where, and the when of material remains through historydestablishing a time-space systematics. This patterning has been treated as a proxy, a representation, a record of people’s activities, of their societies and values. Even if it is not explicitly acknowledged, this archaeological project to connect remains with people in what can be called a social archaeology requires concepts that define the components of human society and how they interact, models of how societies work (a social ontology). Also required are concepts and processes that enable knowledge of past society to be achieved (epistemology), for example by linking patterning established in material remains with the features of past societies and cultures. Social theory is a term that summarizes such ontology, epistemology, and the process of modeling. It should be clear that such social theory is shared across disciplines in the social sciences and indeed also in the humanities (consider, for example, how style is a key concept in art history in establishing the connection between individual artists and their social milieu, how the concept of social power helps understand the workings of class politics, another concept, in 19th century history). There are different varieties of social theory and textbooks regularly foreground the description of different schools of thought (bodies of theory or paradigms as they are sometimes called). Prominent examples include Marxist historical materialism, structural functionalism, structuralism, and many others. I will come back below to this way of understanding social theory in archaeology. Building social theory became a prominent focus of debate from the 1970s in Anglo-American archaeology. Many were keen to make a case for archaeology being a respectable branch of anthropology, a social science capable of developing sound knowledge of the past that was explanatory rather than descriptive. Some archaeologists wanted to explain the emergence of state societies, for example, rather than describing in historical narrative the story of the first civilizations. This aspiration became known as processual archaeology, a school of thought and research, one might say, in the United States that was explicitly concerned with the character of social process among organized human behaviors adapting to the natural environment. It adopted an epistemology that modeled social science on the natural sciences, a program initiated by sociologists and others in the 19th century. This effort to build social theory in archaeology accompanied a considerable growth in the numbers of archaeologists researching in universities, investment in tertiary education and its infrastructures, such as state sponsorship for research, and an associated expansion of academic publishing. By the 1980s social and cultural theory was a prominent part of academic debate generally, with ideas hotly contested about the nature of cultural identity or the social force of economic expediency, for example. Most academic curricula in archaeology by the 1990s came to include a core component that dealt with social theory, and the theoretical foundations of archaeological research into past societies have come to be a critical component of research design, funding applications and awards. Even though we might chart the growth of social theory building especially since the 1970s, archaeology as a disciplinary field has always depended upon social theory in the sense defined above. In the 1930s and after, for example, Gordon Childe produced one of the great synthetic accounts of the archaeology of Europe and the near East. Decades of research had revealed patterning in archaeological remains across the continent. This capacity of material things to be classified allowed them to be treated as a comprehensible record of past human activity. Childe named the groupings of remains that emerged pragmatically from the sorting and classification “cultures”, and they became the foundation of his accounts of prehistory. Childe’s use of the concept of culture had roots in the concept as it had developed in intellectuals of the German romantic enlightenment from the end of the 18th century. Johann Gottfried von Herder, for example, acknowledged cultural variability associated with language, music, folklore, and peoples.
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Identification of cultures as conceived by Childe and other archaeologists could be followed by tracking their changes (innovation and knowledge transfer), interactions (warfare and assimilation, for example), and movements (migration of peoples) across time and geography. As a model of historical change Childe used a modified form of Marxian social evolutionary theory that featured stages of history punctuated by revolutionary changesdto agriculture from hunting and gathering, to the urban state and civilization, to industrial modernity. This combination of concept (culture, defined as regularly occurring assemblages of artifacts, representing people), model of historical change (periods of stability punctuated by change), and research process (pattern finding in material remains), is typically called culture history. Finding pattern and variability remains a core component of archaeological epistemology. The processual archaeology of the 1970s and after questioned the correlation of pattern in remains with the cultural values, norms, and traditions of peoples, instead correlating variability with social behaviors and practices. The school of thought and practice that is regularly described in histories of archaeological thought to have questioned the premise that variability derives from behavior, postprocessual archaeology, has found the relationship between material things and collective human identities and practices indeterminate, unresolved, and far from simple, questioning the building of knowledge of past peoples by treating remains as proxies for people. Despite all this explicit theory building, and I suggest because of a research process that emphasizes the common practice of pattern finding and classification, culture history remains a prominent feature of contemporary social archaeology, and certainly in accounts of the shape of human history that are offered outside the specialized debates of the academic discipline of archaeology. This short opening outline of social archaeology in terms of ontology, epistemology and research process has introduced three schools of thought, for want of a better term: culture history, processual, and postprocessual archaeology. This is the orthodox way of dealing with archaeological theory. Textbooks introduce students to archaeological theory according to what are presented as schools of thought usually centered on leading or representative individuals, as in the example I just used of Gordon Childe and culture history. Another term used to describe different approaches to knowledge building is paradigm, a concept summarizing mindset and outlook, conceptual apparatus, the ontology, and epistemology followed by a community of scientists in their regular practice. The names of schools of thought and paradigms are quite often designated as isms. Marxism, structuralism, postmodernism, processualism, materialism, feminism, posthumanism, and many more. Social theory in archaeology is full of such terms. Debates in journals are regularly conducted by taking up positions vis-à-vis such summary abstract terms. I will not be developing my account here of social theory in archaeology by using this kind of understanding of the way disciplines and knowledge building works. Mapping a disciplinary field such as social archaeology using summary terms to represent schools of thought or bodies of theory can certainly offer a guide to the different ways that archaeology is conceived and practiced, and especially to the complex debates about the best aims, concepts and methods. Useful monographs and collections include Robert Preucel and Lynn Meskell’s Companion to Social Archaeology (2006), Ian Hodder’s edited collection Archaeological Theory Today (2012), Oliver Harris and Craig Cipolla’s Archaeological Theory in the New MIllennium (2017), Matthew Johnson’s Archaeological Theory An Introduction (2020), and Robert Chapman’s Archaeological Theory The Basics (2023). Summary terms and isms, in helping navigation through complex debate, also make archaeological theory easier to teach in university courses. This is a distinctive didactic rhetoric. The benefit of such reduction to summary defining features and to leading figures of academic authority comes often at the cost of abstraction and even caricature. Such accounts promote a view of academic debate as involving distinct and often oppositional positions abstracted from the everyday practices of archaeological research. This is too high a cost, especially if one is concerned with how to orient and organize one’s archaeological practice. Let me now expand this premise and indicate how I will treat social theory in archaeology in the rest of this essay.
Social Theory as Praxis Every archaeological textbook apologizes that theory can be difficult because it is abstract and treated separately from practice. While case studies may be used to illustrate what processual archaeology looks like, for example, debates typically focus on the definition of key features that differentiate schools of thought or paradigms. A commitment to understanding the functioning of society as a system, associated with the processual paradigm, might be contrasted, for example, with the focus upon people’s agency found in postprocessual archaeology. Archaeologists do debate at length the relative merits and failings of different isms. They exercise critique and assert their preference or may even express allegiance to a school of thought. Claims are often made that one paradigm has been supplanted by another, as the discipline supposedly evolves. A fine example of such theorizing is the book Archaeological Theory in Dialogue: Situating Relationality, Ontology, Posthumanism, and Indigenous Paradigms (Crellin et al., 2021). Its authors present and debate different isms, unpacking in great detail issues such as the different manifestations of materialist challenges to the dualism of person and thing. This is certainly what happens in academic disciplines. Positions are taken, asserted, challenged, abandoned. An academic may be associated or identified with a school of thought or paradigm. They may even become a thought leader in what might be claimed to be a paradigm shift. Careers can be made and lost in such maneuvering. In this regard, theory is what some archaeologists do; they debate isms. A contrasting understanding of the significance and character of theory in archaeology emerges in the interviews with archaeologists gathered in the collection Archaeology in the Making (Rathje et al., 2013). The experiences of pursuing research in archaeology since the 1960s explored at length in the interviews do not focus at all on schools of thought and isms, a progression of paradigms from culture history through processualism to postprocessualism and beyond. There were no great thought leaders dominating their
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stories, even though many of those interviewed have been treated as such. Labeling one archaeologist a processualist, another a structural-marxist, another a garbologist only obscures what they were doing in managing their archaeological projects. Yet this is how the history of archaeological thought, including social theory in archaeology, is almost always told. All the archaeologists interviewed for Archaeology in the Making were committed to their practice, thoughtful and reflective about social ontology, epistemology, and a lot more. They shared many insights about their archaeological projects throughout their careers. This points to a different way of treating social theory in archaeology. All the textbooks and debates insist that theory is embedded in what archaeologists do. Even the collection in fieldwork of what may be conceived as raw data is always informed by theory. So, this essay on social theory in archaeology will follow in the line of science studies and focus on what archaeologists actually do. The position taken in the rest of this essay is that theory is well conceived as thoughtful practice. The term used for thoughtful practice is praxis. In this approach, social theory, with its ontologies, epistemologies, models of the working of society, means of pursuing research, is a means to different and diverse ends, being an essential component of constructing narratives of past societies, for example. In this approach, the concepts of social theory, like society and culture, peoples and communities, are construction tools for working with what remains. Conceiving theory as praxis, as thoughtful archaeological practice, enables one to include, even foreground, critical theory, a main branch of social theory that connects concepts about people and society with the cultural politics in which all our projects are immersed. While one may trace the origins of critique back to Immanuel Kant, critical theory is most often associated first with members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1920s and after. It has expanded to become a field of inquiry into the conditions under which understanding is achieved, concepts are mobilized, knowledges built, communicated, disseminated to achieve certain ends. Critical theory helps us reflect upon the location of archaeological work in contemporary society. The next section will outline the features of this pragmatist understanding of social theory in archaeology.
A Pragmatist Perspective on Social Theory in Archaeology A widely accepted and loosely pragmatist premise in the field of science studies is that scientific practices are modes of production that connect scientists, coworkers, institutions and agencies, funding paths, equipment and labs, artifacts and instruments, things that are subject to study, procedures and methodologies, archives and literatures. Such heterogeneous associations, loosely one may call them projects, involve the making of statements, journal papers, images, equations, tables of data, candidates for knowledge and, potentially, many other things. In this focus on pragmatics, what scientists actually do, one focuses not so much on whether an output of science practice, a proposition for example, is true in representing or corresponding with reality, but on how it works to generate action, or not, to inspire adoption in technology, government policy, debates in popular culture, or whatever might be within the scope of the project. In terms of understanding archaeological praxis, one might inquire not whether one account is a better representation of what happened in the past, but who has been pursuing the research and to what end, for whom, by what means. An assessment of the results of an archaeological project may ask questions of the efficacy of the project, its capacity to make a difference, again, to what end, for whom, with what creative potential. Questions of whether an archaeological project makes appropriate use of evidence with its theory and methodology are intrinsic to such evaluation, but do not hinge on whether an archaeological account actually represents or corresponds with what actually happened in the past. It may be argued indeed that what happened in the past is not an adequate objective of an archaeological project on ontological grounds, that there is no such entity “what happened in the past” against which an archaeological account may be assessed. On epistemological grounds, archaeological accounts are underdetermined by the remains of the past; archaeological knowledge building can never be final, it can be argued, and is always dependent upon the particular research questions posed. It is not bad or wrong to set up a project to deliver an account of what happened in the past based upon what remains, but, if one is thoughtful, such an objective will immerse you in the kinds of interminable debates, ultimately metaphysical, that have been going on since philosophers and theorists began debating about what it means to seek a representation of the dynamics of actuality, for example, the experience of connecting past and present in relation to an ontology of “what is actually happening now”. There again, as I have mentioned, social theorists do enjoy debating abstractions and isms. In such a pragmatist perspective social theory is a key component of what archaeologists do, and have always done. Social theory is part of the tool kit that enables archaeologists to carry out their projects. The next sections of this essay unpack the key components and questions in a perspective that treats social theory in archaeology as toolkit. It is the concepts of social theory that play a vital and creative role in developing thoughtful reflective practice or praxis. The key concepts will be outlined in a later section of this essay. It should be clear that there are no necessary answers to the questions that might arise from an abstract definition of what archaeology essentially is, such as archaeology being about using material remains to reconstruct what happened in the past. The questions are matters of agenda and debate and they often come into conflict. The questions and the answers one may give are inseparable from their pragmatic location, from the circumstances in which they are posed and debated, and by and for whom. So, in unpacking social theory as praxis, let us begin at the beginning.
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Beginning An opening question in any project might bedWhere does one start? While one may wish to start fresh with a clean slate, a pragmatic answer is that one starts in medias res, where one finds oneself located. One might seek orientation by askingdWhat do archaeologists do? And thendWhat should archaeologists do? ThendHow might we (I, and those with whom I identify) relate to possible answers to these questions? More specifically one may locate oneself in a scholarly community through one’s choice of research question. Some answers to such questions of location, affiliation, and standpoint can be quite disruptive of the discipline. For example, if one holds that archaeologists work with what remains, then everyone is involved, albeit in different ways, because everyone works with memory. In contrast, if archaeology is held to be what archaeologists do, then archaeologists become quite an exclusive sect with special access and authority in an academic discipline or profession. If one answers that archaeology is the study of the past through material remains, then emphasis is thrown on the past as the key objective, and the politics of the discipline become a secondary, even distracting matter.
Purpose and Project Closely related to the question of where to begin is the question of purpose. What is the object of archaeological praxis, the objective? To secure knowledge of past societies? To make manifest their material remains? To manage the (remains of the) past? If one answers that the subject and objective of archaeological praxis is past society and culture, or humanity, common answers, then matters of social ontology are immediately implicated, as already mentioned in this essay. Just what is the humanity and its social collectives that are the object of archaeological practice? And how is this to happen? Many archaeologists organize themselves in projects, personal perhaps, to research and write a book, or of larger scale and scope, institutional perhaps, to organize a team to survey the archaeological remains in a geographical region, for example. Key questions here concern the character of project design and management. These are not neutral terms but involve different kinds of orientation with regard to the location of archaeological praxis. Some projects are interventionist, managerial and even extractive, others more passive and sympathetic, even empathic. One might ask if it is possible to imagine an archaeological praxis that is not organized in projects. Perhaps one might conceive and practice archaeology as a Proustian kind of sensibility, a mode of awareness of pasts-in-presents.
Legacies The past leaves its baggage and legacies. All the concepts in social theory emerged in the particular circumstances of complex, diverse and varied efforts from the 17th and 18th centuries to make sense of industrial capitalism, secular modernity, and imperialism and colonialism in newly urbanizing nation states. This is a contradictory affair and not a story of the emergence of an essential paradigm of western thought or some similar synthetic abstraction. Awareness of the history of archaeological thought is regularly emphasized as a critical component of archaeological praxis. Chapman (2023) and Johnson (2020) organize their textbooks on archaeological theory with such an historical perspective. Bruce Trigger’s History of Archaeological Thought (Second Edition 2006) is a comprehensive treatment. Especially since the 1990s there has been much investigation of the implication of archaeology and anthropology in colonialism and imperialism. A major body of theory in contemporary archaeology is labeled postcolonial. This matter of legacy runs deep. It is not simply a matter of being aware of the history of thought and practice so that we can avoid its association with political systems and dispositions with which we find fault. The likes of those who support Critical Race Theory argue that past histories of racist oppression are structural, deeply embedded in institutions and ways of life. The pragmatist outlook on the concepts of social theory followed in this essay is that they are creative tools and not just better or worse representations of social reality. Concepts of society, ethnicity, and race help fashion what they may be claimed to describe. This kind of legacy can be called an awareness of path dependency. Concepts developed in certain circumstances for certain purposes and ends can set the frame and outlook on subsequent archaeological practice; concepts can create rutted pathways of thought that may be difficult to escape. Another way of expressing this is to call not just for a history of archaeological thought that tells the story of great archaeological thinkers and schools of thought (as many do), but also a genealogy that tracks how the past endures even when over and gone in the same way that ancestors leave genetic legacies that are present in their descendants without determining who they are. Is this not the case with a current celebration of the findings of analysis of ancient DNA? 19th century concepts of population and ethnic and racial identity are returning as a scaffold for explaining the patterns of genetic variability made evident in the analysis of ancient DNA. The matter of legacy is important enough for there to be a section below dealing with the association of concepts in social theory with modernity.
Orientations One may adopt a certain orientation of disposition in one’s archaeological praxis. This may include allegiance to a particular school of thought, paradigm or ism. As mentioned above, these are concepts that can help summarize how one approaches one’s practice in relation to others. One may be inclined to certain kinds of practice such as ceramic analysis. This is not always or even only a personal matter. The discipline is organized around certain orientations and not others. It is difficult to fund and pursue creative indigenous arts practices in archaeology, for example, and much easier to find funding for analysis of ancient DNA.
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Metanarrative Frames Metanarrative frames are classes of narrative that frame and give orientation to particular archaeological concepts and practices. Perhaps the dominant archaeological metanarrative, the big picture for long-term history, remains that of human development, the emergence of complex societies, often understood through more or less sophisticated concepts of social and cultural evolution, and now those of geological epoch (the Anthropocene). Another metanarrative is one that has been developed more recently and deals with postcolonial cultural politics in stories that share the common feature of people’s experiences and agency in the aftermath of colonial imperialism. Projects that can be subsumed under such metanarratives make more sense to people than those which challenge or run against the grain of commonly held understanding of the shape of history and the character of humanity. Metanarratives may be more like myths. They need not be well founded in evidence but are nevertheless very powerful in delivering orientation and understanding.
Brief The brief is what one might receive from an agency or construct for oneself at the outset of a project. It is a plan that outlines objectives, conditions under which a project will be run, resources and funding, perhaps the composition of a team, a schedule, a scope of work, a methodology and a deliverable, what the output of the effort and investment of materials and energy will be.
Deliverable What is to be fashioned in one’s archaeological praxis? To what is one contributing? Again, there are no necessary answers to these questions, though there are norms and expectations, especially if one is committed to one’s place and role in the discipline and its institutions. It is difficult to build a career in archaeology by writing poetry. Academic papers, reports, and books written in a certain style and under a certain rhetoric (ways of fashioning and delivering arguments) are a standard class of output of archaeological praxis. Other deliverables may relate to institutions and their apparatuses, securing funding for a center, recruiting a team of colleagues and staff, setting up and running a journal, developing and implementing a curriculum, pursuing outreach and communicating the features of the discipline beyond the academy are all examples. Beyond the discipline there are many more possibilities, depending on resources and opportunities to act. Archaeology and heritage management are part of a substantially resourced culture industry and offer many opportunities for broadly defined archaeological praxis (consider here again a conception of archaeology as “working with remains”).
Project Management How might one make things happen? What is the scope of one’s agency to pursue archaeological praxis? What are the opportunities and hindrances? How might one manage a team to realize objectives informed by a posthumanist agenda? If we conceive of archaeological praxis as a mode of production, then concepts drawn from social theory are a key component of organizing, communicating, and running a project. Reconciling objectives with funding opportunities may well hinge on the effective communication of the theoretical frame of the project.
Method What kind of research methods are suitable to your archaeological praxis? How might they work with different concepts? For example, quantitative methods may not well suit the character of the remains with which you are working and with the objective of interpreting individuation and personhood in antiquity. Of course, these questions of method again relate to epistemology, how knowledge building is conceived and managed. Method, which mobilizes concepts, is part of the creativity of archaeological praxis. Method offers essential constraints to the application of imagination in working with remains. Given the genealogy of concepts and indeed methods, which may be an enduring and undesirable legacy of earlier archaeological praxis, creating what they seek to describe, how might one break with the past and innovate? A creative tactic is to ask pragmatic questions of method and concept. So, do not askdwhat was the ancient city state? Instead, askdis this a useful concept? For whom? What other concepts might help understand the dynamics of political affiliation, of intersectional identity formation? What methods will help us mobilize these concepts, and what are appropriate deliverables?
Social Theory and Modernity The key matter of legacy in archaeological praxis is the intimate interrelation of the development of the discipline in association with the assemblage of changes commonly described as modernity. Julian Thomas (2004) has covered the associations in his book Archaeology and Modernity; a special issue of the journal Modernism/Modernity (2004) also dealt with archaeological modernity. I repeat that the relative lack of debate in archaeology about social theory before the 1970s should not be taken to indicate that archaeology did without such theory until then. There is a long intellectual genealogy to every feature of current debate that goes back to the 18th century and earlier. Much contemporary debate around social theory in archaeology is about newly publicized, and so intellectually fashionable, perspectives. It is not difficult to see this debate as the legacy of efforts to understand issues raised by social and cultural changes in a globalizing Europe. The book An Invitation to Social Theory by David Inglis with Christopher Thorpe (2012) is a great introduction to exactly this kind of genealogy. Indeed, the lack of deep discussion of this genealogy and legacies of
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concepts can easily be attributed to the pragmatic pressures in contemporary academic careers to adopt a certain kind of productive practice that values adversarial rhetoric and claims to originalityd“your ism is flawed and in my thought leadership I have invented a new and better ism”. So, what are the concerns of those who have sought to understand the changes associated with the emergence of modernity and that are embedded in our social theory tool kit? It’s a daunting task to summarize, because it involves intense and long intellectual debates among the likes of Kant and Hegel, who together captured most of the epistemological issues, as well as the classical social theorists Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and all those who have delved deeply into a similar range of concerns, and right up to the present. I cite again the usefulness here of the book by Inglis and Thorpe (2012) as well as Alex Callinicos’s (2007) Social Theory A Historical Introduction. Here is a simple list of questions corresponding to archaeological interests at the heart of social theory. The reader is invited to explore their genealogy by starting with the three books just recommended. I reiterate: these questions do not belong to a coherent paradigm of western rationality but are long-standing fields of concern and debate.
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Working with material remains: how might one get to understand materiality without lapsing into a radical separation of human perception and material things? Understanding the shape of long-term human history: are the simple stages posited by social and cultural evolution too simplistic? Do concepts of progress and complexity explain the variety of human cultures that we encounter in the modern world of global trade and colonial imperialism? Defining, modeling, and understanding the working of past societies: what are the key concepts? Understanding complex societies and how they developed: how did industrial capitalism emerge in world history out of societies and cultures more rooted in tradition? Agency and how people matter in history: how does power operate in human society? Human experience and identity: is there a universal basis to human experience and how might this relate to diverse cultural forms and expressions? Reason and rationality: is the aesthetic, emotional and spiritual in human experience compatible with reason and rationality and its progress in history?
In a pragmatist perspective we can associate the concerns expressed in these questions as ongoing efforts to understand how to act in a rapidly changing world of industrial urbanism, political revolution, technological change, and rationalized knowledge. Many of the questions just listed are about finding concepts that can directly inform governmentality, that is the organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which subjects in modern nation states and subjected peoples are understood and governed. At the same time the debates arising from these questions have informed radically progressive political positions. Another way of putting this is to say that any efforts in archaeology to address social injustice in archaeological praxis will be well advised to use the genealogy of concepts to assess their adequacy to such a challenge.
Concepts in Archaeological Social Theory In social theory, concepts can be treated as tools. Here follow some short notes on the key concepts that are mobilized in archaeological praxis.
Society and Culture While culture may be restricted in its reference to values, attitudes, and ways of life upheld by a community, and society taken to refer to the organization of such groups, a radical distinction between the two concepts is now rarely upheld, and social theory in archaeology is often the same as cultural theory.
Social Organization and Social Order This is one of the classic concerns of archaeologistsdthe structure of past societies. Typically, societies are conceived as being organized internally according to horizontal and vertical divisions. Class and rank divide a society horizontally; ethnicity, for example, divides vertically. Such divisions may be quite visible archaeologically, in, for example, the distribution of wealth within a community, or in the way social groups symbolize their identity using artifacts of different style. The attempt to understand social variability may involve reference to demographydthe shape of a population in terms of age, mortality, health, for example. There may be spatial variabilityda rich city state on a fertile plain of farming villages, differences that require a cultural geography of city versus countryside, city-dwellers and peasants, for example. The borders of a society or community may be an issuedinter-group relations are, or course, connected with exchange and inter-polity relationships such as imperialism. Is the variability within a society an ordered system of inter-functioning parts? Society has often been so conceived as a unified whole, or at least aspiring to such a condition. Such systems thinking, the mainstay of much archaeology from the 1960s, has been augmented with sophisticated understanding of societies as complex networks that display emergent structuredconcatenations of individual behaviors out of which emerges social structure. Other approaches to social order inspired by Marxism emphasize contradictions and conflict within social organization.
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A vital concept is that of complex living adaptive system. This evokes an ecological understanding of the networks and relations between heterogeneous members and components of a living system. Animate and inanimate members of the system may be understood to form assemblages in fields of energy generation, procurement, management, and expenditure. What maintains social variability? Is it the force of tradition and of social norms? This is the question of reproduction of social structuredwhy do people keep on doing what they do? People are socialized through childhood into ways of life, and conformity is maintained through means such as systems of reward, threats of exclusion and violence, as well as the sheer weight of expectation and social institutions. Power is a key variable here. Power over others, and the power to act in certain ways to realize one’s goals or desires. This is an expanded concept of social power that runs counter to common sense which usually associates power with the ability to command others. Social theory has often developed such counter-intuitive concepts. So, while individual people are born and socialized into social systems, the ordering of those very systems depends upon the collusion of individualsdsociety is maintained and exists through the acts of individuals. While notions of public and private may be involved, this relationship between structure and individual is captured in the concept of agency which became current in archaeology in the 1980s. This concept has been a way of reintroducing the individual into archaeology. What capacity do people have to act as individuals, furthering their own ends? Can this be summarized under a notion of rational behavior, people, perhaps, tending to maximize benefit to themselves? Agency also implies a duality of structuredthat society is both the medium and outcome of individual practices. Agency involves the creative capacity of people and collectives to express themselves and make things, including their lifeworld. Agency can be held to involve worldbuilding. What people make may be experienced as alienated from their creative agency, separate and independent, when, for example, one feels opposed by social institutions that nevertheless depend upon people for their reproduction. A contrast is often drawn here between behavior, as an expression of a social norm, and practice, as action informed by meaning, performed by agents who think about themselves and their world. This distinction was crucial in the development of postprocessual or interpretive archaeology in the 1980s. Among other things, it has led to considerable work on how the things people do, make and use communicate messages and meaningdabout the ways people think, about the way their world is structured and categorized through the making of pottery or the building of a megalithic monument. This connects symbolism and communication with social order and power. It also brings in many more questions of identity, with people frequently communicating through the horizontal and vertical divisions in a society. Key concepts here are gender and ethnicity. Archaeologists can explore personhooddhow people become persons through actions upon themselves and others, dressing up or down, modifying their bodies and the environments that make them who they are. Individuation, becoming a self, can be treated as a process and experience of performancedperformativity, where acting out roles constructs identity. Performance involves a continuum ranging from spectacle and theater to routines of everyday life. Such located practices entail the possibility of complex intersectional identities throughout history. An individual or human group can look very different depending on whether one chooses to define it based on kin relations, mode of dress, place of birth, language use, artifact use, or how the people would identify themselves verbally. Questions of the phenomenology of human experience can involve concepts of distributed and relational identitydthat who one is involves relationships and located associations in distributed networks and systems. The interest in communication and agency has involved an expansion of the archaeological understanding of technology and artifacts from a traditional focus on materials and techniques to an exploration of making as a design process, with archaeology taking as its subject the materiality of society, the social fabric, and artifacts from manufacture to discard and decay. Material Culture Studies is now a well-established sub-discipline operating with a basic principle that making things makes people. Curiously, the related field of Design Studies is rarely, if ever, referenced or debated in archaeological social theory. Power is clearly connected with political economydthe distribution of wealth and power through the organization of production, systems of value, the exchange, distribution and consumption of goods. An influential collection of archaeological case studies, edited by the processualists Colin Renfrew and John Cherry, was entitled Ranking, resource and exchangeda tripartite summary of a whole social theory.
Social Complexity Why do some societies become more differentiated internally than others, with more horizontal and vertical divisions? This emergence of social complexity is frequently, in history, associated with the state, involving class structures and disparities in the distribution of goodsdwealth, monopolies of legal force and violence, institutions such as organized religion, and manifestations in material culture such as the city. The main approach to such a question of social change is still an evolutionary onedsocial and cultural evolution. The idea is that adaptation and selection, key processes of evolution, offer a way of understanding social change such as the emergence of the state in the wake of agriculture. Do societies adapt to environments like biological species? How might we conceive of the coevolution of biology and culture? Adaptation to experience is certainly a powerful principle that can govern the design of a social institution as well as an organism. We are here invoking the question of the boundaries of the human and the social. Much social archaeology since the 1960s has focused on social interactions with the natural environmentdhow a society feeds itself and uses material resources, local and distant, through trade and exchange, and how variability in the environment may be a factor in social change. The tendency now is to discount simple causes and to blur a radical distinction between the natural and the human. Just as people are intimately associated with their goods, so too they are intimately connected with other species and the environmentdthrough economic,
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religious and communicative practices. Archaeologists, for example, are less inclined now to explain agriculture through environmental factors or economic advantage, but rather locate farming within complex cultural ecologies that have people thinking of other species in new ways in settled architectures that speak of new cosmological understanding. Concepts of complex living adaptive system and performativity (above) destabilize our understanding of relationships between things and people, even their ontology. It is difficult to construct social archaeologies that remain dependent upon stable bounded entities such as societies, races, ethnic groups, states, as well as artifacts and sites. Instead, one needs to conceive of human experience and its categories as in constant creative construction.
Summary and Future Directions Looking Forward We are part of what we seek to understand in our archaeological praxis. This is a key part of the kind of pragmatist perspective presented in this essay on social theory and its concepts. The past is all around us and it is this ontology that is the basis for archaeological praxis. A current trend in archaeological theory is to take this seriously in its implications for what we do as archaeologists and to thereby challenge some basic assumptions of archaeological efforts to reconstruct the past. One emerging trend is to call out the fallacy of representation, that archaeologists work upon a record of the past, and that the epistemological challenge is to use ruins and remains to get back to the human world that made them, that ruins and remains thereby represent past societies that can be understood through concepts such as state and society. It is not difficult to argue that the enormous effort to define archaeological entities has not been very successful. It must surely be admitted that concepts of cultures, states, and peoples do not refer to stable and definable features observable in and through archaeological remains. Decades of attempts to define the ancient polis (city state) have failed to identify anything but heterogeneity, for example. Even agriculture as a concept does not refer to any stable observable phenomenon. Perhaps this is related to the genealogy of such concepts and their relation to governmentality. A more positive response is to look to understand processes rather than substantive concepts such as the state. Just as we can understand archaeological praxis as a process of working creatively with remains with concepts in our own particular circumstances, so we might understand what are labeled ancient city states as bundles of processes of people making their world. This is to take a symmetrical view of archaeological praxis: again, archaeologists are part of what they seek to understand, and we share creative agency with those in the past with whom we connect through remains (These matters of trends in archaeological theory are covered in the book Archaeology The Discipline of Things by Olsen et al. (2012)). An alternative to representation is to seek other kinds of connection with the past such as engagement, creative reworking, mobilizing the past-in-the-present in archaeological praxis conceived as such a creative process of association, assemblage, collage, revitalization. This makes archaeological praxis a kind of memory practice or process of recollection. Remains are a kind of memory, connecting past and present. Memories inspire efforts to recall, to fill in the gaps, to rework and retell for the benefit of the present and future. Conjecture, imagination, and speculation are key parts of this process of memory work. Remains are a key feature in future worldbuilding. The heterogeneity of the remains that feature in our archaeological praxis, the dynamic instability of our concepts, acknowledgment of the fallacy of representation, and the suggestion that we engage with remains in a kind of recollection have considerable relevance for another trend, toward a political activism that reaches out to current concerns in identity politics, in the politics of cultural heritage and cultural property. Rather than telling the story of the past as it supposedly was, archaeologists might engage with what remains now and deliver diverse mobilizations, engagements, interventions in active debates in and beyond the discipline. What might this look like? It is not something new at all. Authors and artists, politicians and policy makers, lawyers and doctors (think of precedent and diagnosis), museum curators and conservators have always taken up archives and remains of the past and worked them into their pragmatic interests. Creative options are limited by disciplinary norms, the strictures of discipline and institution. So, we are nudged into crossing borders, moving into transdisciplinary spaces, transgressing, smuggling concepts to-and-fro. As mentioned above, memory work, connecting past and present is hardly the preserve of a discipline such as archaeology. Here and perhaps most significantly the concepts of social theory so central to archaeological praxis offer grounds for affiliation with others invested in an archaeological sensibility attuned to the remains of pasts in the present.
Conclusion Social theory, with concepts such as society and culture, behavior and communication, is an essential component of any archaeology, even if this is not acknowledged. The usual treatment of social theory is as abstract schools of thought, paradigms, or isms. This is useful for teaching archaeological theory, and it makes easier the navigation of convoluted academic debate. But the costs of abstraction are high. The history of archaeological thought becomes one associated with great thought leaders in adversarial and proprietorial conflicts through and over their schools of thought. Those who wish for membership of an archaeological community are, in this perspective, obliged to acknowledge such tribal silos, and even aspire to creating their own ism or school of thought as a means of advancing their careers. Straw-man arguments that eschew close reading and rigorous scholarship and misrepresent an opposing position through caricature become a regular rhetorical feature of academic community.
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Instead, this essay argues that social theory in archaeology is better treated as a tool kit of concepts shared through many disciplines, understood as organized and often institutionalized modes of cultural production. The concepts of social theory have a long history as a means of understanding the experiences of modernity, such as rationalized industry and the imperialist nation state, especially as they developed in Europe from the 17th century, prompting concerns of social change and governance. Such a pragmatist view of archaeological practice provides specific context for debates in an open field of concern with remains, ontologies of the human and the non-human, the more-than-human, and epistemologies of knowledge building, while challenging the always provisional boundaries of disciplines by acknowledging the material conditions under which archaeological work is performed.
See Also: Philosophy of Archaeology; Post-Processual Archaeology.
References Callinicos, Alex, 2007. Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, second ed. Polity, Cambridge. Chapman, Robert, 2023. Archaeological Theory: The Basics. Routledge, Abingdon. Crellin, Rachel J., Cipolla, Craig N., Montgomery, Lindsay M., Harris, Oliver J.T., Moore, Sophie V., 2021. Archaeological Theory in Dialogue: Situating Relationality, Ontology, Posthumanism, and Indigenous Paradigms. Routledge, Abingdon. Harris, Oliver J.T., Cipolla, Craig N., 2017. Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium: Introducing Current Perspectives. Routledge, Abingdon. Hodder, Ian, 2012. Archaeological Theory Today. Polity, Cambridge. Johnson, Matthew, 2020. Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford. Meskell, Lynn, Robert, Preucel (Eds.), 2006. A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell, Oxford. Olsen, Bjørnar, Shanks, Michael, Webmoor, Timothy, Christopher, Witmore, 2012. Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. University of California Press, Berkeley. Rathje, William, Shanks, Michael, Christopher, Witmore, 2013. Archaeology in the Making: Conversations Through a Discipline. Routledge, London. Schnapp, Jeffrey, Shanks, Michael, Tiews, Matthew (Eds.), 2004. Archaeologies of the Modern. Modernism/Modernity 11.1. Thomas, Julian, 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. Routledge, London. Trigger, Bruce, 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
World-Systems Analysis: Traditions and Schools of Thought P. Nick Karduliasa and Thomas D. Hallb, a Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Program in Archaeology, The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, United States; and b Department of Sociology and Anthropology, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Origins of the World-Systems Approach Recent Developments in World-Systems Analysis Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Key Points
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World-systems theory was developed by historical economists and sociologists to explain the emergence of modern capitalism. The approach has been adopted by many disciplines, including archaeology. Various scholars apply key concepts, such as the relationship between cores, semiperipheries, and peripheries and the nature of incorporation into a world-system, to many periods, including the prehistoric and early historic past in various world regions. Archaeology provides vital time depth to extend and refine our understanding of interactions between various societies in the past, with the creation of intertwined political, economic, and social relationships. Related concepts include globalization and connectivity, and archaeology provides evidence of both processes in antiquity.
Glossary Ingot a block of metal produced by smelting of ore and cast into a shape that facilitates storage or transportation.
Abstract The interpretation of archaeological data requires a robust set of theoretical models. Scholars often borrow approaches from other disciplines and modify them to provide coherent explanations of the material record. World-systems theory, initially developed by historical sociologists and economists, is one important way to explain the ways that past societies affected each other, with grand narratives that encompass large regions, as well as localized interactions. Conversely, archaeology has expanded significantly the geographic and temporal boundaries examined and refined the approach, thus contributing to the development of social theory. World-systems analysis opens an important conversation between archaeologists and other social scientists.
Introduction In the search for comprehensive explanatory models, archaeologists have turned to a number of different approaches. Overall, we can divide these approaches into those that espouse a broader, generalizing perspective that is applicable to many times and places and others that stress the particular ways that specific groups structured their lives in the past. World-systems theory is one of the former approaches. Because of the range of specific theories that have come to characterize this approach, many scholars now prefer to use the term world-systems analysis (WSA). WSA covers a broad range of issues and topics, and here we concentrate initially on a basic definition of key terms, and some problems and suggested alterations in the theory to accommodate the work of archaeologists, especially in terms of core/periphery relations and the process of incorporation; we then discuss some of the applications and refinements of the approach over the past 15 years. World-systems approaches share with other models that emphasize intersocietal
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interaction the basic tenet that past cultures did not exist in pristine isolation; rather, constant contacts, both direct and indirect, affected groups involved in exchange networks. Where world-systems theorists differ with other interaction models is in the geographic extent they consider, the stress on the hierarchical nature of systems with a focus on economics, and for some, the desire to outline long-term cycles of expansion and contraction in system structure and intensity. We want to add that WSA is not a blueprint, or how-to singular model for archaeologists to use. Rather, it is a form of analysis, which suggests topics to consider, questions to be asked, that when pursued can lead to new insights, new explanations, and further questions. We also note that within WSA, at all levels, but especially with respect to archaeological issues, there is a cycle from question to answer to modified models and/or theories, which often alter the original model. A number of archaeologists have contributed to this cycle. We will discuss a few of these as examples or suggestions. We will also note a few papers that parallel this article in some ways, and which suggest other approaches. We will conclude with some newer topics in WSA that might inspire additional issues that some archaeologists may find useful for further exploration in archaeological settings.
Overview and Key Issues Origins of the World-Systems Approach World-systems theory developed as a generalized approach to the study of intersocietal contact, and originated with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, who studied the emergence of modern capitalism. World-systems “. are defined by the fact that their self-containment as an economic-material entity is based on extensive division of labor and that they contain within them a multiplicity of cultures” (Wallerstein, 1974: 348). Wallerstein uses the term world to refer to interacting politico-economic units, and not some global entity. Furthermore, he distinguishes between two types of world-systems, world-empires and world-economies; the difference is the presence in the former of a single political structure over a vast area. Furthermore, the operation of a world-economy requires the presence of core-states and peripheral areas. Core-states possess complex political structures (stratified class systems with large bureaucracies) and, by means of superior technology, exercise control over the major facilities of production, transportation, and communication. Political organization in peripheral areas is at the pre-state or incipient state level and is relatively weak compared to that in core-states. Core-states incorporate peripheral areas into the capitalist world-economy because these peripheral regions often contain important natural resources. Through political and economic control of the system, Wallerstein contends, core-states exploited the labor and material resources of peripheral areas and received a disproportionately large share of the surplus or benefits. He argues further that European nation-states, through colonization, competed among themselves for control or access to peripheral areas in order to increase profits. Interposed between cores and peripheries are semi-peripheries which often act as intermediaries between the two extremes of the system. Over the past four decades, various scholars have significantly augmented the original world-systems formulation in order to address a series of issues. Wallerstein’s study of the relationship between core-states and peripheral areas provides an excellent model of European expansion in the early modern period. One problem, however, is his treatment of incorporation into a world-economy as one-sided. Hall (1986, 1989), among others, argues that one must study the local conditions in peripheral areas as well as the capitalist economy in core-states in order to understand fully the nature of incorporation. Hall notes that incorporation into a world-economy is a matter of degree and that non-state peripheral societies play a more active role than generally believed. This aspect is particularly true for various periods in antiquity when complete domination of a peripheral zone was technologically and politically impossible. As a result, incorporation was less encompassing in antiquity. Furthermore, some scholars note that people on the periphery can at times negotiate effectively because they control access to a key resource. Peripheries exhibit variation. In general, peripheries tend to have decentralized political and economic systems, especially when compared to core regions. Furthermore, there are several types of peripheries. One type is an extraction zone that supplies raw materials to core states. In such places, indigenous populations perform most of the labor required to procure raw materials, and can be identified by the presence of quarry pits, but with minimal evidence of processing (e.g., metal quarries with initial processing of ores into ingots, but not finished products). Second, a fully incorporated periphery will have evidence of foreign installations that indicate the incursion of a core state, complete with administrative structures and central storage facilities. A third type is the contested periphery between competing cores. In such areas, there may be fortified outposts facing each other in strategic locations; barrier walls may also be present. A major issue for archaeologists is the degree to which the world-systems model applies to the ancient world. Wallerstein suggests the world-system was an outgrowth of capitalism and is thus a creation of the 16th century. Archaeologists have applied the approach to Mesoamerica, the American Midwest, and other regions. For the Old World, Kohl (1989) has modified worldsystems theory to fit ancient conditions. In a critique of the primitivist views of M. I. Finley and others, Kohl cites many examples of price fixing, inflation, and market mentality that demonstrate the complexity of ancient economies. He builds a strong argument for the existence of an intricate multi-centered world-system during the Bronze Age in Southwest Asia. Unlike many modern technologies, ancient ones were often portable and could be moved easily from core to periphery. This fact, along with the lack of major colonization, made it possible for peripheries to retain their autonomy and precluded the exploitation and underdevelopment characteristic of the modern world-system. Kohl argues that the barbarian peripheries had a significant impact on how core regions developed. Frank (1993) argues that areas on the margins of the Near East, while important as regions of economic interaction, were subject to the influences of the “super powers” of the time: Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites, and other states in Mesopotamia. Frank contends that an Afro-Eurasian world-system has existed for 5000 years, since the origins of the state in Mesopotamia and Egypt. In
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addition to the long history of the world-system, Frank lists five other theoretical premises: (1) the seminal importance of longdistance trade relations, (2) the accumulation of capital (“cumulation of accumulation”) drives history, (3) core-periphery structure is a key trait, (4) shifting hegemony and rivalry characterizes the world-system, and (5) economic development of the system occurs in long cycles of alternating ascending (or A) phases and descending (or B) phases. Reviewing world-systems applications, Schortman and Urban (1987) suggest the units of study should be society and ethnicity, which are connected by the flow of information. Their archaeological work in Mesoamerica stresses the role of elites who used regional interaction to generate and sustain their elevated status. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1991, 1997) go further and argue that change occurs not within individual societies, but in world-systems. Their goal is to provide a comparative matrix within which to study contacts for all societies, even stateless foraging groups. Of special relevance is their definition of two kinds of core/ periphery relationships. What they call core/periphery differentiation involves groups of varying sociopolitical complexity that engage in active interchange. Core/periphery hierarchy refers to the situation in which one or more groups dominates others in the system. They argue this distinction is necessary because exploitation does not necessarily characterize all interactions between cores and peripheries. Chase-Dunn and Hall also propose a typology of world-systems based on societal complexity and mode of production: (1) Kin-based mode dominant, (2) Tributary modes dominant (urban cultures), (3) Capitalist mode dominant, (4) Socialist mode dominant. Category 2 includes both primary empires and multicentered world-systems in which peripheral zones, empires, and autonomous states interact. One important hypothesis derived from this model is that social innovation occurs readily in semiperipheral zones because they receive input from cores and peripheries and are not burdened by excessive core controls. Chase-Dunn and Hall have issued a call for case studies by archaeologists to provide the comparative data base necessary to test this hypothesis. They also suggest that world-systems are multi-scalar, providing a means to examine large empires and “small world-systems” of foraging or horticultural societies, such as the Wintu of Northern California. In addition, Hall and Chase-Dunn suggest there are four types of boundaries in world-systems; these parameters rarely coincide. The boundaries are: (1) a boundary of information or cultural flows; (2) a boundary of luxury or prestige goods flows; (3) a boundary of political/military interaction; and (4) a boundary of bulk goods flows. Mundane materials, which often constitute the majority of bulk goods, are typically embedded in the information and prestige nets, yet are distinct from the military net. Prehistorian Sherratt (1993) used the term “margin” to refer to a zone that does not interact directly with a core, but does provide materials that are critical to the operation of a world-system. He points to the role of amber from the Baltic region and various metals from central Europe in the Mediterranean trade system. The urban core of the Near East and the Aegean in the Bronze Age stimulated the exchange of many commodities through multiple links, without members from either geographical extreme ever coming into direct contact. Parts of this system go back to the Neolithic. Sherratt implies that the Bronze Age is aptly named, not simply because of the artifacts, but because this metal alloy fueled the economic expansion on which many early states depended. Allen (1996) has added the notion of contested peripheries, i.e., those areas in the interstices between empires that the latter struggle to control (see above). On occasion, people in the contested region have the ability to negotiate with the contending parties to gain the best deal for themselves.
Recent Developments in World-Systems Analysis Over the past 15 years, the use of world-systems analysis has moved forward on several fronts. Some studies have provided additional development of general principles with wide applicability. Other scholars have used world-systems concepts to analyze events in various historical periods. Among the former, an overview by Hall et al. (2011) traces key trends. The authors note that newer comparative versions of world-systems analysis were initially developed to better understand the evolution of world-systems that gave rise to the modern one. These advances are useful for the study of interregional interactions and long-term development across a range of cultures and time periods. However, the key issue is that WSA is not a model to be applied mechanically, but rather a means for generating useful questions and hypotheses to examine empirically. For example, a discussion about the utility of tribe as a concept explores the work of archaeologists working in North America, Europe and elsewhere who argue that systems of political and economic organization go through cycles from less to more complex, and then back again. These oscillations are often depicted in terms of efflorescence and collapse, and WSA permits us to explore how both internal and external contacts affected these shifts. Hall’s (2009) comparative study of frontiers outlines how local as well as global forces shape and reshape various cultural boundaries. Carlson (2012) carries this idea further in describing the “zone of ignorance” to explain the somewhat haphazard manner in which several European colonial powers first “found” the northwest coast region of North America and gradually came to incorporate it into the capitalist worldsystem. This is a useful way of exploring how ancient societies thought about the terra incognita beyond their borders, that determined how they interacted with new groups they encountered. A linked notion is that of resource frontiers from which various raw materials are extracted. These areas, and implicitly all frontiers, are very dynamic places experiencing substantial change, and some of it moves in different, and sometimes opposite, directions (O’Hearn and Ciccantell, 2022). In another important work, Chase-Dunn and Lerro (2014) provide a grand narrative to analyze social change over the last 12,000 years during which humans moved from foraging to farming, and culminated with the emergence of states. They link large-scale systemic developments to the formation of individual social identity, the different forms of which respond to changes in a culture as a whole. To do so, they consider data from anthropology, archaeology, sociology, history, and psychology. They discuss foragers and early agriculturalists as horizontal collectivists because of the egalitarian nature of social and economic relations
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within such groups. Nonetheless, small world-systems in which various goods circulate among the groups over considerable distances can form. The authors explore the chiefdom systems in North America and Hawaii in which the prestige-goods network becomes more significant and vertical relationships are stressed, and then evaluate the rise of civilization. Core/periphery relations become more pronounced with the emergence of early states in which urban centers interacted, at times uneasily, with tribal groups that they occasionally attempted to dominate. Competition in interstate systems such as Mesopotamia, India, and Mesoamerica led to increased social differentiation. The authors also explore how the nature of public space and new conceptions of self affected cognitive development in states. They describe the somewhat chaotic but dynamic nature of life in early cities, and then link the invention of writing and the use of money to increasing levels of abstraction. Some archaeologists have taken these general principles of the approach and applied them to specific regions. From extensive archaeological survey and excavation in Kazhakstan, Chang (2018) explores the linked activities of farmers and nomadic pastoralists, demonstrating the complex relationships of states and confederations through trade and political interchange. The nature and impact of these interactions can only be understood in a larger context. This is where WSA is especially useful in directing inquiries as to which kind of state or other political organization pushed levels of trade, with a concentration on the activities of agropastoralists or those of agrarian farmers. In short, while the occupied sites were clearly localized, how they were organized and how those organizations transformed can only fully be understood by examining their changing connections to other parts of the world-system within which they were embedded. Chang explains the role of alterations in larger contexts in shaping local changes, and adaptation to external conditions. This analysis demonstrates that the nomadic confederacies of central Asia were often more complex, innovative, and fluid than generally thought. Jimenez (2020) provides an important contribution in his examination of prehispanic West Mexico. Specifically, he traces the multiple roles semiperipheral areas play in world-systems. He points out many ways that local actors, especially semiperipheral elites, affect entire polities of all sizes and how actors in peripheral and semipheripheral areas [re]shape core areas, and at times an entire world-system. Semiperipheral actors mediate between core and peripheral areas. He highlights how and why such actors play creative roles in a variety of social changes. It is not that semiperipheral actors are creative due to their structural location in a semiperipheral area. Rather, location in a semiperipheral region affords the opportunity to be creative for those who have the requisite abilities, skills, and opportunities. This study shows that the comparative approach of WSA is applicable in defining past core-periphery structures of the world, and hence has significant potential for the study of ancient social change in various regions. Another topic that world-systems analysts have examined is the notion of small worlds. As noted above, the term “world” here refers to relationships that are established between different societies that vary depending on the degree of political and economic complexity of the groups involved. Some of the interactions can occur at the continental or trans-oceanic level, as those between European core states and the colonies they established in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia. However, interwoven systems can also develop within much more confined geographic regions. The indigenous Wintu people of California were intensive hunter-gatherers who maintained economic and social linkages with neighboring groups through trade, marriage, and other social ties, forming a tightly knit system that met a variety of needs of the participating local groups. The Wintu participated in longdistance prestige-goods trade that brought in beads made from shells gathered on the Pacific coast; they also practiced collective hunting and gathering at times, feasting, and intermarriage between adjacent groups, strengthening local ties (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1997; Chase-Dunn and Mann, 1998). Here and in other regions the interactions between groups at the same levels of socio-political complexity (i. e., non-state, non-ranked societies) are examples of core/periphery differentiation, without the hierarchical structure that characterized the domination of peripheral groups by Europeans during the development of the modern world-system. While not explicitly referencing WSA, others use similar concepts in combination with network theory to describe the nature of interactions within what have been called micro-regions. Tartaron (2014) utilized the small worlds concept in his description of maritime networks during the Mycenaean Late Bronze Age in the Aegean region. On a broader scale, Malkin (2011) delineates the “small Greek world” of the Mediterranean during the Archaic period, when networks defined by shared language, art, and religious cults developed as the result of colonization, shrinking the large sea into a linked system. Other scholars frame their discussions of ancient civilizations around the issue of globalization. In archaeology’s quest for relevance, prehistorians often refer to the lessons of the past, suggesting the existence of recurrent trends. The problem is fitting these trends into an explanatory framework that imposes some analytical rigor and avoids facile generalities. Jennings (2011) focuses on globalization as an old process that has occurred on numerous occasions in the past. Since globalization involves increased levels of interaction, with concomitant enhanced exchange of goods and information, it is an important way to conceptualize overall cultural, as well as specific economic, assimilation. To demonstrate the broad utility of this comparative approach, Jennings illustrates it with three case studies from different parts of the ancient world (Uruk-Warka in Mesopotamia, Cahokia in North America, and the Huari Empire in Peru). He brings the examination full circle by demonstrating that globalization is not a phenomenon unique to modern times, providing some possible outcomes that we can expect as the process unfolds in the 21st century. Jennings pursues the question of how to pluralize globalization, i.e., come to grips with the various ways that this phenomenon can be expressed. He notes that the cultural sequences worked out by archaeologists and historians demonstrate a cyclical pattern in which there are what he calls surges of interaction, followed by collapse and decentralization (the cycling described by others). He enumerates eight trends linked to contemporary globalization whose presence he searches for in the ancient world: time-space compression (i.e., the world is getting smaller), deterritorialization, standardization, unevenness, homogenization, cultural heterogeneity, reembedding of local culture, and vulnerability. Jennings argues that the emergence of cities, with their multiple needs and complex
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webs of relationships, led to previously unknown levels of interregional interaction. Early cities affected the long-distance movement of people, goods, and ideas in a cascading effect that simultaneously expanded the system and accelerated the interactions between urban dwellers, people in the hinterland, and those from more distant regions. This process leads to deterritorialization (in which “the ties to a single location are weakened as a result of the myriad of long-distance interactions that connect that place to other regions” [Jennings, 2011: 25]) and can be traced in the adoption and reproduction of certain pottery styles across broad regions so that the difference between what is local and what is global is obscured; we can identify similar trends in the modern world, with the broad adoption of certain technologies and fashions. What such studies also indicate is that these expanding systems begin to retract when political, economic, and environmental (e.g., prolonged drought) factors undermine the interaction, or force the migration of people, all factors that place immense stress on the system, which adapts by reverting to a less complex level by curtailing the extent of the network. This retraction is conventionally described as collapse, but Chew (2007, 2008) and others see it more as a period of retrenchment when a depleted physical environment has the opportunity to replenish itself. Several other studies highlight the nature of globalization and connectivity in the ancient world. Greaves (2010) reorients the examination of Ionian cities away from the traditional focus on Greek influence from the west to their immediate neighbors in Anatolia to the east. While Ionian cities such as Ephesos and Miletos were important, Greaves notes that the landscape also contained rural temples, smaller settlements, and dispersed farmsteads, which, despite being distributed among the various poleis, formed a network of sites. He argues small independent Anatolian kingdoms developed in the centuries after the collapse of the Hittites, and formed the key milieu for the development of Ionian cities, several of which played major roles in the Greek diaspora that led to the establishment of colonies throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Greaves makes subtle use of WSA, identifying the network types that correspond with various phases: information network with pre-colonization, prestige goods network with emporion (trading post), political-military network with apoikia (settlement), and bulk goods network with full assimilation (rarely if ever happened in antiquity); his two-stage model of Ionian colonization focuses on the emporion and apoikia phases. A recent book (Kouromenos and Gordon, 2020) explores globalization in terms of insular societies of the ancient Mediterranean. Islands simultaneously possess the traits of both isolation and connection (to other islands and the landmasses). The spatial separation and intervening water meant that establishing connections required technological (rafts; ships with oars and sails) and temporal (timing travel when waters were calmer, and prevailing winds were available) adjustments. The development of cultural idiosyncrasies in customs and language fostered by isolation was tempered by the occasional influx of outside influences, even on those most remote or desolate islands. In examining the interplay of insularity and globalization, the contributors deal explicitly with the idea of connectivity in order to address how exactly ancient Mediterranean societies were linked. This issue draws from several scholarly traditions that include organizing principles or approaches such as hybridity, network analysis, and the notion of small worlds. Each contributor attempts to illustrate the general features that tied together various groups through trade, exchange of styles, and other practices that highlight commonalities, while at the same time pointing out the variation and idiosyncratic nature of the individual cultures and sites involved in complex networks. The various studies show that while there are some general trends across the entire region, the process is not exactly the same for each subsection. For example, Gorogianni argues that in the Cyclades, while there was greater sharing of features due to developments in transportation and the proximity of the various islands compared to the more isolated Sardinia, there is also evidence for heterogeneity in individual cultures. The individual authors deal with the direction and impact of outside influencedfor the Aegean Bronze Age, Minoanization suggests major trends originated on Crete and spread to other islands and the mainland, while Romanization posits a similar flow in which Italian elements created cultural homogeneity in the first millennium AD. What the studies in the book make clear is that Minoanization and Romanization should now be thought of as specific examples of a more general process of globalization, but with internal factors that regulate the degree of participation in or adoption of outside elements.
Summary and Future Directions As the discussion above demonstrates, an important aspect of world-systems theory/analysis is its ability to cross-cut disciplines in an attempt to determine the nature of cultural change over time. The approach brings together sociologists (Chase-Dunn, Hall, Wilma Dunaway), political scientists (David Wilkinson, William Thompson), historians (Richard L. Slatta), economists (A. G. Frank), archaeologists (Kohl, Sherratt), and others in the examination of intersocietal interaction, often with a focus on antiquity. In this way, world-systems theory/analysis acts as a bridge among the social sciences. Volumes that demonstrate this interdisciplinary nature include works by Chase-Dunn and Hall, Chase-Dunn and Lerro, Frank and Gills, Hall, and Kardulias (see suggested list below). Finally, a lively debate has continued among archaeologists concerning the value of world-systems theory/analysis in reconstructing the nature of the ancient world (e.g., Galaty, 2011; Kardulias, 1999; Parkinson and Galaty, 2007, 2010; Smith and Berdan, 2003). While prognostication of future developments is always a contingent process, we can reasonably foresee dual developments: enlarging the analyses of interactions and more localized studies. Both sets of processes exert some pressures on the other. There will probably be more examinations of the impacts of local regions (typically but not restricted solely to peripheral areas) on broader regions and the constant feedback in both directions. Jimenez (2020) provides many detailed examples of these processes in ancient West Mexico. There will probably be further refinements in how specifics of geography, soils, weather patterns, etc. shape
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or limit such developments. Possibly, we hope, there will be further explorations of how information, broadly construed, shapes and is shaped by these interactions. For all of these there will probably be refinements in terminology and typology of various processes, especially those that exhibit cyclical patterns.
See Also: Global Theories of Archaeology; Marxist Archaeology; Processual Archaeology.
References Allen, Mitchell, 1996. Contested Peripheries: Philistia in the Neo-Assyrian World-System. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, CA. Carlson, Jon D., 2012. Myths, State Expansion, and the Birth of Globalization: A Comparative Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Chang, Claudia, 2018. Rethinking Prehistoric Central Asia. Routledge, London. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Hall, Thomas D. (Eds.), 1991. Core/periphery Relations in Precapitalist Worlds. Westview, Boulder. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Hall, Thomas D., 1997. Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Westview, Boulder. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Lerro, Bruce, 2014. Social Change. Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present. Paradigm Press, Boulder. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Mann, Kelly M., 1998. The Wintu: A Very Small World-System in Northern California. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. Chew, Sing C., 2007. The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD. Chew, Sing C., 2008. Ecological Futures: What History Can Teach Us. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD. Frank, Andre Gunder, 1993. Bronze age world system cycles. Curr. Anthropol. 34, 383–429. Galaty, Michael L., 2011. World-systems analysis and anthropology: a new détente? Rev. Anthropol. 40, 3–26. Greaves, Alan M., 2010. The Land of Ionia. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Hall, Thomas D., 1986. Incorporation in the world-system: toward a critique. Am. Socio. Rev. 51, 390–402. Hall, Thomas D., 1989. Social Change in the Southwest, 1350–1880. University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, KS. Hall, Thomas D., 2009. Puzzles in the comparative study of frontiers: problems, some solutions, and methodological implications. J. World Syst. Res. 15, 25–47. Hall, Thomas D., Kardulias, P. Nick, Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 2011. World-systems analysis and archaeology: continuing the dialogue. J. Archaeol. Res. 19, 233–279. Jennings, Justin, 2011. Globalizations and the Ancient World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jimenez, Peter F., 2020. The Mesoamerican World System, 200–1200 CE: A Comparative Approach Analysis of West Mexico. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kardulias, P. Nick (Ed.), 1999. World-systems Theory in Practice: Leadership, Production, and Exchange. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD. Kohl, Philip L., 1989. The use and abuse of world systems theory: the case of the “pristine” west Asian state. In: Lamberg-Karlovsky, Clifford C. (Ed.), Archaeological Thought in America. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 218–240. Kouremenos, Anna, Gordon, Jody (Eds.), 2020. Mediterranean Archaeologies of Insularity in an Age of Globalization. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Malkin, Irad, 2011. A Small Greek World. Oxford University Press, Oxford. O’Hearn, Denis, Ciccantell, Paul S. (Eds.), 2022. Migration, Racism and Labor Exploitation in the World-System (Political Economy of the World-System Annuals). Routledge, New York. Parkinson, William A., Galaty, Michael L., 2007. Secondary states in perspective: an integrated approach to state formation in the prehistoric Aegean. Am. Anthropol. 109, 113–129. Parkinson, William A., Galaty, Michael L. (Eds.), 2010. Archaic State Interaction: The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe. Schortman, Edward M., Urban, Patricia A., 1987. Modeling interregional interaction in prehistory. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theory 11, 37–95. Sherratt, Andrew, 1993. What would a Bronze-age world system look like? Relations between temperate Europe and the mediterranean in later prehistory. J. Eur. Archaeol. 1 (2), 1–57. Smith, Michael E., Berdan, Frances F. (Eds.), 2003. The Postclassic Mesoamerican World. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, UT. Tartaron, Thomas, 2014. Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1974. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press, New York.
Further Reading Arena, Emiliano, 2015. Mycenaean peripheries during the palatial age: the case of Achaia. Hesperia 84, 1–46. Beck, Jess, Quinn, Colin P., 2021. Living and dying in mountain landscapes: an introduction. Bioarchaeol. Int. 4 (2), 75–88. Blanton, Richard, Feinman, Gary, 1984. The Mesoamerican world system. Am. Anthropol. 86, 673–682. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Anderson, Eugene N. (Eds.), 2005. The Historical Evolution of World-Systems. Palgrave, New York and London. Gotts, Nicholas M., 2007. Resilience, panarchy, and world-systems analysis. Ecol. Soc. 12, 24. Hall, Thomas D. (Ed.), 2000. A World-Systems Reader. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD. Hall, Thomas D., 2006. [Re]periphalization, [re]incorporation, frontiers, and nonstate societies: continuities and discontinuities in globalization processes. In: Gills, Barry K., Thompson, William R. (Eds.), Globalization and Global History. Routledge, London, pp. 96–113. Hall, Thomas D., Fenelon, James V., 2009. Indigenous Peoples and Globalization. Resistance and Revitalization. Paradigm, Boulder. Hollis, Shirley A., 2005. Contact, incorporation, and the North American southeast. J. World Syst. Res. 11, 95–130. Pailes, Richard A., Whitecotton, Joseph W., 1975. The greater southwest and Mesoamerican ‘world’ system. In: Savage, William W., Thompson, Stephen I. (Eds.), The Frontier: Comparative Studies, vol. 2. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, pp. 105–121. Peregrine, Peter, 1992. Mississippian Evolution: A World-System Perspective. Prehistory Press, Madison. Shannon, Thomas R., 1996. An Introduction to the World-System Perspective, second ed. Westview, Boulder. Stein, Gil J., 1999. Rethinking World-Systems. Diasporas, Colonies, and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Tebes, Juan M., 2014. Socio-economic fluctuations and chiefdom formation in Edom, the Negev and the Hejaz during the first millennium BCE. In: Tebes, Juan M. (Ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Studies Supplement 45: Unearthing the Wilderness: Studies on the History and Archaeology of the Negev and Edom in the Iron Age. Peeters, Walpole, MA, pp. 1–29. Wallerstein, Immanuel, 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Agency in Archaeology Artur Ribeiro, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Before AgencydProcessual Archaeology The Golden Age of AgencydPostprocessual Archaeology Beyond Human AgencydPosthumanist Archaeology Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References
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Agency is the study of the actions performed by humans and/or objects. Social archaeology and human behavioral studies prior to the introduction of agency in archaeology are discussed. Key ideas concerning agency and what these ideas mean in archaeological practice are summarized. The agency theory according to Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu is presented. Issues and points of contention concerning the main themes of agency theory are discussed. The connection between agency and practice is established. The second phase of agency in archaeology, also known as object agency, is analyzed. Some of the issues surrounding object agency are addressed. Summary of agency in archaeology and its influence.
Abstract Agency is the presupposition that people and/or objects can initiate actions. Unlike archaeological approaches that describe and explain past actions through external factors, such as environmental, economic, or biological factors, agency explains past actions through the decision processes and the actions of the agents themselves. This entry provides a brief history of agency, starting with processual archaeology, the school of thought that existed prior to the emergence of agency studies in archaeology. It then describes agency during the postprocessual period, the main thinkers associated to it, the various approaches and ideas developed during this period, and the problems it faced. It then presents a second-phase of agency, when it became a concept associated to networks of humans and non-human objects, and how agency can arise from these networks.
Introduction Agency is a very contested concept, and it means different things in different contexts. When it first became popular in archaeology, coinciding with the rise of postprocessual archaeology during the 1980s and 1990s, there was no strict definition or conceptualization of what agency was or how it could be studied (Dobres and Robb, 2000). At the time, more than anything, agency was merely a metaphor for the idea that past humans were socially knowledgeable and could shape history through their actions (Moore, 2000). In general, what most people agreed with was the idea that humans were not necessarily subject to environmental, religious, or social powers that caused how they acted. The idea that humans have free will, are conscious social beings, make rational choices, or have some degree of “elbow room” to shape their destiny, has been discussed since the birth of Greek philosophy. There has been a lot written on agency and free will, perhaps more than any other topic in philosophy. However, the way agency is described in philosophy can vary immensely, and these descriptions in turn can differ considerably from how it has been described in other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and archaeology. While “agency” has been the term with the strongest purchase in archaeology, outside this context, agency has also been discussed by using the terms “free will,” “freedom,” and “intentionality.” Like most concepts of the sort, there is little consensus as to what any of these signify. However, one of the ideas concerning agency that has some cross-disciplinary popularity is that agency is the capacity to choose or act otherwise and the agent is the being that can express this capacity.
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There is a tacit acceptance among most archaeologists that humans, past and present, had some capacity to act how they desired. According to this way of thought, agency is not merely a topic of interest or a metaphor, it is an ontological property of humans. For instance, Giddens states: Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place (which is why agency implies power: cr. the Oxford English Dictionary definition of an agent, as “one who exerts power or produces an effect”). Agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently. Whatever happened would not have happened if that individual had not intervened. Giddens (1984: 9).
To wit, for those who believe that humans are de facto agents, it means that agency is a real and an ontological aspect of the world, and not something that is merely imagined, conceptual, or heuristic. Furthermore, if agency is real and humans have the capacity to act, it means that actions, events, and causes can start from the human’s capacity for agency. This is what is also known as the doctrine of “Agent-Causation” developed by Thomas Reid. According to this doctrine, an action can either be caused by a human, which means the action is that of a free human who chose to act, or it was not caused by the human and cannot be attributed to them (Reid, 1788: 329). All of this is a bit obscuredit is not really clear why or how humans have some capacity to initiate causes. Some naturalist explanations of how humans can initiate actions, that is to say, explanations that are based on our biological, cognitive, and evolutionary history, have been put forward, and these remain very popular in current times. In more practical terms however, for the social sciences and humanities in general, and archaeology in particular, recognizing the agent as the initiator of a cause is only a first step. For instance, if an archaeologist studies an ancient or historical wall, one of the interpretations is that the wall was built and designed because the agent wanted to. Naturally, as Ian Hodder and Scott Hutson point out, to say that a wall was built because someone wanted to is hardly interesting or helpful (Hodder and Hutson, 2003: 155). That is why agency in scholarship has been devoted to much more than discerning whether humans are in fact agents or not; agency is also about the conditions and circumstances in which agents operate. From this perspective, agency becomes a matter of empirical research. In contrast to the philosophical assertion that humans have an ontological capacity to be agents (i.e. to choose otherwise), the more practical perspective engaged with by a myriad of disciplines assumes that agency manifests and shapes certain social and historical contexts. From this perspective, the study of agency relates to the social and economic conditions that allowed past humans to affect the course of history through their actions. This perspective was captured in the Marxist maxim that states “[m]en make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx, 1934 [1869]: 10). In general, archaeology engaged simultaneously with the idea that agency has an ontological basis and the idea that social, historical, and economic contexts shape how people acted. Throughout the last decades, agency developed varied paths and different aspects of agency have come to the fore. One of these developments, closely linked to the rise of posthumanism, is the idea that agency is not restricted exclusively to humans. While this development became known as “object agency,” the prevalent idea was not so much the fact that non-human and/or non-living objects have agency, but rather, that agency is distributed across a variety of actors, both human and non-human. This was also accompanied by changes in the methodologies by which one could understand and explain agency in the past. The next sections will discuss how agency was understood and what role it had in the practice of archaeology.
Overview and Key Issues Before AgencydProcessual Archaeology From a more colloquial standpoint, agency is usually considered a topic of research within archaeology, but it is not entirely correct to think that there is such a thing as an “archaeology of agency” (Dobres and Robb, 2005: 159). As a concept, agency refers to something that is too general and abstract. Rather, it makes sense to follow Henrietta Moore’s perspective that agency is best understood as an umbrella concept, a metaphor, under which we can develop methods that describe the actions and choices of past peoples (Moore, 2000). Agency is also commonly associated to social archaeology, in the sense that many early scholars of agency viewed it primarily as something that is best understood in social terms. This is particularly evident in some of the early inspirers of agency theory, such as Karl Marx, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu. Despite the association of agency theory with social archaeology, there was still a relatively long period of time between the first iterations of social archaeology and its connection to agency. The expression “social archaeology” can be found as early as 1921 (Trigger, 2006: 125), but what we today would commonly understand as social archaeology emerged much later, with the gradual remission of culture-history. Some archaeologists such as Gordon Childe and Grahame Clark were more interested in societies than they were in cultures, and processual archaeologists, in an effort to distance themselves from the standards and perspectives of culture-historians, also embraced the concept of society instead of culture. Some of this work, such as the Marxist-inspired work of Gordon Childe, did have some loose connections to agency in that there was some space for agents to act of their volition, however, this work was superseded by evolutionary and functionalist conceptions of society during the 1960s and 1970s. The evolutionary and functionalist standpoint, which inspired processual archaeology from the 1960s to the 1970s, did not really engage with
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agency theory. In fact, their brand of social archaeology is best understood as behavioral archaeology, that is, the study of how humans reacted to particular situations and contexts. Some discussion of the processual program and behavioral archaeology is necessary to understand how agency arose. While not everyone was in agreement as to what ideas should be taken seriously in the processual program, some ideas did have stronger purchase than others. For example, central to processual archaeology was functionalism, that is to say, the idea that societies operate as systems of interrelated parts. From this perspective, the system operates much like a living organism, however, the way it operates can be considerably more complex. Binford suggested that societies contain an environmental component and a sociocultural component, and culture per se operates as mediation between these components (Binford, 1965: 205). Thus, what processual archaeology aimed for was an archaeology that viewed societies in a more holistic manner, one where explanations could be obtained by researching the interaction of people with their environment. Underlying these ideas was behavioral ecology, which studies the behavioral patterns in animals, and which many archaeologists realized could be helpful for archaeology. Another crucial idea in the processual program was that social systems were adaptive, and by extension, so was the behavior of the elements of the system. According to this view, a society has the aim to adapt in a given physical environment (Binford, 1962: 218). This was not the only form of adaptation, in fact, societies could also adapt to demographic processes and competition with adjacent societies (Trigger, 2006: 394). Behavioral archaeology remains popular in more recent times, especially in the more general study of human-environment interactions, but as years went by, many came to reject it. Part of why many archaeologists came to reject a behavioral view of society is because it framed human action in deterministic, mechanical, and oversimplified terms. The tenets of the processual program left little room for humans to act of their own volition; most explanations in processual archaeology were based on the principle that change in a society was caused by factors outside of that society, rather than within. As one of the leading figures of processual archaeology argued, culture is the extra-somatic means by which a human organism adapts to its environment (Binford, 1962: 218). From this processual standpoint, one can in fact study those behaviors that exist as adaptation to the environment, behaviors such as those related to foraging, but it cannot truly explain the immense variability of human behavior. More troubling is the fact that behavioral archaeology automatically sets aside all those events that we know led to change in different societies and were not caused by external factors, events such as revolutions, democratic actions, and consumer choices. Granted, it might be anachronistic to assume that most past societies could have changed due to democratic actions or consumer choices, but what these modern actions demonstrate is that it was in fact possible for society to change due to internal factors. It is also important to mention that while processual archaeology and its focus on behavior did have a strong impact in archaeology, this impact was felt largely in North America and in European contexts where prehistory has a strong foothold. In many regions of the world, including in Europe, some departments are separated into prehistoric and historical (or classical) archaeology, and in the latter case, processual archaeology had considerably weaker purchase. Additionally, in Eastern Europe and Russia, where there are very strong and dynamic prehistoric archaeology departments, most programs were of Marxist influence until recently, which means they never underwent a processual or a postprocessual phase, as did in North America and other parts of Europe. Nevertheless, regardless of where processual archaeology did have an impact, agency was not a matter of concern prior to the 1980s. It was with the successor of processual archaeology, postprocessual archaeology, that we start witnessing the rise in popularity in agency studies in archaeology.
The Golden Age of AgencydPostprocessual Archaeology In the 1980s and 1990s, several new theoretical concepts became popularized through postprocessual archaeology. Unlike its predecessor, postprocessual archaeology rose to prominence by performing a radical critique of processual archaeology, in particular, its functionalist agenda, its reliance on evolutionary schemes of social development, and its adherence to stringent and outdated scientific epistemologies. Central to the critique of processual archaeology was postprocessual archaeology’s defense of past humans as de facto agents. Before postprocessual archaeology, processual archaeologists argued that it was important to not just recognize the “Indian [sic] behind the artifact” but also recognize that there is a system behind both the Indian and the artifact (Flannery, 1967: 120). While this was a sensible position to take by supporters of systems-theory, postprocessual archaeologists were considerably less attracted to this position because according to systems-theory, there were systemic processes that were so powerful that actors were unable to act against them (Hodder, 1985: 7). This form of determinism would reduce past humans to mere automata, who react purely as a response to external constraints. From the perspective of most agency theories, people and their choices play an important role in how societies develop historically. This is not to say that past humans were not constrained, limited, or somehow shaped by the surrounding environment in which they lived, but past humans could also act back and affect their environment. It was not only the will to counter this form of determinism that propelled agency theory in archaeology, there were also many social and cultural processes that were of archaeological interest and had been ignored by processual archaeology. For example, many archaeologists realized that explanations of artifact variability had to address the role of human agency, the choices of meaning one could attach to artifacts, and the role of the artist in the creation of artifacts. Postprocessual archaeologists argued that a more fruitful approach to artifact variability, was through the study of meanings, through an interpretative framework, and through the study of past practices. Additionally, with gender archaeology on the rise (Conkey and Spector, 1984), it became readily apparent that the processual program was inadequate when it came to understanding how people acted and structured their roles and practices on a social micro-scale. This, in turn, has led throughout the years to a deeper study of social identity and how the
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position of oneself in a social context and the view one has of the self will affect their actions. With postprocessual archaeology, social archaeology distanced itself from behavioral studies by focusing on people, their social roles, and their practices. During this period, phenomenological (or Heideggerian) approaches also started to emerge (e.g. Thomas, 1996; Tilley, 1994) and although they were quite theoretically diverse, the central idea of these approaches was that the subjective experience of past actors could also play an important role in our understanding of archaeological phenomena. Not everything actors did in the past was motivated exclusively by rational, logical, or economic concerns; many structures and artifacts existed in the way they did because they would convey certain sensorial experiences to the subject. Although not explicitly phenomenological, the discussion by John Barrett on the pathways among and between archaeological sites constitutes a good example of the experience of past actors, and what this experience meant to them (Barrett, 1994: 137–146). Gordon Childe had popularized Marxist tenets in earlier times, but with the rise of processual archaeology, Marxism lost a lot of currency in the western world. In the 1980s, Marxism rose to popularity again with postprocessual archaeology. It is true that in other parts of the world there were archaeologists who were already following Marxist ideas, such as in Eastern Europe, or places where Marxism became popular in archaeology regardless of the postprocessual movement, such as in Latin America and Spain (and in particular, in Barcelona), nevertheless a wealth of new Marxist scholarship in archaeology became apparent from the 1980s onwards. This increase in Marxist popularity also helped spur agency theory onwards, given that Marxist theory, in all its variations and interpretations, is compatible with the idea of active agents changing social and economic circumstances. Central to Marxism is a focus on the working class, their class consciousness, and revolutionary struggles. This fitted perfectly with budding research into past social inequality (Price and Feinman, 1995), and also into research on power and domination in past societies (Miller and Tilley, 1984). Agency theory in archaeology was inspired by many thinkers, namely those stemming from philosophy, social theory, and anthropology. Of all the figures that had an impact on agency in archaeology, Anthony Giddens is probably the most renowned. From the 1980s onwards, Giddens held considerable influence in how agency was to be understood within and outside archaeology. This was largely due to the fact that there had not been any interesting ideas circulating in social theory in Europe since the early 20th century, and in the United States since the 1960s. At the time, social theory still relied on the ideas of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons, and there was a strong desire for an updated set of social concepts and theories that could accommodate current interests. Giddens’ structuration theory (1984) stood out and came to dominate sociology in many parts of Europe, but especially in the United Kingdom. Giddens’ structuration theory was a theory of how society operated and how agents could act within the social context. For Giddens, a society operates through a duality, where human beings are considered knowledgeable actors that have the universal capacity to choose otherwise (1984: 9, 281) and structures that enable and constrain their actions (1984: 175). What Giddens defines as “structure” is a recursive set of rules and resources that agents make use of. It is in this sense that structure is simultaneously constraining and enabling, since the agent is limited to what the structure allows but it is also the structure that allows humans to act in the first place (Giddens, 1984: 25). Giddens disregards intentionality, something he considers inadequate to truly understand the actions of people. Instead, Giddens relies on the idea of practical consciousness and reflexive monitoring to explain how agency operates. Unlike intentionality, which can be nothing more than a motivation, practical consciousness is an awareness of what actions entail, what their purposes are, and what consequences can be derived from it. Using the example of an officer in a submarine, Giddens demonstrates that the intention to pull a lever could have multiple consequences, such as making a mistake and sinking a ship. The intention to pull a lever tells us little about what real world situations could potentially happen, since intentionality concerns the intention alone and not the consequences of the intention. To understand why someone would want to pull a lever requires recognizing that the officer who is responsible is fully aware of what consequences may come from pulling a lever. Structuration theory was a theory of society that had a strong focus on agency, but it also became a reference when it came to practices. Although he does not make use of the concept of “practice” that often in his theory, Giddens nevertheless shines focus on the structured behaviors that regulate daily life. Part of why agency is possible is because routines and predictable encounters are structured on a daily basis (Giddens, 1984: 64). Overall, Giddens’ theory of structuration attracted a considerable number of adherents in archaeology, because it pretty much ticked every box when it came to the topics of research archaeologists wanted in a social archaeology. It took agency and the role of actors very seriously, without disregarding the role that social institutions play in delineating human action. Furthermore, it also addressed symbolism, social codes, and modes of discourse, which were topics of interest to postprocessual archaeology, as well as social power and how it emerges in society. To top it all off, Giddens also provides a clear and concise description of how the theory of structuration can be applied to real world research, providing an example from archaeologydthe rise of agrarian states (1984: 246ff.). In addition to Giddens, another important scholar in agency studies was Pierre Bourdieu. However, unlike Giddens, who was inspired and influenced by developments in British sociology and produced a theory that was somewhat more technical and abstract, Bourdieu developed a theory of practice informed by his ethnographic work in colonial Algeria and Southwestern France. Although there are several overlapping ideas between Giddens and Bourdieu, there was also considerable difference, largely due to their different backgrounds. When Bourdieu arose into prominence, French anthropology and social theory was still very much dominated by structuralism, which Bourdieu viewed as being too deterministic and an inadequate paradigm when it came to addressing human practices.
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Bourdieu’s theory of practice aimed at overcoming previous theories of action that often relied on dualist differentiations of matter from symbol and objects from subjects. In order to achieve this, Bourdieu introduced the concept of habitus, a system of durable and transposable dispositions that are produced by structures of a particular environment (Bourdieu, 1977: 72). In a similar vein to Giddens’ structures, the habitus is reproduced by agents in order to endow the world with a coherent meaningdthe habitus harmonizes the experiences of the agent when engaging with the world (Bourdieu, 1977: 80). Unlike Giddens however, Bourdieu’s theory of practice does not rely heavily on the idea of a knowledgeable agent who is constantly monitoring one’s actionsdthe actions of the agent are largely unconscious since they are determined by the habitus; the agent’s behavior are primarily habits. Naturally, there is little to no agency in Bourdieu’s conception of habitus, which is why Bourdieu also relies on what he calls doxa and its counterpart, agency. Doxa works very much in the same way as Giddens’ structures in that they constrain the field of possibilities of what agents could do. Doxa, in turn, naturalizes the routines of agents’ behaviors, that is to say, it justifies and regulates the day-to-day actions of people (Bourdieu, 1977: 164). Agency differs from doxic actions in that it relies on the agent recognizing the arbitrariness of doxic actions and acting against routine and structures of power (see Smith, 2001). While agency theory seemed to have been competently introduced into archaeology, there was, however, some dissent when it came to dealing with agency in practical terms. For example, Shanks and Tilley introduced agency theory into archaeology from a Marxist perspective, where agency is seen from a more collective standpoint, and where the social structure dictates the actions of individuals (Dornan, 2002: 310; Shanks and Tilley, 1992). While this was interesting, Matthew Johnson rejected this position because this meant agents were nothing more than “cultural dupes” (Johnson, 1989: 194). Despite the growing popularity of agency in archaeology during the 1980s, individual social actors and their choices remained muted. Johnson was one of the few archaeologists to provide very interesting examples of individual agency being expressed, such as through domestic architecture of 16th century Suffolk, England (Johnson, 1989) and the reconstruction of Tattershall Castle by Ralph, Lord Cromwell in the 15th century (Johnson, 2000). It was not just Johnson who was interested in exploring agency through the individual; to many archaeologists, the individual was the main locus of agency (e.g. Knapp and Meskell, 1997). Underlying this discussion is a recurrent dualism (or duality) that was never properly resolved, and which has been described as the individualism-holism debate (see Bell, 1992). In short, this debate separates those thinkers who believe that social agency manifests in individuals (see Dornan-Fish, 2012) from those who believe that social agency only makes sense when we understand society and how it functions as a whole. In addition to this issue, not everyone was open to some of the concepts and ideas imported from Giddens and Bourdieu. Adam Smith has pointed out that Bourdieu’s notion of doxa is incredibly limiting in archaeology, given that doxa is a politically created set of behaviors whereas agency are behaviors that transcend the political order (Smith, 2001). Recognizing doxa and agency in this manner forces the archaeologist into a difficult position, that of having to discern whether an agent was self-conscious enough to recognize that they were part of an established political order, something easier said than done. In summary, despite this rapid rise in popularity, there was little consensus as to what agency truly was and even less as to how to study it from an archaeological standpoint (Dobres and Robb, 2000: 8–9). In general, agency was engaged by some archaeologists through the study of power structures and how these could be challenged; some archaeologists also engaged in the study of individuality and the perspective of the acting subject; whereas other archaeologists focused on how intentions, goals, and strategies were carried out by past actors. The reliance on a wide variety of thinkers, many of which were incompatible with one another, led to persistent issues and contradictions in agency theory. For example, in addition to the issues described above, it was not entirely clear whether intentionality was essential to understanding agency, or if it could be replaced by the study of the actual consequences human actions have in the world. Another nagging issue came from scholars who claimed that most agency studies fell into the anachronistic trap of imposing the freedoms enjoyed by the western liberal middle-class onto past actors (e.g. Bender, 1993) or that the concept of the individual as it is understood among some agency theorists is too modernist and does not have universal application (Thomas, 2004: 119). Thus, despite the popularity of agency theory during the 1980s and 1990s, it was nevertheless marred by the fact that it was very fragmented into mutually exclusive positions. Agency studies were also very methodologically and theoretically distinct from other theories and ideas that were being developed in archaeology. For example, while many ideas of processual archaeology were eventually suppressed, evolutionary theory applied to archaeology continued to develop unabated throughout the 1980s and 1990s, through Darwin’s conception of inheritance and through behavioral (or evolutionary) ecology. As Kristian Kristiansen points out, evolutionary archaeology and agency theory, in the ways both are applied in archaeology, are not entirely compatible (Kristiansen, 2004). Part of the problem, as explained by Kristiansen, is that agency theory and similar theories tend to simply “redline” other approaches to past human societies, that is to say, there was a tendency by supporters of agency theory to arbitrarily dismiss other approaches to human action (Kristiansen, 2004: 79). By the mid and late 2000s, agency theory had lost a lot of its acclaim, with many archaeologists slowly transitioning from the idea of the voluntary agent to the study of practices and the everyday life of past peoples (Robin, 2020). At the same time, the rise of posthumanist approaches led to a very different perspective of agency, one where non-human objects are treated as being on equal footing with humans. According to this view, agency is not something that is possessed by humans but something that exists within networks where both humans and non-humans interact. Finally, in the 2010s, many new scientific approaches were introduced and/or became mainstream, such as bulk collation and analysis of archaeological data (i.e. Big Data), isotope and aDNA analysis, and new computational modeling. How these new approaches relate or inform agency studies remains unclear. In computer modeling in particular, one of the approaches that has stood out is agent-based modeling, an approach to model the behavior of complex behavioral systems. According to this approach, action takes place through agents, who collect information about their environment and perform actions based on that information (Kohler and Gumerman, 2000: 2). Agent-based modeling
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has been remarkably successful in areas such as biology, ecology, and economics, given the ability to model the behaviors within very large systems. Examples where agent-based modeling has been successful is in predicting the spread of viruses, such as in the case of SARS-CoV-2, and in predicting consumer behavior when new products are launched. However, the understanding of agency in agent-based modeling is a far-cry from agency as it was understood among supporters of Giddens and Bourdieu. In agent-based modeling, the aim is to map the unpredictability of agent behavior; there is no concern in trying to understand why agents behave the way they do, such as why people act rebelliously in certain historical periods, how certain people strategized their way into positions of power, or how creativity could emerge and manifest in artifact production.
Beyond Human AgencydPosthumanist Archaeology By the 2010s, agency had undergone many transformations, but the most noticeable transformation was through the idea of object agency. In earlier iterations of agency theory, it was either implicit or explicit that when discussing agents, one was discussing humans. In fact, a perusal of the literature within and outside archaeology rarely discusses which entities can be defined as “agents”dit is simply assumed that agency falls under the purview of human affairs. However, questions started to arise in the 2000s and 2010s about the legitimacy of reserving agency to humans. This all started with the rise of posthumanism and the questioning of the position of humans in the world. According to posthumanists, there is no philosophical or practical reason to assume that humans are ontologically superior to other entities, such as animals and objects. For posthumanists, to assume that humans are ontologically above other beings is anthropocentrism and is to fall back on an outdated Cartesian perspective that humans are thinking subjects, cognitive egos, who are endowed with the capacity to act toward passive objects. The anthropocentrism that posthumanists critique is also one where reality can only exist through the filter of human perception, that objects only exist when encountered by humans. In archaeology, posthumanism has been introduced through a large number of approaches and ideas, following a wide variety of thinkers. Of particular interest are those ideas and approaches that have been variously termed “object,” “material,” or “distributed” agency. These ideas became prominent during the mid-2000s, with a call to return to things and emphasizing their importance in archaeological research (Olsen, 2003). As was argued by many theorists in archaeology, postprocessual archaeology had run its course and the interpretative practices promoted by postprocessual archaeologists had the effect of sidelining the study of objects as what they truly were: objects. At the same time, there was also a gradual recognition in archaeology that animals were more than just passive entities domesticated by humans. This idea came through two routes, one was through the anthropological work performed by Viveiros de Castro on Amerindian populations, who were communities that did not recognize strong social distinction between humans, animals, and spirits (Viveiros de Castro, 1998); the other route was in archaeology itself, in work such as that of Gala Argent, who has come to recognize how horse-rider societies are best understood in a relational perspective, where the decisions and actions of both the rider and the horse play a role (Argent, 2010). But perhaps the greatest inspirers of object agency are those who have argued that agency does not initiate from human intention or consciousness, but rather, that agency is something distributed across a multitude of actors, both human and nonhuman (Bennett, 2010; Gell, 1998; Latour, 1999). There are many variations to the idea of object or distributed agency. Alfred Gell, for instance, argues that it might be strange to view objects as having agency, but at the same time, it is also strange to not recognize objects as extensions of human agency. Using the example of a car, Gell argues that the manifestation of someone’s agency, such as wanting to drive somewhere, is dependent on the car, which means that the car should be seen as the extension of the agent’s body, not unlike a prosthetic (Gell, 1998: 18). Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour have taken a step beyond Gell by arguing that agency is not just extended into the objects that humans use, that objects themselves have to be recognized as agential since they are part of the network or assemblage from which agency emerges (Bennett, 2010; Latour, 1999). Bruno Latour has developed an approach based on these ideas, Actor-Network theory, which recognizes the interactions of both human and non-human actors (Latour, 1999). Latour has dedicated many decades of research to science and technology studies, and that is where his actor-network theory has really shined. As he argues, the way we think of science and scholarship in general, is based on very abstract notions such as “paradigms” and “epistemologies,” notions that have little expression in the material world. A much better path is to recognize science and scholarship operating through a material network, where change and agency manifest through test tubes, microscopes, publications, meetings, computers, and scientists interacting with one another (Latour, 1993). A great example of actor-network theory in archaeology can be found in the study produced by Peter Whitridge on the Thule whalers of the North American arctic (2004). By looking at minor technical details of harpoon head technology, Whitridge points out that small changes to how harpoons are made could alter the entire social and economic context in which whaling is performed. These changes to harpoon head technology did not have the aim to change the entire practice of whaling, but they did nevertheless, and this can only be recognized by placing the harpoon as an actant itself within a wider network involving various human and non-human elements (Whitridge, 2004). Object agency has not gone uncritiqued, with some archaeologists, such as myself, pointing out that object agency relies on an oversimplified view of ethics and responsibility that undermines its own premises (Ribeiro, 2016). Part of the problem is that if agency is distributed across various actors in a network, it becomes permissible to view natural disasters as holding the same responsibility as war generals (Hornborg, 2019: 205). Despite this issue, object agency has nonetheless spurred interesting new research into the role of objects and how social action occurs through relational networks.
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Summary and Future Directions In summary, agency theory was introduced into archaeology to address the limitations of the behavioral description of human action. Whereas behavioral explanations are based on the premise that human action is a response to external causes, such as changes in the natural environment or population pressure, agency presupposes that agents can choose and act even when not pressured by causes to do so. The key thinkers who influenced agency in archaeology were Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, both of whom designed theories involving structural social power and how agents act in relation to this power. Agency studies in archaeology did encounter some issues, one of which was never really recognizing whether agency is collective and based on the social structure or whether it is primarily individualist. Sometime after agency was introduced, the notion of practice became the dominant concept within social archaeology, with many archaeologists focusing less on the individuality and the choices of past agents, and more on habitual acts and everyday life in the past. Nevertheless, agency made a comeback through the idea of object agency. Unlike the agency described by Giddens and Bourdieu, which centered on human beings, object agency recognized agency as emerging from the interaction of humans and non-human objects. This led to the proliferation of approaches based on network theory, where material elements are mapped to show how different objects affect one another. This idea was not without its critiques, with some authors pointing out ethical concerns with regards to object agency. Even though agency has lost some demand in more recent years, the introduction of agency theory during the rise of processual archaeology did have a very strong impact on the discipline. To this day, several angles of research, such as on past practices (Kienlin, 2020), studies on personhood (Fowler, 2016), heterarchies and stateless communities (DeMarrais, 2013), rebellion in the past (Hansen and Müller, 2018), and gender archaeologies (Dommasnes and Montón-Subías, 2012), are all possible due to investment into agency theory. This does not mean that all these research topics explicitly pay respect to agency, nor were they all off-shoots of agency theory, in fact, some arose independently of agency theory, however, their success today was partly due to agency. Object agency, despite some misgivings, has had a great impact in putting objects and their role back in the archaeological agenda. For many, postprocessual archaeology’s overfocus on symbolism, interpretation, and discourse had become rather stultifying, and a return to objects was sorely needed. Overall, although not in as explicit manner as during the 1980s and 1990s, agency survives in archaeology. It survives in the studies of people and material culture and how these interacted and created their own stories. It is difficult to predict what the future has reserved for agency. It seems clear that in archaeology, agency is unlikely to ever recover the popularity it had during postprocessual times. At the same time, the ongoing discussions on definitions and theories of agency show that agency is not something that archaeologists are ready to relinquish. Furthermore, as our economy, culture, and society change through time, what is of concern both among the wider public and in academic circles will also change. This will determine what agency will be about in the future.
Acknowledgments This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation, Projektnummer 2901391021, SFB 1266) published in the second phase of the project “Scales of Transformation: Human-Environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies,” in the project A1, which focuses on historical and theoretical aspects in the study of past societies.
See Also: Gender and Heritage; Identity and Power; Interpretive Art and Archaeology; Post-Processual Archaeology.
References Argent, Gala, 2010. Do the clothes make the horse? Relationality, roles and statuses in Iron Age Inner Asia. World Archaeol. 42 (2), 157–174. Barrett, John C., 1994. Fragments From Antiquity: An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900-1200 BC. Blackwell, Oxford. Bell, James, 1992. On capturing agency in theories about prehistory. In: Gardin, Jean-Claude, Peebles, Christopher S. (Eds.), Representations in Archaeology. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, pp. 30–55. Bender, Barbara, 1993. Cognitive archaeology and cultural materialism. Camb. Archaeol. J. 3 (2), 257–260. Bennett, Jane, 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, London. Binford, Lewis R., 1962. Archaeology as anthropology. Am. Antiq. 28 (2), 217–225. Binford, Lewis R., 1965. Archaeological systematics and the study of culture process. Am. Antiq. 31 (2), 203–210. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Conkey, Margaret W., Spector, Janet D., 1984. Archaeology and the study of gender. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theor. 7, 1–38. DeMarrais, Elizabeth, 2013. Understanding heterarchy: crafting and social projects in pre-hispanic northwest Argentina. Camb. Archaeol. J. 23 (3), 345–362. Dobres, Marcia-Anne, Robb, John E., 2000. Agency in archaeology: paradigm or platittude? In: Dobres, Marcia-Anne, Robb, John E. (Eds.), Agency in Archaeology. Routledge, London, pp. 3–17. Dobres, Marcia-Anne, Robb, John E., 2005. “Doing” agency: introductory remarks on methodology. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 12 (3), 159–166. Dommasnes, Liv H., Montón-Subías, Sandra, 2012. European gender archaeologies in historical perspective. Eur. J. Archaeol. 15 (3), 367–391. Dornan, Jennifer L., 2002. Agency and archaeology: past, present, and future directions. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 9 (4), 303–329. Dornan-Fish, Jennifer L., 2012. Motive matters: intentionality, embodiment, and the individual in archaeology. Time Mind 5 (3), 279–298. Flannery, Kent V., 1967. Culture history v. cultural process: a debate in American archaeology. Sci. Am. 217, 119–122.
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Fowler, Chris, 2016. Relational personhood revisited. Camb. Archaeol. J. 26 (3), 397–412. Gell, Alfred, 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Clarendon, Oxford. Giddens, Anthony, 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Polity Press, Cambridge. Hansen, Svend, Müller, Johannes (Eds.), 2018. Rebellion and Inequality in Archaeology. Habelt, Bonn. Hodder, Ian, 1985. Postprocessual archaeology. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theor. 8, 1–26. Hodder, Ian, Hutson, Scott, 2003. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, third ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hornborg, Alf, 2019. Nature, Society, and Power in the Anthropocene: Unravelling the Money-Energy-Technology Complex. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Johnson, Matthew H., 1989. Conceptions of agency in archaeological interpretation. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 8 (2), 189–211. Johnson, Matthew H., 2000. Self-made men and the staging of agency. In: Dobres, Marcia-Anne, Robb, John E. (Eds.), Agency in Archaeology. Routledge, London, pp. 213–231. Kienlin, Tobias L., 2020. Social life on Bronze age tells. Outline of a practice-oriented approach. In: Blanco-González, Antonio, Kienlin, Tobias L. (Eds.), Current Approaches to Tells in the Prehistoric Old World. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 173–188. Knapp, A. Bernard, Meskell, Lynn, 1997. Bodies of evidence on prehistoric Cyprus. Camb. Archaeol. J. 7 (2), 183–204. Kohler, Timothy A., Gumerman, George J., 2000. Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kristiansen, Kristiansen, 2004. Genes versus agents. A discussion of the widening theoretical gap in archaeology. Archaeol. Dialogues 11 (2), 77–99. Latour, Bruno, 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York. Latour, Bruno, 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Marx, Karl, 1934 [1869][]. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Progress Publishers, Moscow. Miller, Daniel, Tilley, Christopher (Eds.), 1984. Ideology, Power and Prehistory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Moore, Henrietta L., 2000. Ethics and ontology: why agents and agency matter. In: Dobres, Marcia-Anne, Robb, John E. (Eds.), Agency in Archaeology. Routledge, London, pp. 259–263. Olsen, Bjørnar, 2003. Material culture after text: re-membering things. Nor. Archeol. Rev. 36 (2), 87–104. Price, T. Douglas, Feinman, Gary M., 1995. Foundations of Social Inequality. Plenum Press, New York. Reid, Thomas, 1788. Essays on the Active Powers of Man. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ribeiro, Artur, 2016. Against object agency. A counterreaction to Sørensen’s “Hammers and nails”. Archaeol. Dialogues 23 (2), 229–235. Robin, Cynthia, 2020. Archaeology of everyday life. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 49 (1), 373–390. Shanks, Michael, Tilley, Christopher, 1992. Re-constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice, second ed. Routledge, London. Smith, Adam T., 2001. The limitations of doxa: agency and subjectivity from an archaeological point of view. J. Soc. Archaeol. 1 (2), 155–171. Thomas, Julian, 1996. Time, Culture, and Identity: An Interpretative Archaeology. Routledge, London. Thomas, Julian, 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. Routledge, London. Tilley, Christopher, 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Berg, Oxford. Trigger, Bruce G., 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. J. Roy. Anthropol. Inst. 4 (3), 469–488. Whitridge, Peter, 2004. Whales, harpoons, and other actors: actor-network-theory and hunter-gatherer archaeology. In: Crothers, George M. (Ed.), Hunters and Gatherers in Theory and Archaeology. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, pp. 445–474.
Anthropological Archaeology Christopher B. Rodning, Tulane University, Department of Anthropology, New Orleans, LA, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues Summary Acknowledgments References Further Reading Relevant Websites
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Anthropological archaeology is the study of culture and culture change in all world areas and eras of the human past, although it is historically closely associated with archaeology in the Americas. Anthropological archaeology is inherently comparative in its approach, and this comparative perspective guides the ways in which research questions are posed and answers are formed. One of the major topics of interest in anthropological archaeology is the study of the development of complexity in human societies. Archaeology is conducted within other scholarly disciplinesdclassics, Egyptology, Assyriology, and ancient history in Europe and Asiadbut all archaeology potentially contributes to anthropological knowledge and perspectives, and vice versa.
Abstract Anthropological archaeology is the comparative study of all aspects of human societies and patterns of change from the remote past to the recent and historic past. Archaeology conceptualized and conducted within an anthropological framework generally focuses on long-term processes and broad-scale patterns, including those at spatial and temporal scales that may not always have been recognizable to individuals living at particular points and in particular moments of the atlas and archive of the human past. Archaeology is conducted within scholarly traditions and disciplinary cultures outside of anthropology. Whether practiced as anthropology or otherwise, all archaeological knowledge can be framed as anthropological knowledge because archaeology sheds light on the human condition in its many and diverse forms.
Introduction Archaeology is the study of material outcomes of cultural activity in the past, it is the study of what life was like for different people and peoples in the past, and it is the study of cultural change and continuity across long timespans. What makes anthropological archaeology different from other ways of thinking about the past and practicing the craft of archaeology? What makes anthropological archaeology anthropological? This entry outlines major themes of interest in anthropological archaeology in the past and present and charts one prospective course for its future.
Overview Anthropological archaeology originated principally from the study of the archaeology of Indigenous peoples and civilizations of the Americas. Many practitioners of archaeology in the Americas in its early stages during the 1800s and 1900sdgiving rise to what is sometimes known as Americanist archaeology (Dunnell, 1978)dwere focused on sites and materials associated with cultural traditions very different from those of Europeans and European descendants. For this reason, archaeology in the Americas developed a close association with anthropology (Willey and Sabloff, 1974), principally because anthropological perspectives have been and are important for understanding archaeological manifestations of diverse cultural traditions different from those familiar to historians and ancient historians of Europe and the Mediterranean world. Although anthropological archaeology is practiced
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around the world, it is particularly prevalent in the archaeology of Indigenous peoples and places of the Americas. Anthropological archaeologists study the early peopling of the Americas during the end of the last Ice Age, the spread of people from northern North America to southern South America and myriad environments in between, adaptations by Native Americans to changing climate and environment in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, the development of sedentary villages and complex societies, subsistence practices and cultural aspects of foodways and feasting, networks of trade and exchange at varying scales, diverse forms of monumental architecture ranging from earthworks and plazas to stone platforms and ballcourts, the emplacement of art and ritual space within natural and cultural landscapes, the development of urban landscapes and civilizations, the emergence and expansion of states (Maya, Zapotec) and empires (Inka, Aztec)dand similar themes in other world areas outside of the Americas. Several somewhat famous quotes are often cited in characterizing the relationship between anthropological archaeology and the broader discipline of anthropology. Willey and Phillips (1958:2) wrote that, “Archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing,” echoing a very similar line by Phillips (1955:246e247) himself in reference to archaeology in the Americas (Nichols et al., 2003). Earle (2003:17) has more recently and astutely asked whether the “it” in this quote referred then or should be read now to refer to archaeology or to anthropology, arguing cogently that anthropology, as the study of humanity in all its forms, needs archaeology and its perspectives on how change happens. In another influential mid-20th-century article, “Archaeology as Anthropology,” Binford (1962) advocated that archaeologists move beyond the practice of describing archaeologically known cultural manifestations toward developing explanatory models of culture change and environmental adaptations by people and peoples of the past. Approaches to how anthropological archaeologists understand patterns of culture change, and how we identify and collect the kinds of datasets we want and need to answer our research questions, have certainly evolved and adapted themselves since the emergence of processual archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s and the postprocessual critiques of the 1980s and 1990s, leading to what Hegmon (2003) characterized as “processual-plus” archaeology at the dawn of the millennium (see also Pauketat, 2001, and the concept of “historical processualism”), blending the principles of scientific rigor emphasized in processual archaeology with the humanistic and historic interests in people and culture in the past that have emerged within the literature of postprocessual archaeology (Hodder, 1991; Preucel, 1995). Conversations and considerations through these decades have led scholars to ask whether anthropological archaeology has outgrown its connections with other subdisciplines of anthropology (Gumerman, 2002), whether an interdisciplinary archaeology that involves contributions from other fields should be its own distinct discipline (Wiseman, 2002), and counterpoints and counterarguments that archaeology and anthropology derive mutual benefit when closely intertwined (Kelly, 2002). Another framing of anthropological archaeology, articulated in an essay, “Archaeology Is Anthropology,” is that “Archaeology is an anthropology concerned with history and the material world, both on a grand scale and in its study of the way that individual practices are transformed into structure (so that what we see archaeologically is patterned, not chaotic)” (Gillespie et al., 2003:155). This characterization of anthropological archaeology refers to both the study of long-term and broad-scale patterns of life in the past and its archaeological signatures, as well as archaeological interests in the lives and experiences of individuals. Archaeological visibility of specific individuals is sometimes more evident in cases in which there are relevant textual or pictorial sources that can be identified and deciphereddas is often the case for historic archaeology, for example, or in the archaeology of Mesopotamia, Assyria, Egypt, the ancient Mediterranean, and the land of the Bibledbut even with reference to the archaeology of sites and events associated with historically known individuals, an anthropological approach generally seeks to situate the people, peoples, place, and places within broader cultural, historical, environmental, and temporal contexts, and often through comparative lenses. Whether focused on themes outlined here or many others of interest in the present, anthropological archaeology is very much on display in the proceedings and publications of organizations like the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology, and regional archaeological conferences in many areas of the Americas and Caribbean, but anthropological approaches to the study of the past are evident in other world areas as well. For the most part, archaeological narratives in these domains are broadly framed, and they are often either comparative in considerations of diverse case studies, or findings and ideas are packaged and articulated so they can be compared and contrasted with others. The Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association sponsors panels and publications in anthropological archaeology, including written versions of Distinguished Lectures given by eminent archaeologists in years past (Spaulding, 1988; Trigger, 1991); an issue of its Archaeological Papers series with essays about the intellectual exchange between scholarship in archaeology and anthropology (Gillespie et al., 2003; Nichols et al., 2003); and since 2009, there has been an annual review essay about current scholarship in anthropological archaeology in the journal American Anthropologist. Similar points can be made about comparative and even formally anthropological perspectives that frame papers focused on the archaeology of world areas in which there are other forms of archaeological inquiry. For example, although classical archaeology has a different and disciplinary heritage of its own than does anthropological archaeology, important arguments about politics and economy in the ancient Mediterranean have implications for comparative studies of archaeologies and societies in other world areas (Tartaron, 2013). Similarly, archaeology in areas of the world known as the ancient Near East (areas currently known across much of the Western world as the Middle East) encompasses the geographic and scholarly turf of disciplines other than anthropological archaeology, but archaeology of early cities in Mesopotamia has contributed greatly to comparative studies of ancient urban civilizations around the world (Algaze, 2008), and archaeology in the Levant and Anatoliadthe land of the Bible, as well as early villages and early metallurgydhas contributed much to anthropological knowledge about the social, economic, political, and ideological transitions associated with the domestication of plants and animals and the development of sedentary village communities (Simmons, 2007). From these areas and elsewhere, including archaeology of early villages and urban civilizations in East Asia and South Asia, comparative perspectives are evident in anthropological approaches to archaeology. Although it is not the only topic of
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broad and generalizable interest to archaeologists, the study of complexity and the emergence and collapse of archaeologically visible polities and communities is of particular importance.
Key Issues Major themes of interest in anthropological archaeology during the past several decades have included the evolution and spread of humans throughout the world; human adaptation to changing climate and environment; patterns of thought and symbolism as evident through material forms of art and monuments; patterns of interaction shaped by cycles of warfare, diplomacy, trade, and exchange; and the development of diverse forms of complexity, inequality, hierarchy, political organization, economic systems, and religion and ritual in human societies (Smith et al., 2012; Trigger, 1998; see Graeber and Wengrow, 2021 for recent reconsiderations of how archaeologists have thought about sociocultural complexity in the human past). Many scholars study the material culture and lifeways of hunter-gatherer-fishers from the Paleolithic through the recent past; the emergence of permanent villages in the course of the Neolithic Revolution in the Near East and similar developments in other world areas; the development of landscapes associated with large-scale polities often known as chiefdoms, states, and empires; and episodes in the emergence and collapse of civilizations. Topics of currently growing interest, reflecting longstanding scholarly trends as well as developments in the modern world, include patterns of human migration, anthropogenic impacts on past landscapes and landscape management and terraforming, human adaptations to climate change and environmental catastrophes, aspects of human societies that either promote resilience or vulnerability, symbolic and spiritual properties and powers of material culture and elements of natural landscapes, and the subsistence and social dimensions of foodways (Hastorf, 2016). Another topic of much interest in current anthropological archaeology worldwide is the study of colonialism, and how histories of both indigenous peoples and colonial groups have shaped the courses of colonial encounters and entanglements in different world areas and eras of the human past. Considerations of colonialism in the ancient and recent human past involve considerations of practices of enslavement as well as practices of resistance and resilience by those who have been enslaved or who have been otherwise marginalized. Related conversations concentrate on decolonizing aspects of archaeological thought and practice (Acabado and Martin, 2022), through critical reflections on power relations embedded in archaeological thought and practice and considerations of alternative approaches to identifying topics and cultivating knowledge about the past and its polyvalent relationships to the present. Knowledge about these and other dimensions of life in the past enrich our sense of ourselves in the present, help us to imagine different futures for global humanity and our planet, and they shape the ways we can think about and engage in the stewardship of archaeological sites and archaeological finds. During the mid-to-late 20th century, anthropological archaeologists tended to emphasize adaptational approaches to the study of culture and culture change in the past, related in part to the influence of cultural ecology as an important paradigm within the broader discipline of anthropology. This ecological and adaptational perspective was closely intertwined within the processual paradigm of archaeological thought and practice. In recent decades, explanatory models in anthropological archaeology have maintained this interest but have grown to encompass considerations for humanistic, historic, ideological, and ideational sources of culture change. Several theoretical frameworks that have shaped inquiry and interpretation in anthropological archaeology are the following. Stemming from and growing from ecological and adaptationist perspectives in the mid-20th century, some approaches in archaeology emphasize optimal foraging theory and optimization models for culture and culture change especially in hunter-gatherer societies (Bettinger et al., 2015), and others are framed within the perspective of historical ecology and historical patterns that shape human interactions with changing environments (Crumley, 2021). Behavioral archaeology is the comparative study of material culture to reconstruct patterns of human behavior in diverse settings and spanning all periods of the human past, from the deep past and long-term trends in human evolution, through more recent episodes of human history and aspects of the contemporary world (Walker and Schiffer, 2014). Evolutionary archaeology is a school of thought that emphasizes selective forces that shape the course of culture change; innovation happens, the environment changes, historical trends unfold, and forces of selection favor some cultural practices and adaptations more than others (Prentiss, 2019). Cognitive archaeology, sometimes known as the archaeology of mind, is the study of patterns of thought in the past, as evident from the design and manufacture of tools, for example, and from aspects of visual imagery in diverse media (Hodder, 1993; Renfrew, 1982). Another approach to deriving meaning, or at least the structure of meaningful communication and symbolic aspects of material culture, is the archaeology of semiotics, and interpretive efforts to identify connections between material signs and patterns of signification (Swenson and Cipolla, 2020). Applications of agency theory and practice theory in archaeology focus on concepts of personhood, identity, individuality, and the capacity of individuals to take action within the structures of cultural life and human experience and thereby to alter those structures and conditions (Barrett, 1994; Robb, 2010). Marxist archaeology has focused on inequalities in past societies and in manifestations in material forms; it advocates an approach to studying culture and culture change grounded in Marxism and in particular with consideration for reconstructing the means and modes of production and relations among those whose labor creates value and those who benefit from it; an important source of Marxist thought in archaeology is Vere Gordon Childe, an Australian by birth and eminent British prehistorian who is associated with ideas about punctuated episodes of “revolutionary” change in human history and who advocated humanistic and historic approaches to the study of archaeology (Childe, 1936; Spriggs, 2009). Archaeological thought and practice in these and other theoretical domains creates a rich environment in which anthropological archaeology grows. Given current trends in global environmental change, it is perhaps not surprising but important to note that anthropological archaeologists have taken great interest in anthropogenic impacts on past environments and in the effects of climate change on
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past societies (Rick and Sandweiss, 2020). Archaeologists have of course long been interested in how people have adapted to diverse and dynamic environments around the world and throughout the span of human prehistory and history. Current approaches tend to emphasize both natural processes and cycles as well as historical patterns, but also the importance of human-environment interactions, and the long-term outcomes of anthropogenic forces that shape environment and climate at local, regional, transregional, and global scales. Other approaches to interactions between people and past landscapes instead emphasize historical and ideological properties of places, and processes of social memory embedded within place and landscape (Van Dyke, 2004). Memory can be defined as the “shared remembrance of group experience” (Alcock, 2002), and as a selective process shaped by “social engagement with surroundings” (Van Dyke, 2004:414) through which are formed ideas about the always-reimagined past that serve interests and needs in the ever-changing present. Archaeological approaches to memorydoften focusing on monumental architecture and the positioning of sites, structures, monuments, and visual imagery within landscapesdare shaped in part by landscape phenomenology (Van Dyke, 2007), ethnographic knowledge about relationships between people and place, and perspectives from philosophy and cultural anthropology about memory (Connerton, 1989), and related processes of forgetting (Connerton, 2009). Emergent developments in how anthropological archaeology is conceptualized and conducted derive from Indigenous archaeologies and the growing involvement of Native American and African American people and perspectives in the study of the past (Schneider and Panich, 2022). Indigenous archaeologies focus on the study of the past by members of the communities and on cultural traditions shaped by that past, and they seek to identify the significance of archaeological materials and patterning from Indigenous viewpoints about the world and how people relate to it. Such conceptualizations promise at least to change and probably often to enhance and enrich the kinds of questions that archaeologists ask and the answers and interpretations that are developed. One important principle derived from Indigenous archaeologies in North America is an emphasis on relational ontologies, in which identities of individuals and groups are conceptualized in terms of relationships between people and between people and elements of the material world, including entities within the natural world as well as items of material culture. This perspective is of course applicable to the study of archaeology of Indigenous peoples in Native America, but considerations of relational ontologies are potentially relevant and applicable in archaeology elsewhere as well. Ontologies in past societies have been of considerable interest of late within the “ontological turn” in anthropological archaeology (Alberti, 2016). This perspective in archaeology recognizes that modern ontological frameworks are (of course) not the same as those of people and peoples of the past, and it encourages us to consider, as best we can, aspects of diverse ontological frameworks that are relevant for interpreting patterns in archaeological evidence. Some such frameworks focus on elements of the material world, others focus more on relational associations between people, place, networks, material culture, and nonhuman actors within the natural world. Anthropological archaeologists have long been interested in the study of trade and exchange, and patterns of interaction spanning diverse geographic, sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and ideological scales, but recent developments in and applications of social network analyses (SNA) in archaeology have unearthed interpretations and insights about relational aspects of culture in the past (Birch and Hart, 2021). Network analyses are grounded in spatial and statistical analyses of archaeological data, including especially analyses of relative frequencies of particular types of material culture or architecture, relative frequencies of specific attributes or attribute states in assemblages from different sites, or degrees of similarity or difference in assemblages or sites as expressed in numeric variables. These analytical techniques identify linkages connecting people and places within landscapes, which are then amenable to inquiry and interpretation, as clues about networks of connectivity and interaction at varying social and spatial scales. Another major focus of current debates and dialogs in anthropological archaeology relates to the study of collective action, and the balance and fluctuation between cooperation and competition in human societies (DeMarrais and Earle, 2017). Collective action theory acknowledges the agency of diverse social actors of varying statuses and identities within communities, and it conceptualizes social and political life as outcomes of diverse forms of agency, agendas, interests, and strategies. From these perspectives, culture and culture change derives from the cumulative effects of individual activities, guided by individual interests that in some conditions favor cooperation and common ground, and in other conditions favor competition or resistance. One recent outline of major topics of interest to anthropological archaeology are the “Grand Challenges” articulated by Kintigh et al. (2014a,b). Based on workshops and surveys conducted in 2012, they organize 25 major topics of inquiry in the following five topics: “(1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions” (Kintigh et al., 2014a:880,b:5). These topics and themes are fundamental to scholarship in anthropological archaeology, and they have implications beyond archaeology, including knowledge about the past that is applicable to navigating issues of the world in the present and future. Not all interests in anthropological archaeology fit neatly within the “Grand Challenges” framing, but these themes do encompass much of what anthropological archaeologists seek to study, in global and comparative perspective. Cobb (2014) advocates for more of an emphasis on history and historical approaches to archaeology in his response to the “Grand Challenges” model, as well as considerations of ideas and ideals in past societies alongside interests in “coupled human and natural systems” (Cobb, 2014:590; Kintigh et al., 2014a:881,b:7).
Summary Ruth Benedict is often quoted as having said that the “purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences,” or something similar to this viewpoint (Benedict, 1934), which reflects her approach to anthropology as well as her tutelage and
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teachings by Franz Boas, widely credited as one of the founders and architects of American anthropology and its four major subdisciplines: biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. Boas was an important voice in early-to-mid-20th-century anthropological ideas about historical particularism and cultural relativism. Boas taught Benedict at Columbia University, as well as other major figures in the history of American anthropology such as Alfred Kroeber, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, and Zora Neale Hurston. These aspects of the history of American anthropology are relevant to thinking about the history of anthropological archaeology. To adopt and adapt the Benedict quote about the purpose of anthropology, I want to suggest that the purpose of anthropological archaeology is to make it safe for people and peoples around the world to imagine and to appreciate the remarkable differences and diversity there are in the human past, and to suggest that our awareness (or not) of those differences and diversity in the human past significantly shapes the present and our futures.
Acknowledgments Thanks to Peter Biehl for the invitation to write this entry, and thanks for contributions to my thoughts about anthropological archaeology from Stephen Acabado, William Balée, Jess Beck, Marcello Canuto, Alice Kehoe, Flora Lu, Tatsuya Murakami, Jason Nesbitt, Deborah Nichols, Stephen Williams, and Bram Tucker.
See Also: Post-Processual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Social Theory in Archaeology.
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(Eds.), Archeology is Anthropology, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, vol. 13. Arlington, Virginia, pp. 17e26. Gillespie, Susan D., Joyce, Rosemary A., Nichols, Deborah L., 2003. Archaeology is anthropology. In: Nichols, Deborah L., Joyce, Rosemary A., Gillespie, Susan D. (Eds.), Archeology is Anthropology, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, vol. 13. Arlington, Virginia, pp. 155e169. Graeber, David, Wengrow, David, 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York. Gumerman, George J., 2002. Letter to the Editor. SAA Archaeol. Rec. 2 (4), 3. Hastorf, Christine A., 2016. The Social Archaeology of Food: Thinking About Eating From Prehistory to the Present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hegmon, Michelle, 2003. Setting theoretical egos aside: issues and theory in North American archaeology. Am. Antiq. 68 (2), 213e243. Hodder, Ian, 1991. Interpretive archaeology and its role. Am. Antiq. 56 (1), 7e18. Hodder, Ian, 1993. What is cognitive archaeology? Camb. Archaeol. J. 3, 253e257. Kelly, Robert L., 2002. Counterpoint: archaeology is anthropology. SAA Archaeol. Rec. 2 (3), 13e14. Kintigh, Keith W., Altschul, Jeffrey H., Beaudry, Mary C., Drennan, Robert D., Kinzig, Ann P., Kohler, Timothy A., Limp, W. Fredrick, Maschner, Herbert D.G., Michener, William K., Pauketat, Timothy R., Peregrine, Peter, Sabloff, Jeremy A., Wilkinson, Tony J., Wright, Henry T., Zeder, Melinda A., 2014a. Grand challenges for archaeology. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 111 (3), 879e880. Kintigh, Keith W., Altschul, Jeffrey H., Beaudry, Mary C., Drennan, Robert D., Kinzig, Ann P., Kohler, Timothy A., Limp, W. Fredrick, Maschner, Herbert D.G., Michener, William K., Pauketat, Timothy R., Peregrine, Peter, Sabloff, Jeremy A., Wilkinson, Tony J., Wright, Henry T., Zeder, Melinda A., 2014b. Grand challenges for archaeology. Am. Antiq. 79 (1), 5e24. Nichols, Deborah L., Joyce, Rosemary A., Gillespie, Susan D., 2003. Is archaeology anthropology? In: Nichols, Deborah L., Joyce, Rosemary A., Gillespie, Susan D. (Eds.), Archeology is Anthropology, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, vol. 13. Arlington, Virginia, pp. 3e13. Pauketat, Timothy R., 2001. Practice and history in archaeology: an emerging paradigm. Anthropol. Theor. 1 (1), 73e98. Phillips, Philip, 1955. American archaeology and general anthropological theory. SW. J. Anthropol. 11 (3), 246e250. Prentiss, Anna Marie, 2019. Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology. Springer, Cham, Switzerland. Preucel, Robert W., 1995. The postprocessual condition. J. Archaeol. Res. 3 (2), 147e175. Renfrew, Colin, 1982. Towards an Archaeology of Mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rick, Torben C., Sandweiss, Daniel H., 2020. Archaeology, climate, and global change in the age of humans. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 117 (15), 8250e8253. Robb, John E., 2010. Beyond agency. World Archaeol. 42 (4), 493e520. Schneider, Tsim D., Panich, Lee M. (Eds.), 2022. Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Simmons, Alan H., 2007. The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming the Human Landscape. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Smith, Michael E., Feinman, Gary M., Drennan, Robert D., Earle, Timothy, Morris, Ian, 2012. Archaeology as a social science. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 109 (20), 7617e7621.
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Spriggs, Matthew (Ed.), 2009. Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Spaulding, Albert C., 1988. Distinguished lecture: archeology as anthropology. Am. Anthropol. 90 (2), 263e271. Swenson, Edward, Cipolla, Craig N., 2020. Representation and materiality in archaeology: a semiotic reconciliation. World Archaeol. 52 (3), 313e329. Tartaron, Thomas F., 2013. Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trigger, Bruce G., 1991. Distinguished lecture in archeology: constraint and freedomda new synthesis for archeological explanation. Am. Anthropol. 93 (3), 551e569. Trigger, Bruce G., 1998. Sociocultural Evolution. Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts. Van Dyke, Ruth M., 2004. Memory, meaning, and masonry: the late Bonito Chacoan landscape. Am. Antiq. 69 (3), 413e431. Van Dyke, Ruth M., 2007. The Chaco Experience: Landscape and Ideology at the Center Place. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Walker, William H., Schiffer, Michael B., 2014. Behavioral archaeology. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York. Willey, Gordon R., Phillips, Philip, 1958. Method and Theory in American Archaeology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Willey, Gordon R., Sabloff, Jeremy A., 1974. A History of American Archaeology. Thames and Hudson, London. Wiseman, James, 2002. Point: archaeology as an Academic discipline. SAA Archaeol. Rec. 2 (3), 8e10.
Further Reading Arkush, Elizabeth N., Allen, Mark W., 2006. The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Barton, Michael C. (Ed.), 1997. Rediscovering Darwin: Evolutionary Theory in Archeological Explanation, vol. 7. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Arlington, Virginia. Carpenter, Lacey, Prentiss, Anna Marie (Eds.), 2021. Archaeology of Households, Kinship, and Social Change. Routledge, London. Chapman, Robert, 2023. Archaeological Theory: The Basics. Routledge, London. Conrad, Geoffrey W., Demarest, Arthur A., 1984. Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Covey, R. Alan, 2006. How the Incas Built Their Heartland: State Formation and the Innovation of Imperial Strategies in the Sacred Valley, Peru. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Covey, R. Alan, Elson, Christina M. (Eds.), 2006. Intermediate Elites in Pre-Columbian States and Empires. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Cowgill, George L., 2004. Origins and development of urbanism: archaeological approaches. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 33, 525e549. Cowgill, George L., 2015. Ancient Teotihuacan: Early Urbanism in Central Mexico. Cambridge University Press, New York. Demarest, Arthur A., Conrad, Geoffrey W. (Eds.), 1992. Ideology and Pre-Columbian Civilizations. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ehrenreich, Robert M., Crumley, Carole L., Levy, Janet E. (Eds.), 1995. Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies, vol. 6. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Arlington, Virginia. Gardner, Andrew, Lake, Mark, Sommer, Ulrike (Eds.), 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Harris, Oliver J.T., Cipolla, Craig, 2017. Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium: Introducing Current Perspectives. Routledge, London. Hassan, Fekri A., 1988. The predynastic of Egypt. J. World Prehist. 2 (2), 135e185. Johnson, Michael, 1999. Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford. Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, 1991. The Indus valley tradition of Pakistan and Western India. J. World Prehist. 5 (4), 331e385. Kirch, Patrick V., Hunt, Terry L. (Eds.), 1997. Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands: Prehistoric Environmental and Landscape Change. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Martin, Simon, 2020. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150e900 CE. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. McAnany, Patricia S., Yoffee, Norman (Eds.), 2009. Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pétursdóttir, þóra, 2017. Climate change? Archaeology and anthropocene. Archaeol. Dialogues 24 (2), 175e205. Possehl, Gregory L., 1997. The transformation of the Indus civilization. J. World Prehist. 11 (4), 425e472. Spencer, Charles S., 2010. Territorial expansion and primary state formation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 107 (16), 7119e7126. Urban, Patricia, Schortman, Edward, 2012. Archaeological Theory in Practice. Routledge, London. Wenke, Robert J., 1991. The evolution of early Egyptian civilization: issues and evidence. J. World Prehist. 5 (3), 279e329. Yoffee, Norman, 2005. Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Yoffee, Norman, Sherratt, Andrew, 1993. Archaeological Theory: Who Sets the Agenda? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Relevant Websites Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association https://ad.americananthro.org/. Archaeological Institute of America http://www.archaeological.org/. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-anthropological-archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory https://www.springer.com/journal/10816. Journal of Archaeological Research https://www.springer.com/journal/10814. Journal of Field Archaeology https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/yjfa20. Journal of Social Archaeology https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jsa. Journal of World Prehistory https://www.springer.com/journal/10963. Society for American Archaeology http://www.saa.org/. Society for Historical Archaeology http://www.sha.org/. World Archaeology https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rwar20.
Archaeoastronomy Giulio Magli, Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Measuring Orientations: The Basics Interpreting Orientations: The Connection Between Astronomy, Power and Architecture Key Issues and Examples Orientation of Temples Orientation of Tombs Urban Layouts Single-Case Hierophanies Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading Relevant Websites
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Brief introduction to the discipline Relevant examples of applications State of the art and perspectives
Abstract Archaeoastronomy is “the science of stars and stones”: its aim is to investigate the existence and meaning of relationships between ancient architecture and the heavens. Archaeoastronomy is an inter-disciplinary science because both technical knowledge and a solid archaeological background are needed to obtain valid results. This entry briefly describes the basics of the discipline with some examples of its applications (temples, tombs, urban layouts). A few, especially relevant, single cases are also discussed. Problems and perspectives of the discipline are briefly addressed.
Introduction Archaeoastronomy is “the science of stars and stones”: its aim is to investigate the existence and meaning of relationships between ancient architecture and the heavens. Already from the definition above, the prominent inter-disciplinary nature of such a science is apparent. In fact, to investigate the connections of ancient monuments with the celestial cycles means searching for astronomical alignments: axes or other elements of the original architectural projects which point (or pointed) to specific, recurring astronomical events, such as the rising or the setting of the Sun or of other stars. To carry out research in Archaeoastronomy, a series of scientific tools are needed, including high precision relief, computer reconstruction of the sky in ancient times and statistical analysis of data. However, proving the mere existence of astronomical alignments is only one-half of the story. Indeed, the intentionality of such alignmentsdthe “meaning”dhas yet to be proved, and in this realm the contribution of Archaeology is equally important. In rare cases, direct historical (or ethnohistorical) sources are also available, but far more common is the need for an indirect reckoning, based on what is known about the religion and the management of power in an ancient society, which is seen “in action” in the archaeological record. If used with due caution, the archaeo-astronomical analysis of a site can lead to new information about cognitive processes lying behind the motivations and the planning of ancient architectural projects, thus increasing our understanding of the “cosmovision” of their builders.
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Overview Measuring Orientations: The Basics In this section a very brief account of the measures and the procedures which are needed for Archaeoastronomy analysis is given. This section is meant only to give a general idea of archaeo-astronomical fieldwork to the unexperienced reader. The measures which are needed are azimuths and horizon heights. The azimuth is the angle between the geographical northsouth line and the direction of interest (for instance, the axis of a temple) counting positively from north to east (in other words, clockwise). The horizon height or altitude is the angle measured by the observer on the vertical of the point where the direction of interest meets the horizon, up to the point where the horizon becomes free (for instance, the top of a hill). Knowing these two coordinates, one can calculate a third quantity, the declination. Declinations are the circles in the sky where celestial bodies are seen to move, the analog on the celestial sphere of the latitudes on Earth. A rough information on azimuths and altitudes can be obtained using a magnetic compass (with data corrected for magnetic declination) combined with a clinometer. If used with due caution, these instruments can be adequate if there is a large number of monuments to be measured and/or the accuracy achieved by the original builders is not expected to be high (e.g., megalithic tombs). However, much more accurate measuresdwith total station, or differential GPSdare needed if the builders were themselves reaching a high accuracy, such as, for instance, the Egyptians of the 4th dynasty (see The Orientation of Tombs section below). The second step in the analysis of a site consists in studying if the directions of interest correspond to relevant positions of celestial bodies at the time of construction. To do this, a planetarium software is needed, also because the declinations of the celestial bodies in the past were different from today: the extreme declinations of the Sun and the Moon are (lightly) affected by the slow variation of the Earth’s axis angle with respect to the Ecliptic, while the declinations of the stars are affected by the precession of the Earth axis. The third step usually needed is a statistical analysis of the data, to identify possible trends of willing orientation. As occurs in any science, also in Archaeoastronomy negative results can occur. In other words, one can reach the conclusion that the builders of an ensemble of monuments were not interested in connecting them to the celestial cycles (for instance, the royal tombs at Mycenae can be shown to be orientated along the lines of maximal slope of the citadel’s hill).
Interpreting Orientations: The Connection Between Astronomy, Power and Architecture If the analysis of the data produces alignments which appear to be significant, it remains to show that these were so for the builders. It is here that the archaeological context becomes fundamental: as a matter of fact, the vast majority of the “fringe”dif not just crazydtheories dispatching themselves for Archaeoastronomy on the web and in the media usually lack a solid archaeological background. The key to understand why architecture and sky were connected in so many ancient cultures is to understand first the connection between astronomy and power. The latter arises from the fact that human beings need to frame their existence into a “cosmovision”: a worldview composed by notions, social structures, and religious beliefs. It is fundamental for any worldview to put order in space trough the identification of a reference systemdtypically based on the four cardinal directions and a centerdand to “regulate” the flow of time through a calendar. Astronomy is thus fundamental to give order to space and to identify a suitable way to measure time. In turn, the “cosmic order” so obtained is connected to temporal power through a mechanism which can be different in different cultures but is always based on the idea of the ruler being the keeper of the relationship between humans and divine. Many examples could be cited here, but just to mention a few: in Egypt, the Pharaoh was himself a living God; in China, the Emperor was the owner of the mandate of heaven; in Japan, the royal house was directly descending from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, and the appearance of a starda comet actuallydwas used by Augustus to declare the divinity of his (adoptive) father Caesar and consequently, of himself. Thus, cosmic order and temporal power are linked together and to the sky. The last piece of the puzzle is the need for establishing cultural memory, to assure the stability of the worldview and therefore the transmission of power. To establish cultural memory requires the construction of monumental, perennial architecture which, due to the connection between religion, power, and nature, came to incorporate symbolic references to the sky. These references were (and in some cases can still be) enjoyed “in action” through events that carry a high level of emotional participation: the explicit manifestations of the divine, called hierophanies. Consider, for example, a temple aligned with the rising sun. On the correct dates, chosen for religious reasons, the sunlight will penetrate an otherwise dark corridor, illuminating the God’s statue and renewing a sacred appointment fixed by the architect at the moment of planning.
Key Issues and Examples It would be out of question to make here a detailed list of the archaeological sites where astronomical alignments play a relevant role (the discussion of a large number of them can be found in the entries of a specialized handbook (Ruggles, 2015)). In particular, I will not enter into details about buildings aligned to the Moon and to Venus, as their discussion would be too technical; convincing cases of such alignments are, for instance, Chimney Rock for the Moon (Malville et al., 1991) and the Governor’s Palace
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at Uxmal for Venus (Sprajc, 1993). I will, however, briefly discussdwith some examples eachda collection of relevant fields of application, which may help the reader to frame Archaeoastronomy in the correct perspective.
Orientation of Temples Temples are a realm of ancient architecture in which Archaeoastronomy plays in many cases a relevant role. For instance, the axes of many Egyptian temples (like Abu Simbel) were oriented in such a way to illuminate the statues of the Gods at dawn in suitably chosen days (Krupp, 1988; Belmonte and Shaltout, 2005). Another clear-cut case of solar alignment of temples is that of the Greek temples of Sicily. As a matter of fact, the majority of all the Greek temples are orientated toward sunrise (Boutsikas, 2009). However, it is in Sicily that this becomes striking, as 38 of 42 temples face the narrow (less than 1/6 of a circle) arc of the horizon where the sun rises. This is the indubitable result of a willing intention of the builders. As far as the specific meaning of each orientation (and perhaps of the corresponding, specific days) is concerned, the problem is still far from having been solved for several reasons, including the difficulties in attributing many of the temples to a specific deity in a secure way (Aveni and Romano, 2000; Salt, 2009) (Fig. 1). A second crystal-clear case of astronomical orientation is that of the Khmer state temples of Angkor. The Khmer empire flourished between the eighth and the 14th centuries AD. The heartland of the empire was in the vast Cambodian lowlands, where the Khmer kings developed monumental temple architecture as a means for the explicit representation of their power. As a consequence, a series of masterpieces were constructed which, with only two exceptions, are concentrated in the environs of today’s Siem Reap. The Khmer state temples are vast rectangular enclosures with a central unit and several auxiliary buildings and shrines. The aim of such architectural ensembles, whose design in many cases also included the construction of huge barays (water reservoirs), was quite complex, since they functioned as royal residences as well as cult centers attesting the beliefs and religiosity of the kings (either Buddhist or Hinduist) and their divine rights to rule. The characteristic layout of these temples, including the world-famous Angkor Wat, resembles a “pyramid mountain” surrounded by a moat, and alludes to the cosmological setting of Mount Meru and the surrounding Sea of Milk. Thus, the temples reflect concepts related to the foundation of power and to the cosmic order and, not surprisingly, are oriented cardinally: 31 out of 32 have entrance axes lying within an interval as small as four degrees, between 88 degrees and 91 degrees. Furthermore, it is unlikely that even these slight deviations are due to errors of the builders, but rather, they combine with the height of the central tower and the steep trajectory of the sun at tropical latitudes to create spectacular “sun crowning” equinoctial effects when seen from the front main entrances (Stencel et al., 1976; Magli, 2017) (Fig. 2).
Fig. 1 Akragas (Agrigento, Sicily), Spring Equinox. The Sun rises in alignment with the axis of the Concordia Temple as viewed from the inner cella. Courtesy Andrea Orlando.
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Angkor Wat (Cambodia) Spring Equinox. The Sun rises in alignment with the main axis, “crowning” the central tower. Courtesy Giulio Magli.
Orientation of Tombs The sky plays a relevant role in the orientation of tombs among many ancient cultures. A striking example are the tombs of the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, that is, the pyramids, and in particular those of the 4th dynasty (2600–2450 BC). During the 4th dynasty, six royal pyramids were completed (Meidum, Snefru’s Bent and Red, Khufu, Khafra, Menkaura). The side bases of all these monuments are parallel to the cardinal directions with an astonishing accuracy, the largest error being of 20’ that is, 1/3 of a single degree. This poses two problems: how they did this and why. Both problems have reasonable answers, and the two answers sustain each other: in other words, the technical analysis and the historical/archaeological analysis plainly converge, a quite desirable fact in Archaeoastronomy. The solution to both problems must be searched in those stars the Egyptians called imperishable. These are easily identified as the stars that are so close to the north celestial pole that they do not rise or set and are therefore visible during the whole night each night of the year. Due to the precession of the Earth axis, the north celestial pole during the 4th dynasty was in the constellation Draco, not far from a star of this constellation called Thuban (today, it is close to Polaris, of course). Thus, the imperishable were essentially the stars of Draco and of the two constellations we call Ursa Major (the Big Dipper, that the Egyptians depicted as a bull foreleg) and Ursa Minor. Many passages of the Pyramid Texts (inscribed on the walls of the funerary chambers from the end of the 5th dynasty) attribute to the deceased pharaoh a seat in the sky precisely in these constellations. Furthermore, the Egyptians had a way of representing the two Ursae as two celestial adzes. Objects shaped as these adzes are frequent in the depictions of the ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth, a ritual symbolically aimed to re-allow the deceased pharaoh to breath and see. The imperishable stars were thus a very important destination in the afterlife of the king, and the very same stars were used for the orientation of the pyramids’ side bases. Indeed, despite persistent claims, it is impossible to achieve the astonishing accuracy of the ancient Egyptians using the shadows of the sun, and by far the most likely candidate for the orientation method used by the Egyptian surveyors is the so-called simultaneous transit. This consists of observingdwith the naked eye of course, but with the help of a fork-like instrumentdtwo circumpolar stars. The surveyors kept track of their relative positions and identified north as the direction on the ground corresponding to the segment joining the two stars when it is perpendicular to the horizon (Spence, 2000; Belmonte, 2001). As a final confirmation of the relevance of these stars, the two small channels located in the north wall of the two main chambers of the Khufu pyramid pointed (at the time of their construction) to imperishable stars as well. Another clear example of astronomical orientation of tombs are the Neolithic dolmens of western and southern Europe. These tombs have a well-defined axis, the direction of their access corridor. Their orientations are clearly not random and concentrated in the part of the horizon where the sun is seen to rise. Of course, the fact that the builders conformed to such an orientation custom does not necessarily mean that their motivation was in the skydfor instance, tombs in a specific area can be topographically oriented to a relevant feature on the horizon. However, this can hardly occur if the monuments are scattered in a wide area and not intervisible. A particularly clear-cut case in this context is that of the dolmens (“seven-stone antas”) of the Alentejo region. These are quite peculiar megalithic monuments, in which the sides of the corridor are made of three stones each, leaning in sequence up to the backstone. Of these monuments, 177 out of 177 face the range of the eastern horizon where the sun is seen to rise two days of the year (Hoskin, 2001).
Urban Layouts Human beings need to found space to inhabit it (Eliade, 1959). This led to the presence of “cosmic” references in the planning of settlements and towns in many cultures around the world.
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One very well-known example of town foundation ritual is, of course, the Roman one (Rykwert, 1999). The foundation of a Roman town (and consequently, its layout) was a sacred act described in detail by many ancient sources. The layout was based on two main orthogonal axes; the choice of the direction of one of the axes (the second being obliged by orthogonality) was in some cases governed by local topography, but in several others was related to symbolic reasons and governed by astronomy. This is especially clear for the towns founded in Augustus’ times, since celestial matters played a prominent role in the foundation of the power of the first Roman emperor. First, as already mentioned, a comet appeared on the occasion of the games that Augustus was celebrating in honor of Caesar. Augustus could thus claim that Caesar had been accepted among the Gods and awoke to himself the epithet of son of a God, intermediary with the gods and keeper of the cosmic order. The celestial omen of the comet was also taken to symbolize the beginning of a new “golden” age (Zanker, 1990), celebrated with the huge architectural projects of Campus Martius in Rome and touted through another powerful celestial icon, the zodiacal sign Capricorn. The reasons for this choice relate to the symbolic value of the Capricorn as the sign of the winter solstice, which in countless cultures was associated to rebirth. These celestial associations also influenced the planning of newly founded towns. Cities founded under Augustus indeed show a definite pattern of astronomical orientation (as opposed to topographical) and a marked preference for the Winter Solstice sunrise, as for instance occurs at Augusta Pretoria Salassorum (today’s Aosta) (Bertarione and Magli, 2015; Gonzalez-Garcia et al., 2019) (Fig. 3). Another example of settlements where a pattern of orientation is well established is to be found in Meso-America, and in particular, among the Mayas. In a seminal paper, Aveni and Hartung (1986) first noticed a clear tendency of ceremonial centers to be orientated along a main direction “south-north” (quotation marks are here mandatory) skewed some 10–20 degrees to the east of north. Consequently, temples and ceremonial buildings (which are mostly orientated orthogonally to the main direction) usually exhibit orientations 10–20 degrees south of east/north of west. Since then, several debates occurred whether this general tendency to a coherent orientation can be extended up to the assertion that Maya cities were true “cosmograms” ordmore simplydreflected some general principles of cosmic order. Of course, it is out of question to pursue this debate here, what is important is that Archaeoastronomy offers definitive proof of the astronomical origin of this general pattern and a likely interpretation of it as well. As a specific example, we consider the Maya lowlands. Here the distribution of eastward azimuths presents a clear concentration close to sunrises in (Gregorian) dates in February and October, so that most of the sunset dates fall in April and August (similar results are obtained when declinations are considered). This concentration of dates in four periods can be related to the steps of the maize cultivation cycle. Furthermore, orientations tend to mark dates separated by multiples of 13 and 20 days, the basic periods of the 260-days Mesoamerican calendrical system. A clear maximum corresponds to February 12 and October 30, which are separated by 260 (13 20) days (Gonzalez-Garcia and Sprajc, 2016).
Fig. 3
Aosta (Italy) Winter solstice. The Sun rises in alignment with the axis of the Roman town. Courtesy Paolo Pellissier.
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Single-Case Hierophanies There exist in ancient architecture some projects whose scale is both unprecedented and unequaled, and whose astronomical connections are impressive but unprecedented as well. Such projects are unique under many respects and as such must be studied. In other words, it would be unworthy to dismiss their archaeo-astronomical interpretation a priori because the observed phenomena occur in single-cases although, of course, the outmost care and caution must be applied in the (virtual) absence of terms of comparison and therefore, of statistics. A first example is the prehistoric solar observatory and ceremonial center at Chankillo (Casma Valley, Peru) which has been recently inscribed on the World Heritage List. Here a unique feature composed by a line of thirteen cuboidal towers stretching along the ridge of a hill was used, by observing from well-defined observation points, the sun rising/setting between the towers, to accurately determine dates throughout the year (Ghezzi and Ruggles, 2007). More than 1500 years later, the Incas will use the very same method to determine important ritual/agricultural dates by observing the Sun framed between pillars built on the horizon (Bauer, 1998; Aveni, 2001; Zawaski and Malville, 2010) (Fig. 4). Another clear-cut example of unique monument where astronomy plays a fundamental role in the project is the Hadrian’s Pantheon in Rome. It stands over the foundations of the temple originally built under Augustus’ rule, which had been destroyed by fire; Hadrian’s architects completed the reconstruction in AD 128. The building consists of a rectangular portico, with three lines of granite columns, fronting a circular building. The latter is a huge hemispherical dome (43.3 m in diameter), built over a cylinder which has the same diameter and is as high as the radius. The top of the dome opens up in the oculus, a circular hole which is the only source of direct sunlight, owing to the northward orientation of the entrance, which points 5 300 west of north. The specific function of this magnificent building has not been passed on by contemporary sources, although its sacred value is apparent. One thing, however, is certain: on each sunny day, the attention of the visitors is attracted by the shaft of sunlight entering from the oculus that penetrates the gloom. Since the entrance opens to the north, the shaft of sunlight at local noon (that is, when the Sun culminates in the south) is always located on a line which passes over the entrance. At the autumn equinox, the spot of sunlight touches the interior springing of the upper hemisphere. Then the spot moves up to its maximum height in the roof over the entrance, reached at winter solstice. Thereafter, it starts moving down, again brushing the base of the dome at the spring equinox. In the subsequent days, the sun culminates progressively higher, and so the beam moves further down, illuminating the grill over the entrance, and finally the entire opening, which is fully lit around 21 April, creating a spectacular hierophany (after that day, the beam starts moving across the floor toward the center of the building, only to “turn back” and retrace its steps after the summer solstice). How can we be confident that such a unique phenomenon is intentional? As already mentioned, the Roman emperors promoted an association of their power with the sky. There are passages from Latin authors (Virgil, Manilius, and others) which suggest that a particular point of cosmic balancedidentified with the equinoxdwas understood to be assigned to the emperor in the heavens. The month of April in turn was traditionally devoted to Venus, the goddess from whom the Caesar family Gens Julia claimed direct lineage, and the 21st of April is the traditional date of the foundation of Rome. Therefore, the symbolic action of the sun in the Pantheon on this day is “to put Rome among the Gods” creating a hierophany which acts as a symbolic link between the people and the gods, as well as an impressive confirmation of the emperor’s power (Hannah and Magli, 2011) (Fig. 5). The final one-shot case which will be discussed here is the “Akhet” hierophany occurring on the Giza plateau, Egypt. This is a spectacular phenomenon visible from the temple area in front of the Sphinx. Every day, from this area, the Sun is seen to set behind the artificial horizon formed by the pyramids of Giza. However, every day the sun sets of course in a different position. As we approach the summer solstice, the setting sun “moves” from the pyramid of Khafra to that of Khufu. The northernmost setting point is in the middle between the two giant monuments, so that our star is seen setting between the two in the days around the
Fig. 4
Chankillo, Peru. The winter solstice sunrise. Courtesy Ivan Ghezzi.
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Pantheon (Rome) April, 21. The sun hits the entrance at local noon. Courtesy Giulio Magli.
summer solstice (Lehner, 1985) (actually, the change in declination of the sun in the days near the solstice is so small that all solstitial phenomena like this one are observable for a few days before and after as well). The Sun then, together with the two enormous artificial mountains, forms an image which happens to be a spectacular replica of a hieroglyph. This hieroglyph, called Akhet, represents the sun setting (or rising) between paired, symbolic mountains and was associated with afterlife. Indeed, in the pyramid texts Akhet is a place where the dead are transformed, preparing themselves for the after world. As part of the sky, it was also the place in which the sun, and hence the king, was destined to be reborn. Finally, the choice of the summer solstice for the date clearly was not coincidental, since it heralded the flooding of the Nile. The interpretation of the phenomenon in cultural terms is completed by the very name of the pyramid of Khufu, which is known from many ancient sources, and was “The Akhet of Khufu”. Thus, this hierophany also reflects a structural analogy between language and cosmos, which is typical of the ancient Egyptian way of thinking (Assmann, 2011; Magli, 2016) (Fig. 6). Archaeoastronomy started with pioneering works written at the end of the 19th century (Nissen, 1869; Lockyer, 1893; Penrose, 1897). Since then, it took a long pause up to the revolutionary (and controversial) works by Hawkins (1964) on Stonehenge and Alexander Thom on megalithic sites of Britain and Brittany (Thom, 1967). There were many problems with these works, including exasperate claims for ancient accuracy and approximate knowledge of the archaeological background (Ruggles, 1984). Since then, however, Archaeoastronomy has evolved into a solid status. In a nutshell, robust results in Archaeoastronomy are usually based on a statistically significant number of alignments, framed into a coherent and compatible set of archaeological and, whenever possible, historical information (in “single-shot” cases, this last set must be particularly solid). In all cases, assertions must be backed up by cultural interpretation in terms of calendrics, religion, and/or political ideology (Iwaniszewski, 1989; Ruggles, 2011). Despite its internal consistency, resistance exists among a few archaeologists to accept Archaeoastronomy as a relevant tool in understanding the ancient minds. In many cases, it is easy to understand why: the reason relies in the tremendous amount of “fringe” theories, which have an impressive impact on the public. Such theories produce a noisy background thatdcomprehensivelyddoes not help the diffusion of a correct approach to this discipline. On the other hand, increasing the awareness of Archaeoastronomy (as of any science) is not easy. Improvements may come from an increase of the background
Fig. 6
Giza (Egypt). Summer solstice sunset from the Sphinx area. Courtesy Giulio Magli.
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knowledge of the public, as a recently developed, stable and free online course aims to do (see list of websites). In turn archaeologists should be trained at least in the basics of Archaeoastronomy “best practice”, so that they can recognize (or exclude) the possible presence of astronomy in the sites under study.
Summary and Future Directions To conclude, the study of astronomical alignments plays a relevant role in the cognitive analysis of several archaeological sites. However, this does not exhaust the potential of Archaeoastronomy. Indeed, the approach of this discipline can be useful in understanding sacred landscapes also when the sky, the natural features, and the human-built features combine in complex scenarios in which celestial references are only one component. For instance, the approach of Archaeoastronomy is to be used whenever alignments exist for symbolic reasons, independently of whether they have an astronomical character or not. Examples are “dynastic” alignments between chronologically subsequent monuments in Egypt (Lehner, 1985; Jeffreys, 1998) or topographical alignments toward key features of the landscape as occurs, for instance, in Chinese “feng-shui planned” necropolises (Magli, 2019). Another field in which Archaeoastronomy can play a relevant role is that of preservation and fruition of cultural heritage. A striking and intrinsic feature of Archaeoastronomy is indeed the possibility of rediscovering spectacular appointments with the Sun (or the Moon) which were fixed in ancient times and successively forgotten. This may culturally enhance the site in question and is potentially very important for the dissemination of Archaeoastronomy itself among the public. Moreover, and more generally speaking, it may play a relevant role in conservation and promotion. In this respect, an important initiative connecting Archaeoastronomy with conservation and fruition is that linking Archaeoastronomical Heritage with the UNESCO World Heritage Convention (Cotte and Ruggles, 2010) which has recently led to inscription of two sites for their archaeo-astronomical value, Risco Caido (Gran Canaria, Spain) and the already mentioned Peruvian site of Chankillo. To conclude, it should also be noted that Archaeoastronomy can be seen in action in contemporary architecture. One example is the memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks built in front of the Baltimore World Trade Center. The memorial, which is made of three original steel beams from the destroyed WTC north tower, is constructed on top of marble blocks bearing the names and birthdates of the 68 Marylanders who died in the attacks. The position of the plinth has been designed in such a way that, on September 11, the shadow of the huge skyscraper moves across it like a sundial, progressively highlighting the inscriptions that commemorate those tragic events. The choice of such an ancient and emotive way of linking architecture with the Heavens gives a deep impression of respect for the dead, reminding us at the same time what our ancestors were able to achieve using simple technologies, combined with a deep knowledge of the natural cycles.
See Also: Archaeological Science; Archaeology of Cult and Religion.
References Assmann, Jan, 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Aveni, Antony, 2001. Skywatchers: A Revised and Updated Version of Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico. University of Texas Press, Austin. Aveni, Antony, Hartung, Horst, 1986. Maya city planning and the calendar. Trans. Am. Phil. Soc. 76, 1–79. Aveni, Antony, Romano, Giuliano, 2000. Temple orientation in Magna Grecia and Sicily. J. Hist. Astron. 31, 52–57. Bauer, Brien, 1998. The Sacred Landscape of the Inca: The Cusco Ceque System. University of Texas Press, Austin. Belmonte, Juan Antonio, 2001. On the orientation of old kingdom Egyptian pyramids. Archaeoastronomy 26, S1. Belmonte, Juan Antonio, Shaltout, Moshalam, 2005. On the orientation of ancient Egyptian temples: (1) upper Egypt and lower Nubia. J. Hist. Astron. 36, 273–298. Bertarione, Stella, Magli, Giulio, 2015. Augustus’ power from the stars and the foundation of Augusta Praetoria Salassorum. Camb. Archaeol. J. 25, 1–15. Boutsikas, Efrosyni, 2009. Placing Greek temples: an archaeoastronomical study of the orientation of ancient Greek religious structures. Archaeoastronomy 21, 4–19. Cotte, Michael, Ruggles, Clive, 2010. Astronomical heritage in the context of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention: developing a professional and rational approach. In: Ruggles, Clive, Cotte, Michael (Eds.), Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the Context of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention: A Thematic Study. ICOMOS– IAU, Paris, pp. 261–273. Eliade, Mercia, 1959. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt, London. Ghezzi, Ivan, Ruggles, Clive, 2007. Chankillo: a 2300-year-old solar observatory in Coastal Peru. Science 315 (5816), 1239–1243. González-García, Cesar, Sprajc, Ivan, 2016. Astronomical significance of architectural orientations in the Maya Lowlands: a statistical approach. J. Archaeol. Sci. 9, 191–202. González-García, Cesar, Rodríguez-Antón, Andrea, Espinosa-Espinosa, David, García Quintela, Marco, Belmonte, Juan Antonio, 2019. Establishing a new order: the orientation of Roman towns built in the age of Augustus. In: Magli, Giulio, González-García, Cesar, Belmonte, Juan Antonio, Antonello, Elio (Eds.), Archaeoastronomy in the Roman World. Historical & Cultural Astronomy. Springer, Cham, pp. 3–6. Hannah, Robert, Magli, Giulio, 2011. The role of the sun in the Pantheon design and meaning. Numen 58, 486–513. Hawkins, Gerald, 1964. Stonehenge Decoded. Doubleday, New York. Hoskin, Michael, 2001. Tombs, Temples and Their Orientations. Ocarina books, Bognoor regis. Iwaniszewski, Stanislaw, 1989. Exploring some anthropological theoretical foundations for archaeoastronomy. In: Antony, Aveni (Ed.), World Archaeoastronomy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 27–37. Jeffreys, Dietrich, 1998. The topography of Heliopolis and Memphis: some cognitive aspects. In: Guksch, Heike, Polz, Daniel (Eds.), Stationen: Beitrage zur Kulturgeschichte Agyptens. Rainer Stadelmann Gewimdet. von Zabern, Mainz, pp. 63–71. Krupp, Edwin, 1988. The light in the temples. In: Ruggles, Clive (Ed.), Records in Stone: Papers in Memory of Alexander Thom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 473–500.
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Lehner, Mark, 1985. A contextual approach to the Giza pyramids. Arch. Orientforsch. 31, 136–158. Lockyer, Norman, 1893. The Dawn of Astronomy: A Study of the Temple-Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians. Macmillan and Company, Troon, Ayrshire. Magli, Giulio, 2016. The Giza “written” landscape and the double project of King Khufu. Time Mind 9 (1), 57–74. Magli, Giulio, 2017. Archaeoastronomy in the Khmer heartland. Stud. Digit. Herit. 1 (1), 1–17. Magli, Giulio, 2019. Astronomy and Feng Shui in the projects of the Tang, Ming and Qing royal mausoleums: a satellite imagery approach. J. Archaeol. Res. Asia 17, 98–108. Malville, John Mckim, Eddy, Frank, Ambruster, Carol, 1991. Lunar standstills at Chimney rock. J. Hist. Astron. 22 (16), S43–S50. Nissen, Heinrich, 1869. Das templum: antiquarische untersuchungen. Weidmann. Penrose, Francis Cranmer, 1897. On the orientation of Greek temples and the dates of their foundation derived from Astronomical considerations, being a supplement to a paper published in the “Transactions of the Royal Society,” in 1893. Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. 61 (369–377), 76–78. Ruggles, Clive, 1984. Megalithic Astronomy: A New Archaeological and Statistical Study of 300 Western Scottish Sites. BAR British Series, vol. 123. British Archaeological reports, Oxford. Ruggles, Clive, 2011. Pushing back the frontiers or still running around the same circles? Interpretative archaeoastronomy thirty years on. Proc. Int. Astron. Union 7 (S278), 1–18. Ruggles, Clive (Ed.), 2015. Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Springer-Verlag, New York. Rykwert, Joseph, 1999. The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World. MIT Press, Cambridge. Salt, Alun, 2009. The astronomical orientation of ancient Greek temples. PLoS One 4 (11), e7903. Spence, Kate, 2000. Ancient Egyptian chronology and the astronomical orientation of pyramids. Nature 408, 320. Sprajc, Ivan, 1993. Venus orientations in ancient Mesoamerican architecture. In: Ruggles, Clive (Ed.), Archaeoastronomy in the 1990s. Group D Publications, Loughborough, pp. 270–277. Stencel, Robert, Gifford, Fred, Morón, Eleanor, 1976. Astronomy and cosmology at Angkor Wat. Science 193 (4250), 281–287. Thom, Alexander, 1967. Megalithic Sites in Britain. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Zanker, Paul, 1990. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Zawaski, Michael, Malville, John Mckim, 2010. An archaeoastronomical survey of major Inca sites in Peru. Archaeoastron. J. Astron. Cult. 10, 20–38.
Further Reading Aveni, Anthony F., 2001. Skywatchers: A Revised and Updated Version of Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. Krupp, Edwin, 1997. Skywatchers, Shamans, and Kings. Wiley, New York. Magli, Giulio, 2013. Architecture, Astronomy and Sacred Landscape in Ancient Egypt. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Magli, Giulio, 2020. Archaeoastronomy: Introduction to the Science of Stars and Stones. Springer Nature, New York. Ruggles, Clive L., 1999. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland. Yale University Press, New Haven. Ruggles, Clive L., 2005. Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopedia of Cosmologies and Myth. Abc-Clio, Santa Barbara, CA.
Relevant Websites Online Archaeoastronomy Course. https://www.coursera.org/learn/archaeoastronomy. Portal for Astronomical Heritage. https://www3.astronomicalheritage.net/.
Archaeological Science Thilo Rehren and Efthymia Nikita, Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Spatial Analysis and Sedimentology Environmental Archaeology Archaeobotany Zooarchaeology Geoarchaeology Human Osteoarchaeology Archaeological Materials Science Lithics and Other Stones Plaster and Mortar Ceramics Metals and Alloys Glass and Glazes Absolute Dating Methods Key Issues Provenance Determination Data Integration, Discipline Formation, and Canonization of Practices Data Sharing and Compatibility Archaeological Science and Archaeological Theory Sample Archives and Preservation Geographic and Financial Inequality, Export Issues and Brain Drain Summary and Future Directions One Science Opportunity Sharing Data Integration, Data Mining, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence References Further Reading
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Key Points
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Archaeological science encompasses methods from the natural and life sciences and engineering in the study of the human past Archaeological science makes important contributions to archaeology, complementing traditional sources of information, such as historical evidence and archaeological typological analyses The relationship between sciences and archaeology is increasingly synergistic and productive Specific challenges exist for a wider application of archaeological science, as well as for its academic development
Abstract Archaeological science consists of the application of methods from the natural sciences and engineering to the study of the human past. It covers the study of human and animal remains, plants, archaeological materials and sediments, and explores research questions pertaining to human-environment interactions, subsistence practices, palaeoenvironmental conditions, craftsmanship, provenance determination as a proxy for movement and mobility, and many others. It also includes physical dating methods, as well as remote sensing and geophysical prospection methods that locate and identify archaeological remains. As such, it offers a wide range of independent information and testable data complementing other lines of enquiry.
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Introduction Archaeological science, also referred to as Archaeometry or Science-Based Archaeology, is the study of the human past using methods and concepts from the natural and life sciences, and engineering. The distinction between archaeology and archaeological science is fluid; few people would call the use of stratigraphic recording in archaeology archaeological science, even though the concept of stratigraphy is borrowed from the Earth sciences. Thus, only the more distinct examples of the application of natural sciences and engineering approaches are commonly understood to comprise archaeological science. The defining parameter setting archaeological science applications apart from modern science is that their main purpose is to study the lives of past people and their interaction with the environment. Thus, archaeological science covers the study of human and animal remains, plants, archaeological materials and sediments, and explores diverse research questions pertaining to human-environment interactions, subsistence practices, palaeoenvironmental conditions, craftsmanship, provenance determination as a proxy for movement and mobility, and many others. Important contributions also include the study of the design and use of structures, engines and machines in the wider sense, such as kilns and furnaces, large-scale irrigation systems, quarries and mines, monumental or defensive architecture, and ship building, to mention just a few. This often includes an element of reverse engineering, for instance when reconstructing the design, construction and operation of a metallurgical furnace from the surviving waste products and remains. Archaeological science traditionally includes also quantitative physical approaches to what has survived from the past; this includes physical dating methods such as 14C dating, but also remote sensing and geophysical prospection methods that locate and identify archaeological remains. The latter can range from the single coin found by a metal detectorist up to the landscape-level mapping of whole cities and agricultural installations using airborne and satellite-based detection of magnetic or other human-influenced signals in the environment. Closely related to archaeological science, one can distinguish two different focus areas, which still maintain a high degree of common ground with it. The recently emerging field of “heritage science” is more concerned with the documentation of the current state of monuments and artifacts and their use in the present, and seems historically more related to archaeometry with its focus on inorganic materials and instrumental method development and optimization (Bastidas and Cano, 2018). In contrast, “conservation science” is focusing on the study of the mechanisms that lead to deterioration over time, and how to slow down or even reverse these processes (Garside and Richardson, 2021). For both, there is a significant overlap to archaeological science in the stricter sense of focusing on the human experience in the past, since both heritage and conservation science necessarily include the study of manufacturing and past use of monuments and artifacts. Archaeological science can appear epistemologically relatively strong in its belief in “objective” and “indisputable” data; however, the step from measured and documented data to the archaeologically relevant interpretation is still subject to the same plethora of different theoretical frameworks and prior beliefs that characterize all archaeological research. A most significant contribution of archaeological science lies in the massive broadening and deepening of the type of data that is available relating to the past human experience, by providing independent lines of evidence far beyond the classical sources of archaeological enquiry. It is therefore not surprising that archaeological science is particularly strong in prehistoric research frameworks and outside monumental settings. However, research where science-based evidence is providing complementary information to historical or iconographic sources and well-established archaeological prior knowledge is a rapidly growing arena where archaeological science can arguably make its greatest contributions still to come. Archaeological science contributes well beyond the characterization of physical remains of the past. Complementing the insights gained from written and iconographic sources into the thinking of past people, archaeological science is also a major source of information regarding the reconstruction of intangible cultural heritage. Archaeobotany and zooarchaeology, for instance, contribute fundamentally to our understanding of social practices, rituals and festive events; archaeological materials science informs us about past knowledge and practices concerning the natural environment, and about traditional craftsmanship – thus addressing three of the five main manifestations of intangible cultural heritage listed in the UNESCO Convention for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention). A common example how archaeological science contributes to this is the use of the chaîne opératoire framework to reconstruct social and practical processes that are not or not in detail covered by other sources. Importantly, archaeological science allows to cover these aspects for the vast majority of people and activities that are not in the very limited focus of textual and iconographic sources.
Overview The essence of archaeological science lies in collecting and documenting data that is reproducible and testable using science-based methods. As such, it is both independent of and complementary to information from other sources about the past, such as historical texts, accumulated archaeological scholarship, ethnoarchaeology, linguistics, theology, philosophy etc. Today’s practice of archaeological science follows closely the disciplinary structures of the established science and engineering fields, from where it draws both methods and personnel. While this is convenient in terms of disciplinary classifications, it is a-historical and potentially misleading since this modern classification of knowledge systems does not reflect the way ancient populations may have perceived their environments and activities. A unique strength of archaeological science in the study of the human past is the much wider range of past population members it can include, whether directly or indirectly. Studying skeletal remains provides information even where no grave goods are present,
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opening up views on non-elite populations or those from cultures that did not favor grave goods. The study of primary production processes, whether of food, cloths, or worked natural and artificial materials and artifacts, provides insight into skills levels, traditions and preferences of common populations and specialist craftspeople, revealing their intangible heritage at levels of detail and spatial and temporal coverage unparalleled by any information provided by historical sources. Researcher and funder bias may still favor the study of elite contexts, populations, and artifacts, but the potential of archaeological science to represent and give voice to otherwise undocumented populations provides unparalleled research opportunities. The following brief listing of the major sub-disciplines within archaeological science serves only as an overview; most have dedicated entries within this encyclopedia with in-depth presentations.
Spatial Analysis and Sedimentology Humans affect the natural environment in a myriad of ways, from leaving burnt spots in soil from the first controlled hearths at some time in the Paleolithic, through woodland clearing, agriculture, settlement building, civil and military engineering works, and waste disposal, to the global effects of contemporary climate change and environmental pollution. Many of these activities leave identifiable traces in soils, both natural and anthropogenic, where they can be recorded and through interpretation linked back to past human activity. The reconstruction of past activities can be performed through the analysis of soils and sediments to reveal information regarding site formation processes and spatial variation (Nicosia and Stoops, 2017), as well as through spatial analysis (field-walking survey, remote-sensing and geophysical survey), which elucidates the patterning of human activities (Gillings et al., 2020).
Environmental Archaeology Environmental archaeology explores past human interactions with the natural world, that is, it covers the study of past plants (archaeobotany), animals (zooarchaeology), and landscapes (geoarchaeology).
Archaeobotany The study of the plants used by past people covers how they satisfied their most fundamental need – food. It additionally sheds light on the use of plants for fuel, medicine, rituals, or as building and craft materials. Indeed, archaeobotanical research has been employed across the world to address questions regarding the origins of plant domestication, the development of agriculture, past environmental conditions, subsistence strategies and diet (Madella et al., 2014). Different strategies, such as gathering wild plants, domesticating wild forms to enhance their utility, selecting some of them over others to meet environmental, climatic, social and economic parameters, leave different traces in the archaeological record. These can be identified most prominently through the study of macro- (e.g. seeds, grains, fruits, tubers) and micro- (phytoliths, starch granules, pollen grains) remains, but they also leave molecular and geochemical traces in the soil through deposition and practices such as manuring that fall more in the remit of geoarchaeological study. Anthracology, the study of charcoal, is traditionally seen as part of archaeobotany, while dendroarchaeology is more often seen as part of physical dating methods.
Zooarchaeology The relationship between humans and animals is an important aspect of past societies, as animals provided food (meat and secondary products), labor, various raw materials, and company, while they also served symbolic functions in certain contexts (Russell, 2011). The study of animal bones and other faunal remains (e.g. shells, scales, hides, proteins and DNA) is based primarily on the archaeologically more resistant remains, whether as waste/discard or as used materials (Gifford-Gonzalez, 2018). Zooarchaeological (or archaeozoological) analysis can help explore past dietary patterns, subsistence practices, the domestication process, ritual practices (e.g. burial of selected animals, types of animals consumed in ceremonial contexts), the spread of zoonotic diseases and other aspects of human-animal interaction.
Geoarchaeology Geoarchaeology examines the formational history of archaeological sites. Upon deposition, archaeological remains are affected by multiple geological processes (e.g. erosion, sediment accumulation). Geoarchaeology identifies these post-depositional processes through the analysis of sediments and the stratigraphy of each site. In examining these processes, geoarchaeology also reconstructs past environmental conditions and the human impact on the landscape (Goldberg et al., 2022).
Human Osteoarchaeology Human osteoarchaeology is the contextual analysis of past human remains, that is, it examines human remains (mostly bones and teeth) within their archaeological and historical context in order to explore past humans as biocultural beings (Martin et al., 2013). The study of past human remains sheds light on different aspects of past living conditions, including health and disease, demography, diet, mobility, biological kinship, physiological and mechanical stress (Nikita, 2017). Such study is used to explore patterns at a group level (e.g. cemetery population or smaller intra-cemetery groupings) and/or to reconstruct the osteobiography of single individuals. Human osteoarchaeology adopts primarily non-destructive macroscopic methods, but the use of microscopic
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(e.g. histological study of taphonomic or pathological alterations), isotopic (stable and radiogenic isotopes for the study of diet and mobility), and molecular (ancient DNA for the study of ancestry or infectious diseases, as well as palaeoproteomics) methods is also very common.
Archaeological Materials Science The study of archaeological materials includes as main groups lithics and other stones; plaster and mortar; ceramics; metals and alloys; glass and glazes; and pigments and dyestuffs. Most of these are directly or indirectly based on geomaterials, which explains the dominance of Earth science, chemistry and related engineering approaches to their study. Among the main research topics in archaeological materials is compositional characterization for classification purposes; this is often done to assign specific finds to pre-defined compositional groups, particularly for provenance determination. A separate research direction concerns the reconstruction of the production history of a specific artifact or more generally a craft or industrial activity, through reverse engineering, often based on waste products rather than the finished artifacts.
Lithics and Other Stones Stones were among the earliest materials humans selected for their use, even before the Paleolithic. The functional diversity of lithics ranges from jewelry and cosmetics to tools, building materials, and aggregate. All have in common their geological origin; some such as sandstone can be very common, while others, such as lapis lazuli, can be restricted to just three or four occurrences worldwide. Mineralogical and geochemical characterization often enables us to narrow down the place of origin, as long as the material has not undergone compositional alterations. Successful provenance determinations include the well-known sourcing of almost all Old World lapis lazuli to the unique occurrence in Badakshan, Afghanistan, which has been exploited continuously since the Early Bronze Age, and the sourcing of the main stones of Stonehenge to their original quarry sites, a topic of research for over a century (Thomas, 1923; Thorpe et al., 1991; Bevins et al., 2022). Other examples concern the provenancing of white marble used for classical sculpture (Herz and Waelkens, 1988; Al-Bashaireh, 2021), or of Roman millstones (Williams-Thorpe and Thorpe, 1988; Gluhak and Hofmeister, 2011). Scientific methods are also widely used to elucidate the use of stone tools, either through the study of use-wear traces, for instance as a result of constant friction on knapped flint sickles (tribology), or through the extraction of archaeobotanical micro-remains such as phytoliths or starches from grinding stones etc.
Plaster and Mortar Among the oldest artificial materials are plaster and mortar, appearing already in the Neolithic period and in some regions predating the use of ceramics. Compositionally, there are three main groups, namely gypsum plaster or plaster of Paris, lime plaster, and hydraulic or pozzolanic cements. All three are based on a chemical reaction that transforms a stable mineral (gypsum: CaSO4*2HO; lime: CaCO3) through the application of heat into a reactive powder which, when mixed with water and allowed to set, transforms back into the original material, but in a new shape. For a number of reasons, the burnt raw material is often mixed with a non-reactive filler or aggregate, often sand or pebbles. In theory, this cycle can be done repeatedly. Pozzolanic or hydraulic cements consist of burnt lime and a suitable reactive siliceous aggregate; when the mixture sets, the lime reacts with the aggregate and forms stable alumosilicate phases that offer additional strength. The distinction between plaster and mortar is more based on their use than the material, with mortar serving as a binding agent in masonry and plaster being more often used for coats and coverings. The scientific study of plasters and mortars aims to identify raw material selection, processing and recipe reconstructions. Much of this research is done using X-Ray Diffraction and chemical analysis, as well as optical microscopy. Lime plaster recombines with atmospheric CO2 when it sets, making it a suitable material for 14C dating; however, the inclusion of residual unburnt lime clasts, or of lime-rich aggregate, can cause complications.
Ceramics Ceramics are probably the most dominant material class in archaeology, and the backbone of much research, both as vessel fragments and building materials such as bricks and tiles. They are made of clay and often intentionally added temper, and are shaped while they are wet and plastic. During firing at temperatures from about 600 C to more than 1200 C the clay minerals transform into a rigid ceramic matrix, providing strength and durability. Instrumental ceramic analysis uses petrographic study of thin sections (Quinn, 2013) and a wide variety of chemical analyses to characterize macroscopically identified fabrics and wares, from X-ray fluorescence to neutron activation analysis, and from atomic absorption spectroscopy to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (Velde and Druc, 1999). The main objectives of these approaches is to define compositional groups, and ultimately link these to production origins, by comparison to finds from kiln sites, and to raw material origin, by comparison to geological maps, clay samples and potential temper sources. Ceramic studies can also reveal the intentional selection of specific clays or tempers from among a range of potential raw materials for specific applications. This sheds light on cultural preferences and traditions, but also gives insight into the potters’ understanding of the properties of different materials and their suitability for various uses, and how to adjust and improve them.
Metals and Alloys The use of metals began with naturally occurring gold, copper and meteoritic iron, which were often worked with the same methods as other rocks and minerals, within a set of Stone Age technologies that included mechanical deformation and heat treatment to
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modify certain properties. Metallurgy as a distinct technology began with the melting and casting of copper and gold, and the chemical transformation of oxide minerals and ores in some sort of hearth or furnace into metal, through smelting (Craddock, 1995). This requires not only the provision of temperatures above c 1100 C, but also the control of redox conditions within the furnace or crucible. The emergence and spread of metallurgy in human history are hotly debated topics, with the earliest firm evidence for smelting in the Balkans and in Iran around 5000 BCE, followed by a millennium-long dispersal across Eurasia. Independent inventions are recognized for Iberia and South America, and discussed also for sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South and South-East Asia. The scientific study of early metallurgy covers several different areas, using approaches from the Earth sciences, engineering, and chemistry (Hauptmann, 2020). The analysis of slags and other waste products focusses on the transformation of ore to metal and the reconstruction of the different processes involved in this (Bachmann, 1982). The analysis of finished objects by microscopic and chemical methods mostly aims to determine their composition and manufacturing history, including alloying practices, surface treatment for decoration and heat treatment to improve the performance of the metal or alloy for functional use. Another major research field within archaeometallurgy is the geological provenance determination of the metals. Early attempts to link distribution maps of objects with trace element analyses to identify regions of origins and potential links to specific ore regions proved only partially successful; since the 1970s, the analysis of lead isotope abundance ratios has evolved into a versatile method for provenancing silver, copper and its alloys, and lead itself. Provenancing iron and steel has been much more elusive, but current research using slag inclusions and unconventional isotope systems, such as osmium, give promising new results. The study of use wear, repair and reuse, and corrosion of artifacts extends archaeometallurgy into the growing field of object biographies.
Glass and Glazes Glass emerged relatively late in human history, around 1600 BCE, and was initially restricted to an area including Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, with evidence for long-distance trade of glass beads as far as Iberia, Scandinavia and China. Early glass served as highly colored material for mostly decorative purposes complementing and substituting for precious stones such as lapis lazuli, agate, turquoize and others. The use of specialist raw materials such as specific plant ash, powdered white quartz pebbles and exotic metal oxides and minerals as colorants restricted its large-scale production, ensuring its status as an elite material. In the Roman period, the use of sand and mineral natron as the main raw materials and the invention of glass blowing promoted the predominantly transparent nature we associate with it today, and facilitated its use as a mass-produced common material (Rehren and Freestone, 2015). Glazes predate glass proper by several millennia; the technological relationship between early glazes and the emergence of glass is still debated. The scientific analysis of glass often focusses on composition and coloration, linked to provenance studies for which the highly mobile nature of glass, such as beads and other jewelry as trade items and grave goods makes it particularly attractive. Recent advances in laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) have revolutionized the analysis of glass, combining virtually non-invasive analysis with extremely high sensitivity for large numbers of trace elements (Dussubieux and Walder, 2022).
Absolute Dating Methods Several physical and chemical dating methods can provide absolute chronologies depending on the materials on which they are applied and the time depth one wishes to capture (Geyh and Schleicher, 1990). Some important dating techniques include radiocarbon dating for organic materials, dendrochronology for dating timber in buildings and other structures such as ships, furniture, etc., and also as a key method for calibrating radiocarbon dates, thermoluminescence dating for inorganic materials, and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) for buried sediments. Moreover, various isotope systems with half-life times longer than 14C, such as K/Ar and uranium series, are used to date Paleolithic events. In most cases it is important to consider what event one is actually dating: the formation of a specific sediment layer, the growth or felling date of a tree, the discard of an object, or its production. The combination of prior archaeological information and physical dates through Bayesian modeling can offer enhanced accuracy, as part of larger dating programs (Bronk Ramsey, 2009).
Key Issues For the last century, archaeological science has made immense contributions to archaeology, with an ever-increasing breadth and depth of information gathering and interpretation. Uniquely positive aspects of the archaeological science approach include the significant widening of the data base in archaeology, to encompass populations and activities that traditionally found less – or no – representation in the archaeological record, or attracted less scholarly attention, even though they formed essential components of the past. It also provides independent and testable evidence to complement existing scholarship, expanding the epistemological basis of archaeology. In a research field where only the tiniest fraction of a percent survives of what had been there, any independent additional source of information will help enable real progress to be made in our understanding of the past. Still, the full potential of archaeological science within archaeology is yet to be explored. The integration, or lack thereof, of archaeological science within archaeology, particularly in an anthropological framework, has been discussed at length (e.g., Martinón-Torres and Killick, 2015). Despite ongoing efforts to bridge the disciplinary divide, it is likely to remain a constant topic, as is characteristic of a healthy relationship between and within closely related disciplines that evolve in their methodology and
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theoretical frameworks. Beyond this essential ongoing discourse, there are several aspects within the current practice of archaeological science, which we would like to highlight as key issues that deserve more attention.
Provenance Determination From its inception, determining the provenance of archaeological finds has been a major topic in archaeological science. Here, it is important to first define which origin one is trying to determine. This could be the geological or environmental origin of the raw material, or the workshop origin of a finished product, or the origin of deposition in the archaeological record, or the origin from some art market or other more recent movement of the object in question. Provenance studies are particularly relevant for materials and artifacts that travel easily, such as metal ingots, coins, or jewelry, glass beads, ceramic transport vessels, and rare or precious stones. Investigating their movement across space is part of the study of ancient trade and cultural contact. The careful mapping of find spots of specific typologically defined artifacts is an established archaeological method and can generate distribution maps across wide geographical regions, with high-density areas potentially indicating production areas. The same approach can be used for chemically rather than typologically defined materials. This is done very successfully to determine the geological origin of lithic materials, such as obsidian in the Mediterranean (Renfrew et al., 1965), the Americas (Shackley, 2005) and elsewhere, or the examples mentioned above under Lithics and other stones. The “provenance hypothesis” here is based on the assumption that a given geographically defined lithic source has a unique chemical or mineralogical characteristic, and the expectation that the material’s composition does not change during preparation and use as a tool; thus, an artifact found at some distance from its geological occurrence can be reliably traced back to it (Wilson and Pollard, 2001: 507–508). A similar principle underlies the discussion of ceramic provenance; here, however, one has to consider the intentional or accidental manipulation of the raw clay source during pottery production, such as added temper, refining the clay, or mixing clay sources (Rice, 1987: 413–426). The actual firing of the material does not normally affect the chemical composition of the ceramic, apart from the loss of water and organic material from the clay. Determining the geological origin of metals is more challenging, due to the substantial transformation of the ore mineral to metal during smelting, and the propensity of metals to be mixed and recycled. Few source-specific parameters survive the smelting process unchanged; among them, lead isotope abundance ratios are the most prominent and successfully applied ones (Stos-Gale and Gale, 2009). Even minute amounts of lead in the ore of any metal can transfer to the final metal; however, pure lead metal is a common alloying material for copper and bronze, and is widely used in the production and refining of silver and gold. In such cases, any lead isotope signature in an object will be that of the added lead metal rather than that of the main metal, copper, silver or gold. Recycling and refining of base metals adds further layers of complexity to the resulting lead isotope signature, eventually making a provenance determination impossible. Provenancing iron and tin, two of the most important metals, remains challenging; tin isotope studies are giving some hope (Berger et al., 2019), while for iron provenance, the analysis of osmium isotopes (Brauns et al., 2020) and slag inclusions (Charlton et al., 2012) are both promising. Recent advances in trace element analysis of glass, particularly through laser-ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, has enabled major strides in defining compositional groups, and narrowing down their provenance. Since glass is made by fusing together several raw materials, its chemical and isotopic signature is a blend of the individual contributions from its raw materials. Thus, glass provenance studies typically aim to determine the production origin of the glass itself rather than the geological origin of individual raw materials. Raw materials and finished artifacts are not the only items of provenance research; a very similar concept underpins the isotopic study of human (and animal) palaeomobility. Here, the underlying assumption is that the isotopic signature for oxygen and strontium will reflect in broad terms the geographic (oxygen) and geological (strontium) region where the individuals spent their childhood. In specific, strontium and oxygen isotope values may be measured in the dental enamel, a tissue that largely forms during childhood and does not remodel in later life. If these values do not match the local environment at the depositional site, this indicates that the individuals are non-local, i.e. they migrated from elsewhere to their place of burial. Under certain circumstances, the non-local isotopic signature can be matched to potential regions of origin from where the individuals may have migrated; however, equifinality, that is, the fact that many regions have the same range of isotopic values, is a major limitation, and additional lines of evidence (e.g. textual sources) are necessary in order to narrow down the potential place of origin for non-locals.
Data Integration, Discipline Formation, and Canonization of Practices The compartmentalization of archaeological science across numerous modern scientific disciplines is a major hindrance in exploiting its full potential in the study of the human past. This ranges from the purely practical problem of having to divide the archaeological record into separate boxes for each specialist – human bones here, ceramics there, soil samples for archaeobotany flotation there, inscribed finds in yet another box, etc. The bones may, however, belong to the same person that used the ceramic pot to cook their food, parts of which are found among the archaeobotanical remains. Separating and distributing these multi-faceted remains of a human life puts their study on a track that does not encourage holistic interpretations or cross-disciplinary conversations. This is further exacerbated by the different disciplinary traditions of recording and reporting data, which often slow down or even prevent full integration of results across sub-disciplines. For some sub-disciplines within archaeological science, established practices are widely followed, often supported by textbooks and specialist Master’s degrees that teach to a similar canon. An example in this direction is human osteoarchaeology in Europe, where the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology has published various standards for data collection (including destructive sampling), codes of ethics and practice (https://www.babao.org.uk/publications/ethics-and-standards/).
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In addition, multiple Master’s programs are very successful in universities across the UK, and have played a major role in training osteoarchaeologists throughout Europe and beyond. As a result, data in these sub-fields are generally compatible, enabling metastudies to be undertaken. However, in other sub-fields, particularly those which are marginal in terms of number of practitioners and have few taught programs to follow, these different “schools”, often developed around a particular department or individual scholar, prevent effective data sharing. In contrast, the presence of numerous peer-reviewed journals specializing in archaeological science and its sub-fields is a major factor contributing to promoting common practices. This is further reinforced through a plethora of handbooks and textbooks, leading to an increasing canonization of research practice and the consolidation of archaeological science as a recognized discipline. At the same time, there is an ongoing flow of experience and methodological innovations from the numerous mother disciplines into the practice of archaeological science. This enables levels of research advances and instrumental development that would not be possible with the funding levels and pool of talent available within archaeological science alone.
Data Sharing and Compatibility Archaeological science generates an increasing amount of data, including visual, quantitative, qualitative, descriptive, absolute, and countless more. The disciplinary segmentation of archaeological science results in a plethora of data formats and conventions being used even within similar types of data. This problem is not unique for archaeological science, and major initiatives aim to overcome unnecessary hurdles to merging and combining datasets. Recent trends aim to make data FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Dedicated data repositories, such as the Archaeology Data Service in the UK (https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/) or The Digital Archaeological Record (https://core.tdar.org/) are major initiatives in this endeavor, and their use is increasingly mandated by funding bodies promoting Open Science and Open Data policies. The level of adoption of such policies for digital-born data, and the considerable effort necessary in providing metadata and keeping data formats future-proof is currently patchy at best, despite large-scale funded initiatives such as Ariadne (Niccolucci and Richards, 2013) and it successor, Ariadne Plus. The vast amount of legacy data that is either not at all or only rudimentarily documented, and/or available in formats that are not machine readable, is a major challenge for the future. These limitations of the compatibility of archaeological, archaeological scientific, and historical information severely restricts our ability to exploit the complementarity of these different approaches to the human past (e.g., McKeague et al., 2020).
Archaeological Science and Archaeological Theory All data needs interpretation, and interpretations take place within theoretical and conceptual frameworks. The issue how the sciences and humanities can work together to solve current problems has been the subject of major discussions for well over half a century (Snow, 1959), and has been at the center of at times bitter intellectual disputes between archaeologists and archaeological scientists, if not intentional ignorance. We contend that archaeological science provides (mostly) testable and reproducible data, rather than offering one opinion among others, and as such feeds into an epistemologically independent body of information within the study of the past. The integration and interpretation of such information, of course, still needs to be cognizant of and integrated into suitable theoretical frameworks. Theoretical frameworks such as processual and post-processual archaeology, neopositivism, new materialism and many others reflect different approaches in interpreting archaeological patterns, and it is essential for archaeological sciences to be familiar with them. Some argue that archaeological science has reached a stage where it should no longer be seen as a discrete discipline distinct from archaeology, but has become part of the broad canon of archaeological enquiry, as eloquently argued by Martinón-Torres (2018). The penetration of scientific methods in archaeological research practice, however, is on a global scale still very limited, rendering such debates often irrelevant in many research environments.
Sample Archives and Preservation While in some sense, the archaeological record grows with every passing day through the debris we leave behind, it is at the same time a non-renewable resource. A wide range of factors ensures that the archaeological record starts to diminish as soon as it has been formed, through normal taphonomic processes, natural erosion, attrition and catastrophes, and all sorts of human interventions. Most of these processes affect archaeological sites either in general, or at random and in an unplanned manner. In contrast, archaeological excavation is inherently a targeted process, often almost systematically removing evidence for sites, periods and regions that are of particular research interest, retaining for the future only selected documentation and recovered material remains. Additional damage, minus the documentation, is inflicted on the archaeological record through looting and casual or deliberate destruction of museums, collections and archives. Retention and documentation policies vary widely among excavations, but are almost universally constrained by limitations of funding and space. As a result, in most cases only a fraction of the original record remains accessible once the excavation has been completed. Museums and excavation archives are limited in what they store and preserve through their collection policies, which are often biased toward selecting specific materials only. While this ensures a (limited) extension of the survival of some parts of the archaeological record, protected by restrictive sampling and de-accession policies, it does little to promote the wide application of archaeological science research in the future. Often, documentation, sampling and analysis are more easily done while the excavation is ongoing. At this stage, significant numbers of samples are often taken and moved to specialist laboratories. Some of this
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material is consumed in the process of analysis, while some remains in a form that is amenable to long-term storage, such as lithic or ceramic thin sections, archaeobotanical macro- and microremains, mounted pieces of metals and glass, etc. Once the analysis is completed, these samples constitute a unique and irreplaceable resource for future research, if they are stored and documented properly. Improving the collection and documentation of such samples for future use, either to enable reproducibility of results, or to facilitate additional research, is a major challenge and ethical responsibility for archaeological scientists. While many large research museums have suitable mechanisms in place, they are often limiting their sample collection to those that were taken from artifacts in their own holdings. With the majority of archaeological science research done at universities or other institutions that lack the tradition and capacity of archiving materials for future access, this creates a huge loss of opportunity and exacerbates the ethical dilemma between invasive sampling and the integrity of archaeological finds (Rehren, 2002). Initiatives such as the Heritage Samples Archives Initiative of ICCROM (https://www.iccrom.org/projects/heritage-samples-archives-initiative) begin to address this issue. An additional layer of complexity characterizes human remains, the study of which in certain contexts is forbidden or has to adhere to strict limitations imposed by several stakeholders, including descendant communities. Whilst such limitations aim at ensuring an ethical treatment of the deceased, they narrow the interpretative potential of the remains, particularly in cases of reburial, which renders this material inaccessible for future research when even more advanced methods become available.
Geographic and Financial Inequality, Export Issues and Brain Drain The practice of archaeological science is dependent on sustainable funding access, and therefore it is very much a Global North phenomenon. This has two important implications. The first one is the ongoing export of archaeological materials for study “abroad”, in countries with dedicated instrumentation and expert knowledge. As a result, irreplaceable archaeological remains have to leave their countries of origin, often never to return, even if they are not fully destroyed during analysis. Increasingly, countries aim to end this practice by not allowing the export of archaeological materials for analysis; the effective application of such measures requires sufficient in-country infrastructure and expert knowledge, which is often still lacking. The second implication is brain drain, as non-northern scholars in the field are almost forced to migrate into the global North in order to find employment and research opportunities, given the lack of long-term funded institutions and research positions in archaeological science in their countries. As an example, despite the importance of Africa as a key region of early metal use, there is only a handful of professionally trained archaeometallurgists from all of sub-Saharan Africa, and very few are currently research-active in the region; others are now based in the US or Europe. This practice prevents a local tradition in archaeological science to be established in regions where it is most needed. At the same time, it restricts knowledge transmission and multi-vocality within archaeological science and promotes the loss of research experience and technical skills from major regions of the world.
Summary and Future Directions For much of the first century of its development, archaeological science struggled to move from an “auxiliary” approach to archaeology, or being seen as a handmaiden to history (Perry, 2007). The expansion of research funding in the second half of the 20th century CE in the Global North provided a fertile environment for the growth of archaeological science both at universities and in research institutions. Despite this, the lack of strategic planning within the academic communities, the often geographically limited focus of funding opportunities, entrenched disciplinary boundaries, and colonial traditions and post-colonial realities of archaeological practice more generally all contribute to the persistent patchy and fragmented coverage of global archaeology by science-based approaches. In its current state, archaeological science practice reflects strongly the availability of blue-sky excellence-driven funding in Europe, and the strong tradition of physical anthropology in North American archaeology. In recent decades, China is emerging as a further country with large-scale funding for archaeological science. In all cases, the practice of archaeological science is closely mirroring the established disciplinary boundaries of the classical Western canon of education and research. The numerous sub-disciplines of archaeological science will continue to generate desperately needed data in regions beyond the current non-representative geographical and chronological coverage of global archaeological science. Hopefully, this will reach a level where the data for at least some areas and periods can be discussed and interpreted beyond the very broad brush or anecdotal – though often attention-grabbing – evidence that dominates current practice. Beyond this essential ongoing filling in of the vast areas of terra incognita, and where possible linking up areas for which “maps” are emerging, we see a number of fundamental developments and opportunities that will help keep archaeological science relevant within archaeology and history.
One Science The disciplinary separation of the science-based study of archaeological remains often limits the deeper integration of results, both for individual archaeological projects, but also for larger meta-studies with thematic foci. The traditional model of “specialist reports” being appended to the final excavation monograph, or maybe constituting the n-th volume in a multi-volume final publication series, too often prevents communication and coordination among specialists. Here, the co-location of archaeological science laboratories within the same institution will be a first step to promote cross-disciplinary cooperation. The active involvement of
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scientists in the initial planning, timely reporting of results, and ongoing monitoring of archaeological projects will lead to significant increase in the quality of results and to more meaningful interpretations and discussions. The communication among different materials scientists is already increasing, supported by the similarity of the nature of their data sets and overlapping research questions, be it on reconstructing production or provenancing material origins. Similar enhanced cooperation has been strengthened among organic remains specialists (e.g. osteoarchaeologists, geneticists, isotope specialists, but also zooarchaeologists and archaeobotanists), acknowledging the interconnectedness of these remains and their complementary nature. However, much still needs to be done to better integrate studies of organics and materials, for instance to explore the mobility of humans and animals in conjunction with the circulation of materials and technologies. Here, the earlier work on concepts such as the “Neolithic Revolution”, later expanded to the “Neolithic package” and its relationship to human migration gives encouraging examples of successful integration of theoretical and scientific discourses (Zvelebil and Zvelebil, 1988; Richards, 2003). This, in our view, is as much a matter of research coordination at the point of project planning, as of co-location of research teams within the same institution, and the development of common theoretical frameworks and research agendas.
Opportunity Sharing A major area of future development in archaeological science is the sharing of research opportunities among research teams in different regions of the world. The application of many scientific methods requires infrastructure and human capital resources that far outstrip funding sources available to most archaeologists. In many cases, stop-gap measures are taken, such as outsourcing analytical work to established but non-archaeological scientific laboratories within the same institution. We argue that the real limiting factor in archaeological science is not access to laboratories, but the availability of experienced specialist research staff who are part of the archaeological team. The often limited amount of material and remains to be analyzed makes it impractical to establish dedicated archaeological science laboratories in every region. Sharing of resources and pooling of expert knowledge within a few dedicated super-regional laboratories with FAIR access policies and reliable core funding would enable a leveling of the playing field for researchers in the Global South. In addition, such laboratories could act as centers for academic crossfertilization, contributing to establishing common practices and protocols for all researchers as a major step toward the emergence of disciplinary canons and research agendas within archaeological science.
Data Integration, Data Mining, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Above, we commented on the fragmented and highly restricted nature of the known archaeological record as a miniscule fraction of past realities. Unfortunately, this description applies also to the nature of the existing archaeological knowledge base, as encapsulated in libraries and data repositories. Major breakthroughs can be expected once this documentary representation of the past becomes truly FAIR; here, the current explosion of Big Data approaches and the capabilities of machine learning and artificial intelligence are likely to revolutionize archaeology, including the full integration of archaeological science within the discipline.
See Also: Archaeological Materials: Challenges and Future Directions; Archaeological Science in Practice; Environmental Archaeology; Human Remains: Challenges and Future Directions.
References Al-Bashaireh, Khaled, 2021. Ancient white marble trade and its provenance determination. J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep. 35, 102777. Bachmann, Hans-Gert, 1982. The Identification of Slags from Archaeological Sites. Institute of Archaeology, London. Bastidas, David M., Cano, Emilio (Eds.), 2018. Advanced Characterization Techniques, Diagnostic Tools and Evaluation Methods in Heritage Science. Springer, Cham. Berger, Daniel, Brügmann, Gerhard, Pernicka, Ernst, 2019. On smelting cassiterite in geological and archaeological samples: preparation and implications for provenance studies on metal artefacts with tin isotopes. Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 11, 293–319. Bevins, Richard E., Pearce, Nick JG., Parker Pearson, Mike, Ixer, Rob A., 2022. Identification of the source of dolerites used at the Waun Mawn stone circle in the Mynydd Preseli, West Wales and implications for the proposed link with Stonehenge. J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep. 45, 103556. Brauns, Michael, Yahalom-Mack, Naama, Stepanov, Ivan, Sauder, Lee, Keen, Jake, Eliyahu-Behar, Adi, 2020. Osmium isotope analysis as an innovative tool for provenancing ancient iron: a systematic approach. PLoS One 15, e0229623. Bronk Ramsey, Christopher, 2009. Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates. Radiocarbon 51, 337–360. Charlton, Michael F., Blakelock, Eleanor, Martinón-Torres, Marcos, Young, Tim, 2012. Investigating the production provenance of iron artifacts with multivariate methods. J. Archaeol. Sci. 39, 2280–2293. Craddock, Paul T., 1995. Early Metal Mining and Production. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Dussubieux, Laure, Walder, Heather, 2022. The Elemental Analysis of Glass Beads: Technology, Chronology and Exchange. Leuven University Press, Leuven. Garside, Paul, Richardson, Emma (Eds.), 2021. Conservation Science: Heritage Materials, second ed. Royal Society of Chemistry, London. Geyh, Mebus A., Schleicher, Helmut, 1990. Absolute Age Determination – Physical and Chemical Dating Methods and Their Application. Springer Verlag, Berlin. Gifford-Gonzalez, D., 2018. An Introduction to Zooarchaeology. Springer, Cham. Gillings, Mark, Hacıgüzeller, Piraye, Lock, Gary, 2020. Archaeological Spatial Analysis, A Methodological Guide. Routledge, London. Gluhak, Tatjana Mirjam, Hofmeister, Wolfgang, 2011. Geochemical provenance analyses of Roman lava millstones north of the Alps: a study of their distribution and implications for the beginning of Roman lava quarrying in the Eifel region (Germany). J. Archaeol. Sci. 38, 1603–1620. Goldberg, Paul, Macphail, Richard I., Carey, Chris, Zhuang, Yijie, 2022. Practical and Theoretical Geoarchaeology. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ. Hauptmann, Andreas, 2020. Archaeometallurgy – Materials Science Aspects. Springer International Publishing, Cham.
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Herz, Norman, Waelkens, Marc (Eds.), 1988. Classical Marble: Geochemistry, Technology, Trade, Vol. 153. Brill Archive. Madella, Marco, Lancelotti, Carla, Savard, Manon (Eds.), 2014. Ancient Plants and People: Contemporary Trends in Archaeobotany. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. Martin, Debra L., Harrod, Ryan P., Pérez, Ventura R., 2013. Bioarchaeology. An Integrated Approach to Working with Human Remains. Springer, Cham. Martinón-Torres, Marcos, 2018. Mobility, minds and metals: the end of archaeological science? In: Armada, Xose-Lois, Murilla-Barroso, Mercedes, Charlton, Mike (Eds.), Metals, Minds and Mobility – Integrating Scientific Data with Archaeological Theory. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 161–169. Martinón-Torres, Marcos, Killick, David, 2015. Archaeological theories and archaeological sciences. In: Gardner, Andrew, Lake, Mark, Sommer, Ulrike (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford. McKeague, Peter, Anthony, Corns, Larsson, Åsa, Moreau, Anne, Posluschny, Axel, Van Daele, Koen, Evans, Tim, 2020. One archaeology: a manifesto for the systematic and effective use of mapped data from archaeological fieldwork and research. Information 11, 222. Niccolucci, Franco, Richards, Julian D., 2013. ARIADNE: advanced research infrastructures for archaeological dataset networking in Europe. Int. J. Humanit. Arts Comput. 7, 70–88. Nicosia, Cristiano, Stoops, Georges (Eds.), 2017. Archaeological Soil and Sediment Micromorphology. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ. Nikita, Efthymia, 2017. Osteoarchaeology: A Guide to the Macroscopic Study of Human Skeletal Remains. Academic Press, San Diego, CA. Perry, Megan A., 2007. Is bioarchaeology a handmaiden to history? Developing a historical bioarchaeology. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 26, 486–515. Quinn, Patrick Sean, 2013. Ceramic Petrography: The Interpretation of Archaeological Pottery & Related Artefacts in Thin Section. Archaeopress, Oxford. Rehren, Thilo, 2002. Object integrity – or why do we excavate? Pap. Inst. Archaeol. 13, 9–12. Rehren, Thilo, Freestone, Ian C., 2015. Ancient glass: from kaleidoscope to crystal ball. J. Archaeol. Sci. 56, 233–241. Renfrew, Colin, Cann, Johnson, Dixon, J., 1965. Obsidian in the Aegean. Annu. Br. Sch. Athens 60, 225–247. Rice, Prudence M., 1987. Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Richards, Martin B., 2003. The Neolithic transition in Europe: archaeological models and genetic evidence. Documenta Praehistorica 30, 159–167. Russell, Nerissa, 2011. Social Zooarchaeology: Humans and Animals in Prehistory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Shackley, M. Steven, 2005. Obsidian: Geology and Archaeology in the North American Southwest. University of Arizona, Tempe, AZ. Snow, Charles Percy, 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Stos-Gale, Zofia Anna, Gale, Noël H., 2009. Metal provenancing using isotopes and the Oxford archaeological lead isotope database (OXALID). Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 1, 195–213. Thomas, Herbert H., 1923. The source of the stones of Stonehenge. Antiq. J. 3, 239–260. Thorpe, Richard S., Williams-Thorpe, Olwen, Jenkins, D. Graham, Watson, J.S., Ixer, R.A., Thomas, R.G., 1991. The geological sources and transport of the bluestones of Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK. Proc. Prehist. Soc. 57, 103–157. Velde, Bruce, Druc, Isabelle Clara, 1999. Archaeological Ceramic Materials: Origin and Utilization. Springer, Berlin. Williams-Thorpe, Olwen, Thorpe, Richard S., 1988. The provenance of donkey mills from Roman Britain. Archaeometry 30, 275–289. Wilson, Lyn, Pollard, Mark, 2001. The provenance hypothesis. In: Brothwell, Don R., Pollard, Mark (Eds.), Handbook of Archaeological Sciences. J. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 507–517. Zvelebil, Marek, Zvelebil, Kamil V., 1988. Agricultural transition and Indo-European dispersals. Antiquity 62, 574–583.
Further Reading Baskaran, Mark (Ed.), 2011. Handbook of Environmental Isotope Geochemistry. Springer Science & Business Media, Cham. Brown, Terence A., Brown, Keri, 2011. Biomolecular Archaeology: An Introduction. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ. Degryse, Patrick, Henderson, Julian, Hodgins, Gregory, 2009. Isotopes in Vitreous Materials, vol. 1. Leuven University Press, Leuven. Dussubieux, Laure, Golitko, Mark, Gratuze, Bernard (Eds.), 2016. Recent Advances in Laser Ablation ICP-MS for Archaeology. Springer, Berlin. Goffer, Zvi, 2006. Archaeological Chemistry. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ. Goldberg, Paul, Holliday, Vance T., Ferring, C. Reid (Eds.), 2013. Earth Sciences and Archaeology. Springer Science & Business Media, Berlin. Grupe, Gisela, McGlynn, George C. (Eds.), 2016. Isotopic Landscapes in Bioarchaeology. Springer, Berlin. Malainey, Mary E., 2010. A Consumer’s Guide to Archaeological Science: Analytical Techniques. Springer Science & Business Media, Berlin. Martin, Debra L., Harrod, Ryan P., Perez, Ventura R., 2013. Bioarchaeology: An Integrated Approach to Working with Human Remains. Springer, New York. Pollard, A. Mark, Armitage, Ruth Ann, Makarewicz, Cheryl A. (Eds.), 2023. Handbook of Archaeological Sciences. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ. Reitz, Elizabeth, Shackley, Myra, 2012. Environmental Archaeology. Springer Science & Business Media, Berlin. Richards, Michael P., Britton, Kate (Eds.), 2020. Archaeological Science: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Stephens, Jay A., Ducea, Mihai N., Killick, David J., Ruiz, Joaquín, 2021. Use of non-traditional heavy stable isotopes in archaeological research. J. Archaeol. Sci. 127, 105334. Turney, Chris, Canti, Matthew, Branch, Nick, Clark, Peter, 2014. Environmental Archaeology: Theoretical and Practical Approaches. Routledge, London. Tzedakis, Yannis, Martlew, Holley, Jones, Martin K., 2008. Archaeology Meets Science: Biomolecular Investigations in Bronze Age Greece. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Varela López, Sandra, L. (Eds.), 2018. The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences. Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ. Web Links https://www.iccrom.org/projects/heritage-samples-archives-initiative. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention. https://socarchsci.org/.
Archaeology of Childhood Jane Eva Baxter, DePaul University Department of Anthropology, Chicago, IL, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Ethnoarchaeology/Ethnography Apprenticeship and Learning Toys and Play Artistic Representation Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Studies Key Issues Summary and Future Directions References
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The disciplinary history of the archaeology of childhood as a topic of inquiry in various fields of archaeology The evidentiary and theoretical basis for studying children archaeologically Some of the key findings archaeologists have made to date by focusing on children and childhood as central topics of study Key areas of current development in the field and emerging directions of research
Abstract The archaeology of childhood is an area of specialization within archaeology that centers on children, childhood, childrearing, and related topics of age and identity in archaeological studies. Research emphasizes the development of methods to identify individuals of different ages, and to theorize past societies as those in which people of all ages were integral members and significant contributors to social, economic, and cosmological aspects of communities. Analytical emphasis is placed on those individuals who were recognized in their own communities as children or may be identified archaeologically as not having attained adult status.
Introduction The archaeology of childhood is an area of specialization within archaeology that centers on children, childhood, childrearing, and related topics of age and identity in archaeological studies. This area of interest emerged in many types of archaeology beginning around 1990, and has distinct origins in different communities of archaeological practice. For those studying prehistory, interest in children and childhood was largely an extension of earlier work on the archaeology of gender, which was informed by feminist approaches and called for an archaeology that was inclusive of women as active participants in past societies. Scholars studying childhood noted that like women, children have been a significant part of all documented human populations past and present, and to ignore this fact when interpreting the archaeological record almost certainly results in incomplete and inaccurate interpretations. They also noted that most archaeologists come from cultures that can be broadly labeled as “Western” and that those societies hold ideas about children that are inherently limiting by downplaying children’s agency, creativity, and contributions to social and economic aspects of society. Archaeologists studying the recent past also were engaged with these dialogues about the relationship between gender and childhood as constructed categories of identity, but these scholars often also had documentary source material that helped define childhood, provide direct references to child-specific material culture, and impart information about child rearing practices to help in the interpretation of archaeological findings (Wilkie, 2000). In Classical Archaeology, interests in children and childhood emerged around the same time, but primarily built upon existing disciplinary interests in the study of the family and family life rather than expanding ideas from the archaeology of gender (Evans et al., 2013). Classical Archaeology also had distinct data sources on which it relied to develop an archaeology of childhood, particularly the rich artistic and iconographic library of images that often depict children and younger adults in different types of activities and in association with particular types of material culture. These sources allowed archaeologists to study how childhood as a stage
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of identity intersected with other social categories such as social class, and to explore ritual transformations of identity through rites of passage. Bioarchaeology, or the study of human skeletal remains in archaeological contexts, has flourished around the topics of children and childhood, particularly in the past two decades (e.g., Beachesne and Agarwal, 2018; Mays et al., 2017). The ability to study the growth and development of the human skeleton, to look for markers of significant developmental milestones, and to identify issues of health, diet, and mortuary treatment that connect to culturally-defined stages of identity, such as childhood, has been a rich area of exploration in this area of archaeological specialization. While origins of interest and types of available data may vary, the study of children and childhood has become widespread across these different types of archaeology. These topics have also allowed scholars to work across traditional scholarly boundaries, and much of the work on children and childhood incorporates wide-ranging ideas from many or all of these areas of archaeological practice. These collective efforts have gone on to highlight how evidence for children can be found in nearly every category of archaeological data available for study, including skeletal remains, landscapes, architecture, art, and artifacts. This work has also shown that it is necessary for scholars to identify and set aside their own cultural biases about children and childhood that potentially limit the ability to understand how past societies defined and understood children as well as the possible roles, activities, and identities available to them. Historical and ethnographic sources have been used very effectively to illustrate the rich diversity of documented childhood experiences, the unique cultural definitions of childhood that exist in varying cultures, and the many significant contributions children make to their families, communities, and societies as a whole. Bioarchaeological approaches to childhood have been at the forefront of breaking down the idea that childhood is a universal experience defined by biology and human development. This work has consistently illustrated how biological and social ages often exist in complex tensions with one another, and how intersecting the biological lives of individual children and broader cultural ideas of childhood is a very complex and often uncertain process. Behavioral studies of work, play, apprenticeship, and learning have emphasized how different societies have defined children, and how those varying definitions created different opportunities for children to interact with one another, with adult members of society, and with the material world. Other works have looked at the symbolic value of children, and how the cultural category of child not only defined roles, but also held particular cultural resonance and meaning. In all of these cases, children are the primary analytical focus of archaeological study and are treated as a unique and valuable population that has much to tell us about the past.
Overview An excellent place to begin an overview of the archaeology of childhood is to explore its historical origins within the field (see Crawford et al., 2018; Baxter, 2022 for longer histories). Prior to 1990, there were very few works in archaeology that included children in interpretations of the past, and those that did frequently produced works that were “cautionary tales” explaining why the archaeology of children was not possible (Baxter, 2022) or concluded that children were not an important topic for archaeologists to pursue (Kamp, 2001; Sofaer, 2000). The earliest scholarship on the archaeology of childhood was designed specifically to redress the omission of children in archaeological interpretations, and to make a case for the visibility and viability of children as a topic of archaeological scholarship (see Baxter, 2008 for a summary of many of these early works). Undoubtedly, the most influential work in the field and the work generally credited as marking the beginning of the archaeology of childhood was Grete Lillehammer’s 1989 article in the Norwegian Archaeological Review. Her work not only explained why children were important as an integral part of archaeological studies, but also clearly demonstrated, using published archaeological findings from across Norway and Scandinavia, that evidence for children was readily identifiable in all the major types of archaeological evidence that are regularly excavated, recorded, and reported by archaeologists (Lillehammer, 1989). This critical assertion has been consistently and repeatedly upheld as archaeologists expanded their interests in children and began analyzing archaeological findings with the expectation of being able to identify children.
Ethnoarchaeology/Ethnography Archaeologists in many areas of scholarship routinely turn to the ethnographic record and to the ethnoarchaeological work of colleagues to provide useful analogies and insights to the archaeological record. In the archaeology of childhood, scholars consistently use these sources to look for alternative definitions and experiences of childhood that expand understandings of childhood beyond contemporary, and largely Western cultural constructs (e.g., Lancy, 2016). The earliest studies using such sources were designed specifically to identify examples of children making meaningful economic contributions to their families and communities through work, and to document children engaging in a variety of self-guided learning activities, such as play. These findings unequivocally demonstrated the assumptions many researchers held about children were incorrect, and expanded the types of activities that could be associated with children when seen in the archaeological record (e.g., Kamp, 2001). More recently, work done with the Human Relations Area Files has systematically identified the types of objects associated with children in work and play across cultures, as well as patterns documenting where such activities most often take place in relationship to other site areas, offering further tools for identifying children archaeologically (Ember and Cunnar, 2015).
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These reviews of ethnographic literature have focused on children in hunter-gatherer and farming communities to help provide the most useful analogies for archaeological work. The same is true of ethnoarchaeological work, which has also taken place in communities where farming and craft production occur on smaller, local scales and in places where people still hunt, gather, and forage as integral parts of their subsistence. One enduring ethnoarchaeological study of children is the work of Bird and Blige Bird (2000) who studied foraging behavior among Meriam children in the Torres Strait region of Australia. Here, both adults and children forage for marine resources as an essential part of the group’s subsistence strategy. Their work found that children’s smaller stature and tinier hands allowed them to forage for species of shellfish unobtainable by adults. Children were able to forage for their own food while also providing unique resources to the dietary profile of the entire group. These contributions by children were readily identifiable in the shell middens created by these groups, suggesting children’s foraging behavior may be visible in more ancient shell middens often studied by archaeologists.
Apprenticeship and Learning Archaeologists have also found that the process of learning to become a skilled crafter leaves traces in the archaeological record. Some of the most durable and enduring artifacts encountered at archaeological sites, lithics and ceramics, are objects that require technological competence to produce consistently and effectively. This technological competence takes time to master, and it is believed that children routinely engaged in the process of learning how to make these objects. Evidence for children learning can be seen through direct evidence, such as children’s fingerprints in clay vessels (Kamp et al., 1999; Dorland, 2018) or indirect evidence, such as systemic errors in production that can be associated with a lack of experience, manual dexterity and/or spatial reasoning skills (Crown, 2014; Dorland, 2021; Grimm, 2000; Langdon, 2013). Such studies are not limited to identifying the work of novice crafters, but also often explore relationships between novice producers and skilled crafters to reveal processes of teaching and learning and dynamics within communities of practice. Some studies have looked at the spatial distribution of novice crafting activities in relationship to those of skilled crafters to identify the degrees of overlap, and therefore interaction in the production process (Grimm, 2000). Others, have studied innovation and conservatism in artifact design to look at artistic influences upon and within production communities (Dorland and Ionico, 2020). In all cases, archaeologists acknowledge that the acquisition of crafting skills is deeply embedded in the teaching and learning of intangible information, such as the meanings of cultural symbols and importance of relationships and traditions (Langdon, 2013).
Toys and Play Toys have been the traditional route to identifying children in the archaeological record. The identification of objects thought to be toys would often result in a mention that children were present, but rarely led to a more robust analysis of childhood or children’s roles at the site where the toys were found (Baxter, 2022; Wilkie, 2000). In the more recent past, toys have been identified using documentary and photographic sources (Wilkie, 2000). In cultures with surviving artistic and iconographic traditions such as Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, images depict associations between particular objects and individuals of certain ages, including children and toys (e.g., Harrington, 2018; Oakley, 2013). Finding objects in children’s burials is another avenue archaeologists have used to identify symbolic associations between children and particular artifacts, which might guide archaeologists to items used by children during their lifetimes (Crawford, 2000). Other associations are less certain, such as identifying objects as toys based solely on their small size (Baxter, 2022) or using modern analogs for toys without further culturally-specific research (Fig. 1). Archaeologists interested in childhood have worked to problematize this singular reliance on toys to identify children, and the tendency to think identifying children is the same as incorporating them into archaeological interpretations. It is well known that children have always been present in all human social groups (Högberg, 2018) but the archaeological discovery of toys is actually relatively rare (Baxter, 2015a). The archaeology of childhood had a limited chance to grow if this simple association remained the only pathway to finding children. Sally Crawford (2009) wrote that toys are an artificial category we place upon objects. Any object can move in and out of the category of “toy” based on its use and meaning. In other words, if a child plays with an “adult object”, that object temporarily becomes a toy. When the play is done, the artifact may re-enter a different system of uses and meanings defined by its adult user(s). Therefore, all artifacts found by archaeologists have the potential to be toys, and children’s use of artifacts is not confined to child-specific objects. Similarly, objects that are identified as toys are rarely child-specific in that they also carry with them meanings and associations that are important to adults as well (Baxter, 2016, 2022). Some archaeologists are taking this idea into the field and are looking for evidence of children’s play not through toys, but through relational approaches to children and the material world (Dozier, 2016; Hutson, 2006, 2015). These types of studies eschew the need to find toys and instead recognize that children spent their daily lives surrounded by the same landscapes, architecture, art, and artifacts as adults. Understanding how spaces and objects were used by children as well as adults has opened up the ability for archaeologists to interpret sites with children as active occupants without the need for toys to be discovered. Both Hutson (2006) and Dozier (2016) found evidence for children’s play in very different archaeological contexts, not by finding toys, but by identifying assemblages of interesting or curious artifacts in places where they should not have been. By decoupling the relationship between toys and children to consider behavioral and social elements of play, all artifacts and spaces become potential sources of evidence for children.
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Fig. 1 Little horse on wheels (Ancient Greek child’s toy) from a tomb dating from 950–900 BC. Kerameikos Archaeological Museum in Athens. Ancient items like this are often determined to be children’s toys solely based on their similarity to toys familiar to archaeologists. While these determinations may often be correct, they ideally would also be corroborated using evidence from the culture under study. Image available through common license: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Little_horse_on_wheels_(Ancient_greek_child%27s_Toy).jpg.
Artistic Representation Not all cultures produce art that is preserved for archaeological study, but evidence for children participating in creative and artistic activities dates back to the Paleolithic (Nowell, 2021). In times and places where such art survives with regularity, images of children can be used to identify objects and activities associated with children (above), to identify different stages of identity and rites of passage that mark transitions (Beaumont, 2012; Joyce, 2000), and to explore how children function as symbols of particular cultural meanings and values (Bobou, 2018; Harrington, 2018). As an example, children’s headstones in 19th century America include a range of artistic motifs that associate them uniquely with values of innocence and purity as well as using the untimely death of children to reinforce the importance of family at a time the industrial revolution was profoundly disrupting American family life (Baxter, 2015b; Snyder, 1992) (Fig. 2). In addition, sources regarding children chosen for sacrifice among the Maya depict people who were not seen as expendable or unloved, but rather were understood as being close to the divine and particularly powerful communicators with the gods because they had spent so little time on earth (Ardren, 2011). Artistic representations of children are a highly fruitful source for archaeological study of children, but they do have limitations. For example, Harrington (2018) showed that children in Ancient Egypt are never artistically depicted as being at play, although play undoubtedly was an activity in which Egyptian children partook. Owen (2013) noted that children in Ancient Greek art are never seen crying, acting out, or otherwise behaving in ways we might see as unpleasant. Both of these studies demonstrated that art
Fig. 2 Detail of the headstone of a 5-year-old girl, India Kephart, who was buried at Oakwoods Cemetery in Chicago in 1882. This elaborate headstone creates many symbolic associations with the child. The scallop shell represents her Christian journey through life and her baptism in the church. The white color of the stone symbolizes innocence and purity. Depicting a child in a state of slumber was common in the late 19th century, as death was often referred to as being asleep or at rest, affirming to the viewer that the child was simply waiting for her family to rejoin her in the next life. The doll clenched in the arms of the child was a specific symbol of home and family. Photo by James E. Dourney.
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depicting children is selective: emphasizing some aspects of children while downplaying or ignoring others. Art alone is an incomplete source of information about childhood in the past, even when such tantalizingly intact images exist.
Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Studies Studying children through their skeletal remains has a long history in archaeology, but such efforts were generally not geared toward interpreting the lives of children and instead used children as indicators of different types of social status (Sofaer, 2000) and/or as a proxy for the overall health and well-being of a population (Lewis, 2006). Bioarchaeological studies of children have refocused their analyses toward understanding children’s lives in their social and natural contexts, and have grown in complexity over time. The earliest works in this area continued to include children in population-level analyses and emphasized relationships between social and natural environments and how human growth, health, development, and mortality were shaped by those relationships (Mays et al., 2017). These initial forays into the bioarchaeology of childhood lead to an incredibly prolific body of research that developed and refined methods to study the skeletons of children from neonates to teenagers. Such efforts are ongoing. The field has also changed its emphasis from populations to individuals, embracing ideas such as “embodiment” where scholars seek to use social theory to understand the corporeality of human identity and social interactions as reflected in human skeletons (Halcrow and Tayles, 2011; Inglis and Halcrow, 2018; Lewis, 2006; Ellis, 2019). Bioarchaeologists are also working to problematize the practice of imposing categories that divide what is in reality a very fluid human aging process, and instead embrace a “life course” approach, which looks at aging as a continuous process (Beachesne and Agarwal, 2018; Gowland and Newman, 2018).
Key Issues This overview shows a relatively recent field of scholarship that is in a state of constant, dynamic motion. In all of these areas of research it is also possible to trace a marked trajectory in scholarly emphasis. The earliest works on the archaeology of childhood needed to emphasize children in particular in order to demonstrate the archaeological capacity for their study. Finding specific examples of children’s roles in various societies, identifying material culture and patterns of learning, working, and playing that could be attributed uniquely to children, and refining and defining stages of development that could be understood archaeologically were all priorities. These early works that justified the study of children as useful, and demonstrated children could be identified using archaeological methods are now the foundations that underpin a much more robust field of scholarship. More recent work places children in relational contexts with one another, with adults, with the built environment and with the natural world. Recognizing that individuals of all ages were present at archaeological sites, changes the way archaeologists approach the archaeological record. Individuals of various ages all used the spaces and artifacts recovered at archaeological sites, but the way they understood and experienced those spaces and artifacts likely often varied with age and experience. Seeking to understand how the material world helped shape human relationships across different generations and age groups is a much more holistic endeavor than simply proving that children, as well as adults, were present at a site in the past. It is no longer enough to demonstrate that novice crafters were present, for example, but rather to use the archaeological record to tease out human relationships around the process of production. How did individuals of all ages and levels of technological competency come together to produce objects that were functional, symbolic, and aesthetically acceptable to their communities as a whole? Who were the teachers? The learners? The innovators? The guardians of tradition? Similarly, archaeologists are not just turning to toys and other objects that can be labeled as “child specific” to prove the presence of children at sites in the past. Children were at nearly every archaeological site that has ever been studied. Where were they? How did children use and understand the structures, landscapes and artifacts that they shared with the adults around them? How did their relationship to spaces and artifacts change over their lifetime? How did former children use the knowledge they obtained in their youth about the natural and cultural world to make decisions when they became adults? What do these parallel changes in various areas of scholarship on children suggest about the current state of the archaeology of childhood? The field is still focused on studying the lives of children and the various meanings of childhood that existed in the human past. Rather than doing so in isolation, however, these efforts are becoming increasingly relational and emphasize how the study of children is inherently integrated with the study of human communities. A simple way to understand the current state of the field is that children are now understood less as a category of person that can be identified archaeologically, and instead are understood as people who had their own unique, valid experiences of the past alongside other individuals in various ages and stages of life. In her retrospective on the “child’s world” 25 years later (Lillehammer, 2015), Grete Lillehammer noted that while the archaeology of childhood had made great progress, it had yet to challenge the field of archaeology as it should. One way that the archaeology of childhood can not only contribute but also challenge archaeology as a whole is through these changes. The archaeology of childhood is one of many fields of archaeology that is emphasizing the complexity and diversity of people who lived in the past, rather than invoking a group of nameless, faceless adult males as the only human actors archaeologists encountered. Seeking to find the diversity of human experiences and relationships in the past is central to the archaeology of childhood, and requires an increasingly rigorous set of methods and progressively complex theoretical groundings. It is these endeavors in method and theory that typify the archaeology of childhood today.
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Summary and Future Directions Taking a loosely chronological approach to the origins and evolution of the archaeology of childhood allows for an understanding of how this area of interest fits into archaeology more broadly, and how it is entwined with the changing nature of the field. When the archaeology of childhood was introduced as a potential area of study, the field was still grappling with the integration of gender as an analytical framework, and had yet to embrace fully more complex ideas of identity and personhood. As these other ideas evolved, the space for an archaeology of childhood also expanded, and now the archaeology of childhood is well aligned with the more humanistic, personal forms of archaeology that are gaining widespread popularity and acceptance in the field. The archaeology of childhood is one of many areas of archaeology that has moved the field away from an unquestioned idea that archaeological evidence was produced by impersonal, unidentified actors, that by default those actors were adult males. In this changing climate, the archaeology of childhood has moved from the margins to the mainstream of archaeology. There are professional organizations devoted solely to the subject. Archaeologists regularly participate in interdisciplinary conferences on childhood that take place around the globe. Children and childhood are topics that are now found on every major conference program in archaeology. Publication trends are changing as more work on the archaeology of childhood is being published in non-topical journals rather than being confined to edited volumes and specialized publications exclusively about childhood. All of these changes have combined to make the topics of children and childhood increasingly valued by archaeologists and visible in the places where archaeologists exchange and seek knowledge. The issues of validity and visibility that traditionally kept children out of archaeology have largely been reconciled. These changes are allowing the archaeology of childhood to move forward in new ways. Not only are new generations of scholars entering into a field where the archaeology of childhood is accepted, but there are people who can help mentor and nurture their work. As a result, larger-scale studies on children are being undertaken, and archaeologists are learning more about children in different time periods and geographical locations and building deeper understandings through continued engagement in others. On the other end of the spectrum, archaeologists who do not consider themselves scholars of childhood are beginning to integrate the study of children as an essential element of archaeological inquiry. Recognizing that children are always present in the past is an important shift in archaeological thinking and is helping to transform the archaeology of childhood from a disciplinary specialization to another analytical framework available to all archaeologists. Many of the earliest scholars studying children in the archaeological record called for all archaeology to be the archaeology of childhood, and with these important shifts and greater integration, the field is not there yet, but it is getting steadily closer.
See Also: Bioarchaeology of Childhood; Post-Processual Archaeology.
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Archaeology of Cult and Religion David A. Warburton, Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Rituals and Religion From Burial to Transaction Burials The Divine Fear, Ritual, Belief and Power Omens, Oracles and Magic Architecture The Iconography of Attributes Transactions: Political Power and the Divine The Spread of Sumerian Influence Commercialization of Faith Myth The Other Tradition of the Major Religions Symbolicity Archaeology and Study of Religion Divergent Approaches to Origins Conceptual Problems Cognitive Approaches The Social Nature of Religion and the Concepts of Justice, Inequality and Theodicy Diffusion and History Counter-Intuitive Ideas vs. Rational Explanations An Opportunity and Challenge for Archaeology Summary and Future Directions Anthropology and Archaeology Hinduism Death and the Beyond Religion and Science References Digital Sources
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Beliefs around immortality and burial rites lie at the origins of the archaeology of cult and religion Economic, political and social change contributed to conceptual developments, influencing, e.g., myth, and changes in practices, such as burial customs and temple construction Diffusion and identity played crucial roles in the spread and formation of belief systems
Glossary Emic (Basically, the insider’s view of social behavior) and Etic (basically, the outsider’s view of social activity) are important concepts that researchers must always bear in mind when dealing with social phenomena. Prehistorians can never gain an emic view from an informant when studying artifacts; anthropologists face great difficulties in clearly recognizing, delineating and maintaining etic and emic standpoints when carrying out fieldwork among unfamiliar foreign peoples.
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Ideology Is usually part, or a result, of a search for social legitimacy (which e.g., is the foundation of a recognized right to rule, or offers a platform from which a priest or prophet can speak out with indisputable authority), which can entail divine support e.g., for the exercise of hereditarily transmitted social authority related to a social mission (whether kingship or prophecy) or the mobilization for warfare. Magic Is generally understood as a means of exerting the influence of supernatural or otherworldly forces in this world, or of tricking otherworldly beings in the Beyond, usually for personal or illicit purposes. It is highly probable that the development of magic as a conceptual system occurred in historical times and that its floruit was after, and a consequence of, the emergence of religion (rather than having been a predecessor as is tacitly assumed by many). Evidently, its foundation is the ability to communicate with powers in the Beyond and thus “religious” in characterdbut “religion” is assumed to have a “positive” role in pushing ideal social norms, whereas mere magic is not. However, many “magical” devicesdsuch as the Egyptian “Book of the Dead”dare actually treated as religious texts, precisely because imperial gods are mentioned. When used by statesdas in Egypt around 2000 BC or in first millennium BC Babyloniadmagic is usually a mark of desperation and fear rather than power. Numinous Is a term used to describe the ill-defined sensation of an encounter with the awesome, inexplicable, spiritual power of something holy, something that is of itself separate from our world. Purity Has been fundamental to religious ritual since ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as rituals are invalid if the necessary purificationdthe precondition for transcendental communicationdis lacking. In religious communities, impurity and purity are fundamental matters of social consensus, playing a role in identity and exclusion. Rationality Is usually assumed to be a consciously non-ideological, non-religious means of analyzing and solving social problems. In this approach, in the contemporary world, religious phenomena are presumed to be unverifiable, dubious or fictive (in contrast to what Socrates thought [sic], meaning that cognitive evolution is constantly mutating and up-dating what is rational). Unsurprisingly, the actions of the gods could be rationally interpreted as appearing irrationaldand this led to the necessity of placating the gods (as in Mesopotamia) and also to explaining the complex behavior of the gods rationally (as among the Hebrew prophets and the other authors of the Old and New Testaments). Religion Among students of religion, is understood as a social phenomenon based on a discourse assuming transcendental phenomena (and thus dependent upon mutual and reciprocal understanding, including points of reference and value judgments), somehow positing and embedding ideal social norms. It is studied from regional, critical, historical, comparative, textual and linguistic, sociological, phenomenological, and cognitive, etc. approaches; it is taught in terms of gods (e.g., nonhuman immortal beings), myths (e.g., narratives involving legendary heroes or gods) and ritual (e.g., standardized divine services). Students of religion do not confuse a “discourse” about transcendental phenomena with assuming “beliefs” in such, although archaeologists do frequently make that leap on behalf of individuals who died long ago without having made verifiable statements about the matter. However, in contrast to this divergence, archaeologists could legitimately propose that one add the importance of architecture, iconography, hymns, and the confrontation with death as all fundamental to the Study of Religion (but this is an agenda, not a reality today). Religious Cult Takes place in the spatial, conceptual and temporal confines determined by the wider social context in which the performance of religious rituals, the use of the necessary utensils, the fulfillment of required preparations, and related activities fit into place, life and the calendar (e.g., divine services, worship, prayer, offerings, sacrifices, processions, feasting and festivals tied to recurring events or exceptional but calendar-based ones such as celestial eclipses) and/or corresponds to requirements dictated by necessary social events that are inherently, or have been transformed into religious rituals (e.g., marriage, coming of age [¼ variants of rites de passage], enthronements, burials). The concept is related to “cultivating” or “tending” the attention of transcendental beings. Religious Ritual Is a subcategory of a larger set of routine (repetitive, communicative) social practices, whereby actors are not the authors of the prescripted procedures and the actions are somehow related to postulated transcendental phenomena invoked by religious claims. The actual execution of the procedures is the meaning in some cases (e.g., declarations of faith with no follow-up); in others, the performance entails or justifies other social activities (e.g., war, peace, participation in community events, wife-beating, child-bearing, etc.). In the earliest demonstrably clear religions, purity was an essential prerequisite to the performance of ritual. Sacred Is what we can separate from our world (hence “consecration” is a human activity), as in a sacred district, a temenos, that is cut off and dedicated to aspects relating to the divine (e.g., worship of a deity, or secluding objects pertaining to a god). The Study of Religion Is different from Religious Studies, in that the former is the academic discipline studying the phenomenon (etic), whereas the latter is usually associated with one creed or another (emic), even where comparative religion is taught. Yet in certain respects the two are not far apart in their approach to religion as a phenomenon. This latter situation is at least partially because the Study of Religion emerged out of theology faculties rather than departments of philosophy, which would have been its natural home. These originsdand this situation, which continues to this daydhave an impact on thinking and publications in the Study of Religion in practice. This is important for archaeologists to realize when trying to understand
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the theoretical approaches of the Study of Religion, as these can ultimately be traced back to theologydwhich is the quintessence of what is thought about religion as it is understood by practitioners today (emic)drather than an understanding which would have been reached by beginning with an examination of the history of thought (etic). The result is a great and systematic distortion of the evidence by almost all concerned.
Abstract The origins and early development of religion are accessible to Archaeologists and Philologists dealing with prehistoric cultures and the earliest civilizations through burial practices. With writing, ideology came to associate kingship with ordained legitimacy and thus gods in the heavens, and this gradually led to the emergence of science, justice and myth. This conceptual system spread and morphed in other cultures, eventually culminating in different types of discourse, incorporating fear of, and belief in, gods in the heavens. Scholarship dealing with early religion has proven problematic, but there is growing interest. Fundamental methodological and conceptual obstacles remain.
Introduction Understanding religion is an extremely complicated issue, both for archaeology and the study of religion. The academic study of religion has largely avoided the matter of prehistorical/early historical origins; archaeology as it is presently organized is unprepared to approach the matter, although it is the only discipline that can offer clarity. Anthropologists have made some effort, but the matter can only be resolved by an interdisciplinary approach relying on a clear recognition of the reality of the philological and archaeological evidence concerning the early development of religion. Once the origins and early development have been recognized as problems, the individual manifestations of religion found at archaeological sites can be examined and the evidence interpreted in terms of what is actually revealed in the archaeological material. This entry aims to treat some of the issues which must be faced, and offer some guidance. This is one field where archaeology should play a decisive role in dermining both the methodology and the conclusions.
Overview and Key Issues Rituals and Religion Buildings and spaces that housed memories, sacred relics, gods, the dead, priests, monks and/or the associated offerings of the wealthy and powerful dominate the archaeology of the greater early civilizations (e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, India, the Olmecs and Maya) that developed social innovations, and the cultures which adopted and adapted some of their practices (e.g., Israel, Arabia, Japan, Mughal India, Rome, Cambodia, Toltecs, etc.) in the ancient and premodern periods. Built structures dominating the landscape and reaching toward the heavens are typical of the religions of the historical period since 3000 BC. In Mesopotamia, the earliest textual sources include offerings and hymns to temples (Fig. 1); the most important temple in Babylon was intended to convey the idea of being the structure that linked heaven and earth; in Egypt, dead rulers and their bureaucratic servants dominate the earliest part of religion, until eclipsed by the divine temples, after 2000 BC when in Egypt monumental architecture was likewise gradually incorporated into the domain of the worship of the godsdand this has since become the norm in all civilizations. Artwork depicting the divine and the dead is thus well represented in the museums and monuments of the world. The texts of early literate societies demonstrate the presence of deities from just before the dawn of history. However, in contrast to the monuments of the great civilizations, recognizable major remains of divine worship are not usually characteristic of those cultures that did not make the leap to literary worship of deities and enduring statehood. Significantly, the variety and complexity of religions in the advanced world and the transformations visible in the texts and art confirm almost constant change in recent millenniadwhereas this was not obvious earlier, and most other societies remained on this earlier level (while being influenced by the diffusion of ideas). Rather than leading to the emergence of a research agenda based on a material-based, history-oriented analysis of religion and society, archaeology and anthropology have struggled to bring material, theory and interpretation coherently together. One problem is certainly the lack of an historical perspective. The challenge is amplified by the fact that the academic Study of Religion has long tended to avoid material culture, and is generally inadequately prepared to deal with illiterate societies without living witnessesdmeaning that the discipline of the Study of Religion could actually benefit from archaeology, while that discipline can offer archaeologists little guidance. Indeed, the discipline of the Study of Religion (as exemplified by Eliade, 1987; Antes et al., 2004; Boyer, 2001; Geertz, 2013; Sinding Jensen, 2014), is impervious to history: a classic case is Segal’s (2004) widely acclaimed alleged introduction to “Myth”, where he just takes abbreviated versions of one Greek myth (that of Adonis) and uses that to follow the interpretations of tales in Classical Antiquity and in the 19th and 20th centuries to tell us what is done with myth by philosophers, rather than delving
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Fig. 1 Right, detail of cult procession with statues of gods on display, taken out of a temple (presumably similar to that of Fig. 2 left); left, original complete vase showing offering bearers presenting goods (in the name of a ruler, depicted in top register) to the temple (presumably received by the goddess herself, or her representative, top register), Uruk, southern Mesopotamia (ca. 3000 BC).
into the Sumerian bits and pieces which lay at the origins of the Greek and Roman tales, and how these and Akkadian elements fed into the Greek tale, and thereby coming closer to the nature, origins and evolution of “myth” as a fundamental element of culture. Instead, we just have the narcissistic version of the Study of Religion looking at itselfdsold as a study of “myth”. Obviously, the Study of Religion can offer nothing to the archaeologistsdbecause archaeologists frequently find themselves likewise (a) inclined to introspective approaches (which must be overcome) and (b) to neglect taking account of the details of the enormous social changes that have taken place in the last 50,000 years (with rapid change recognizable at the end of this era, making the tale of the last 3000 years far different from that of the Palaeolithic), facilitating comparisons bereft of value. What is needed is an approach recognizing the nature of the material. The degree to which anthropologists have interceded (e.g., Guthrie, 1995; Rappaport, 1999), offering to come to the aid of both historians of religion and archaeologists with versions of the origin of religion is largely due to the gap left by the Study of Religion and Archaeologydthe latter well illustrated by Insoll’s endorsement of a rather amateur approach to religion in archaeology, seemingly justifying its inclusion in archaeological analysis because it is “in” and Western archaeologists should join the bandwagon (Insoll, 2020: 1). What some archaeologists (e.g., Gimbutas, 1999) have offered is not really helpful, and thus the encouragement should be adopted with caution. In that volume by Insoll we should not be surprised to find an article on “water” in whichdwhile excellent on holiness, sacredness and puritydis less strong on the cosmological so that neither the Sumerian ab.zu nor the Greek Okeanos are adequately stressed (and similarly neglected are ideas like that of Bahrain being the meeting place of the briny sea and the fresh water sea, as still lives on in the name of the island in Arabicdor the cosmic religious importance of the separation of land and water). In the article on “cosmogeny” we find the obscure category “transcendental religions” (Insoll, 2020: 76) misused, conflating “transcendentalism” and a belief in a “transcendent god” with monotheistic religions. The article on “death” refers to burials which are “standardized routine [developed] independently on more than one occasion” (in Insoll (2020: 89))dwithout any evidence, demonstration or proof. The article on tabu has the most misguided version of the Egyptian tale of Horus and Seth imaginable (in Insoll (2020: 107)). This attitude is probably successful because it is in line with the orientation of Post-Processual archaeology where scholarship does not play a prominent role: given the theoretical and historical vacuum, this leads to piecemeal catalogs without any sense of knowledge, let alone diffusion, diachronic change or synchronic similarity. Exceptional in Insoll’s volume is the article on “ritual”, where a broadly acceptable presentation of the phenomenon concludes that ritual is “challenging” for archaeologists and therefore a “very promising field of research” (in Insoll (2020: 128)), probably a tacit recognition that nothing useful has been done. One problem is that accepting the offerings of the anthropologists means recognizing that they do not think historically, as their priority is mankind as a phenomenon (frequently allied with politically correct agendas). Paradoxically, archaeologists approaching their own material seem to take an equally narrow-minded approachdmeaning that the phenomenon is not understood as developing, even though the major change that took place in the last three thousand years is evident to everyonedand those undeniable
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changes should hint that the complexities of the present may not reveal much about what we should expect in the distant past. Instead, the present is used to illuminate the past, as if recent social and technological change had no impact ondand did not contrast withdthe slow early cognitive development and behavior of humans with our own capacities. Nevertheless, today, sufficient material and theoretical preparations are available to provide explanations for activities and evidencedand such matters should then be debated on a material-based theoretical level, taking account of the relevance of an historical perspective.
From Burial to Transaction Burials The earliest evidence of ritual is that of burial in the Middle Palaeolithic (MP), followed by the beginning of the deposition of tomb offerings in the Late Middle Palaeolithic, and then the plethora of different treatments of the dead characterizing the Late Upper Palaeolithic and Early Neolithic of the Near East. Hovers and Belfer-Cohen (in Tarlow and Nilsson Stutz (2019: 632, 634e635)) stress that (a) MP Neanderthal and Anatomically Modern Human - AMH (Homo sapiens) burials are both found in the Levant and (b) the AMH burials are almost certainly earlier than those of the Neanderthals. Significant is therefore that these practices were probably initiated by AMH in the Near East, and only subsequentlydrarely, eccentrically and exceptionallydadopted by the (genealogically elder) Neanderthals late in their own development (in the early European Upper Palaeolithic). Pettitt (in Insoll (2020: 338)) assumes that the irregularity of Neanderthal burials disproves this. However, the Neanderthals did not begin to bury their dead until roughly the time when our own (genetically younger) ancestors had begun the custom. And the irregularity itself demonstrates a lack of concept, as opposed to the consistent practices of our ancestors, which developed in a clear evolutionary pattern of gradually changing practices, with one widespread tradition leading to burials with offerings in distinct non-residential areas. That even during the Upper Palaeolithic (UP) it was a long and gradual evolution to progressively more complex burials, is adequately demonstrated by Riel-Salvatore and Gravel-Miguel (in Tarlow and Nilsson Stutz (2019)). However, eventually in the ancient world, burials and cremations with rich offerings, monumental markers, elaborate rituals and offerings became typical of human behaviordto differing degreesdin all cultures and civilizations, with special treatment initially reserved for the socially powerful political leaders (and select members of their families and entourage)das was evidently the model in the UP. This can be viewed as evidence that (a) ritual of this type is a human activity and the special treatment of the dead confirms that death has become a specifically human obsession. It is only over the course of recent millennia that burial or cremation have become nearly universally accessible to the entire population of a given community. Earlier, only exceptional people were treated in this fashiondand expensively. And in Western Asia, the idea of cemeteries separate from residential areas did not catch on in a uniform fashion. It is therefore also (b) a confirmation that it is not a human universal, but rather an historical development, resulting from the diffusion of an idea spreading around the globe in the last few thousand years from the core area of the cultures which consolidated the tradition. During the Bronze Age, the luxurious burials for the elite became a matter of ostentatious display in the Near East, Egypt and China. From the texts, we know that those same members of the highest elite were intimately involved in military exploits (expressions of state power) and in communications with the gods (expressions of political legitimacy).
The Divine Secure evidence of the divine can only come from written texts, where the Mesopotamian deity Inanna appears as the recipient of income in Uruk in Mesopotamia before the dawn of history (before ca. 3500 BC), in those texts which recorded administrative activities before writing was used for language. Around the dawn of history in southern Mesopotamia, probably the most important element of ordinary peoples’ lives would have been the payments due to the major temples (rather than, e.g., visits to local shrines). Thus, Englund (cited in Warburton (2012: 309)) correctly admonishes us that the earliest testimony of Inanna “might also point to a substantially different system, or level, of religious belief” from that we understand as normal. Probably significant in this context is that the earliest Sumerian hymns in the first half of the third millennium are to temples rather than to gods (as came soon thereafter) and kings (many centuries later; Ebeling et al., 1928e2018, 4: 539e548). This is highly important for archaeologists, as it means that the built places where the divine was worshiped or sheltered were extremely important at the dawn of history (and therefore probably before)dand that the structures themselves were important. Important is, however, also that a verbal discourse with agreed meanings is essential to religion as we understand itdand such a discourse is not in the texts until centuries after the accounting texts, when hymns to temples are the first confirmation that the discourse with the divine has begun. In this sense, the godsdwhatever they weredmay well have preceded the emergence of discourse, but this “soon” followed, in the historical period (centuries later), where, from that new beginning, the Sumerian gods are linked in writing to the heavens, van Dijk stressing that “the ‘great gods’ are all deified cosmic phenomena” (Asmussen and Læssøe, 1971e1975, I: 445; Inanna was Venus, Utu the sun, Nanna the moon, An heaven itself); Nanna was the chief god of the city of Ur, and an eclipse of the moon portended political threats. Thus, it was those deities recognized by the state that rose from being embodied worldly possessors of wealth to the lords of the celestial vault. The Egyptians never stressed eclipses that much (suggesting that the Mesopotamian belief in omens was based on correlating historical specific local identifications of deities with local political and celestial events), but the Egyptians did adopt the convention of locating the gods in the heavens,
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as it is clearly textually delineated centuries later, although not clear from the beginning (when death and the Netherworld were central, as this strain gave birth and momentum to the development of religion). Of extreme importance was purity in the divine ritual activities of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Third and second millennium BC Sumerian has a wide range of terms for “pure”, “purity”, e.g., dadag, had, zalag with an implication of “bright”; but also na dag with an additional implication of “explain, consecrate”; especially important is kugdone of the oldest wordsdalso related to the purity of silver (cf., e.g., Ebeling et al., 1928e2018, 11: 295e299). It could be that the “purification” process of silver lies at the historical origin of the idea of purity; striking is that white is associated with purity as silver is the “white metal” in Egyptian (ḥḏ ), Sumerian )dalthough silver is not white (although "bright", and this is probably the key). The refine(kugbabbar) and Chinese (baijin ment of silver probably belongs to the innovations of the fourth millennium BC, and thus the appearance in the texts moved with then recent historical and technological developments; whether fire became associated with purity because of its light or because of the pyrotechnology which transformed things at the end of prehistory is difficult to determine (although one would tend to suspect that its consuming and transformational power was decisive). In third-millennium BC Egypt and Mesopotamia, there also emerged a social awareness that taking care of the widows and orphans was a social responsibility. The preservation of a good name was also central. It is very difficult to understand how the greater part of the populace participated in the system. Together, these phenomena suggest that coherent worship of the major divinities had (1) historical origins, and (2) evolved in an almost exclusively elite context in which the few members of the upper-most classes had created an efficient means of separating themselves ideologically and practically from the masses. By acting as benefactors, members of the elite could build up a constituency, cementing those hierarchical dependency relations that held the premodern world together. In Egypt, kingship is associated with the earliest state and the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. At that time, some avatar (perhaps Bat?) of Hathor is present when writing appears with the First Dynasty (ca. 3000 BC), and a divinity (probably the Sungod) seems to be responsible for securing the hereditary succession of kingship by the end of the Second Dynasty (Kahl, 2007: 3, 46; ca. 2600 BC). Significantly, the earliest Egyptian kings of the First Dynasty seem to have become divinities of the Beyond upon death (at the latest)dbeing posthumously entitled “Foremost of the Westerners”, or the Dead (a title which later became an epithet of Osiris, who is not documented until around five centuries later). However, before this, they had lived as kings somehow identified with Horus, who later became the god of kingship (but was initially the title of the legitimate Kings). By the middle of the third millennium, the Egyptian kings had hopes of joining the stars in the heavens after the transitional phase of death. Significantly, Sumerian kingship came down from heaven after the beginning of urbanism and historydand therefore the concept of earthly human kingship was probably imported from Egypt, and with it the divine commission. The hope of some Mesopotamian kings to enjoy an astral existence after death (Ebeling et al., 1928e2018, 11: 329; 323e333) likewise suggests exchange with Egypt at an early age. As the most important divinities lived in the heavens with which the kings were linked, the royal attention to celestial omens, and the consultation of oracles, to receive divine guidance in political decision-makingddocumented in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and China in the second millennium BCdis merely part of a system based on the profound thoughts of the Sumerians about the links between the regularities of the universe and political history. It follows that night and the Netherworld were linked, and thus some Sumerian deities were born in the Netherworld (whence the stars appeared). Yet the real gods of the Netherworld were rarely worshiped on earth; in Mesopotamia, Inanna’s desire to visit the Netherworld led to chaos on earth, indicating that her place was in this world (and the heavens) and not in the Netherworld (but her star did drop out of sight temporarily on occasiondand this probably led to the myth). In Egypt, the Sun-god regularly moved in both the heavens and the Netherworlddstrengthening the promise of life after death. The intellectual exploration of these phenomena and the exchange in the oldest civilizations (in Mesopotamia and Egypt from the third millennium through the first millennium BC) led to (a) astronomy revealing the home of the gods, (b) poetry about the gods, heroes, and the Beyond and (c) the construction of increasingly elaborate earthly residences for the gods, so that the gods could descend from the heavens and take up abode in their statues situated in suitable surroundingsdand the kings could immortalize their names on the buildings, and have hymns composed to celebrate themselves, like gods.
Fear, Ritual, Belief and Power Burying someone and putting stones on the dead body can only be motivated by fear, whatever other vague “beliefs” there may have been, motivating the burial and the placing of offerings in the tomb. Placating a dead person with offerings could also be so construed. Fear is a strong motivation in any society: fear of being held responsible for errors is one automatic human reaction; fear of the unknown, and the more powerful in society, are equally natural and ingrained. Fear of death and the dead may march in parallel. Violence is an implicit element in all human interaction, and brings about more violence (one can gain from, e.g., Wagner-Durand, 2021). Maurice Bloch suggests that myth can be related to ritual and belief through doubts. However, this seems too Western educated and academic. I assume that fear (rather than doubt or belief) is a major factor in ritualized communal activity, and agree with Bloch’s (in Harvey (2005: 59)) conclusion that these factors lead to a social paradox whereby “we cannot construct cosmologies other than those which offer a toe-hold to the legitimation of domination and violence”. Such cosmologies are anchored in state systems with myth, and they influence or determine some rituals. Conforming to tradition assured that hope would balance feardand assure the maintenance of worldly power.
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It is highly significant that in the rituals of various different Egyptian temples for different gods in the late second and early first millennium BC, when worshiping the gods, the priests repeat phrases and actions derived from the earliest known Egyptian mortuary rituals performed near tombs for dead kings who are assumed to live on as members of the divine community in the mid-third millennium BC. These ritualsdperformed for gods and kings alikedrelate to a mythical (but clearly early historical, not prehistoric) conflict between two brothers, each contesting the other’s right to the inheritance of the kingship, with one brother losing an eye (Horus) and the other his testicles (Seth). In a revised version of the myth, it would appear that the victor oversees the burial of his father (Osiris), possibly thereby legitimizing the inheritance of the office. But his success might also have been possible largely because the other could not produce an heir to succeed him. Without doubt, the origin of what later became standardized religious ritual can ultimately be traced back to death leading to burial. What may be the oldest coherent myth in the world turns on death (the precondition for inheritance) and the legitimate divinely sanctioned inheritance of political power, with extreme violence and the ritual of burial playing a role. Significantly, neither the details of the actual myth (Griffiths, 1960, 1980) nor the execution of the rituals (Warburton, 2010) were actually consistentdbut the whole belonged in an urban world. Obscure references were adequate for the legitimacy conferred by the cosmology and the ritual. There is no way belief played a role here, whereas the divine actions were invoked to legitimate the decisive actions here on earth. Smith (in Harvey (2005: 38)) notes that in principle ritual itself is empty: it is merely the displacement from daily life that renders it meaningful, “As such, ritual is systemic hierarchy par excellence”. That this is accurate and probably contradicts Rappaport (1999) is important. When arguing that “beliefs” can simply be assumed and projected onto burials, Tarlow (in Tarlow and Nilsson Stutz (2019)) does not allow for a long development whereby respect and fear lead to the emergence of social hierarchies bringing about societies in which “beliefs” could be nurtured. “Belief,” as Tarlow describes it, depends upon trust and understandingdboth of which are rare among ordinary humans (who are generally socially deficient). “Belief” is most probably the final outcome of a long social historydand probably not an essential aspect at the origins of religion, where “fear” and “awe” may have been intermingled sensations when facing human rulers and divine powers alike.
Omens, Oracles and Magic It is impossible to know when human beings first understood the idea of reading signs in naturedsuch as eclipses, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the likedas being preludes alluding to coming political or social catastrophes. Such irregular phenomena will have been shocking events much more awesome than thunder, lightning, and storms, etc.dand yet even these mild and common phenomena were linked to divinities in Indo-European thought, as with Hittite and Nordic weather gods, or the Greek gods Poseidon and Zeus. Somehow, rarer eventsdsuch as earthquakes and eclipsesdbecame associated with kings in Mesopotamia and China, and thus momentous occurrences in the earth or the heavens were linked to political developments. This later procedure depends upon reliable calendars, political systems, observations and recording and was thus tied to developments in historical timesdand in the case of celestial events eventually led to astronomy and thus the birth of science (with predictions based on observation and perceived meanings, as when a lunar eclipse is linked to the death of a king or the end of a dynasty, as presumably happened around the end of the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia, cf. Warburton, 2016). This concept of interpreting natural phenomena as portents led to the systematization of omensdbut also to the idea of posing questions to the deities, and thus the birth of oracles (initially about relating divine actions, decisions or judgments to royal political behavior in Mesopotamia and China). Obviously, there is an enormous difference between understanding eclipses as themselves being mysterious numinous phenomena, and linking the celestial entities (moon, sun, planets) to divinities worshiped here on earth and then linking the eclipses to the stars of the earthly political pantheon (kings, dynasties). The latter part of this development took place in historical timesdwhile the former can probably be traced further back, but it can hardly have been systematized without calendars, and calendars are the hallmark of the great civilizations (not “primitive” peoplesdalthough peripheral peoples will have been influenced by the discoveries of the great civilizations over the course of the last few thousand years). A slightly different practice is involved in magic, where e.g., in Egypt the names of political enemies could be inscribed on pots which were then brokendevidently with the object of doing the enemy some harm without the expenses of carrying out a military intervention. This was attempteddin vaindin Egypt from around the end of the third millennium onwards. A major concern in Egypt was also using written and spoken spells to support the survival of the king in the Beyond after death. Omens, oracles and magic were initially related to political events and thus the statedand all seem to have appeared gradually during the third millennium BC. Later, in astrology, astronomical phenomena were interpreted for those outside the highest political elitedbut this took place in the second half of the first millennium BC after the Persians privatized the temples of Mesopotamia. In the same way, via the Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead in Egypt in the second millennium BC, the use of magic spells to aid the survival of ordinary humans in the Beyond after death became routine. By the second millennium BC, ordinary middle-class boys and girls could pray to the goddess Hathor that she render the desired one pliable. Significantly, the context of magical systems seems to be based on state gods who are somehow integrated into spells with very private interests, meaning (a) that many of the “religious” texts from Egypt are really “magical” and (b) that these are indeed recent historical phenomena. It is not insignificant that the Nordic gods come long after the Near Eastern origins of religion as a state organization (for literature, cf. Rochberg, Brisch in Snell (2020)).
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Architecture In Mesopotamia, monumental temple architecture erected for the gods (Heinrich, 1982) was one of those major features (along with hymns and divine order) which the Sumerians introduced into religiondand which have endured (up to the present-day) as essential features of all major religions. Temples were understood as offering an abode for the gods on earth, and were the place where offerings were made (on altars before the buildings, as in Greece), with rituals being performed within, observed by the statues of select worshipers from the elite. At the earliest stage of Egyptian history, the kings’ resources were expended on elaborate mortuary architecture which expressed continuity with past human ritual practice (with burials the first solid evidence)dand the resources of the elite were likewise so expended (albeit on a smaller scale), with an extraordinary number of major elite tombs in the cemeteries at Helwan during the earliest dynasties (the latter unfortunately omitted in Stevenson in Renfrew et al. (2021), while treating the continuity from Prehistory to History; we can hope for a thorough and accessible treatment of this significant Helwan cemetery by Christiana Köhler in the near future). Over time, an increasingly smaller proportion of the elite chose to expend their wealth on tombsdas burial customs became more universal throughout the population (Fig. 2). Only at the end of the third millennium BC did the Egyptian kings begin to erect stone temples for the gods (as opposed to themselves, where even the Dynasty V solar temples must be viewed as celebrations of the kings themselves rather than as having been primarily built for the divinity), but as stone was increasingly used for larger divine temple architecture, the progressively more diminutive royal pyramids were made of brickdand eventually disappeared entirely, transformed into subterranean galleries, while the obelisks dedicated to the gods rose higher and higher.
The Iconography of Attributes In the context of this brief survey, it is impossible to do justice to a complicated issue fundamental to the understanding of the development of religion. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, attributes were used in iconography (and epithets in language) to distinguish different divinities and heroes. However, the system was by no means firm at the start of history and in Bronze Age Egypt did not reach a stable state (so that, e.g., the goddess of the West, Isis and Hathor trade attributes and epithets so that only the inscriptions put a name on them), whereas in Babylonia, by the Iron Age, there was a relatively well-established system of iconic attributes and symbols linked to divinities. However even still, e.g., in the Old Babylonian era, there is one celebrated Mesopotamian piece (Burney Relief, Black and Green, 2011 frontispiece) where the identity of the deity in question is not a matter of agreement. In the Greek world the symbols were far more consistently applieddand this stability continues into Christian medieval art, but is also particularly prominent in Buddhism. Archaeologists should recognize the gradual development and diffusion of the idea of attributes in this context (with, e.g., halos being common to both Christianity and Buddhism). The systematization of attributes does not lie at the origins, but at the developed stage. This clearly indicates a conscious and far-reaching refinement of the idea of the numinous exclusively in historical times.
Transactions: Political Power and the Divine In Egypt, the example of a cultic practice antedating the first state (perhaps ca. 3200 BC) can be followed stratigraphically up through mud-brick structures to a mid-second millennium state sponsored stone temple. Significantly, the original shrine (to a numinous being whom we cannot identify) was initially threatened by the construction of a state-sponsored fortress, but this latter structure was abandoned, and the shrine continued to grow, with gradually increasing evidence of state support. Important is that the earliest evidence of ritual here involves the deposition of objects at a time when the shrine was but a natural stone niche, i.e., with no evidence of any significant expenditures or efforts before the emergence of the state, which initially disregarded (Kopp,
Fig. 2 Religion through the ages: left, stylized copy of ancient image of a “horned temple” (presumably made of sun dried brick, wooden fittings and plastic decoration), Western Asia (ca, 3000 BC); center left, copy of an ancient image of a “horned shrine” (presumably flimsy materials, with real elephant tusks, Egypt, ca. 3000 BC); center right, Egyptian obelisk from Karnak, today Rome (ca. 1500 BC); right, Japanese Pagoda, Nara (ca. 800 AD).
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2006; Ziermann, 2003), but then adopted the shrine, with indifference or hostility culminating in submission and dominion. The evidence implies that the emergence of the first shrine made of flimsy materials itself followed the appearance of the statedand that even such a minor feature was not typical of non-elite prehistoric cult practices, and that almost any kind of religious architecture was itself bound up with the economic growth of the state (as evidenced both by the negligence at the time of the creation of the fortress, and the subsequent eventual adoption of the shrine). In Egypt, the kings somehow began to become divine with the creation of the first territorial nation state after the conquest of Lower Egypt, and to some unclear extent, the kings remained divinedalthough probably becoming more divine after death. Somehow a tradition that the Egyptian kings might have had divine ancestors was insinuated into the system, although (in secular propaganda texts, rather than religious inscriptions, where they were necessarily divine) some Egyptian kings clearly denied having had divine antecedents. In Sumerian Mesopotamia the process was more complicated as initially, the gods seemed to have been in control of the wealth accumulated by the community administrators in the temples and only gradually did the ruling families (as deputies of the gods) become more prominent, before actually appropriating the wealth of the gods for themselves (i.e., the state). This was followed in the Semitic Old Babylonian era by the appointment of human kings selected by the gods (as in the case of Hammurabi). Prior to this, the Semitic Akkadian king Naram-Sin had declared himself to be a god. The origins of the dominant system are evident in that “much of the [Sumerian] religious literature is inseparably related to concepts of kingship” and there was confidence “in the efficacy and necessity of ritual, which expressed human dependence on the divine while at the same time enabling a reciprocal relationship between the two” (Cunningham in Salzman (2013: 31)). Once this tradition had become relatively clearly established, kings claimed legitimacy by virtue of divine origins or by virtue of being selected by the godsdand this version spread around the globe, with kingship being associated with the state. In a quid pro quo or do et des exchange, aside from ritual, the kings would erect monuments and/or promote justice assuring that the gods approved of royal legitimacy. The popular gods were adopted by the state, and the state gods insinuated their way into the minds of the populace, so that state and divinities were bound together, with the kings serving as mediators.
The Spread of Sumerian Influence Our modern abstract concept of religion thus came to life in the era of the earliest urban states between 4000 and 2000 BC, with several interacting features. Firstly, there were three fundamental traditions, (a) that of Sumer (based on the assumed existence of the gods linked to concrete existence, with the world guided by a “basic plan”, one which “was not drawn up by the gods, but on the contrary, one to which the gods were subordinated”, as van Dijk expresses it, Asmussen and Læssøe, 1971e1975, I: 442), (b) that of Egypt (where the kingship was divine, and thus the power of the state itself divine, but linked to royal performance, Assmann in Kaiser (2019 II: 336e838)) and (c) that of the Semites (who were intent on abstract order and understood the gods as substantial powers with their own will, Warburton’s version of Aage Westenholz, slightly influenced by von W. von Soden und J. van Dijk). Secondly, these intellectual traditions were bound up with the relatively rapid evolution of social hierarchies, as the new ruling classes of bureaucrats, warriors and ritualists controlled the subordinated peasants now forced to create the wealth of the rulers, and the hunter-gatherers, who were initially marginalized by the Neolithic, but over time becamedas pastoralistsdmore important in the urban economies (due to the evolving economics and practice of sheep-breeding) so that they thereby became ambivalent members of urban society. To these came the new classes of merchants and craftsmen, dependent on the ruling classes they served. Each of the various members of these classes had conflicting interestsdand extremely contrasting capacities to promote their will socially. The importance of the craftsmen and merchants gradually increased over time, and their interests were initially bound to those of the states, but as the size of the world economy grew, their loyalty was increasingly tied to divinities and social bonds beyond the immediate power and interests of the states in the core (as they had dealings with others, sharing different identities and loyalties). These conflicts and intellectual traditions were the products of Near Eastern Bronze Age urbanizationdand had a powerful impact on developments elsewhere. One decisive inadvertent change was the identification of some gods with astronomical phenomena, which culminated in the creation of science, by the bureaucrats of the religious institutions (Warburton, 2016). Another unintended change was that the states pushed commerce and the emergence of merchant networks that projected the intellectual inclinations of the core states into the distant margins of the periphery (drawing on, e.g., F. Kaul in Warburton (2015) and the theses of K. Kristiansen in e.g., Christensen et al. (2013)). The result of these interactions is that after the Near Eastern Bronze Age, (a) celestial bodies came to be universally associated with the major gods and (b) “surprisingly few of the [Greek] Olympian deities have a clear Indo-European etymology” (Renfrew in Insoll (2020: 683)), meaning that the character of the gods, and their identities were being borrowed or inherited rather than created anew. Most of the identifiable influences beyond the core (such as the Near Eastern origins of the Greek gods) can be traced back to the social conflicts in Mesopotamia, as Egypt played a minor role in the details of this intellectual game in comparison to Mesopotamia (before the advent of Christianity, which incorporated Egyptian concepts, such as the judgment after death). In contrast to constantly challenged semiotic Babylonian thought, Bronze Age Egyptian religion evolved in isolation and was not touched by outside competition; beyond that, the tradition of astronomical sciences shifted from Egypt to Babylonia after the end of the third millennium BC, so that it was primarily Mesopotamia that directly influenced developments in Anatolia, the Levant and the Aegean as well as Iran and the Gulf. Fundamental in this respect is that the Sumerian tradition was basically abandoned after the end of the third millennium, when it may have reached its intellectual zenith. However, the thoughts of the Sumerians were the first in world history and determined
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a great deal of the thought that the Semites modifieddand this Sumerian influence had an impact on all of the surrounding world, as these thoughts spread, especially as propelled by the Semitic adoption of Egyptian astronomical science and Sumerian commerce. Van Dijk (Asmussen and Læssøe, 1971e1975, I: 443) correctly realizes that we can “hardly ascribe” Sumerian intellectual constructions “to the ‘irrational’” but also that it was hardly understood when translated into Akkadian. It was in this fashion that magic (as in the case of the loaves and the fish, Mark 6: 30e39) eventually entered into religion: through the misunderstanding of Sumerian thought. The origins of Sumerian thought were thoroughly rationaldand the observations of the Egyptian astronomers were entirely objective. However, the underlying thoughts were lost through (a) calendrical problems rendering Egyptian astronomical observations useless and (b) an incapacity to understand Sumerian thought. What had been logically and empirically correct was lost due to incomprehensibility and calendrical inadequacy. Regardless of the explanation for the divergence, magic served as the bridge severing science from thought and marginalizing intellectual analysis, as magic was more readily comprehensible for the masses. This should never be forgotten: magic was basically the result of inadequate calendars combined with a belief in the gods, and therefore a result of uneven intellectual development, rather than a predecessor of systematic thought.
Commercialization of Faith These royal/divine exchanges therefore filtered down through the society (and on to the periphery) as, over time, merchants came to play a central role in the economies of the early states. Not only would merchants deliver goods to the gods (e.g., in commissions from state institutions in the earliest states), but in the second millennium BC Near East merchants would also take loans from the gods (Veenhof, 2004)dand would come to appeal to the gods for help (visible to us in the aftermath, as e.g., merchants deposited offerings at temples as an expression of thanks for their merchandise being saved at sea; cf., e.g., Warburton, 2020). Beginning with jade axes in the fifth millennium BC (Pétrequin, 2012), the tendency to treat artifacts transformed by human hands as objects of a special kind became a human passion. The earliest of these skilled craftsmen must have somehow served some people with special functions. Using expensive imported stones and metals, later craftsmen were either palace/temple dependents, or commissioned by the institutions to execute artwork representing ideological conceptions. Seals (made of precious materials) with mythological, divine or worldly scenes became symbols of status as well as instruments of state control. With the growth of the trade routes, craftsmen in obscure regions could dispatch decorated items which found their way into temples, palaces and tombs. During the third millennium BC, many of these were decorated with images that either reflected myths developing in the core states or actually inspired bureaucrats and court poets in the core states to create suitable myths. By the mid second millennium BC, advances of pyrotechnology assured that the commercial manufacture of cheap amulets and/or imitation seals rapidly became an industrial scale enterprisedleading to many “small finds” in the Near East and Mediterranean. These objectsdfrom the late fourth millennium onwardsdare thus part of the economic and social changes occurring in recent millennia, and thus reflect a new world (different from that of the Palaeolithic craft production which eventually gave rise to mythological figures, many millennia later). In the mid first millennium BC, the Greeks noted carefully how much money they were spending on temples, so that it was known that the public money flowed through the community. The impact of the growth of Greek religiondwhich was shared by the peopledprobably had an impact on neighbors, as the evidence of religion in the European Iron Age is compelling, as well argued by Joy (in Insoll (2020)); although there is far more, she does demonstrate that the material evidence demands “beliefs” which went beyond tomb offerings, and involved the elites in renouncing some (potentially significant) part of their wealth for the benefit of “wetland demons” (my term, not hers), in a fashion which may have been partially a matter of display. Along the Silk Road to the east, merchants would make donations and endow foundations for religious institutions, and money would therefore flow through the communities there as well. Partially through merchants, religiondin the sense of wide-spread participationdhad become an established fact of life for the masses.
Myth Although it is possible that there were mythical texts among the incomprehensible materials written in Sumerian in the early third millennium BC, those Sumerian and Akkadian myths which can be read and translated date from the late third millennium BC onwards. Of those myths with any kind of social context, all belong so the urban world of the earliest cities and states and were not inherited from prehistoric times: Junge (in Kaiser (2019, III/2: 931e932)) describes one Egyptian case involving gods who “write letters to each other, form a court with a president subordinated to the legal system of the divine magistrates, [.arguing] legal subtleties and hair-splitting, culminating in their taking refuge in a divine judgment”. This case is admittedly a satire written at the end of the Bronze Age, but it is the only one from Bronze Age Egypt, where there is no evidence of any kind of coherently organized myth in the earliest material, while those which appear later (in the first millennium) are clearly fiction and not historical memories. The one we have involves a dispute about the inheritance of the kingship. This myth of Horus, Seth and Osiris was being re-worked during the third millennium, perhaps before the Sumerian ritual texts were used as the basis for the creation of myths such as Inanna’s descent to the Netherworld, perhaps around 2000 BC. This literary tradition flourished from this time onwards. In terms of development, some form of popular belief in supernatural powers and life in the Beyond came into existence and continued to exist, but the creation of myth was primarily linked to the major gods of the Sumerian and Egyptian state pantheons, and this tradition would continue through history: the important myths would primarily concern the state gods when the Sumerian
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tradition was progressively modified, elaborated and imitated in Babylon, Ugarit, Israel and Greece (with Rome virtually adopting a re-named and re-ordered Greek pantheon). Despite its repeated defeats, the Athenian state celebration of Athena paid off in a way thatdlacking the funding and inspiration for suitable monuments and traditionsdthe gods of Sparta did not enjoy. In Egypt, it was the state gods Osiris and Isis who prospered and enjoyed widespread popularity in comparison to local godsdand they were among the most important to survive until the interdiction of the traditional religion in the Roman/Byzantine Empire. Those popular gods who were merely worshiped, or offered aid, gradually declined in importance, marginalized by the state traditions long before the religion faded, as illustrated by the fate of the Celtic deities. It was the state gods (recognized by Socrates) who enjoyed the luxury of myths. Strangely, Eliade (1963:12) assumed that “everyone knows that since Xenophanes (ca. 565e470 [or 570e467 BC])dwho was the first to critically examine and reject the ‘mythological’ expressions of divinity used by Homer and Hesioddthe Greeks gradually expunged myth of any religious and metaphysical value”. Some members of the elite may have shared this vision, but it was certainly only many centuries (or indeed probably more than a millennium later) that the people will have abandoned the gods and their myths exchanging them for the versions incorporated into the Old and New Testaments, which were accompanied by a plethora of Catholic and/or Orthodox saints (each of whom had more accessible powers than most of the polytheistic gods). The Akkadians began their literary mythological career largely by translating, modifying and organizing Sumerian literature. There is little evidence of creativity in Akkadian mythical traditions until after they treated the Sumerian myths. A remarkable and important case is that of Ereshkigaldthe Mesopotamian goddess assigned the Netherworld who lived on as Greek Persephone (with both of them residing in subterranean apartments). In contrast to Persephone (who was worshiped in parts of the Greek world with her mother Demeter), Ereshkigal was basically not worshiped on the surface of the earth anywhere, ever, in a significant fashion. Ereshkigal was incorporated into state myths and thus had an identity without a real cult. Significantly, like the Greek myths, the details of the various references to Ereshkigal do not create a coherent tale, but the story is clear. Curiously, the Greek tradition reverses the Mesopotamian in several respects, as, e.g., (1) Ereshkigal lures her future husband Nergal into her bed in the Netherworld where she already rules and keeps him there making him king, whereas Persephone is carried off to the Netherworld by Hades who is already ruling there and names her queen and (2) originally it was Inanna’s male partner Dumuzi who would spend part of the year in this world whereas it is Hades’ female partner Persephone who comes up regularly. Significant is that, being institutionalized gods (or one goddess with different names and myths), they lived on. Ereshkigal was part of the pantheon of the urban Sumerian world, and it is the traditions of this world that survived, and led to the emergence of the Study of Religion in the West (where Ereshkigal continues a lively existence in the literature: Gadotti, 2020). However, the real key is probably not in the details of the tale of how Ershkigal got Negal into the Netherworld, but rather in realizing that these myths were created as “explanations” for phenomena understood as real and existing, i.e., that Nergal was the god of the dead, as was Hades. Beyond that, it is important to note that myths are indeed dependent on creativity based on stimulation of some kind leading to creativity, and this stimulates further borrowing and translating. They thus (a) form a legacy born in the urban era with its palaces and temples peopled with priests and gods and (b) this legacy has relatively recent beginningsdand the sequences can be established based on the written records and the iconography. In Classical Greek literature and art, there was therefore substantial variety in the details of the various stories and scenes we associate with the traditional mythology. This was at least partly due to the influences inherited from the Ancient Near East along with local traditions in the various corners of Greece. However, what is important is that one can easily see (a) that the tales about Ereshkigal may have been one of the earliest efforts of mythical literature in Akkadian, (b) that they draw on Sumerian myths and (c) at some point (because of textual losses we cannot tell exactly when) it became a kind of conscious satire. Regardless of when this Mesopotamian text became a satire, in the Contendings of Horus and Seth, we have a “burlesque” version of an Egyptian mythical text “which takes place exclusively among gods” before the end of the second millennium BC, taking “a form like myth by Aristophanes” (Junge in Kaiser (2019 III/2: 930, 933)). In other words, the Egyptians were writing satires of myths centuries before the wise Xenophanes began to criticize the Greek mythsdwhich, as far as myths about gods are concerned, were themselves nothing but revised versions of what they had inherited from the Near East. That this is the oldest mythological text preserved from Egypt is generally unmentioned. Myth is thus a good example from which students of Religion (e.g., Segal, 2004) and archaeologists alike could learn. Arguing that myth is a pre-urban phenomenon when most of the early myths belong so urban settings should be recognized as a bit dubious. As the Akkadians seem to have started copying Sumerian texts and only then developed their own which then fed into Greek myths should likewise throw doubt onto the practice of assuming that myth and religion are universalsdrather than diffused inventions, borrowings and legacies (as they are). Failing to recognize that the Egyptians and Mesopotamians threw their own traditions into question before the Hebrew Bible was composed using bits and pieces of Ancient Near Eastern lore allows endless speculation to blossom. Yet such dubious contentions have led to the concept that “beliefs” and “myths” can be ascribed to prehistoric peoples. Morales seems to accept that “Myths are stories that are of psychological importance to a community” (Morales, 2007: 3) while recognizing that Euripides wrote what is probably the best-known version of Medea, but that it is really “Euripides’ invention” differing fundamentally from “previous versions” (Morales, 2007: 23). The Greek elite may not have believed in the myths, but they used the myths as a means of expression. Otto (2002) seems persuaded that the Greek elite will have appreciated the identities of the gods as expressed in the myths and hymns well into the Hellenistic era. The Egyptians likewise used the myths, and had already satirized their own myths before the myths of the Greeks had begun to emerge, let alone thrown into doubt. Thus, Eliade’s observation is irrelevant. Important is that the Sumerian elite created a form of expression that was adopted by the massesdand
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maintained by them long after the elites had abandoned the idea. However, the greatest error is not that of Eliade, but rather that the idea of “mythical” thought is adopted by thinkers like Donald (1991)dand projected by them into the Palaeolithic without any foundations whatsoever, and this is then accepted by the likes of Mithen (1999). In this sense, the details of the temples, myths and rituals were not what made the gods concrete, but rather their places in the universe, as the Sumerians originally organized the world, assigning identities to the earth, the Netherworld, the heavens, the air, and the ocean, strengthening links with the celestial beings. It makes little difference that Cauvin, Hodder and Gimbutas can identify potential cult practices and alleged deities in prehistory and in the periphery of the Near Eastern Bronze Age: ultimately, it was Yahweh and Allahdderived from the state gods of Mesopotamiadwho replaced Jupiter (¼Zeus) and came to dominate in the West. The Greeks bore a major role in this transformation of divine identity, by making their gods popular and giving them relatively clear identities, epithets and attributes, as can be seen in the legends, the hymns and the art. The Greeks were thus the zenith of the Western polytheistic traditionsdand through Gandara had a direct influence on both Hinduism and Buddhism.
The Other Tradition of the Major Religions However, the tale in the East really is different and far more complicated. The ancestor cults of China and Japan buttressed the state, and were thus following directly in the Egyptian traditiondbut without the use of auxiliary deities to support them. However, in contrast to Egypt, they endorsed Buddhism, a type of universal revealed religion that did not exist in the Bronze Age. Yet without Ashoka and the Mauryas in India, Buddhism would never have reached the Silk Road, and thus the role of the state (which was invented in the Bronze Age Near East, and accompanied the growth of religion, being particularly important for Greece) was crucial for what has since become a popular religion. The history of Hinduism really begins after the Buddhist breakthrough, and Ashoka himself was building on Greek traditions (ultimately derived from the Near Eastern states whose successor Alexander had annihilated) as he exploited the power of the state to support religion. Initially, the Maurya support for Buddhism flourished and it was only centuries later that the states began to support Hinduismdand as with the Hindu-influenced traditions in Cambodia, these religions flourished with state support, having had early influences from the West. After the fall of Rome, Christianity flourished without the state, and thanks to merchants, Buddhism likewise blossomed without being dependent on the state. It is thus only in the last two millennia (in a changing economic and political context) that religion has become a phenomenon separate from the state and societydbut it still continues to enjoy substantial support from the state (ranging from tax-breaks and taxes to subsidies, endowments and state-paid clergy, etc.). And virtually all known forms of religion ultimately owe their orgins to the Ancient Near Eastern states. These were the religions which determined the birth and nature of the Study of Religion.
Symbolicity In contrast to burials, the tendency to recognize and deliberately model images goes back far further than our own species. It can be argued that an australopithecine picked up a stone that can be construed as depicting a naturally created image of a face; regardless of whether this example is discarded or accepted, it is “absurd” to think of religion in this context (Insoll in Insoll (2020: 426)). The stratigraphically secure figurine from Berekhet Ram (created by a Homo erectus) is demonstrably older than our own species (Pettitt in Insoll (2020: 333e334)), and likewise irrelevant to religion. This tendency to model figurines continued in the Upper Palaeolithic (and beyond), where it was accompanied by wall paintingsdand this tradition then exploded in the Neolithic where the creation of figurines, and the decoration of pottery and walls became common. At some point in the last 50,000 years, we can assume that the origins of religion had evolved far enough to associate figurines with religion. Five millennia ago, the earliest recognizable figurines or statues are those of kings (in Egypt) or the delegates of the gods (in Mesopotamia)dand not demonstrably the gods themselves, although a priestess may be identified so closely to Inanna that perhaps neither we nor the Sumerians were intended to distinguish them (cf. top register, Asmussen and Læssøe, 1971e1975, I: 441); it is possible that statues (presumably of the goddess or goddesses) are depicted in the same register (Fig. 1). Subsequently, by the middle of the third millennium BC, divine images were routinely depicted on Mesopotamian cylinder seals and in plastic, as well as in Egypt in sculpture. That precious materials were required for the bodies of the gods was cause and outcome of the growing economy and trade routes of the Bronze Age Near East. In Classical Greece divine images were likewise created by the best artists using the most expensive materials, and the images likewise set up in expensive temples. In the Bronze Age Aegean, there is far less evidence of either divine worship or divine imagery in templesdin contrast to the imagery of the signet rings which clearly evoke a divine woman who entrusts power to a youthful male figure. However, the meanings of the imagery lead to complications. There is an Akkadian myth of a hero who saves an eagle’s life, and the eagle takes him into the heavens, from which at some point he falls (meaning that the origins of the Greek story about Icarus can be recognized here). The exact fate of the Akkadian hero is unclear since the text is broken, and the evidence of kinglists not conclusive. However, there are images of a man flying on a bird on seals that are earlier than the preserved texts. Do they indicate that the myth is older than our preserved copies? Or did the imagery have some other context, but then gave rise to the myth? This is merely one hint at the complexities of analyzing the earliest sources. With the Greek tales, we know that there are enormous inconsistencies whereby written records and imagery do not necessarily relate.
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Archaeology and Study of Religion Divergent Approaches to Origins The Study of Religion has left the issue of the origins of religion open. As understood by students of religion, religion is dependent on language (because discourse requires language to give any meaning which could be conveyed to others about any possible meaning in any discourse including artistic symbols). Of central importance is that the debate about the origins of language has been re-opened among linguists, but mostly working on pure speculation. Here the archaeologists feel free to speak their minds; some plead for an Antiquity of languages going back to Homo erectus (e.g., Parzinger, 2014: 110, following his interpretation of the archaeological evidence which implies to his mind that early co-operation and tool-making would have been unthinkable without language). Virtually no one familiar with the debate would agree with this, and thus many would plead for MP or more likely UP origins (e.g., Mithen, 1999, presumably ultimately building on Donald, 1991, 2001 and other cognitive theoristsdwith their mistaken understanding of mythic thinking), and this is probably the general consensus. Few would plead for the earliest Near Eastern Neolithic as the era when language and religion were combined with an explosion of symbolism (led by Cauvin (2010)). Yet, in terms of the projected convergence of etymologies, the Semitic and Indo-European language families can hardly have had any origins much before the end of the Levantine-Anatolian Neolithicdand we have no other method of judging language. Language and religion can hardly be much older than the late Levantine-Anatolian Neolithicdbut speculation rules, and leads to further speculation based on circular logic (with abundant references available to conceal the vacuum in the evidence). Certainly, Donald comes into a problem because he assumes “myth” in the Palaeolithic, for which there is no evidencedand the evidence of the myths themselves imply a tradition since the third millennium and no earlier. The evidence suggests that language as a social tool for conceptual communication is hardly older than 3000 BC and probably lessdand would not support any argument that language and religion go back much further than 6000 BC (when the Levantine-Anatolian Early Neolithic collapsed, and the Ubaid began to develop to southern Mesopotamia). Burials began far earlier, and artistic craftsmanship began to gradually develop over time (Cook, 2013), but the earliest floruit of any religion based on a shared discourse cannot really antedate the Bronze Age by much (if at all).
Conceptual Problems Exemplary of misunderstandings about the nature of early ritual practices and religion is work by Renfrew and Bottéro. The former (Renfrew in Insoll (2020: 686, 688)) endeavors to sever “death” and “secular” political practices from religion, and the latter (Bottéro, 1998: 65) proposes that we are missing a long oral tradition, for which there is no evidence of the richness he posits. Aside from neglecting the glyptic which demonstrates a link between political power and the divine, Renfrew fails to realize that the concern with ritual is not the path to understanding religion, since secular rituals related to power will still have involved the divine. Bottéro fails to appreciate (a) the importance of the Sumerians and (b) the impact of social and economic change dictated by urban development on the phenomenon of religion, by assuming that there were myths long before the cities and the states whereas there are hardly any hints at religion before urbanism. There is, however, no evidence of states without religion. The states made themselves dependent on the immortal gods, and the kings who aimed to overcome death were the key: politics played a decisive role in the appearance, growth and spread of religion, while the origins lie with death and burials. Beyond that, there are quite a number of invisible conceptual problems. One is that most archaeologistsdwho study material culturedassume that the world religions appear harmonious because textual traditions unite them, and would probably be surprised to realize that early Western visitors encountering Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Japan were initially totally unaware that it was the same religion: the texts tell one story, the material culture another. Another is that Western archaeologists tend to think of a chronological sequence of whereas the European Mesolithic and Neolithic follow ondand partially result fromdthe sequence, with the consequence that influence from the Near East is psychologically blocked off, at precisely that moment when the Near East had become the leader in social development, as signified with Neolithic Göbekli and later Bronze Age Sumer with monumental architecture and textual religious traditions appearing millennia before such appear in Europe. A very different example of grasping the degree of the complexities of analysis is Bahn’s largely acceptable criticism of the misguided interpretations of Upper Palaeolithic cave art, i.e., in terms of shamanism and sympathetic magic. Yet, while justifiably throwing doubt on these various interpretations, Bahn (a) neglects the indisputable evidence of the masked figures in the trois frères cave (one of which has a striking parallel on an Egyptian palette around ten millennia later, Fig. 3), and the sculpted Löwenmensch/ “Lion Man” (Cook, 2013: 28e35) while (b) Bahn paradoxically refers cavalierly to “beliefs”, “myths”, “stories”, “mythical beings”, “gods” and “sorcerers” (in Insoll (2020: 348, 349, 351)) without explanation or discussiondwhen this should be the topic of his discussion. If he truly believes in these phenomena at this time, it undermines his denunciation of shamanism. Treating “shamanism” with detailed disdain, while assuming that “myths” and “beliefs” do not deserve a discussion is certainly peculiar, since this is the matter of religiondand hardly justifiable unless you follow Leroi-Gourhan (1964: 2) and his claims that, e.g., “Lascaux is no different for us” than a Medieval French cathedral would be for an alien without a Bible, which Bahn apparently unthinkingly does. Yet Bahn and Leroi-Gourhan cannot prove there was anything like a Bible, and that complex book (which should look childish to anyone who realizes that most of it was written after Thucydides) was at the tail end of more than two millennia of written traditions, which themselves had no precedent. The actual written documentation begins with offerings to the gods, supplementing those for the dead in written formdcontinuing a tradition antedating the UP. In this sense, Bahn is entirely correct
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Fig. 3 Cult through the ages: left, a masked figure from the Late Upper Palaeolithic, France (ca. 15,000 BC); center left, a masked figure from the Late Predynastic Period, Egypt (with flute; ca. 3000 BC); center right, musicians (one with aulos; exceptionally for Egypt en face) and dancers at a festival, Egypt (ca. 1500 BC); right, an aulos player with dancer, Mediterranean (ca. 500 BC).
with his detailed attention to Upper Palaeolithic burials, as these really are clear evidence of what remains, one central aspect of religion up to the present day. However, “beliefs” in the UP are another matter. In an excellent discussion of “Personhood”, Fowler (in Insoll (2020)) displays both change and variety in one key aspect of religion, which incidentally also confirms the importance of death in the classification of the individual: the uninitiated are not permitted into the cemeteries in some religions, and in others, only dead ancestors or spirits really count. Thusdwithout any researchdthe evidence of radical and rapid change and variety in the phenomenon of religion in the last few thousand years is as indisputably there for everyone to see as is the relatively slow gradual change before the introduction of states. There is no evidence that technical innovation could have been verbally expressed before writing, nor should concepts which do not appear before the age of early writing be projected back to before the introduction of writing. However, concepts developed in literate cultures could be conveyed (in potentially garbled form) to neighboring illiterate cultures. Exchange and evolution characterize recent millennia far more than earlier. Thus evolution of thought should be expected in recent times and not projected back into the distant past. Archaeologists should recognize diffusion, historical evolution and regional variation integrated into the social process of social evolution, with religion complying with and influencing developments, most importantly in supporting social order (which is a very recent phenomenon). In those regions which failed to develop socially complex systems, religion is as conspicuously lacking as it is obvious where social development took place; cognitive development probably depends more on social evolution than genetics. The earliest social behavior demanding a conception about something beyond our world takes place with burials linking the living and the dead dozens of millennia agodand not in cities where the link between the living and the gods only gradually crystallized in recent millennia. In reality, therefore, the issue of immortality is fundamental, but can only hint at the origins of what later led to religiondwhere the political exploitation of the gods was fundamental to the growth of the state and religion. These issues were fundamental to the development of Near Eastern religionsdwhich then had an impact on behavior around the world, beyond the urban centers. The economic power unleashed by the earliest states was enabled by the ruling elite anddfrom the beginningdconcepts of divinity played a crucial role in the creation and consumption of wealth guided by the states. It is a fact that after the collapse of the Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, world religions gradually became less secular, but the mere role of the confrontation with death in the development of religion (starting with burial) demonstrates the importance of both social relations and death (for burials and offerings demonstrate a bond between the living dealing with death and the dead, which inherently generates transcendental relations). In this sense, one can understand that religion was a key element in the ideologies which maintained the great states. In an otherwise quite perceptive analysis of the evidence of religion and ritual in the European Bronze Age, Brück (in Insoll (2020: 398e399)) realizes that she cannot see a divide between “ritual” and the everyday, and thereby falls onto the rails linking “ritual” with “religion”, where the real problem is isolating out the rituals of the elite, where secular power and religion are intertwined, from the daily routines which are partially ritualized and partially functional. It is essential to understand that "feasting" may be a ritual associated with "religious" practices, but the "feasting" is not "religious" while the perhaps closely associated "worship" (with its own rituals) is. This is the route to the “detailed appreciation [of how.] religious beliefs and practices [.played a role] in shaping Bronze Age social and political relationships” at which she aims. In dealing with the Neolithic, Thomas is equally discerning, yet seduced by Durkheim and Augustine falls into a chasm where “belief” (in Insoll (2020: 372e373)) is allegedly a mental state in Christianity, rather than realizing that religion is more likely an emotional state, and some Greeks probably consciously believed in their gods in the first half of the first millennium BC (following Otto (2002)), rather than fearing them as the Mesopotamians did, and doubting them as has been increasingly the norm since the days of the Classical Greeks. I rather doubt that beliefs existed before the Greeks began to “think” they did. Thus, in thinking and analyzing as Brück and Thomas do, archaeology will come further, but one must come to terms with the real nature of ritual and belief. Architecture In the matter of ritual, both archaeology and the Study of Religion need to learn from early history. With architecture, the situation is quite different: the creation of built space is a phenomenon of the Anthropocene that probably had a very deep impact on human
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thought and behavior, as architecture can be used to uphold hierarchies, include and exclude individuals and groups as well as give shelter and privacy (Warburton, 2012). The impact on thought should not be underestimated, and should be carefully examined, with archaeology contributing to expanding the fundamental features of religion (beyond gods, myth and ritual) to include those magnificent monuments which serve as a form of display for religious thought as well as sheltering gods or the community (according to the religious tradition). The beginnings of monumental built architecture lie in the Levantine-Anatolian Pre-Pottery Neolithic where communal housing and small ritual platforms turned monumental at Göbekli Tepe and Jericho (as hitherto excavated examplesdbut hardly the whole story). The interpretation of these buildings is disputed with some suggesting elaborate residences while others recognize a communal ritual roledthis latter role is relatively certain but it is impossible to decide whether it related to ancestor cults, the dead in general, deities, or perhaps a celebration of the society that built them (for details, cf. e.g., Notroff et al. in Renfrew et al. (2021)). Notroff et al. suggest that death was possibly related to Göbekli, but I would guess that is probably because they were invited to link Göbekli to death and not because death was central to the evidence from Göbekli. In fact, there is strikingly little evidence for a concern with death in comparison to other roughly contemporaneous neighboring sites, as e.g., Djerf alAhmar. It is certain that the communal effort was more important than anythingdbut the idea that some of the animals depicted in the buildings could be associated with fear might actually be far more important. Feardof death, of the dead, of dangerous animals, of powerful human beings, etc.dmay have been fundamental to the origins of religion (and only much later have led to belief, but cf. Wagner-Durand, 2021). Paradoxically, buildings to celebrate fear might have contributed to creating a sense of securityda sensation that might well have been almost unknown before the Neolithic (The virtues of buildings are that one can know what is inside them, and that they can be cleaned or purifieddwhich is not the case with caves like Lascaux, where fear and filth could never be fully controlled let alone eradicated). The Components of Ritual Yet one can never know what people in the distant past really knew, felt or thought. Archaeology has difficulties coming to terms with the reality, because we cannot really be certain of anything beyond the most superficial positivistic details. Yet certain things can be known where we have texts. Sallaberger notes that in general in Mesopotamia, “the meal and festivities following a sacrifice did not belong to the religious rituals” (Ebeling et al., 1928e2018, 11: 424; 421e430), whereas there is a tendency among archaeologists to assume that the feasting was part of the ritual (or indeed possibly a whole ritual in itself, as seems to be suggested by Dietler in Insoll (2020)). Far more important is that we can on occasion see that the ancients thought that they knew some things: Zgoll (Ebeling et al., 1928e2018, 11: 326; 323e333) stresses that based on knowledge acquired through examination (e.g., omina, oracles), the purpose of ritual was to “please the gods and get them to act favorably”. This is quite different from Rappaport’s (1999: 287e312) assumption that the ritual performance of the credo was the essential element of ritual. Repeating the credo is important where there is doubt; it is of no value when there is no doubt the gods exist and must be placated or appeaseddas was the case in third and second millennium BC Egypt and the Near East, especially as the kings were responsible for social justice. Rituals could lead to knowledge about actions to be taken because of the resultsdand not mere declarations of faith as in contemporary monotheistic religions. Religion and Ideology In separating allegedly “secular” rituals from religion, Renfrew (above and in general in his methodology) fails to understand and incorporate into his mind the impact of the Sumerians on re-directing human history. When the Sumerians established their temples and assigned the domains of the universe to various godsdwhose will had to be determined if one was to ruledthey created the original system of social order that has survived to this day, based on the state held together by an ideology, and this continued to be religious throughout ancient and premodern history. Obviously, in an environment where the gods are assumed to exist, and they provide the legitimacy of the hierarchical elite ruling society, and satisfying the gods is imperative, it is useless to question the ideology. An approach to ideology indiscriminately applying the modern term without grasping the reality of the ancient world, and particularly the economic system (see e.g., McGuire & Bernbeck in Insoll (2020)) is useless. Instead of vainly deploring the absence of ideological statements, one can start with policy. I once stated: “A fiscal system is an administrative system which represents the practical expression of the ideological conception of a state” (Warburton, 1997: 205). Such an approach is valuable for the earliest states, where we have few emic expressions of the ideology, but can recognize some tendency of the state to seek control over labor, appropriate production and use what they had to construct monuments for gods (and also to create a textile industry to pay for the exotic materials embellishing palaces and temples). Such an ideology was based on legitimacy acquired by appeasing the gods. From the time of the Zhou Dynasty in China (first millennium BC) onwards, states become increasingly adept at developing coherent ideologies, frequently expressed both verbally and in a fiscal policy. Rationality and Religion Another major problem derives from the nature of the Western societies that created Christianity, Capitalism and scientific archaeology, namely an assumption that somehow what we view as “economics” is rational and that what we view as “religion” is not. Marxists will propose that “religion” is manipulative and that modern economic development is inevitable without realizing that this latter assumption is as historically erroneous as the former is obviously not the entire story. Thus, understanding the role of religion in society really depends upon one’s view of the human mind and the means whereby societies are held together.
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Another aspect of this is the assumption that gods can be assumed to have always been a kind of fiction. Without citing Socrates (Apologie, I: 35d), Wagner-Durand (2021) points out that for the Mesopotamians, it was likewise obvious that the gods were simply “there”, and had to be appeased if one was to get anything from them. It is extremely important that Rappaport (1999: 281) stresses what I call the tenets of the credo (not far from what Rappaport calls “Ultimate Sacred Postulates” and probably close to what Whitehouse understands as “doctrinal mode”). Rappaport assumes that the credo is fundamental to all (religious) ritual even where not explicitly stated, and that this can be neither “verified” nor “falsified” according to our present system of science and logic. It is therefore an unprovable claimdand Rappaport (1999: 279) goes on to state that because no one today makes such claims about e.g., Jupiter and Marduk, whose names are no longer called in ritual, regardless of “the supernatural case”, they are presumably universally dismissed. It is his insistence on the fact that rituals perform the role of a credo in other non-literate cultures that allows him to argue (in my opinion, wrongly) that ritual played a role in the creation of religion. Important is that his entire case for religion is based on Western logic arguing that the issue is the belief in the credo. If, however, there is no doubt that the gods exist, the argument unravels. The stress on the importance of rituals in contemporary archaeological discourse (e.g., Renfrew et al., 2018, 2021; Insoll, 2020) is diminished when realizing that purity was essential to Egyptian and Mesopotamian ritual because this was the precondition for communication with the godsdand ritual served this role under the condition of purity. Ritual performance is not evidence of religion, and thus Bloch (in Hodder (2010)) is correct to dismiss religion at Çatal Hüyük whereas Whitehouse and Hodder (in Hodder (2010)) follow the archaeological presumption, probably anchored in something like Rappaport’s interpretation of ritual as being a building block on the way to credo. Yet credo really only appears when doubts have arisen, and thus comes long after the Sumerian breakthrough.
Cognitive Approaches The Study of Religion has avoided the idea of origins by stressing that it is based on either textual sources and/or living oral informants. This approach allows universalists, linguists and cognitive oriented scholars to propose that both language and religion are very old, perhaps even hard-wired in the braindand this is then repeated by archaeologists. However, the actual evidence of the text based sources (above) suggests that there was substantial change and development in the nature of religion during the last few thousand years. A grave obstacle is grasping cognitive history, since a lack of solid material evidence can lead to the dominance of unjustified assumptions and the surreptitious introduction of speculation based on circular logic, both distorting our understanding. My own impression is that cognitive scholars use evidence from the last three thousand years of religion to construct an understanding of religion in generaldand then project that back to before the Palaeolithic, and claim that practices known from the Old Testament and Classical Greece are hard-wired in the human mind (e.g., Geertz, 2013). Obviously, this circumvents the Bronze Age Near East where decisive developments certainly took place. For a differing cognitive angle on details of the Neolithic and Bronze Age see Warburton (in Christensen et al. (2017) and in Antes et al. (2004 2: 419e455)).
The Social Nature of Religion and the Concepts of Justice, Inequality and Theodicy One relevant field that is generally absent in the archaeological discussion is the actual history of justice, equality and the theodicy problem. Yet unjustified assumptions about a consciousness of inequality and justice seem to underlie many of the discussions about the pastdas if “justice” has always been present in the minds of men and is not an historical artifact, with a beginning and evolving through time. A key example of this conundrum is Rappaport’s (1999: 277e278) assumption that the rituals of “primitive” peoples are comparable to credos of monotheistic religions as he confuses several different developments. In ancient Egypt, the concept of justice (maat) appears in the first half of the third millennium BC. By the beginning of the second millennium BC, in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, the concept of justice was understood as recognizing that the king should treat both the rich and the poor (the strong and the weak) equally, an obligation which the king performed for the gods and for mankind. There was an awareness that the Egyptian god was not taking responsibility for the performance of justice among men on earth, and that god would only take responsibility for punishing the unjust after death, and that the king was viewed as responsible for justice on earth. It is not insignificant that the appearance of “justice” follows shortly after the invention of the balance, which is then applied to the understanding of justice on earth and in the Beyond. It is presumably the invention of the balance which created the foundation for a concept of justice as related to equilibrium (and thus probably hardly accidental that its symbolism is still maintained in the contemporary world of legal affairs). However necessary it must have been, the invention alone was probably not sufficient and it was probably a consciousness that the unrestrained application of pure power by legitimate kings (in dealing with dissidents, rebels and critics) was not the most efficient way to ensure loyaltydand that the proclamation of applying justice was a subterfuge facilitating allegiance. And even this did not lead to the emergence of widespread clearly enunciated statements of the fundamental character of religion as defining and restricting the king’s central role in society, as such statements are not typical of the earliest states. One single brief statement of this conceptual framework appears in one passage of a single text (copied a couple of times) which Assmann (in Kaiser (2019, II: 836e838)) identified as a text describing the Egyptian king’s role as a priest of the sun, whereby assuring justice among men was central. At that time, the royal obligation to perform justice among men on earth could also protect the inheritance of divine kingship, and therefore create a compelling and persuasive coherent circular logic serving the interests of the kings.
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Yet, even after this idea entered the minds of the elite, justice remained a very contentious matter and created the basis for the theodicy debate which began around 2000 BC, but was only nameddby Leibnizdmore than 3500 years later. In doing so, Leibniz invented a Greek worddusing the Greek dίkh for “justice” in a fashion which might not have been obvious to those in the ancient world. It is not unimportant that the words used in one of the key sentences in Hebrew (משפט, Isiah 42, 1) and Greek (krίsι2, Matthew 12, 18) and conventionally translated as “justice” actually tend more toward “judgment” than “justice”. Job generally uses the same word as Isiah, and also “ צדקrighteousness” (as related to being forthright towards god). Most of the references to “justice” in the translations of the Old and New Testaments, actually use words meaning “punishment”, “judgment” or “righteousness”, rather than words we would translate unhesitatingly as “justice”. In one very rare case, where “justice” really does appear in the New Testament, it is ironically the Greek goddess herself (ἡ δίκη, Acts 28, 4) who appears. This way of translating probably influences the way even scholars like Weber thought and think. The “theodicy problem” is probably far more complicated than most think, because Leibniz used a Greek word for an abstract concept we think we understand whereas the emergence and development of the Semitic thought as expressed in the Old and New Testaments was based on practice (“judgment”, “righteousness”) with regard to respect for god, and not abstract justice among men as the Egyptian god viewed as a royal responsibiltiy. In his remarks about the “theodicy problem”, Weber is very deft, mentioning ancient Egypt while stressing the Job of the Old Testament, and thus implies that the problem of the theodicy arises when there is an omnipotent god who exists alongside injustice. Stressing monotheism, Weber (1972: 315) does not dwell on earlier times. The problem is trying to disentangle the relationship between “justice” and “gods” and the “state”; today this can be approached, but it must be done systematically. This necessary review must then serve as feedback to re-formulate the role of religion and ritual in creating humanity (as, e.g., Rappaport understands it). The very concept of justice came into existence after and actually depends upon the state, which places restrictions on the ruler, while enhancing his/her power far beyond that offered by simpler social systems. The state did not emerge in Europe out of the Neolithicdnor did it automatically emerge as part of an evolution in the Near East. The state emerged unexpectedly in southern Mesopotamiadand the emergence of that state determined developments everywhere else, including Egypt, where urbanism began late but came rapidly, shortly after (what we recognize as) evidence of Mesopotamian influence arrived. This was after the Levantine-Anatolian aceramic Neolithic collapsed and left few traces. The state thus emerged in places where there was no long social development: it was in Upper Egypt and southern Mesopotamia, where urbanism and the state emerged rapidly under strange and exceptional conditions. And it was in these two regions that religion (in the sense of the historians of religion) was born. And it was only after the state was created by autocratic rulers supported by bureaucrats that justice was brought into existence, in the interest of making personal rule more acceptable. Failing to understand this, economists, anthropologists and historians of religion have adopted a speculative attitude that “archaic communities” used religion and rituals as a way of binding communities together, with some kind of mutual interest serving the “welfare of the communities”, and some mysterious force maintaining this kept the development going steadily and progressively on until it reached its pinnacle in the state, and the idea of the ancient state is then associated with a modern set of values. Yet this is not what can be read in history: injustice was simply an attribute of early state societies. All the principles of these earliest states were unjust in a socially wrenching fashiondbut no one could realize (or cared about) it because there was no concept of justice before the very existence and survival of the state obliged politicians and thinkers to justify their power by creating a threadbare concept of justice. The human soul offers no soil for responsible governance. It was in an era of oppressive civil war and social conflict that the word “justice” maat appears for the first time in the history of the royal family in Egypt where the abstract concept of “justice” (maat) arose rapidly in the mid-third millennium BC. In third millennium BC Mesopotamia, it was allegedly the gods themselves (actually probably primarily Inanna in the beginning, but in the following centuries, other gods followed) who were the first to be demanding taxes and labor; once the cities came into existence, Enlil and Inanna then engaged in widespread destruction with glee. Nevertheless, by the end of the third millennium, the term “justice” (ni^ gisa) also appears in Sumerian, and a few centuries later in Akkadian (mısarumdwhich is, of course, derived from eserum, the origin of Hebrew ישך, which generally means “straight, right”). As noted, Hammurabi associated justice with the Akkadian sun-god Samas (and thus since Samas was not a major god in Babylon, and maat should probably be supposed to be the daughter of the Egyptian sun-god Redwho stood at the pinnacle of the pantheond, so we can assume the Mesopotamians got “justice” from Egypt). But in Egypt, before the sun-god took over responsibility for justice, he supported the kings, and thus as in Mesopotamia, in earliest Egypt the earliest gods made way for, and stood with and behind the kings in imposing their will on society. In the earliest civilizations, power (royal and divine) was what held the states together (not social bonding). However, this earliest Egyptian state was not terribly advanced, even at that time.
Diffusion and History One major issue archaeology is only now beginning to face once again is diffusion: the evidence of what is routinely described as “shamanism” in North America and Siberia demonstrates an exchange of ideas stretching into the recent Anthropocene. Evidence of similar practices documented roughly simultaneously suggests exchange (Price in Insoll (2020)) rather than any hard-wired cognitive mechanisms. As Eliade (probably correctly) originally assumed that Shamanism adopted conceptual frameworks from the historical period of the Near East, it follows that Shamanism is part of recent history.
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Counter-Intuitive Ideas vs. Rational Explanations Using a cognitive approach, the historian of religion, Boyer (2001) proposed that religious ideas were counter-intuitive and this thought tends to resurface in broadly based archaeological studies of ritual and religion (e.g., Pettitt in Insoll (2020)). Boyer’s explanation is really the opposite of what we can follow: Zgoll (2001: 458) states “The Sumerian the period when religion began to emerge as a recognizable phenomenon, religion is the consequence of empirical experience. The gods, as personified powers in and behind the phenomena, are powerful”. It was rationally assumed that supernatural entities were responsible for phenomena observed by humans which they could not explain otherwise and sought to interpret.
An Opportunity and Challenge for Archaeology The discipline of archaeology faces one major challenge, where it is the only means of access to a field, which rightly belongs to the academic Study of Religion: the study of the origins, evolution and diffusion of religious behavior. In the historical period, there is no doubt about the existence and importance of religion in premodern societies: the origins of religion lie in Prehistory, and archaeology is the only means of approaching them. This is rather obvious. However, there is a very important misunderstanding about the early development of religion, and that is recognizing and determining the degree to which the early state ideologies determined the early development of what later became recognizable as what scholars of religion consider to be their field. As long as archaeologists maintain their present attitude of ambivalence to blind speculation and preference for introspection (mistaking the academic field of archaeology as the subject matter of archaeology, rather than investigating what and how material history can contribute to understanding the past), there is no hope that archaeology can make a contribution to the history of human societies. In this sense, the academic Study of Religion will maintain its hold.
Summary and Future Directions Up to this day, most of the planetsdof which six were known to several civilizations in the first millennium BC (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiterdplus earth)dbear the names of Roman gods. Like the sun and the moon, all were named by the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese and Greeks, so the Romans adopted the custom from the Greeks, who had gotten it from the Babylonians. It was the Babylonians who began systematic observations of the heavens in the early second millennium BCdafter the Egyptians had given up, having made the fundamental discoveries in the mid-third millennium. The Sumerians designated their gods as “stars”, but did not have either astronomical or medical science, and thus this part of the origins of science and religion belongs to the Egyptians (Warburton, 2016), whereas the concept of a divine order including the heavens was the work of the Sumerians (van Dijk in Asmussen and Læssøe, 1971e1975, I). The discovery of the planets and the creation of a divine order are historical artifacts representing changing cognitive tendencies, just as the appearance of “justice” combined with a consciousness of royal dependence on the gods for legitimacy was a second transformation, followed by the birth of religions which would become independent of the states in the first millennium AD. All these changes meant that behavioral patterns may have remained largely the same, but corresponded to radically changing conceptual and social practices. Of central importance is that the burials began long before beliefs in justice, post-mortem judgment and/or resurrection. The concept of a Netherworld governed by deities was an urban inventiondunderstood using the shared concept of the “great city” in Egypt (njw.t wr.t) and Mesopotamia (úrugal)dalthough in both the Netherworld was also associated with the sign for “mountain” or “foreign land”, and in neither was justice a phenomenon related to the afterlife in the earliest era. That the idea of the judgment of the dead based on justice arose in Egypt should be as clear as that divine judgment and resurrection were later adopted by more complex systems of belief such as Christianity and Zoroastrianism (cf., e.g., Eliade, 1987, 15: 585). Yet the belief in the possibility of existence after death long preceded the Near Eastern Bronze Agedand a consciousness of this development and its spread should be inculcated into the curriculum of archaeology. However, this aspect must be united with another: Otto (2002: 171) stresses that “The domain of the older [Greek] gods is limited to the world of the dead” while the younger Greek gods will have nothing to do with death. Significantly, without references to non-Greek sources, Otto (2002: 182e183) seems certain that the Classical Greeks adopted an earlier idea that the dead were no longer capable of acting, “neither here nor there”, having been “transfigured into a special kind of reality”. The Bronze Age Egyptians had already developed this concept of a transfiguration (s:Ȝḫ) in the Beyond (Bonnet, 2000: 4), but they had hardly separated their gods from death, as Osiris remained popular. There was a major change in the first millennium BC, whereby the nature of the gods, and belief itself, became a different phenomenon from what it had hitherto been: in the polytheistic world, Osiris survived until the very end, but was easily defeated by a religion stressing life, and linking belief to salvation. This type of belief owes its origins to the changed polytheistic world of the first millennium BC. Belief became something concrete, something separate from a fear of death and the desire to overcome death. This change took place before the rise of Christianity, but long after the earliest established religionsdand its implications cannot be projected back into Prehistory. This cognitive change must be recognized rather than making “death”das it is for usdan enduring unchanging phenomenon. There were variations in understanding as this idea spread, but it is not only visible in burial and cremations; other archaeological material itself is the testimony to this change in attitudes: offerings for the dead are not the same as grave goods linked to a belief in resurrection. However, Otto stresses only that the new belief of the mid-first millennium is new, while recognizing that traces of many conflicting ideas about death and the dead have survived up to
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the present. What is important is that belief itself was a cognitive innovation, brought into the world at this time, and complementing or replacing fear which had hitherto been the main preoccupation of religious activity. This is very important as some studies of early urban cemeteries link these to socio-economic changes in this world rather than to contemporaneous concepts of religion and death (e.g., Algaze (2023)); if analysing in this fashion, we risk anachronistically projecting our own values onto the past, obscuring a transformation that happened in historical times, and changed behavior across Eurasia. There were thus enormous changes over the course of the millennia of the historical era. Related to all of this is one crucial feature that probably cannot really be disentangled without substantial further researchdand while throwing light on it, research alone cannot solve this. This is the link between the gods and the precious materials extracted from the earth: stones and metals. This began in the Neolithicdwhere the European jade axes are exemplary of a phenomenon related to “something special” (Pétrequin, 2012), and should probably be linked to gold as well, which is found in burials from its first appearance (Leusch, 2015). In their earliest appearances, such materials will have been related to prestige and some sense of the numinous, but not necessarily to social hierarchies involving powerdalthough they later were: as complex societies developed, precious materials became attributes of power, status and divinity. This transformation came after legitimacy was anchored to identifiable gods. Initially, it was the materials themselves which were rare, attractive and mysterious. The Near Eastern Bronze Age was a time of expanding mining in all of the regions around the major civilizations, and the exotic preciosities were acquired by the major states and given to the gods and the illustrious deaddof whom the gods alone will also have been linked to the creation, revelation or discovery and exchange of the materials themselves. Hathor in particular is closely associated with gold and turquoisedand she appears as a kind of anomaly in the Egyptian pantheon, omnipresent but not really coherently integrated into the state ideology. For Egyptian traders abroad, Hathor will have been the Mistress of Byblos (locally known as Semitic Baalat Gubal who maintains a rather Egyptian Hathor-like appearance, like Qadesh, “the sacred” in Semitic and known by that Semitic name in Egypt) with whom they dealt when acquiring precious goods abroad, as since the third millennium BC, Egyptian pharaohs are recorded as offering gifts to her. Seafaring and trade were as relevant as mining and the divinities associated with the exotic and valuable articles may have actually come into existence and developed in the historical period, while owing their origins to vague Neolithic beginnings. The tradition of offering precious materials to religious institutions (temples, churches, mosques) was maintained in the monotheistic religions where the divinity of the materials themselves was probably eventually forgotten, and their commercial value became preeminent.
Anthropology and Archaeology Archaeologists citing Bell (e.g., in Harvey (2005: 271)) should be conscious that shedcorrectlydmixes secular and religious rituals, so that the then contemporary tendency of young Reformed Jewish women to endorse Orthodox Judaism might be related to a desire for the certainty offered by domestic rituals, just as certain Christian churches adopting what were once Judaic practices do so “for emotional resonance” in a context where “emotional, intuitive expression” is deliberately sought; thus “while ritual once stood for the status quo [.] it has become antistructural, revolutionary and capable of deconstructing inhuman institutions”. Bell underscores a thought shared by Rappaport, standing behind this, that ritual offers “a way to remain human in an increasingly dehumanized world”dand thus making us conscious of the proclaimed agenda of the anthropologists who are concerned about “mankind” more than about the messy details of history. One should be conscious that the nature of ritual changed from that associated with Palaeolithic burials when it came to serve states, and again when religion was disassociated from states. Thinking of ritual as some kind of constant, or as some kind of diffuse ever-changing and variable phenomenon means that it can hardly be used as a guide to religion and cult. The most important point of this survey is grasping that “Archaeology” means the “study of origins” and not the “presentation of isolated bits of material culture”, as happens when Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia are each presented as single articles with equal space allotted to the Aegean, Mayas, Aztecs and Incas, respectively (as in Insoll (2020)), where religion in historic China is largely omitted). Understanding historical developments is an imperative. Equally important is to unify the understanding and terminology so as to understand what is being claimed and concluded, and thus disrobe abstruse claims about some vague concept of “religious ritual” defined by circular logic. Only such an approach could identify origins, and follow developments.
Hinduism One very important example from which archaeologists could learn a great deal would be an encounter with the archaeology, reality and history of Hinduism. Today, Hinduism is tied to the modern land of India, and one finds polemics in endeavors (a) to link the ancient Indus Civilization with contemporary Hinduism, (b) to sever the links with Indo-European influences, (c) to sever the links with Buddhist architecture and the suchlikedall intended to establish and support an intolerant social identity. Many of these efforts are not motivated by an understanding of history, but rather by the contemporary politics of identity, as India is increasingly linked to Hinduism. However, this tribal spirit is also deeply rooted in societies held together by traditional religions, and thus potentially important as an aspect of understanding. This is always an aspect of the study of the history of any religion: religions are constantly being brought up to date, while preserving memories of the distant past, and appropriating, modifying, or discarding these as required. These developments are evidenced by the last millennium and a half of change visible in the archaeological history of Hinduism.
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Ironically, archaeology could offer the absolute best means of resolving the dispute about the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, as a proper stratigraphic excavation could reveal the history of the site, and plans could be objectively prepared and analyzed to identify the buildings. However, this very procedure is based on Western scientific concepts of procedures counter to the entire concept of truth as understood in religion. Understanding this is crucial to understanding the reports on the excavations (and their interpretation) which have hitherto circulated, as archaeology is used as a weapon in the dispute. As it existed a few centuries ago, Hinduism was not only based on state support, but was also fully aligned with a caste system, meaning that the gods, temples, priests, society, wealth and the state all fall in line with the religion strengthening identity with the firmest bonds. Typical in this mode of thought is that “Just rule was closely linked to patronage of religious institutions such as Hindu temples” as Sugandhi and Morrison (in Insoll (2020: 929)) put it. The temples will have offered royalty vast systems for dispensing patronage in dependency relations, for everyone from cleaning staff and builders to singers and priests. This is not quite our understanding of “justice”, but obviously appropriate for a social system based on land tenure, where many of the “employees” will have paid their own salaries by tilling land awarded them in return for services in the temples. The royal bounty will have aligned the interests of the temple staff, the kings, and the gods on a material basis through religious services. This will doubtless have existed long before Hinduism. As in earlier religions, purity is also extremely important in Hinduism, and separates the lowest classes from the highest classes in an ideologically and socially convenient fashion. Obviously the upper classes will have composed hymns for the gods and supported the kings. This is probably the closest that we can come to the powerful state religions of the great Bronze and Iron Age civilizations (living on into the premodern in China and India), before the universal religions began their gradual ascent. At its earlier highpoint Hinduism was in an excellent position to ward off Buddhism (in the land of its birth) but subsequently had to cope with the Mughal Islamic regime in a fashion which was utterly syncretistic (ironically in both senses of the word: [a] Plutarch’s original pragmatic , where it meant that the Cretans would side with those they pleased against a common enemy, and [b] the academic popular etymology linking and , allegedly meaning “to mix together”). In this religion, the poorest of the poor worship both their chosen gods and Shiva, the powerful national god in the form of his linga, much in line with what we should imagine for the Bronze Age. Important for the archaeologist are also the temples without space, in a religion with endless crowds of adherents participating in pilgrimages and processions. Equally important is (a) the gradual appearance of an iconographic canon, which was not in place at the start, but emerged and (b) the seemingly endless variety of gods and iconographic tendencies. The pageantry of the gods and their crowds is also a fundamental aspect of the developed form of the religion (which was not originally present), as are both the huge temples and the most miniature shrines. But, above all, archaeologists should be aware that the entire history of the Hindu religion we can see all unfolded after the changes created in the Bronze Age Near East, meaning that the gradual expansion of material values accompanied by the gradual dwindling of the importance of death as a fundamental element in religion all preceded the explosive growth of the Hindu religion in recent millennia. In this sense, rituals and monumentality cannot be taken alone as indications of equivalence to the fundamental characterteristics of religion as a universal, since underlying thought was changing. The variety and multifold changes that have taken place in Hindu theology and practice in India in the last two millennia also highlight the contrast with what came in the era beforedwhere there is no trace in the material culture, although Hinduism must have been there (but perhpas having emerged as late as the first millennium BC, i.e., Hinduism is not eternal, even if it may have existed without much paraphernalia before Buddhism). Equally relevant is the architecture of premodern Cambodia where the temples seem to be Hindu, with Sanskrit inscriptionsdand yet the actual national religion was different, and almost invisible in the material record. The entire history of Hinduism from the early lack of material culture (before Buddhism) to the socioeconomics and the elaborate rituals, festivals and temples of the premodern and contemporary forms of Hinduism will unfold the panoply of religion’s multiple and confusing aspects as relevant to the archaeologist facing religion as a recent phenomenon.
Death and the Beyond Hinduism gives an idea of the immensity of the task, but the beginnings of Hinduism lie long after the origins of the phenomenon of religion. The idea that the dead “go somewhere”dto arise and walk unseen in this world, to fly to the heavens or remain in the Netherworlddseems to be widespread. It is unclear where this started and how it was really understood. Once burials became common, it would be logical to suspect that the Netherworld would somehow bring all the buried dead together. Initially it might have been understood that only those buried had a lease on life in the Netherworlddand obviously this depended upon the surviving to assure it. Certainly the fear of death may have played a roledalong with the fear of the deaddin cementing identities and lineages which may have led to the emergence of religion. Regardless, death is thus central to the origins of religion in several different ways, the most obvious of which is the mortality of humans and the immortality of the gods. However, the matter of burial lies at the origins of ritual, and is thus central in a different fashion. Examining sacrifice and feasting from the standpoint of contrasting “death” and “life” is probably far more coherent than thinking in terms of consumption or ritual, and would lead to an understanding of one aspect of religion (rather than mere classification). In the same sense, Bahn’s (in Insoll (2020: 345)) attempt to deny the relation between red ochre and blood and life is contradicted by the widespread application of red ochre to cowries roughly a hundred thousand years ago (Bouzouggar et al., 2007) where the application of the ochre is to a dead shell (the opening of which bears an uncanny resemblance to the human vulva) and not the bodydrefuting Bahn’s claims about odors and suggesting a link between life and blood.
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This matter of understanding concepts relating to death, burial and the Beyond is one area where Archaeology may well be able to offer important insights to the Study of Religion, as the entire matter is not viewed as the heart of religion, whereas it might actually be the heart and origin of religion.
Religion and Science Immortality alone does not, however, enable us to deal with godsdand here the Study of Religion cannot really aid the archaeologist in untangling the historical development of gods. On the contrary, it is for the archaeologists to read what is in the record. In contrast to the practice of Post-Processual archaeologists, when Flannery (1973) wrote “Archaeology with a capital ‘S’”, he did not mean “Speculation”. The New Archaeology failed because it did not offer a solid basis for economic analysis, whereas it should have drawn on the archaeological data to understand economicsdand could have done the same with religion. Both can now be done: our tools are better than ever, but our analysis has not improved at the same pace. However, the precondition to integrating religion into archaeological analysis is to understand that in the last four millennia, “religion” has become an increasingly important part of the everydaydbut it was not always thus, and the development leaped ahead from the first millennium BC onwards, as religions became more coherent and allowed for popular participation. Archaeologists are the only ones who can recognize how the first figurines, the first burials with offerings, the earliest use of ochre to paint cowrie shells, the first monumental stone architecture, the first states, the first hymns and myths, the first alphabet, divine kingship, the first conception of one paramount divinity, the separation of church and state, and other fundamental markers in the history of human cognition (such as intolerance and purity) emerged and were transformed over the last half million years, and all fed into the development of religiondand are all present at the origins in the region where Africa, Asia and Europe meet. Archaeologists should be able to recognize what this means: exchange leads to the crystallization and spread of ideasdand ideas change as they spread. Adopting an objective attitude to the nature of the problem of understanding the origins and early development of religion and recognizing the reality that only archaeology and philology working together can offer a legitimate interpretation, and that this is the only way forward. This means taking what evidence there is at face valuedsome of which I have described heredand using this selectively as the basis for establishing a theoretical and historical account of the development of religion. Once this has been recognized, archaeology can contribute to revealing the long and gradual process by which religion emerged and changed. Each archaeological context where religion is present offers some testimony to the stages and changes in the history of religion. On the one hand, the overall nature of religion has been changingdand the individual religions have also been changing, adding diversity and detail. This is an adventure where archaeology can make a substantial contribution. Much has been donede.g., in the domain of Hindu ritual and architecturedbut a balanced approach to every manifestation of religion is imperative if the phenomenon is to be understood. Making assumptions and generalizations is not the way forward. Examination and reflection is.
See Also: Archaeoastronomy; Cognitive Archaeology.
References Algaze, Guillermo, 2023. Life and death in early Dynastic Kish: the evidence from Ingharra, Trench Y. In: Wilson, Karen L., Bekken, Deborah (Eds.), Where Kingship Descended from Heaven: Studies on Ancient Kish. Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago, Chicago, pp. 1e12. Antes, Peter, Geertz, Armin W., Warne, Randi R. (Eds.), 2004. New Approaches to the Study of Religion. de Gruyter, Berlin. Asmussen, Jens P., Læssøe, Jørgen (Eds.), 1971-1975. Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen. Black, Jeremy, Green, Anthony, 2011. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia. University of Texas Press, Austin. Bonnet, Hans, 2000. Reallexikon der ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte [1952]. de Gruyter, Berlin. Bottéro, Jean, 1998. La plus vieille religion: En Mésopotamie. Gallimard, Paris (¼ Jean Bottéro. [2001]. Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Bouzouggar, Abdeljalil, et al., 2007. 82,000-Year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 104, 9964e9969. Boyer, Pascal, 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books, New York. Cauvin, Jacques, 2010. Naissance des divinités, naissance de l’agriculture. CNRS Editions, Paris (¼ Cauvin, Jacques [2000]. The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Christensen, Lisbeth Bredholt, Hammer, Olav, Warburton, David A. (Eds.), 2013. The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe. Acumen, Durham. Christensen, Lisbeth Bredholt, Tae Jensen, Jesper (Eds.), 2017. Religion and Material Culture: Studying Religion and Religious Elements on the Basis of Objects, Architecture and Space. Brepols, Turnhout. Cook, Jill, 2013. Ice Age Art: The Arrival of the Modern Mind. British Museum Press, London. Donald, Merlin, 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA). Donald, Merlin, 2001. A Mind so Rare. Norton, New York. Ebeling, Erich, et al. (Eds.), 1928-2018. Reallexikon der Assyriologie. de Gruyer, Berlin. Eliade, Mircea (Ed.), 1987. Encyclopedia of Religion. Macmillan, New York. Flannery, Kent, 1973. Archaeology with a capital “S”. In: Redman, Charles L. (Ed.), Research and Theory in Current Archaeology. John Wiley, New York, pp. 47e53. Gadotti, Alhena, 2020. Never truly hers: Ereskigal’s Dowry and the rulership of the netherworld. J. Ancient Near E. Relig. 20, 1e16. Geertz, Armin W. (Ed.), 2013. Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture. Acumen, Durham. Gimbutas, Marija, 1999. The Living Goddesses. University of California Press, Berkeley. Griffiths, John Gwyn, 1960. The Conflict of Horus and Seth. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.
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Griffiths, John Gwyn, 1980. The Origins of Osiris and His Cult, second ed. Brill, Leiden. Guthrie, Stewart, 1995. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford University Press, New York. Harvey, Graham (Ed.), 2005. Ritual and Religious Belief. Equinox, London. Heinrich, Ernst, 1982. Die Tempel und Heiligtümer im alten Mesopotamien. de Gruyter, Berlin. Hodder, Ian (Ed.), 2010. Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Insoll, Timothy (Ed.), 2020. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kahl, Jochem, 2007. “Ra is My Lord”: Searching for the Rise of the Sun God at the Dawn of Egyptian History. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. Kaiser, Otto (Ed.), 2019. Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments [1985]. wbgAcademic, Darmstadt. Kopp, Peter, 2006. Die Siedlung der Naqadazeit. von Zabern, Mainz. Leroi-Gourhan, André, 1964. Les Religions de la préhistoire. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Leusch, Verena, et al., 2015. On the Invention of Gold Metallurgy. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 25, 353e376. Mithen, Steven, 1999. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. Thames & Hudson, London. Morales, Helen, 2007. Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Otto, Walter F., 2002. Die Götter Griechenlands [1929], eighth ed. Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt/M. Parzinger, Hermann, 2014. Die Kinder des Prometheus: Eine Geschichte der Menschheit vor der Erfindung der Schrift. Beck, Munich. Renfrew, Colin, Morley, Iain, Boyd, Michael J. (Eds.), 2018. Ritual, Play and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pétrequin, Pierre, et al., (Eds.), 2012. Jade: Grandes haches alpines du Néolithique européen, Ve et IVe millénaires av. J.-C. Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, Besançon. Rappaport, Roy A., 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Renfrew, Colin, Boyd, Michael J., Morley, Iain (Eds.), 2021. Death Rituals, Social Order and the Archaeology of Immortality in the Ancient World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Salzman, Michele Renee (Ed.), 2013. The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Segal, Robert A., 2004. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sinding Jensen, Jeppe, 2014. What is Religion? Acumen, Durham. Snell, Daniel (Ed.), 2020. A Companion to the Ancient Near East. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken NJ. Tarlow, Sarah, Nilsson Stutz, Liv (Eds.), 2019. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Veenhof, Klaas R., 2004. Trade with the Blessings of Shamash. In: Dercksen, Jan Gerrit (Ed.), Assyria and Beyond. Nederlands Instituut, Leiden, pp. 551e582. Wagner-Durand, Elisabeth, 2021. Beyond texts? Die Welt des Orients 51, 10e27. Warburton, David A., 1997. State and Economy in Ancient Egypt. University Press, Fribourg. Warburton, David A., 2010. The significance of shared aspects of the daily temple rituals. In: Dolinska, Monika, Beinlich, Horst (Eds.), 8. Ägyptologische Tempeltagung: Interconnections Between Temples. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, pp. 205e211. Warburton, David A., 2012. Architecture, Power, and Religion: Hatshepsut, Amun and Karnak in Context. LIT, Münster. Warburton, David A., 2015. The New Kingdom solar theology in Scandinavia? In: Kousoulis, P., Lazaridis, Nikolaos (Eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists. Peeters, Louvain, pp. 1271e1280. Warburton, David A., 2016. Egypt’s role in the origins of science. J. Anc. Egypt. Interconnect. 9, 72e94. Warburton, David A., 2018. Prices and values: origins and early history in the Near East. In: Kristiansen, Kristian, Lindkvist, Thomas, Myrdal, Janken (Eds.), Trade and Civilization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 56e86. Warburton, David. A., 2020. Mediterranean stone anchors: Bronze Age trade & social practice. eTopoi Journal for Ancient Studies 7, 193e211. Weber, Max, 1972. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Mohr Siebek, Tübingen. Zgoll, Annette, 2001. Sumerische religion. In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. XXIII. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 457e462. Ziermann, Martin, 2003. Die Baustrukturen der älteren Stadt. von Zabern, Mainz.
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Archaeology of Enslavement Hayden F. Bassett, Virginia Museum of Natural History, Martinsville, VA, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues Strategies of Enslavement Maintaining Identity and Cultural Practice Resistance The Enslaved Community Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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The archaeology of enslavement is closely aligned with historical archaeology, plantation archaeology, and African diaspora archaeology. It is best defined as a research agenda that developed from the 1960s to the early 21st century through the study of New World plantation contexts. Key issues in the archaeology of enslavement include: understanding strategies and the social process of enslavement, the continuity of cultural practices and identities among enslaved people, subtle and overt acts of resistance to enslavement, and the institutions and social dynamics created by enslaved people to negotiate the conditions of enslavement. Today, the archaeology of enslavement is seeing greater recognition and professionalization within the wider discipline of archaeology due to its contemporary resonance and the interests among descendant communities.
Abstract The Archaeology of Enslavement is a research agenda within Historical Archaeology, whose development has paralleled that of plantation archaeology and African diaspora archaeology. It is jointly defined as: (1) the study of the conditions, strategies, and power structures of enslaving; and (2) the practices, behaviors, social structures, beliefs, and resistances maintained or created while negotiating the conditions of enslavement. While the archaeology of enslavement developed through the study of New World plantation contexts, today it is also widely studied through contexts of enslavement in Central and South America, coastal West and East Africa, and the Indian Ocean world.
Introduction The archaeology of enslavement can be jointly defined as: (1) the study of the conditions, strategies, and power structures of enslaving; and (2) the practices, behaviors, social structures, beliefs, and resistances maintained or created while negotiating the conditions of enslavement. In this way, the archaeology of enslavement is best understood as a distinct research agenda. While this research agenda is widely applicable to any historical context of enslavement, it continues to feature prominently in the study of social and historical contexts related to European colonization beginning in the 15th century. Because of this, the archaeology of enslavement remains closely aligned with historical archaeology. Related and occasionally synonymous topics include plantation archaeology and African diaspora archaeology.
Overview While the archaeology of enslavement saw its maturation from the 1980s forward, this research agenda was initially developed in the 1970s (Fairbanks, 1977; Handler and Lange, 1978; Vlach, 1978). Over the past 60 years, this topic emerged through the development of historical archaeology as a sub-discipline. The methods, questions, and scholarly community remain closely aligned.
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Over the second half of the 20th century, a focus on the lives of enslaved people was in part influenced by the research engagements aligned with the Civil Rights movement and the passing of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966. Among other provisions, the NHPA created a new framework that led to a requirement for federal undertakings to consider potentially damaging effects to archaeological sites, historic architecture, and other cultural resources. From the 1960s to the 1980s, this requirement led to an unprecedented level of identification of archaeological sites and standing architecture associated with enslaved people. At the same time, a growing movement among a handful of research-based archaeologists associated with universities in the American southeast began investigating plantation contexts, with an explicit focus on the lives of enslaved people. By the late 1980s, a generation of former graduate students from the handful of plantation archaeology projects of the 1970s had professionalized this line of research. Whereas the earliest projects were focused on plantations in the American southeast and Caribbean, the archaeology of the 1980s saw new projects focusing on contexts of enslavement throughout the wider Atlantic world (Fairbanks, 1984; Kelso, 1984; Singleton, 1985, 1990; Armstrong, 1990). This included projects focused on reconstructing the experiences of enslavement through traditional archaeological methods, as well as bioarchaeological examination of human remains recovered from contexts of enslavement (Handler et al., 1986; Kelley and Angel, 1987). The archaeology of enslavement saw its greatest growth in the 1990s, with major projects undertaken throughout the eastern and southeastern United States and the Caribbean. Distinct topics and research questions emerged, many of which sought to understand the diversity of individuals and experiences within an enslaved population. This included diversity related to socio-economic status, enslaved occupation, place of birth, among other key biographical characteristics. This movement was in part influenced by a new focus on human agency within institutions such as plantation slavery of the Atlantic World. This shifted studies to smaller scales of archaeological inquiry in order to move the conversation from general pictures of enslaved populations to more nuanced understandings of enslaved communities and households. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, major research topics in this shift included the continuity of West African cultural practices in New World contexts (a topic first established in the 1970s), the differential experiences of enslavement between different types of commodity production (e.g., tobacco, wheat, sugar, coffee, rice, etc.), enslavement in urban contexts, and resistance to institutional practices of enslavement (Orser, 1990; Singleton, 1990; Armstrong, 1990; Ferguson, 1992; Deetz, 1996; Delle, 1998; Armstrong and Kelly, 2000; Heath and Bennett, 2000). Parallel to this, the physical and social mechanisms of enslavement also emerged as a new line of inquiry. Chief among these was the study of how designed landscapes and the built environment were instrumental in displaying, concealing, and/or maintaining the institutions of slavery (Upton, 1984; Delle, 1998; Epperson, 2000). This time also witnessed a major growth and critical turning point in bioarchaeological contributions to understanding the lived experiences of enslavement and the contemporary dialogue surrounding those histories (Blakey et al., 1994; La Roche and Blakey, 1997; Blakey, 1998). From the mid-2000s to the present, multi-scalar and comparative approaches have framed much of the archaeological study of enslavement. A common theme among contemporary research is the simultaneous study of the before-mentioned topics at the landscape, community, household, and in some cases, the individual scales. Major lines of research include the physical mobility of enslaved people beyond their places of labor, subversive networks (physical and social), market participation by enslaved people, and the related topic of self-provisioning as a subsistence strategy (Bates, 2014, 2016; Hauser, 2008). Of these, some of the most insightful studies have opened new lines of inquiry at the household and individual scales. This includes the utilization of discrete archaeological assemblages to understand the role of gender, kinship, complex racial categories, labor roles, status, and prestige among enslaved individuals and between households of enslaved people (Armstrong and Fleischman, 2003; Armstrong, 2010; Galle, 2010). Advances in technology and the larger spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities have also greatly influenced the archaeology of enslavement. New data dissemination capabilities such as online comparative databases, such as the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (Bates et al., 2020), and the growth of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software have facilitated new avenues of inquiry in recent years. With this, a new emphasis has been placed on documentation efforts for rapidly disappearing resources, such as standing architecture, as well as cemeteries and burial grounds associated with enslaved people. This has been facilitated by accessible and cost-effective solutions, such as digital mapping, 3D scanning, and photogrammetry. Of the most recent directions in the archaeology of enslavement, the participation of descendant communities has perhaps had the greatest influence. While the involvement of descendant communities began in the 1990s (La Roche and Blakey, 1997; Blakey, 1998), it is only now commonly viewed as a professional standard. The involvement of descendant communities is not limited to that of an audience for information learned. Rather, a much deeper level of involvement now informs site selection, the formulation of questions, methodological approaches, the composition of excavators, and the curatorial, exhibition, and outreach initiatives. It has also expanded the objectives and utility of archaeology in these contexts. While many projects remain driven by the before-mentioned historical and anthropological questions, it is now common for archaeology to also be utilized as a form of community engagement or activism (Deetz et al., 2015). This is particularly important when few or no other historical records exist for a contemporary group, or the historical contingencies of enslavement can be connected to contemporary circumstances (Agbe-Davies, 2022). This descendant-centered archaeology is often referred to as “community archaeology.” While this is by no means the dominant form of the archaeology of enslavement today, it will continue to shape the direction and expectations of projects in this research agenda moving forward.
Key Issues Strategies of Enslavement Today, a major focus in the archaeology of enslavement is the social process of enslavement. Archaeologists studying this seek to identify the material and social strategies the enslaving class deployed to create and maintain institutions of enslavement (Bassett,
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2017). This research often uses the perspectives, objects of study, and scales of landscape archaeology. As such, these studies tend to cross disciplinary boundaries, frequently borrowing from history, architectural history, geography, and even urban planning. Those studying these dynamics will frequently engage theoretical perspectives from sociology and cognitive science. A common approach to studying the social process of enslavement is through a detailed investigation of the organization of historic landscapes, such as plantations or port cities. Researchers will often study the configuration of historic buildings, roads, walls, production spaces, domestic spaces, and more to identify intent in landscape design (Upton, 1984; Delle, 1998; Epperson, 2000; Bates, 2014; Neiman, 2008; Nelson, 2016; Bassett, 2017, 2022). In these landscape-focused studies, archaeological assemblages are typically used to populate discrete spaces with understandings of the class and status of those living and laboring in discrete areas. This approach was largely developed in the study of plantation slavery in New World contexts, where it remains a productive avenue of research today. New World urban and plantation contexts from the 17th to the 19th century often retain surviving records, including detailed maps, survey plats, and land deeds from the period. These maps often include buildings identified by function, details of landscape features, agricultural fields, and the locations of the villages or dispersed quarters for enslaved people. When combined with the physical terrain, archaeologists study landscape configuration as a strategy of power and control. Common themes explored in the connection between physical infrastructure and social phenomena in New World contexts include tactics of fear (Nelson, 2016), the connection between surveillance and self-discipline (Delle, 1998), population segregation and control (Bassett, 2022), the physical and cognitive infrastructure that allowed a small number of individuals to exert control over what was often an enslaved majority (Nelson, 2016; Bassett, 2022), and the landscape and architectural strategies used to display or mask the realities of enslavement to different audiences (Upton, 1984; Neiman, 2008; Bassett, 2022).
Maintaining Identity and Cultural Practice One of the earliest lines of research within the archaeology of enslavement was a focus on the persistence of the long-held identity and cultural practices of enslaved individuals despite the dehumanizing conditions of enslavement. These continuities were commonly referred to as “Africanisms” by archaeologists of the 1970s through the 1990s (Vlach, 1978; Emerson, 1999). For those studying the conditions of enslavement in Atlantic World contexts, this was often posed as a research question. That is, are there archaeologically detectable signatures of West African cultural practices in New World contexts, or did the conditions of enslavement impose or result in completely new practices and identities? With respect to the former, this motivated an explicit pursuit of identifying West African influences in religion, medicine, food preparation, farming, craft production, personal adornment, architecture, and other material practices. For the latter, some archaeologists argued that the destructive and dehumanizing conditions of Atlantic slavery did not allow such vestiges of a former identity to survive the Middle Passage. Today, most archaeologists agree that the identities and cultural practices created and maintained by enslaved people represent a blend of long-held ethnic practices from multiple regions and New World creations (Deetz, 1996; Samford, 2007). In this respect, most agree that enslaved people practiced various forms of agency in creating or maintaining identities within the unique conditions of enslavement in any given context. While it is clear that few objects survived the Middle Passage, most would now agree that many archaeologically detectable practices do reflect traditions identifiable to many or occasionally specific areas of West and Central West Africa. Commonly identified examples include food preparation techniques, housing arrangements, aesthetics (e.g., yard sweeping), and personal adornment practices.
Resistance By the early 2000s, a focus on human agency within social and institutional structures translated into several new lines of research in the archaeology of enslavement. While the institutions of enslavement are readily detectable, many archaeologists recognized the need to address the often minority of practices that either deviated from or clearly subverted those institutions. These are often interpreted as subtle or overt acts of resistance. The study of resistance within the archaeology of enslavement is commonly interpreted in two ways. First, routine practices that subvert the institution are often seen as subtle acts of everyday resistance. These include, but are not limited to, subversive pathways outside the view of the enslaving classes, temporary or petite maroonage, reoccurring community or inter-household organization around unifying events or celebrations, intentional breaking or theft of the enslaving class’ assets, or other activities seeking to subvert the institution as a form of negotiating one’s position (Delle, 1998; Fellows and Delle, 2015; Smith and Bassett, 2016; Nelson, 2016; Bassett, 2022). Second, single events oriented to a permanent end-state are often interpreted as outward acts of resistance. These include major organizing and uprising events, destruction of production equipment or infrastructure, permanent maroonage, and other activities seeking to disrupt the institution itself (Agorsah, 1993; Orser and Funari, 2001; Fellows and Delle, 2015; Nelson, 2016; Bassett, 2017). In many contexts of enslavement, this also includes the archaeological study of maroon communities, or discrete communities of individuals who escaped enslavement, evaded capture, and organized into new social, political, and often defensive units (Agorsah, 1993, 2000).
The Enslaved Community One major contemporary area of research within the archaeology of enslavement is the study of the behaviors, relationships, and social organization that define an enslaved community (Neiman, 2008; Armstrong, 2010; Galle, 2010; Reeves, 2015; Bassett, 2017,
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2019). Community in this sense is defined by inter-household relationships and institutions that form the basis of a community as a discrete social unit (Yaeger and Canuto, 2000). This focus on the household, as opposed to the individual, recognizes that the dwelling unit is typically the smallest archaeologically detectable reflection of social units in the domestic contexts of enslaved people. Archaeological evidence for the dwelling unit, or discrete housing unit of those living together, can in turn be combined with other evidence such as artifact assemblages, house groupings, documentary records, and more to identify the nature of a village, grouping, or sub-grouping of households. Archaeological questions stemming from this include the manner in which demographics, kinship, or other internally developed or externally imposed structures define a dwelling unit. From this, the definition of the household, which can include multiple dwellings, is a major objective of this line of research. Once the nature of the household is defined, this allows archaeologists to study relationships between households of enslaved people in order to ask questions at the community scale. Archaeologists studying inter-household complexities within contexts of enslavement typically begin by defining the externally imposed conditions or constraints of enslavement within a specific historical context. This includes characteristics such as labor roles, types of production, size and demographics of the enslaved population, logistics of provisioning, degrees of mobility, and the location of domestic areas. These constraints also include the previously discussed material and social strategies deployed by the enslaving class to maintain power over an enslaved population. Within these externally imposed constraints, the focus of those studying the archaeology of communities are the detectable rules or practices of household groupings, material inequalities between dwellings or dwelling groups, material reflections of household or inter-household cooperation (e.g., resource pooling or shared domestic infrastructure), among other dynamics. Overall, this line of research is organized around the question “what institutions and social practices did enslaved people create for themselves to negotiate the conditions of enslavement?”.
Summary and Future Directions The archaeology of enslavement has stood as an important research agenda within Historical Archaeology for the past 60 years. Today, the focus, questions, and methods developed between the 1960s and the early 21st century are being applied to far more historical contexts of enslavement than those of the American South and Caribbean. This includes contexts of enslavement along the West African coast (Nelson, 2016), plantation contexts in the Indian Ocean world (Haines, 2018; Marshall, 2018), and colonial contexts in Central and South America (Funari and Orser, 2015). This focus is also now being applied to other forms of enslavement beyond agriculture and tradespersons, such as enslaved mariners, miners, foundry workers, and other labor roles. Both new and longstanding archaeological projects continue to refine and challenge our understanding of enslavement. Among the key issues discussed, there are two major directions in the archaeology of enslavement shaping much of the research today: one research-oriented, the other practice-oriented. The fastest growing body of research in the archaeology of enslavement is the previously mentioned study of the social and economic practices created by enslaved people to negotiate the conditions of enslavement (Neiman, 2008; Hauser, 2008; Galle, 2010; Bates, 2016; Smith and Bassett, 2016; Bassett, 2017, 2019). This direction recognizes that outright resistance to enslavers was not always an option, and that subtle forms of resistance were often combined with material, economic, and social practices to negotiate the conditions of enslavement. Growing themes focused on the social and economic agencies of enslaved people include studies of household economies, market participation, craft production and selfprovisioning, novel forms of household organization, and physical and social mobility under conditions of enslavement. The second, professional practice-oriented direction in this research today is that of inclusion. Among archaeological projects associated with sites of enslavement, such as historic plantations open to the public and colleges and universities previously constructed or operated through enslaved labor, there is a far greater emphasis on the public interpretation of enslavement and its role at that site or institution (Agbe-Davies, 2022). Whereas many public history sites first sought to interpret the life and homes of elite individuals or families, many of these heritage tourism sites have recently invested more in uncovering and interpreting the lives, spaces, and stories of the enslaved people who once lived and labored there (e.g., Battle-Baptiste, 2011). Because archaeology is one of the few ways to identify and interpret those narratives to visitors, public history sites have contributed significantly to the topics and methods of the archaeology of enslavement. As a part of the same professional direction, recent archaeological projects have conducted this research in close consultation or collaboration with the descendant communities of enslaved people. This includes engagement of descendants in research questions, research design, archaeological fieldwork, and the interpretation of findings. For some projects, this also includes the connection of archaeological findings to contemporary racial or socio-economic injustices. As the contingencies of the institutions of enslavement continue to be recognized in contemporary society, community archaeology will continue to influence the archaeology of enslavement (Agbe-Davies, 2022). Current directions in this respect include archaeology as an avenue for community engagement, political discourse, and identification of historical facts underpinning contemporary socio-economic circumstances. The wider discipline of archaeology continues to recognize the growing importance of the archaeology of enslavement as a critical topic in the profession today. This is most apparent in the profession’s investments in shaping its future. Many academic and public history jobs in archaeology are now explicitly geared toward the archaeology of enslavement. Several academic journals entirely dedicated to this topic have also emerged in the past 15 years. Through professional and public advocacy, many state and federal grant programs have been created to identify and preserve sites of enslavement. Involvement of descendant communities is increasingly becoming a professional standard, codified in professional ethics and scholarly expectations. These directions are expected to continue and expand in years to come.
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See Also: Postcolonial Archaeology and Colonial Praxis.
References Agbe-Davies, Anna S., 2022. African American archaeology, for now. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 51, 345–363. Agorsah, E. Kofi, 1993. Archaeology and resistance history in the Caribbean. Afr. Archaeol. Rev. 11, 175–195. Agorsah, E. Kofi (Ed.), 2000. Maroon Heritage: Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives. University Press of the West Indies, Barbados. Armstrong, Douglas V., 1990. The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL. Armstrong, Douglas V., 2010. Degrees of freedom in the Caribbean: archaeological explorations of transitions from slavery. Antiquity 84 (323), 146–160. Armstrong, Douglas V., Kelly, Kenneth G., 2000. Settlement patterns and the origins of African Jamaican society: Seville plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Ethnohistory 47, 369–397. Armstrong, Douglas V., Fleischman, Mark L., 2003. House-Yard burials of enslaved laborers in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Int. J. Hist. Archaeol. 7 (1), 33–65. Bassett, Hayden F., 2017. The Archaeology of Enslavement in Plantation Jamaica: A Study of Community Dynamics Among the Enslaved People of Good Hope Estate, 1775–1838. Dissertation. William & Mary. Bassett, Hayden F., 2019. Asymmetric architectures of enslaved people in Jamaica: an archaeological study of household variation at Good Hope Estate. In: Delle, James A., Clay, Elizabeth C. (Eds.), Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, pp. 87–115. Bassett, Hayden F., 2022. Plantation roads and the impositions of infrastructure: an archaeology of movement at Good Hope Estate, Jamaica. J. Afr. Diaspora Archaeol. Herit. 11, 48–73. Bates, Lynsey, 2014. “The landscape cannot be said to be really perfect”: a comparative investigation of plantation spatial organization on two British colonial sugar estates. In: Marshall, Lydia Wilson (Ed.), The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion. Center for Archaeological Investigations. Occasional Papers No. 41, pp. 116–142. Bates, Lynsey, 2016. Provisioning and marketing: surplus and access on Jamaican sugar estates. In: Bates, Lynsey, Chenoweth, James A., Delle, James A. (Eds.), Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean: Exploring the Spaces in between. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, pp. 79–110. Bates, Lynsey, et al., 2020. Archaeological data in the cloud: collaboration and accessibility with the digital archaeological archive of comparative slavery (DAACS). In: Crowder, Jerome W., Fortun, Mike, Besara, Rachel, Poirier, Lindsay (Eds.), Anthropological Data in the Digital Age. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 85–107. Battle-Baptiste, Whitney, 2011. Black Feminist Archaeology, first ed. Routledge, Walnut Creek, CA. Blakey, Michael L., 1998. The New York African burial ground project: an examination of enslaved lives, a construction of ancestral ties. Transform. Anthropol. 7 (1), 53–58. Blakey, Michael L., Leslie, Teresa E., Reidy, Joseph P., 1994. Frequency and chronological distribution of dental enamel hypoplasia in enslaved African Americans: a test of the weaning hypothesis. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 95, 371–383. Deetz, James, 1996. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. Anchor Books/Doubleday, New York, NY. Deetz, Kelley F., et al., 2015. Historic black lives matter: archaeology as activism in the 21st Century. African Diaspora Archaeol. Newslett. 15, 1–33. Delle, James A., 1998. An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Springer, New York, NY. Emerson, Matthew, 1999. African inspirations in a New World art and artifact: decorated tobacco pipes from the Chesapeake. In: Singleton, Theresa A.A. (Ed.), ‘I, Too, Am America’: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA, pp. 47–82. Epperson, Terrence W., 2000. Panoptic plantations: the garden sights of Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. In: Delle, James A., Mrozowski, Stephen A., Paynter, Robert (Eds.), Lines that Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN, pp. 58–77. Fairbanks, Charles, 1977. Backyard archaeology as a research strategy. In: South, Stanley (Ed.), Conference on Historic Site Archaeology Papers 11. The South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Columbia, SC, pp. 133–139. Fairbanks, Charles, 1984. The plantation archaeology of the southeastern coast. Hist. Archaeol. 18, 1–14. Fellows, Kristen, Delle, James, 2015. Marronage and the dialectics of spatial sovereignty in colonial Jamaica. In: Funari, Pedro, P.A., Orser, Charles E., Jr. (Eds.), Current Perspectives on the Archaeology of African Slavery in Latin America. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 117–132. Ferguson, Leland G., 1992. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Funari, Pedro P.A., Orser, Charles E. (Eds.), 2015. Current Perspectives on the Archaeology of African Slavery in Latin America. Springer, New York, NY. Galle, Jillian E., 2010. Costly signaling and gendered social strategies among slave in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake: an archaeological perspective. Am. Antiq. 75, 19–43. Haines, Julia Jong, 2018. Landscape transformation under slavery, indenture, and imperial projects in Bras d’Eau National Park, Mauritius. J. Afr. Diaspora Archaeol. Herit. 7, 131–164. Handler, Jerome S., Lange, Frederick W., Riordan, Robert V., 1986. Lead contact and poisoning in Barbados slaves: historical, chemical, and biological evidence. Soc. Sci. Hist. 10, 399–427. Handler, Jerome S., Lange, Frederick W., 1978. Plantation Slavery in Barbados: An Archaeological and Historical Investigation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Hauser, Mark W., 2008. An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Heath, Barbara J., Bennett, Amber, 2000. “The little spots allow’d them”: the archaeological study of African-American yards. Hist. Archaeol. 34, 38–55. Kelley, Jennifer Olsen, Angel, J. Lawrence, 1987. Life stresses of slavery. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 74 (2), 199–211. Kelso, William M., 1984. Kingsmill Plantations, 1619–1800: Archaeology of Country Life in Colonial Virginia. Academic Press, Orlando, FL. La Roche, Cheryl J., Blakey, Michael L., 1997. Seizing intellectual power: the dialogue at the New York African burial ground. Hist. Archaeol. 31, 84–106. Marshall, Lydia Wilson, 2018. Maroon archaeology beyond the Americas: a view from Kenya. Hist. Archaeol. 52, 717–740. Neiman, Fraser D., 2008. The lost world of Monticello: an evolutionary perspective. J. Anthropol. Res. 64, 161–193. Nelson, Louis P., 2016. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Orser, Charles E., Funari, Pedro P.A., 2001. Archaeology and slave resistance and rebellion. World Archaeol. 33, 61–72. Orser, Charles E., Jr., 1990. Archaeological approaches to New World plantation slavery. Archaeol. Method Theor. 2, 111–154. Reeves, Matthew B., 2015. Scalar analysis of early nineteenth-century household assemblages: focus on communities of the African Atlantic. In: Fogle, Keven R., Nyman, James A., Beaudry, Mary C. (Eds.), Beyond the Walls: New Perspectives on the Archaeology of Historical Households. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, pp. 22–46. Samford, Patricia, 2007. Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL. Singleton, Theresa A., 1985. The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life. Academic Press, Orlando, FL. Singleton, Theresa A., 1990. The archaeology of the plantation south: a review of approaches and goals. Hist. Archaeol. 24, 70–77. Smith, Frederick H., Bassett, Hayden F., 2016. The role of caves and gullies in escape, mobility, and the creation of community networks among enslaved peoples of Barbados. In: Bates, Lynsey, Chenoweth, John A., Delle, James A. (Eds.), Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean: Exploring the Spaces in between. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, pp. 31–48. Upton, Dell, 1984. White and black landscapes in eighteenth-century Virginia. Places 2, 59–72.
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Vlach, John M., 1978. The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts: Basketry, Musical Instruments, Wood Carving, Quilting, Pottery, Boatbuilding, Blacksmithing, Architecture, Graveyard Decoration. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA. Yaeger, Jason, Canuto, Marcello A., 2000. Introducing the archaeology of communities. In: Canuto, Marcello A., Yaeger, Jason (Eds.), The Archaeology of Communities: A New World Perspective. Routledge, London, pp. 1–15.
Further Reading Armstrong, Douglas V., 1991. The Afro-Jamaican house-yard: an archaeological and ethnohistorical perspective. Florida J. Anthropol. Special Publication 7, 51–63. Armstrong, Douglas V., 1998. Cultural transformation within enslaved laborer communities in the Caribbean. In: Cusik, James G. (Ed.), Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Carbondale, IL. Occasional Paper No. 25, pp. 378–401. Armstrong, Douglas V., Hauser, Mark W., 2004. An East Indian laborers’ household in nineteenth-century Jamaica: a case for understanding cultural diversity through space, chronology, and material analysis. Hist. Archaeol. 38, 9–21. Bassett, Hayden F., 2019. The roads of empire: infrastructure and control in plantation Jamaica. Perspecta 52, 107–114. Bates, Lynsey, 2007. Surveillance and Production on Stewart Castle Estate: a GIS-Based Analysis of Models of Plantation Spatial Organization. Distinguished Majors Thesis in Archaeology. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Bates, Lynsey, 2015. Surplus and Access: Provisioning and Market Participation by Enslaved Laborers on Jamaican Sugar Estates. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania. Blakey, Michael L., 2001. Bioarchaeology of the African diaspora in the Americas: its origins and scope. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 30, 387–422. Clay, Elizabeth C., 2019. Landscape and labor on the periphery: built environments of slavery in nineteenth-century French Guiana. In: Delle, James A., Clay, Elizabeth C. (Eds.), Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, pp. 166–187. Deetz, James, 1993. Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA. Delle, James A., 1999. The landscapes of class negotiation on coffee plantations in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica: 1790–1850. Hist. Archaeol. 33, 136–158. Delle, James A., 2014. The Colonial Caribbean: Landscapes of Power in Jamaica’s Plantation System. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Delle, James A., Fellows, Kristen R., 2019. Variation within the village: housing enslaved laborers on coffee plantations in Jamaica. In: Delle, James A., Clay, Elizabeth C. (Eds.), Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, pp. 116–140. Delle, James A., Mrozowski, Stephen A., Paynter, Robert (Eds.), 2000. Lines that Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN. Epperson, Terrence W., 1999. Constructing difference: the social and spatial order of the Chesapeake plantation. In: Singleton, Theresa A. (Ed.), ‘I, Too, Am America’: Archaeological Studies of African–American Life. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA, pp. 159–172. Fortenberry, Brent R., 2019. Research notes: digital documentation in vernacular architecture studies. Build. Land. J. Vernac. Archit. Forum 26, 98–114. Galle, Jillian E., 2011. Assessing the impacts of time, agricultural cycles, and demography on the consumer activities of enslaved men and women in eighteenth-century Jamaica and Virginia. In: Delle, James A., Hauser, Mark W., Armstrong, Douglas V. (Eds.), Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloose, AL, pp. 211–242. Haines, Julia Jong, 2021. Shaping landscapes: environmental history, plantation management and colonial legacies in Mauritius. Int. J. Hist. Archaeol. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10761-021-00629-0. Hauser, Mark W., 2011. Routes and roots of empire: pots, power, and slavery in the 18th-century British Caribbean. Am. Anthropol. 113, 431–447. Higman, Barry W., 1987. The spatial economy of Jamaican sugar plantations: cartographic evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. J. Hist. Geogr. 13, 17–39. Higman, Barry W., 1998. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. University of the West Indies Press, Kingston. Howson, Jean E., 1990. Social relations and material culture: a critique of the archaeology of plantation slavery. Hist. Archaeol. 24, 78–91. Kelly, Kenneth G., 1989. Historic Archaeology of Jamaican Tenant-Manager Relations: A Case Study from Drax Hall and Seville Estates, St. Ann, Jamaica. Dissertation. College of William and Mary. Moore, Sue Mullins, 1985. Social and economic status on the coastal plantation: an archaeological perspective. In: Singleton, Theresa A. (Ed.), The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life. Academic Press, Orlando, FL, pp. 141–160. Orser, Charles E., Jr., 1988. The archaeological analysis of plantation society: replacing status and caste with economics and power. Am. Antiq. 53, 735–751. Orser, Charles E., Jr., 1989. On plantations and patterns. Hist. Archaeol. 23, 28–40. Owsley, Douglas W., et al., 1987. Demography and pathology of an urban slave population from New Orleans. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 74, 185–197. Reeves, Matthew, 1997. By Their Own Labor: Enslaved Africans’ Survival Strategies on Two Jamaican Plantations. PhD thesis, Syracuse University. Singleton, Theresa A., 1999. ‘I, Too, Am America’: Archaeological Studies of African–American Life. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA. Wilkie, Laurie A., 1996. Glass-knapping at a Louisiana plantation: African-American tools? Hist. Archaeol. 30, 37–49. Wilkie, Laurie A., Farnsworth, Paul, 1999. Trade and the construction of Bahamian identity: a multiscalar exploration. Int. J. Hist. Archaeol. 3, 283–320. Wilkie, Laurie A., Farnsworth, Paul, 2005. Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition at a Bahamian Plantation. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Archaeology of Food Meriel McClatchie, School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues Beyond Subsistence Finding Foods Multi-disciplinary Approaches Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Food is a basic requirement for human survival, and the development of complexity in food production paved the way for important advances in the history of humanity Archaeobotany provides evidence for a wide variety of human-plant interactions, with the focus often on food Through analysis of archaeobotanical remains recovered from archaeological excavations, insights can be gained into food choices and activities associated with food procurement, preparation and consumption The evidence mostly comprises the ingredients of meals but innovative approaches are enabling new perspectives on meals and wider foodways
Abstract The archaeology of food explores what people ate in the past, and how foods were procured, prepared and consumed. Archaeobotany provides key evidence for these activities through recovery of the remains of plants from archaeological excavations. A wide variety of analytic methods can be applied to reveal not only plant categories but also activities such as food processing and cooking traditions. Archaeobotany is increasingly combined with other analytic techniques to develop insights into the meanings and values ascribed to foods, thus providing a lens into how foods shaped our worlds.
Introduction Food is a basic physical requirement, and for millennia, plant-derived foods have played an important role in meeting human biological needs. Eating has been described as “the most common of daily practices” (Hastorf, 2022: 5), and the remains of plant foods are often recovered from archaeological excavations. People’s relationships with plant foods in the past went far beyond meeting basic nutritional needs, however. Investigating what foods people ate in the past (and what they avoided), how these foods were procured, prepared, presented and shared, and the treatment of food waste can provide an important window into daily lives, cultural values, politics and social interactions in past societies. The archaeology of food can be a challenging and complex endeavor, which to a large extent reflects the often fragmentary and partial record that survives in archaeological deposits. Furthermore, for many decades food was not a central topic in archaeological investigations of past societies, perhaps being regarded as too “everyday” or too associated with the activities of women to deserve serious scholarship. In recent decades, however, powerful new scientific methods have emerged that are transforming food scholarship, and an interdisciplinary approach is increasingly taken, enabling much-improved understandings. When coupled with a wider societal interest in ancient and traditional foodways, the result has been a significantly increased emphasis on the archaeology of food. This entry will focus on the contribution of archaeobotany to the archaeology of food. Archaeobotany can be defined as the study of past societies and environments through the analysis of preserved plant remains, the plant remains usually being derived from archaeological deposits. Archaeobotany encompasses a wide variety of plant remains, which are usually described as either “macro-remains” or “micro-remains”. The term “plant macro-remains” usually refers to plant structures that are detectable by the naked eye when extracted from archaeological deposits but may not be discernible during excavation. Macro-remains include
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seeds and fruits of higher plants, pods, cobs, vegetative components of plants and parenchymatous tissues (underground storage organs of plants, such as roots and tubers). The term “plant micro-remains” usually refers to material that requires highpowered magnification for both observation and identification. Pollen, phytoliths and starch grains are examples of microremains; in the case of phytoliths, they range in length from 0.005 to 0.25 mm. While the remains of prepared food products are occasionally recovered, archaeobotanical evidence for food mostly comprises the ingredients of meals, in the form of these plant macro-remains and micro-remains. Both macro- and micro-remains usually require specific environmental conditions or some sort of mechanism to enable preservation because otherwise they degrade and become unidentifiable in the archaeological record. Charring is the most common method of preservation, which occurs when the plant components are incorporated into a fire and the supply of oxygen in the fire is insufficient for combustion to occur (Charles et al., 2015, Fig. 1). This can happen in a wide variety of circumstances, including the drying of seeds or grains before storage, cooking activities and accidental conflagrations. Other mechanisms of preservation include waterlogging, desiccation, freezing and mineral-replacement, but some remains, such as phytoliths, may not require special conditions to enable preservation (Pearsall, 2015). Plant remains are most often recovered from sediments, for example when samples of soil are taken from different activity areas at excavations. Plant remains can also be recovered from ancient fecal remains (coprolites), tool and vessel surfaces, and calculus that forms on people’s teeth (Piperno, 2006: 98–100; Twiss, 2019: 23). Plant remains will usually be contained within a sedimentary matrix, and separation must take place prior to their identification; the method applied will depend on the type of remains and their mechanism of preservation (Pearsall, 2015). Plant macro-remains are often identified using low-powered magnification, in the range of x 6 to x 40, and by comparing archaeological specimens with modern examples and images. More powerful microscopy, such as scanning electron microscopy, may be required, for example in the determination of cell patterns and amorphous plant matter. Plant micro-remains usually require laboratory processing for separation of material from their sedimentary matrix and high-powered microscopy. A wide variety of themes can be explored in the archaeology of food. Archaeobotany can contribute to many of the key themes, enabling important insights into plant availability and dietary choices at different times and locations, long-term dietary patterns, and the role of food in shaping social identities and behaviors. This entry will provide a brief history of scholarship in archaeobotany, explore three key themes (beyond subsistence; finding foods; multi-disciplinary approaches), and provide suggestions for future pathways in research.
Overview The investigation of food has been a central focus in the sub-discipline of archaeobotany for many decades. Hundreds of archaeobotanical studies have been completed on what was eaten in past societies, and how this changed through time and space. The historical development of archaeobotany, particularly in relation to macro-remains, has been discussed in several publications (recent reviews include Marston et al., 2015; Pearsall, 2015; Twiss, 2019). Some of the earliest archaeobotanical studies were undertaken by botanists during the 19th century, including desiccated plant remains from Egypt and Peru, and waterlogged deposits from Swiss lake villages. In relation to food, these studies investigated issues such as cultural associations of various plants, seasonality and implications for site occupation, and the place and time of domestication. During the late-19th and early-20th centuries,
Fig. 1 Experimental hearth containing charred debris from fuel and food-preparation activities, which can be sampled for its archaeobotanical content.
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investigations were concentrated on material from Europe, with a more global reach emerging by the mid-twentieth century. Archaeobotany studies were still relatively rare, but this changed in the 1960s with the development of processual archaeology. Processual archaeology focused on issues such as economic systems, resource exploitation, and local and regional ecologies. Archaeobotany was well-placed to tackle such issues, and this broadly coincided with the development of new recovery techniques, such as flotation, which resulted in larger and more varied assemblages for analysis. These changes in theoretical and methodological practice meant that archaeobotanical investigations were increasingly undertaken, and food was often central to these investigations. Studies explored which plant species were consumed by past peoples, how plants were acquired, the processes and dietary impacts of domestication, and the role of plants in subsistence economies (for example, van Zeist et al., 1991). Detailed investigations of the morphology of remains (such as shape and size) revealed whether plants were gathered or domesticated foods. Studies also unpacked the chaîne opératoire, or sequence of practices, of food preparation activities, which involved ingredient gathering, processing and mixing (Hastorf, 2017: 15). Cereals were initially the focus; the types and quantities of cereal grains, chaff and arable seeds recovered from a site were linked to processing stages between harvest and consumption, while also considering the effects of differential preservation and formation processes. Ethnographic-based models were developed to further elucidate how foodprocessing practices might be detected in the archaeobotanical record (Hillman, 1984; Jones, 1984). It was found that more than ten steps can be required between harvest and “clean” grain or seeds, including threshing, winnowing, coarse- and finesieving, pounding and hand-cleaning. Crucially for the archaeobotanist, each stage in this process was found to leave a distinct signature in terms of the frequency and nature of grains, chaff and arable weed seeds. Examination of the various plant components in an archaeobotanical assemblage could thereby provide insights into, for example, whether hulled wheat was stored as cleaned grain or within spikelets, whether maize was stored as whole cobs or shucked, or whether tubers were processed using stone grinding-tools. The origins of agriculture continue to be a focus of archaeobotanical scholarship, encouraged by improved chronologies and achievement of a critical mass of data. Non-farming societies have also received considerable attention in recent years. Studies have considered how the physiological properties of plants can affect the choice of post-harvest processing techniques; options for wild plants could include dehydration, fermentation, parboiling or pickling (Wollstonecroft, 2011). Important insights have also been gained into early processing practices required to remove toxins from certain plants to make them edible, thereby creating new hominin-plant relationships (Butterworth et al., 2016). Micro-remains in dental calculus, such as starches and phytoliths, are challenging long-held assumptions such as the prevalence of meat-based diets for Neanderthal communities, when it appears instead that plant use was widespread (Power et al., 2018). Analysis of phytoliths and starches on early grinding tools is also enabling new understandings of food practices before and soon after the advent of farming (for example, Dietrich et al., 2019). For more recent millennia, the movement of food plants through long-distance trade networks and the “globalization” of certain foods has also received attention, including differential access to new foods (Livarda and van der Veen, 2008; Jones et al., 2011; Walshaw, 2015, Fig. 2). Non-staple plant foods also receive attention, such as the use of spices in South Asia to make foods more palatable (Bates, 2019). Food storage practices have enabled exploration of social organization; for example, large quantities of burnt cereals at Bronze Age Assiros in Greece were drawn upon to explore community versus individual storage practices (Jones et al., 1986). A wide variety of approaches can be taken, therefore, when using archaeobotany as a basis for investigating the archaeology of food.
Fig. 2
Pop-up Roman cooking exhibition at Butser Ancient Farm, England, which showcased several “exotic” foods.
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Key Issues Beyond Subsistence At the interpretative level, earlier studies often placed emphasis on subsistence practices; for example, which ingredients were chosen, how they were procured, and the nutritive and physiological aspects of food consumption (Hastorf, 2017: 4). In recent decades, however, social, cultural and political dimensions of food have become more embedded in archaeobotanical investigations. Meals form the most common social engagement with family and friends, and there has been a shift in archaeobotany toward exploring wider concepts of foodways, including the “meaning” of meals, their rhythm, and social participation and commensality (recent studies include Hastorf, 2017, 2022; Twiss, 2019). There is increasing acknowledgment that food is not only good to eat, but also good to “think” (Lévi-Strauss, 1962: 89). A startlingly large proportion of archaeological literature on social aspects of food has centered around feasting (Twiss, 2019, 7), perhaps because food and feasting are seen to have played a prominent role in the emergence of social hierarchies, and the negotiation of power and identity (Dietler and Hayden, 2001). While feasting may result in the recovery of larger quantities of plant remains, thereby making such activity identifiable in the archaeological record, it is increasingly recognized that feasting may not incorporate diverse food types or exotic foods. Classifying foods as “luxury” can also be complex – they should not be defined as only those that are exotic, rare, expensive to procure, or restricted from the bulk of the population (van der Veen, 2003). Food may instead be defined as a luxury based on its cultural and economic setting, spatial placement, association, quality and frequency, rather than simply the ingredients (Hastorf, 2003, 545; Fig. 3). A contextual approach can be vital, therefore, when interpreting archaeobotanical remains. But archaeobotany has the potential to provide important insights into foodways beyond feasting and luxuries. Archaeobotanical evidence can provide a basis for exploring complex issues, such as gendered labor practices and political participation (Hastorf, 1991). Investigations can be undertaken into how different communities shared farmed spaces in landscapes, as has been done for Neolithic Germany, based upon diversity in arable weed ecologies (Bogaard et al., 2011). Plant remains can provide a window into daily life, as has been shown for the Chimú Empire in Peru (Cutright, 2015). Wider concepts of kinship and cosmology can also be explored, as shown by a study of regional cooking traditions in Europe and western Asia that explored preparation methods (such as boiled versus roasted) and food-sharing practices (Fuller and Rowlands, 2011). The importance of moving beyond ingredients toward broader foodways is therefore a vital element of scholarship in the archaeology of food.
Finding Foods Developing a comprehensive understanding of foodways across space and time can be challenging because of issues relating to the recovery and identification of food remains. While much scholarly progress has been made on identifying individual ingredientsdsuch as the macro- and micro-remains of cereals, tubers, fruits and nutsddetermining the ways in which these foods were combined to produce dishes, meals and cuisines has been more elusive. The material traces of food in the archaeological record more often relate to production and early stages of processing rather than final stages of processing, cooking and consumption. Perhaps the most convincing evidence for individual meals is found in preserved gut contents and coprolites. A recent study that re-examined the last meal of a famous Danish bog body, Tollund Man, found that both cultivated and wild plant foods were likely ground before being consumed in a porridge-type meal (Nielsen et al., 2021). Latrine deposits are another potential source of direct information, whereby humanly excreted plant macro- and micro-remains can be recovered (Hald et al., 2020). The recovery of starches and phytoliths from dental calculus can also provide direct evidence of consumed plant foods. Researchers have had to broaden their search, therefore, for traces of prepared foods and meals.
Fig. 3
Experimental grinding of cereal grains on a quern stone.
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Although archaeologists have recovered charred, amorphous food “lumps” from excavations for many decades, it is only in recent years that detailed analysis of such material has been more widely undertaken. New insights have been enabled by increased access to powerful microscopy (such as Scanning Electron Microscopy), the development of identification criteria and the testing of hypotheses through experimental archaeology (Fig. 4). Distinct tissue fragments have been identified through SEM analysis, which have been assigned to different food categories, such as bread, porridge, gruel/stew and tubers. A variety of bread and bread-like finds have been discovered in recent years, including flat breads from Roman France (Heiss et al., 2015) and Natufian Jordan (Arranz-Otaegui et al., 2018), and bread and bread-like objects from Neolithic Switzerland (Heiss et al., 2017) and Turkey (González Carretero et al., 2017). Through observation and detailed measurement of preserved plant tissues, studies have not only been able to identify the ingredients but also detect sequences of production applied, such as grinding, sieving, leavening and baking (Heiss et al., 2015). Defining a distinct category is not always possible (for example, bread versus porridge in specimens examined from Bronze Age Bulgaria), and the importance of being conservative in identifications has been emphasized (Valamoti et al., 2019). As well as food “lumps”, food crusts adhering to ceramics and other objects have also received attention (KubiakMartens et al., 2015). Alcoholic beverages reflect another area under investigation, with both macro- and micro-remains evidence being examined. A recent study on cereal macro-remains undertook experimental work that reproduced the malting process, charred the malted grains to simulate their preservation, and recorded microstructural changes to the grains that could be used as markers to detect malting in archaeological specimens (Heiss et al., 2020). The limits of such analyses have been recognized, however. While markers for malting can be detected, this does not automatically mean that brewing was taking place because of the lack of diagnostic tools in archaeobotany to detect fermentation and the recognition that cereals may be malted for a variety of different food products (Heiss et al., 2020). Experimental work has also demonstrated that plant components can be altered on a microscopic scale that reflects the processing or cooking methods directed at them (Valamoti et al., 2019). Starch microstructure features can be examined to detect evidence for intentional cracking of cereal grains (which might reflect, for example, the production of cracked wheat products) and the heating of grains in liquid, as has been demonstrated for prehistoric Greece and Bulgaria. Work is ongoing to develop further diagnostic features for distinct cereal-food preparations, shedding new light on a wide variety of past culinary practices.
Multi-disciplinary Approaches While archaeobotanical remains play a central role in exploring foodways, studies that incorporate a variety of analyses and approaches enable more detailed and nuanced investigations. Studies that incorporate ethnographic evidence, for example, have revealed significant variability in wild plant food procurement through time and space, and the ways in which foods can play a role in personal and group identity formation and maintenance (for example, Hardy and Kubiak Martens, 2016). An investigation
Fig. 4
SEM micrograph of a fractured charred cereal grain from early medieval Ireland.
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of wild and cultivated plant foods in Argentina has demonstrated how ethnobotanical evidence can be crucial in identifying foodprocessing pathways for individual plants and combinations of plants (Capparelli et al., 2015). The combination of plants to produce meals can be rather elusive if studies rely only on archaeobotanical remains, but the integration of other approaches (ethnobotany, in this case) can unlock new perspectives. Studies have also drawn upon ethnographic evidence to explore how distinct processing practices might be detectable in the archaeological record. A good example is the study of legumes from prehistoric Greece; ethnographic evidence highlighted food products that required the intentional splitting of legume seeds, and it was found that this intentional splitting left a distinct trace that could be differentiated from seeds broken through accidental or fire damage (Valamoti et al., 2011). The many ways in which cereals can be processed and prepared are also highlighted by ethnographic sources, and the archaeological signature that these diverse processing techniques might leave behind has been considered in the context of archaeobotanical evidence from prehistoric south-eastern Europe (Valamoti et al., 2019, Fig. 5). Such approaches are important because they avoid the projection of modern perceptions about cereal foods to the distant past (Valamoti et al., 2019, 111). The identification of diagnostic features associated with specific practices brings us closer to revealing ancient recipes and meals created with plant foods. Ethnography can also provide insights into the human consumption of foods that might be considered fodder crops in more recent years (Peña-Chocarro and Zapata Peña, 1999). Another powerful approach is the integration of historical sources with archaeobotany, particularly when the sources are not simply taken at face value but when a critical approach is applied that takes account of political, social and colonial propaganda (McClatchie et al., 2022). Studies have highlighted food plants that are missing from the archaeobotanical record but recorded in historical sources, and the potential taphonomic factors that might affect the recovery or otherwise of various plant species and components. Historical sources can provide new insights into the status and uses of plant foods, as has been demonstrated for citrus fruits in the Mediterranean world (Zech-Matterne and Fiorentino, 2017). Insights can also be provided into complex processing practices required to prepare plants for consumption, such as the oil extraction process applied to argan seeds (Ruas et al., 2011). The application of a variety of scientific approaches is increasingly undertaken, with exciting results. The analysis of starch grains from ceramic vessels has been combined with lipid analyses to explore how plant-based ingredients were transformed into meals in prehistoric India and how they were mixed with other food categories, such as meat (García-Granero et al., 2022). Integrated analyses of stable isotopes and archaeobotanical remains can provide persuasive models for shifts in food choices, such as the emergence of millets as a dietary staple in Europe (Filipovic et al., 2020). A contextual approach that explores archaeobotanical remains and their association with cooking features can also be valuable in distinguishing different food products used by different social groups, as shown, for example, in a study of plant remains, bread forms and ovens from Egypt (Samuel, 1999). These collaborative studies have made an important contribution to enhanced understandings of ancient foodways, and it is anticipated that increasingly innovative studies will be embarked upon in years to come.
Summary and Future Directions Food is now a vibrant area of research in both archaeology and archaeobotany, and interest seems to be growing each year. This reflects a wider modern societal interest in traditional foods, an acknowledgment that ancient practices might play a role in developing sustainable foods for the future, and the emergence of powerful scientific techniques that are relatively accessible to the archaeobotany community. There are few regions globally where archaeobotanical studies have not been undertaken, and increasingly resolution is being gained on what people ate at different times and places, and in different social contexts. Subsistence
Fig. 5
Experimental crushing of plant foods using a pestle and mortar.
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practices formed an important area of research in earlier studies, examining what plant foods were selected, the methods of procurement and impacts on health. More recently, studies have explored wider perspectives on human-plant relationships and foodsharing practices. Improved analytic techniquesdparticularly relating to microscopy and identification criteriadhave enabled a buoyant sub-field to emerge, based on analysis of food “lumps” that represent the remains of prepared meals. This exciting development brings us even closer to past humans and their food choices. The benefits of a collaborative approach that integrates diverse techniques is well understood and increasingly followed, resulting in unprecedented insights into foods and foodways of past societies globally. In looking to the future, perhaps one of the most important contributions that archaeobotany can make relates to food security. Archaeobotany has developed an extraordinary knowledge base. There are long-term records for crops that are drought-resilient and that can grow in challenging environments, for crop wild relatives that can help increase biodiversity, for landraces and varieties that developed to enable plants to grow in new habitats and produce desirable culinary attributes, for land-use patterns and their potential impacts on climate change, and for knowledge systems to process plants that might otherwise be inedible, such as removing the testa (seed coat) to help to remove toxic substances (for example, Valamoti et al., 2011; Fuller and Castillo, 2016). These are potentially hugely valuable insights that can be shared with government agencies and NGOs who are working to tackle our modern climate and environmental crises. The potential role that archaeobotany can play in tackling modern societal challenges has been recognized in several recent papers, including a study of food security in Ghana’s past and present (Logan, 2016), an analysis of how adaptive practices in past food systems impacted by climate change could inform the future (Guedes et al., 2016) and a food systems approach to help identify intervention points for enhancing food security that draws upon archaeobotanical evidence for agricultural development over time and under different challenges (Reed and Ryan, 2019). Archaeobotany can help develop a new understanding of the four key tenets of modern food security: availability, accessibility, utilization and stability (Reed and Ryan, 2019). By characterizing food practices over centuries and millennia, and by telling the deep history of how and why people adapted their food practices, archaeobotany can contextualize and bring important new perspectives to strategies tackling modern global challenges.
See Also: Agricultural Fields; Animal Management; Archaeobotany: Crop Husbandry; Food and Feasting; Hunting Traps, Jumps, and Kill Sites; Shell Middens.
References Arranz-Otaegui, Amaia, González Carretero, Lara, Ramsey, Monica, Fuller, Dorian, Richter, Tobias, 2018. Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 115 (31), 7925–7930. Bates, Jennifer, 2019. Oilseeds, spices, fruits and flavour in the Indus Civilisation. J. Archaeol. Sci. 24, 879–887. Bogaard, Amy, Krause, Rüdiger, Strien, Hans-Christoph, 2011. Towards a social geography of cultivation and plant use in an early farming community: Vaihingen an der Enz, southwest Germany. Antiquity 85, 395–416. Butterworth, Peter J., Ellis, Peter R., Wollstonecroft, Michèle, 2016. Why protein is not enough: the role of plants and plant processing in delivering the dietary requirements of modern and early Homo. In: Hardy, Karen, Kubiak-Martens, Lucy (Eds.), Wild Harvest: Plants in the Hominin and Pre-agrarian Human Worlds. Oxbow, Oxford, pp. 31–54. Capparelli, Aylen, Pochettino, María, Lema, Veronica, et al., 2015. The contribution of ethnobotany and experimental archaeology to interpretation of ancient food processing: methodological proposals based on the discussion of several case studies on Prosopis spp., Chenopodium spp. and Cucurbita spp. from Argentina. Veg. Hist. Archaeobot. 24 (1), 151–163. Charles, Michael, Forster, Emily, Wallace, Michael, Jones, Glynis, 2015. “Nor ever lightning char thy grain”: establishing archaeologically relevant charring conditions and their effect on glume wheat grain morphology. STAR 1, 1–6. Cutright, Robyn E., 2015. Eating empire in the Jequetepeque: a local view of Chimú expansion on the north coast of Peru. Lat. Am. Antiq. 26 (1), 64–86. Dietler, Michael, Hayden, Brian (Eds.), 2001. Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC. Dietrich, Laura, Meister, Julia, Dietrich, Oliver, et al., 2019. Cereal processing at early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey. PLoS One 14 (5), e0215214. Filipovic, Dragana, Meadows, John, Marta, Dal Corso, et al., 2020. New AMS 14C dates track the arrival and spread of broomcorn millet cultivation and agricultural change in prehistoric Europe. Sci. Rep. 10, 13698. Fuller, Dorian Q., Castillo, Cristina, 2016. Diversification and cultural construction of a crop: the case of glutinous rice and waxy cereals in the food cultures of eastern Asia. In: LeeThorp, Julia, Katzenberg, Mary Anne (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Diet. Oxford University Press, Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199694013.013.8. Fuller, Dorian Q., Rowlands, Michael, 2011. Ingestion and food technologies: maintaining differences over the long-term in west, South and east Asia. In: Wilkinson, Toby C., Sherratt, Susan, Bennet, John (Eds.), Interweaving Worlds: Systematic Interactions in Eurasia, 7th to 1st Millennia BC. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 37–60. García-Granero, Juan José, Suryanarayan, Akshyeta, Cubas, Miriam, et al., 2022. Integrating lipid and starch grain analyses from Pottery vessels to explore prehistoric foodways in northern Gujarat, India. Front. Ecol. Evol. 10. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.840199. González Carretero, Lara, Wolstonecroft, Michèle, Fuller Q., Dorian, 2017. A methodological approach to the study of archaeological cereal meals: a case study at Çatalhöyük East (Turkey). Veg. Hist. Archaeobot. 26 (4), 415–432. Guedes, Jade A., Crabtree, Stefani A., Bocinsky, R. Kyle, Kohler, Timothy A., 2016. Twenty-first century approaches to ancient problems: climate and society. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 113 (51), 14483–14491. Hald, Mette Marie, Magnussen, Betina, Appelc, Liv, et al., 2020. Fragments of meals in eastern Denmark from the Viking Age to the Renaissance: new evidence from organic remains in latrines. J. Archaeol. Sci. 31, 102361. Hardy, Karen, Kubiak-Martens, Lucy (Eds.), 2016. Wild Harvest: Plants in the Hominin and Pre-agrarian Human Worlds. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Hastorf, Christine A., 1991. Gender, space, and food in prehistory. In: Gero, Joan M., Conkey, Margaret W. (Eds.), Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 132–159. Hastorf, Christine A., 2003. Andean luxury foods: special food for the ancestors, deities and the elite. Antiquity 77, 545–554. Hastorf, Christine A., 2017. The Social Archaeology of Food: Thinking About Eating From Prehistory to the Present. Cambridge University Press, New York.
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Hastorf, Christine A., 2022. Learning about the past through food. Archaeol. Food Foodways 1 (1), 5–15. Heiss, Andreas G., Pouget, Nathalie, Wiethold, Julian, Delor-Ahü, Anne, Le Goff, Isabelle, 2015. Tissue-based analysis of a charred flat bread (galette) from a Roman cemetery at Saint-Memmie (Dép. Marne, Champagne-Ardenne, north-eastern France). J. Archaeol. Sci. 55, 71–82. Heiss, Andreas G., Antolín, Ferran, Bleicher, Niels, et al., 2017. State of the (t)art. Analytical approaches in the investigation of components and production traits of archaeological bread-like objects, applied to two finds from the Neolithic lakeshore settlement Parkhaus Opéra (Zürich, Switzerland). PLoS One 12 (8), e0182401. Heiss, Andreas G., Berihuete Azorín, Marian, Antolín, Ferran, et al., 2020. Mashes to mashes, crust to crust. Presenting a novel microstructural marker for malting in the archaeological record. PLoS One 15 (5), e0231696. Hillman, Gordon C., 1984. Interpretation of archaeological plant remains: the application of ethnographic models from Turkey. In: van Zeist, Willem, Casparie, Wil A. (Eds.), Plants and Ancient Man: Studies in Palaeoethnobotany. Balkema, Rotterdam, pp. 1–41. Jones, Glynis, 1984. Interpretation of archaeological plant remains: ethnographic models. In: van Zeist, Willem, Casparie, Wil A. (Eds.), Plants and Ancient Man: Studies in Paleoethnobotany. Balkema, Rotterdam, pp. 43–59. Jones, Glynis, Wardle, Kenneth, Halstead, Paul, Wardle, Diana, 1986. Crop storage at Assiros. Sci. Am. 254 (3), 96–103. Jones, Martin, Hunt, Harriet, Lightfoot, Emma, et al., 2011. Food globalization in prehistory. World Archaeol. 43, 665–675. Kubiak-Martens, Lucy, Brinkkemper, Otto, Oudemans, Tania F., 2015. What’s for dinner? Processed food in the coastal area of the northern Netherlands in the Late Neolithic. Veg. Hist. Archaeobot. 24 (1), 47–62. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1962. Totemism. Merlin Press, London. Livarda, Alexandra, van der Veen, Marijke, 2008. Social access and dispersal of condiments in North-West Europe from the Roman to the medieval period. Veg. Hist. Archaeobot. 17, 201–209. Logan, Amanda L., 2016. An archaeology of food security in Banda, Ghana. Archaeol. Pap. Am. Anthropol. Assoc. 27, 106–119. Marston, John M., D’Alpoim Guedes, Jade, Warinner, Christina (Eds.), 2015. Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. McClatchie, Meriel, Flavin, Susan, OCarroll, Ellen, 2022. Unearthing a new food culture: fruits in early modern Ireland. In: Valamoti, Soultana Maria, Dimoula, Anastasia, Ntinou, Maria (Eds.), Cooking With Plants in Ancient Europe and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Archaeology of Plant Foods. Sidestone, Leiden, pp. 229–238. Nielsen, Nina H., Steen Henriksen, Peter, Fischer Mortensen, Morten, et al., 2021. The last meal of Tollund Man: new analyses of his gut content. Antiquity 95, 1195–1212. Pearsall, Deborah M., 2015. Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures, third ed. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek. Peña-Chocarro, Leonor, Zapata Peña, Lydia, 1999. History and traditional cultivation of Lathyrus sativus L. and Lathyrus citera L. in the Iberian peninsula. Veg. Hist. Archaeobot. 8, 49–52. Piperno, Dolores R., 2006. Phytoliths: A Comprehensive Guide for Archaeologists and Paleoecologists. Altamira, New York. Power, Robert C., Salazar-García, Domingo C., Rubini, Mauro, et al., 2018. Dental calculus indicates widespread plant use within the stable Neanderthal dietary niche. J. Hum. Evol. 119, 27–41. Reed, Kelly, Ryan, Philippa, 2019. Lessons from the past and the future of food. World Archaeol. 51 (1), 1–16. Ruas, Marie-Pierre, Tengberg, Margareta, Ettahiri, Ahmed S., Fili, Abdallah, van Staëvel, Jean-Pierre, 2011. Archaeobotanical research at the medieval fortified site of Îgîlîz (AntiAtlas, Morocco) with particular reference to the exploitation of the argan tree. Veg. Hist. Archaeobot. 20, 419–433. Samuel, Delwyn, 1999. Bread making and social interactions at the Amarna Workmen’s village, Egypt. World Archaeol. 31 (1), 121–144. Twiss, Katheryn C., 2019. The Archaeology of Food: Identity, Politics, and Ideology in the Prehistoric and Historic Past. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Valamoti, Soultana Maria, Moniaki, Aikaterini, Karathanou, Anegliki, 2011. An investigation of processing and consumption of pulses among prehistoric societies: archaeobotanical, experimental and ethnographic evidence from Greece. Veg. Hist. Archaeobot. 20 (5), 381–396. Valamoti, Soultana Maria, Marinova, Elena, Heiss, Andreas G., et al., 2019. Prehistoric cereal foods of southeastern Europe: an archaeobotanical exploration. J. Archaeol. Sci. 104, 97–113. van der Veen, Marijke, 2003. When is food a luxury? World Archaeol. 34 (3), 405–427. van Zeist, Willem, Wasylikowa, Krystyna, Behre, Karl-Ernst (Eds.), 1991. Progress in Old World Palaeoethnobotany. Balkema, Rotterdam. Walshaw, Sarah C., 2015. Swahili Trade, Urbanization, and Food Production: Botanical Perspectives From Pemba Island, Tanzania. Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 90. British Archaeological Reports Series 2755. ArchaeoPress, Oxford. Wollstonecroft, Michèle, 2011. Investigating the role of food processing in human evolution: a niche construction approach. J. Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 3, 141–150. Zech-Matterne, Véronique, Fiorentino, Girolamo (Eds.), 2017. AGRUMED: Archaeology and History of Citrus Fruit in the Mediterranean: Acclimatization, Diversifications, Uses. Publications du Centre Jean Bérard, Naples.
Further Reading Aranda Jiménez, Gonzalo, Montón-Subías, Sandra, Romero, Sánchez, Margarita (Eds.), 2012. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Feasting Rituals in the Prehistoric Societies of Europe and the Near East. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Asouti, Eleni, Fuller, Dorian Q., 2013. A contextual approach to the emergence of agriculture in Southwest Asia: reconstructing early Neolithic plant-food production. Curr. Anthropol. 54 (3), 299–345. Bogaard, Amy, 2004. Neolithic Farming in Central Europe: An Archaeobotanical Study of Crop Husbandry Practices. Routledge, London. Dennell, Robin W., 1979. Prehistoric diet and nutrition: some food for thought. World Archaeol. 11, 121–135. Jones, Martin, 2007. Feast. Why Humans Share Food. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lodwick, Lisa, 2014. Condiments before Claudius: new plant foods at the late Iron Age oppidum at Silchester, UK. Veg. Hist. Archaeobot. 23, 543–549. Metheny, Karen B., Beaudry, Mary C. (Eds.), 2015. The Archaeology of Food: An Encyclopedia. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham. Milner, Nicki, Miracle, Preston T. (Eds.), 2002. Consuming Passions and Patterns of Consumption. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge. Orengo, Hector A., Livarda, Alexandra, 2016. The seeds of commerce: a network analysis-based approach to the Romano-British transport system. J. Archaeol. Sci. 66, 21–35. Spengler, Robert N., 2019. Fruit From the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat. University of California Press, Oakland. Stika, Hans-Peter, 2011. Early Iron Age and Late Mediaeval malt finds from Germany: attempts at reconstruction of early Celtic brewing and the taste of Celtic beer. Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 3 (1), 41–48. Valamoti, Soultana Maria, Petridou, Chryssa, Berihuete-Azorín, Marian, 2021. Deciphering ancient “recipes” from charred cereal fragments: an integrated methodological approach using experimental, ethnographic and archaeological evidence. J. Archaeol. Sci. 128, 105347. Valamoti, Soultana Maria, Dimoula, Anastasia, Ntinou, Maria (Eds.), 2022. Cooking With Plants in Ancient Europe and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Archaeology of Plant Foods. Sidestone, Leiden. van der Veen, Marijke, 2011. Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains From the Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir Al-Qadim, Egypt. Africa Magna Verlag, Frankfurt.
Archaeology and the New Materialisms Louise Steel, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, United Kingdom © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview of the New Materialisms: Key Concepts Materiality and Matter Vibrant Matter Agency Relationality Assemblages/Agencement Agential Realism Key Issues: Archaeological Applications of New Materialisms Vital Materialisms Assemblages Agential Realism Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Key Points
• • • • • • •
Exploration of materiality and the matter of the world Posthuman challenges to representationalism and dualistic ontologies of separation between human-nonhuman Vital matter, capacities and affect Agency, intentionality, causality Relationality: exploring how the material world is in relationship through Deleuzian assemblages Agential realism: questioning the ontological status of the thing as bounded entity and examining intra-actions Porosity and blurred boundaries
Abstract The New Materialisms are part of a wider turn to matter in the humanities and social sciences. This theoretical approach draws attention to matter, exploring the materiality of the world and specifically challenging anthropocentric approaches that prioritize humans over other nonhuman beings and entities. New materialists question dualistic ontologies that separate humans and nonhumans and problematize representationalism as another means of distancing humans from the rest of the material world. Key to the New Materialisms is the understanding that matter is not inert and passive, but has agency, distinct from humanist notions of rationality and intentionality. The relationality of the material world, examining how the materials of the world are in relationship, is a key concept in the New Materialisms, although new materialists diverge in how they approach this. Assemblages explore how (im)material entities are continual in flux as they move into and out of relationship, while agential realism argues that the world is not made up of separate bounded entities. Instead, things-in-phenomena emerge from intra-actions and the agency of matter.
Introduction We are not outside observers of the world . rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity Barad (2003, 828).
The New Materialisms is a relational ontology, which is gaining traction within the wider social sciences and humanities (Coole and Frost, 2010; Fox and Alldred, 2019; Attala and Steel, 2019). This approach is essentially a turn to matter, inspired by Posthumanist ideas (Braidotti, 2013) that question the privileged position humans have assumed for themselves within Enlightenment-inspired ontologies. While these anthropocentric ideas serve to separate and distance people from the rest of the
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physical world, the New Materialisms recognize the innate materiality of the world and challenge the human exceptionalism that assumes matter is simply inert and passive, waiting to be manipulated, shaped and controlled through human actions. As such, the New Materialisms recognize the agency of a multiplicity of human and non-human actors/actants, all of which are equally involved in the co-creation of the material world. The scholarship underpinning the New Materialisms is multi-disciplinarydinformed by philosophy, quantum physics, political science, anthropology, feminist theorydand draws upon the ideas of scholars such as Barad (2003, 2007), DeLanda (2006, 2016), Bennett (2010), Coole and Frost (2010), Drazin and Küchler (2015). Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) exploration of becoming, nomadology and assemblages in particular, has been especially influential on the development of new materialist philosophies.
Overview of the New Materialisms: Key Concepts Three core theoretical concepts underpinning the New Materialisms are matter, agency and relationality, the latter of which has been explored as assemblages (or agencement) and agential realism. These concepts are informed by Posthumanist ideas challenging the notion of the human “at the ontological center or hierarchical apex” (Bennett, 2010, 11) and a rejection of the binaries separating nature and culture. Rather than an inert, passive material world waiting to be worked upon and assigned meaning by people, the New Materialisms draw attention to how we are part of the matter of the world in its continual physical becoming. This approach actively embeds humans within the matter of the world and highlights how human agency is constituted by the matter with which it interacts.
Materiality and Matter The New Materialisms draw attention to the matter of the world and “its brute ‘thereness’” (Coole and Frost, 2010, 7). The focus is on the capacities and physical properties of matter (Drazin and Küchler, 2015), its vibrancy and vitality (Bennett, 2010), indeed its very materiality (c.f. Ingold, 2013, 27). The underlying theoretical standpoint emphasizes how rather than being passive and inert, something to be made meaningful by human action, matter is creatively in relationship, working to co-produce the material world. It is the flow of material agency, described by Barad (2003, 817) as “an ongoing open process of mattering,” that makes the worlding world (Latour, 2017, 35). This materially embedded, Posthumanist understanding of the world effectively moves attention away from humans, displacing them from the center of enquiry (Bennett, 2010, 11; Fox and Alldred, 2019), instead focusing on the affective capacities of the non-human. The New Materialisms have emerged from the feminist third wave (Braidotti, 2013; Fox and Alldred, 2019) as a neo-materialist movement that extends materialism to the body, dealing with the politics of gender and embodiment and challenging patriarchal systems of knowledge production. More recent new materialist thought has shifted the focus to how the body itself is situated within a wider world of substances. This New Materialities approach (Attala, 2019; Attala and Steel, 2019; see also Govier and Steel, 2021) draws attention to the very materiality (capacities and affect) of the myriad substances of the body and how the body itself works with, and is provoked, enabled and constrained by, the agency of other substances to co-generate the material world. Emphasizing materiality recognizes that humans are not simply entangled within the matter of the world; rather, people are not only composed of, but equally are part of the substantive matter of the world. As such, the New Materialities firmly situate humans as part of the many co-constituted matterings of the world. The new materialist focus on matter and matterings rejects the anthropocentric tendency to represent the world (Barad, 2003, 2007; Coole and Frost, 2010, 2; Fox and Alldred, 2019, 1), questioning why language and culture are perceived to be more reliable than the matter of the world (Barad, 2003, 801). Instead, the New Materialisms emphasize how these discursive practices effectively serve to distance humans from the physical world, as is clear in the tripartite nature of knowledge production inherent in representationalism: the knowledge (representation) separates the thinking subject (who represents) from the known reality (what is represented) (Barad, 2007, 46–7). Following Haraway (1992), Barad (2003, 803; 2007, 71–94) proposes a diffractive methodology, which focuses on the intra-actions that occur within research, rather than reflecting upon the world as something that pre-exists and is separate from our enquiry. Such an approach, she argues, elucidates how the boundaries between what appear to be separate entities are in fact blurred and indefinite: there is not a sharp distinction between things in static relationship to each other, but rather an ongoing doing and becoming. Representation and reflexivity both serve to create an ontological gap between how humans know (or represent) the world and the physical world, whereas the New Materialisms blur boundaries, demonstrating the inherent permeability and entanglement of the matter of the world (Attala and Steel, 2019; Averett, 2021).
Vibrant Matter Jane Bennett (2010) draws attention to the vitality of matter. This approach attends to the agency of nonhuman things and substances and their capacity to act and produce effects, and is influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) material vitalism. Core concepts of vibrant matter are assemblages (discussed below) and thing-power, the latter of which Bennett defines as the vitality of nonhuman actants producing affects upon the world, beyond how they might be socialized and given meaning by humans. Bennett equates agency with materiality and notes how this agency flows around and through human bodies. While this might appear to perpetuate dualistic ontologies, in fact Bennett shifts the emphasis on the human away from rationality to
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an understanding that human-power (agency) derives from the very materiality of the human body. It is an assemblage (see below) of diverse interacting vital materials (2010, 10–13). Indeed, for Bennett, the “structured materiality of all things” bridges the ontological gap between people and the matter of the world. Humans are both in and of the world (Bennett, 2010, 114; Coole and Frost, 2010, 7, 18–20), an understanding which underpins the distinct approach of the New Materialities discussed above (Attala, 2019; Attala and Steel, 2019), which explores human bodies as a set of interacting materials in relationship with each other. Thing-power also allows us to explore social worlds and culture as being more than purely human constructs, but instead coming into existence through the affect and capacity of nonhuman forces.
Agency Key to the New Materialisms is the concept that nonhuman matter has agency, namely the capacity to affect. Agency is viewed as being the preserve of rational thinking humans in western Enlightenment-inspired ontologies, typically being equated with intentionality (Gell, 1998, 16–17; Bennett, 2010, 29–30; Coole and Frost, 2010, 7). For the new materialist, agency is not aligned with the thinking, rational human but is a characteristic of the matter of the world and how it materializes or comes to matter (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Coole and Frost, 2010). Nonetheless, Coole (2013) highlights possible pitfalls inherent in equating human intentional agency with the agency of nonhuman matter, as this potentially allows humans to dissociate themselves from responsibility for their destructive actions in the Anthropocene. Recognizing agential capacities of matter allows us to explore and engage with its vital forces, while still taking responsibility for human actions in our co-production of the material world. Agential realism (see below) offers a different perspective on material agency, which not only moves the concept away from a traditional humanist focus, as an attribute of human intentionality, but also requires that we rethink the causal relationship between things. For Barad (2007, 175, 214), agency is not the attribute of a (human or nonhuman) subject with affective capacities acting upon and affecting another separate entity, but rather it is an enactment which only exists in-phenomena. Different possibilities and effects (phenomena) are either enabled or constrained and excluded by different intra-actions. Causality within such an agential realist approach therefore, does not comprise the one-way movement of cause and effect between the things, matter and substances but instead emerges from intra-actions. Agency emerges from the very materialization or mattering of the world (see Govier, 2019b; Govier and Steel, 2021, 301–02).
Relationality Key to the New Materialisms is the understanding that the material world is not fixed and stable, composed of discrete bounded entities; rather it is fluid, permeable and in a constant state of becoming. As such, the New Materialisms emphasize how the matter and entities of the world are in relationship. This relationality has been articulated through two key concepts: assemblages (DeLanda, 2006, 2016; Bennett, 2010) and agential realism (Barad, 2003, 2007). These understandings of relationality are embedded in the matter of the world and do not privilege the position of the human in the relationships. Other relational ontologies that are sometimes included within new materialist thought include Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005; Witmore, 2014, 208–10; Fox and Alldred, 2019), entanglement (Hodder, 2012) and symmetrical archaeology (Witmore, 2019), all of which explore connectivity between human actors and nonhuman actants. ANT, developed by Latour (2005), extends social networks beyond human actors to also include non-human actants, which are envisaged as nodes that interact within a string of connections to form a network. Hodder’s entanglement (Hodder, 2012, 95) argues that people and things are intertwined, interconnected and bound together in meshworks (see Ingold, 2010), acting upon each other. Symmetrical archaeology (Olsen and Witmore, 2015; Witmore, 2019) likewise places people and thingsddefined as “every being in the world . individual and differentiated entities or units that cannot be broken into their parts” (Olsen and Witmore, 2015, 191, original emphasis)d on an equal ontological foundation and draws attention to the agency of nonhuman things in social and material worlds. These approaches are all framed within a flat ontology, in which humans and the nonhuman material world have equal agency but are distinct from each other, thus perpetuating the separation of human and nonhuman. Moreover, they focus on people and things as separate bounded entities, whereas the core aspect of the New Materialisms is the matter of the world (Coole and Frost, 2010; Fox and Alldred, 2019; Govier and Steel, 2021). Assemblages and agential realism however, more firmly situate humans as an integral part of the inter-relating matters of the worlding world.
Assemblages/Agencement The assemblage, as a means of making sense of the unpredictable relationality of the material world, derives from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1980). They draw upon the multiplicities of rhizomes, continually in a process of flux, flow and becoming: growing, multiplying, breaking apart, reconnecting. Likewise, an assemblage is an ongoing process of becoming; the coming together, connections and interactions of a heterogeneous group of entities (Delanda, 2006, 2016; Bennett, 2010). This becoming is non-hierarchical, with no ontological primacy attached to any of the constituents of the assemblage. An assemblage is multiscalar, from the microscopic through potentially to the hyperobject (Morton, 2013); moreover, both physically tangible entities and the immaterial might cohere to co-produce an assemblage. Delanda (2016), for example draws attention to social structures while Bennett examines the force of things in the seemingly mundane assemblage of rubbish (2010, 4–6). There is inevitably continual flux and flow in an assemblage, which is always open-ended (Bennett, 2010, 24) and in a constant state of becoming (Harris, 2014a, 90). All constituents of an assemblage have agential capacities, but equally these come together to co-create the
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agency of the assemblage. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, an assemblage actively links this multiplicity of interacting entities by establishing relations between them (Delanda, 2016, 2) in a recursive and ongoing process of becoming. There are certain problems inherent in the discussion of assemblages, which relate to the translation of the word from the original French term agencement (Delanda, 2016, 1; Hamilakis and Jones, 2017, 80; Govier and Steel, 2021, 306–08). Agencement literally means the process of arranging, ordering and organizing and as such neatly encapsulates the open-endedness, relationality and material flows of the concept. Given the very distinct nuances separating the terms of assemblage and agencement in French, some scholars have chosen instead to return to the original French term agencement (Phillips, 2006; Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Anderson et al., 2012; Abbots, 2017; Govier and Steel, 2021). Such a distinction potentially has especial resonance for archaeologists, for whom assemblage already has a very specific meaning (Govier and Steel, 2021, 306), as it could help avoid the inevitable confusion implicit in the elision of two very different ontological concepts under one term.
Agential Realism Like assemblages, Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism (2003, 2007) is a relational ontology. This approach has developed from a cohesion of quantum entanglement and feminist theoretical perspectives, in particular performativity. The core concepts of agential realism are phenomena, intra-action, agency and entanglement. Agential realism questions the conceptual validity of the thing (Govier and Steel, 2021, 304, 308). Barad argues that things are not ontologically prior but only come into existence through the agency of matter; rather than a world made up of fixed, bounded entities (things-in-) phenomena come into being through intraaction. While the theoretical approaches outlined above describe the interaction between various (non)human actants, Barad’s approach highlights intra-action: that things only exist if already in relationship. Agential realism emphasizes the ongoing materialization and becoming of the material, worlding world and also highlights relationality. Rather than the relationship of fixed, static things/entities, as perhaps described in assemblage theory (see above), phenomena only exist in relationship. A key influence on Barad’s development of agential realism (2003, 813–15; 2007, 97–131) was Niels Bohr’s work on light and in particular how when this is measured differently, it appears to the observer to be either a wave or a particle. Specifically, this draws attention to how the choices made by a researcher in how to measure or record the material world affects their observation and understanding. For the agential realist, there is not a fixed, stable reality waiting to be measured and researched, independent of the researcher; rather, the researcher is entangled within their research by the choices they make, namely what questions to ask, what data to measure, collect and record, what theoretical apparatus to use to interpret this data and how to present the data and their findings. Research is relata-in-phenomena: the researcher is thoroughly entangled and in relationship with the research and what is researched emerges in-phenomena with the researcher (Juelskjaer et al., 2021, 14–15). This results in what Barad (2014) describes as the agential cut: choices made by the researcher will co-produce different research phenomena. Research, therefore, is part of the ongoing materialization of the world.
Key Issues: Archaeological Applications of New Materialisms Archaeologists are increasingly engaging with the New Materialisms. Given the inevitable materiality that archaeologists engage with, there has been significant discussion of the affordances and capacities of materials and as such their impact on past technologies (Conneller, 2011; Malafouris, 2013). The relationality of the archaeological record has likewise been explored through a new materialist lens. The concept of assemblage, in particular has been eagerly adopted as a means of exploring archaeological assemblages (Harris, 2014a,b, 2017; Witmore, 2014; Hamilakis and Jones, 2017). Archaeologists have also engaged with agential realism both as a relational ontology (Marshall and Alberti, 2014; Fowler and Harris, 2015; Jones, 2015; Govier and Steel, 2021) and also for exploring causality and agency (Govier, 2019b).
Vital Materialisms The core focus of the New Materialisms allows us to consider how the matter of the world both provokes and constrains our own interactions with matter and also demonstrates the porosity of boundaries between human and nonhuman. Conneller (2011) has developed an archaeology of materials, exploring how the different ways in which people worked with and responded to the capacities of different substances articulated different social and material worlds. She examines the interrelationship of material and form in various Upper Palaeolithic artifact types, including stone and mammoth ivory beads, as well as portable and parietal cave art, to illuminate not only the different capacities of materials but also how people know and work with them. Malafouris challenges the separation of mind, body and object in material interactions involved in the throwing of pottery, showing how potters think through and with matter (2013, 236). Rather than inert matter waiting for the potter to impose his will and shape into an object envisaged in the mind, Malafouris draws attention to how the potter works with clay (and the wheel), responding to their physical properties and capacities. The clay enables and provokes the potter as much as the potter shapes the clay. Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory blurs the boundaries between human-nonhuman: the potter’s hands, the wheel and the clay are blurred, permeable and fluid. In a similar vein, Steel (2020) has focused on the blurring of boundaries involved in pottery production, looking at the vital materialism of the clay used in the production of the distinctive Base Ring pottery from Late Bronze Age Cyprus. She demonstrates how potters worked with the vibrant matter of a very plastic, fine-grained clay, which responded to being shaped by hand but not using the wheel, collaborating with this substance to produce a distinctive material
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world. Govier (2019b, 53) shifts the coming together of potter, potter’s wheel, clay and pot, viewing this through the lens of agential realism as material in-phenomena. She likewise recognizes how the material properties of the clay, with its own distinct capacities, inform the making event.
Assemblages Archaeological applications of assemblage theory have largely focused on the physical groupings of archaeological materials, such as the Early Bronze Age burial remains from the Isle of Man (Crellin, 2017). Cifarelli (2018) for example, examines beaded dress ornaments made from various materials (including carnelian, shell, vitreous substances and copper) as well as copper armor scales buried with a small group of women in Early Iron Age Hasanlu, Iran. Her detailed analysis of the biography of the different components of personal adornment demonstrates how these objects were entangled in a variety of relationships (assemblages) over generations, moving into and out of circulation in a continual cycle of “creation, fragmentation and recreation” (Cifarelli, 2018, 53) before finally coming into relationship with the women’s bodies in a new sensorial assemblage. The material engagements in a colonial context between the native Joara community and the Spanish garrison of Fort San Juan in 16th century North Carolina are the focus of a recent article by Beck (2020). This examines how the coming together of different material culture traditions might transform social structures, presenting the intersections of materials and rules as a messy network of matter and social practices. However, Beck separates the making of the objects from the final assemblage, noting how the materials are physically transformed into objects that might afterward become incorporated within an assemblage (2020, 628), rather than viewing the maker and raw material equally as part of the assemblage. Govier’s (2019a, 20–2) discussion of how human bodies become-with other matter, looking at the carbon deposits on the ribs of skeletons from Çatalhöyük identified as the result of smoke inhalation, provides a more nuanced understanding of the relationality and flux of an assemblage; equally, this is embedded in a vital materialist approach to the flow of agency around and through human bodies (Bennett, 2010; Attala and Steel, 2019). Recently Steel (2021) and Averett (2021) have explored the blurring of boundaries in human-animal relations in BronzeIron Age Cyprus. Steel discusses the wearing of animal skins and masks, as depicted on the ceremonial vessels from Bellapais-Vounous, alongside the ingestion of meat from the same animal species, as human and animal becoming consubstantial within theatrically charged performances. Averett focuses on the ways in which animal body parts were incorporated within cult practices in ritual spaces, most notably how the wearing of bucrania as masks by practitioners of cult enacted a material assemblage that enabled a becoming-with human-animal. Lucas (2012) elides the traditional archaeological assemblagedthe depositional and typological groupings of findsdwith the Deleuzian open-ended assemblage, examining various material flows into and out of relationship that are implicit in archaeological practice. The archaeological record itself is presented as a new materialist assemblage, composed of both tangible and intangible entities; there is an ongoing flux and flow of relationships through the processes of excavation, recording, analysis and publication through which the archaeological record becomes-with the archaeologist. Edgeworth (2012) also explores the relationality between humans and the archaeological record in excavation. He highlights the direct encounter between archaeologist and material during the process of excavation, as the archaeologist follows stratigraphic layers and the cuts and fills of features.
Agential Realism There have been fewer archaeological applications of agential realist ideas, perhaps reflecting the innate uneasiness of a discipline which excavates and typologizes things as discrete entities with an approach that questions the ontological priority of the thing (see for example Fowler and Harris, 2015, 4). Nonetheless, this approach has allowed archaeologists to engage with their own role in creating archaeological narratives, noting that different understandings of the past result from the configuration of relationships and intra-actions in the present, which include the role of the researcher. Jones (2015) for example, highlights the agential cut inherent in research and draws attention to the malleability of the past; this is not a reality waiting to be discovered and described by the archaeologist but instead is in-phenomena with the archaeologist. Jones discusses his research of Scottish rock-art in Argyll as intra-actions between rock, rock carver, rock carvings and archaeologist, which he describes as a “dialogue with another entity: rock” (Jones, 2015, 330). He concludes that the archaeological record is a phenomenon intra-acting with the rock and the archaeologists who are measuring and recording the art, rather than a discursive representation shaped in the present. Drawing upon Barad’s observation that the nature of the measurement and apparatus shapes the outcome (or agential cut) of research, Marshall and Alberti (2014) challenge the discursive representations of the world implicit in archaeological narratives. They demonstrate for example, how agential realism might inform the ways in which archaeologists engage with the biological sex or gender of an archaeological body, commenting that gender is a phenomenon that emerges from material-discursive practices of performative intraaction (2014, 28). They also examine Maori chevron amulets from an agential realist perspective, noting that these can be both ephemeral Taonga (ancestral power) and material artifact; they remain open and unbounded because they come into being through intra-action (2014, 30–2). Fowler and Harris’ diffractive reading of West Kennet long barrow (2015) draws upon the light as particle-wave paradox (see above, Barad, 2003, 2007). They draw attention to the multiple overlapping and shifting (non)human entanglements and relationships which have coalesced to shape the monument over time. Rather than interaction between fixed entities, Jones explores the production of ancient art as an intra-action, emphasizing the fluidity of people and materials, which are in correspondence with each other (cf. Ingold, 2013, 111). “The artist or maker follows the forces and flow of the material; they attentively work with it” (2018, 24) and the blurred boundaries between substances co-create art objects.
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Moreover, Jones argues that the effects of an artwork are multiple and ongoing, a continual becoming, produced by “the intra-action of people and things” (Jones, 2018, 27). Arguably, however, this approach perpetuates the separation of human-nonhuman agencies and has more in common with symmetrical archaeology (Witmore, 2019) than Barad’s agential realism. Govier and Steel (2021, 309–11) have framed the ongoing taphonomic processes of the archaeological record as a phenomenon that emerges from multiple intra-actions which archaeologists have traditionally divided into cultural and natural transformations. As such, this approach closes the gap between human and non-human; these are equally engaged in co-producing the archaeological record, which only exists in relationship.
Summary and Future Directions The New Materialisms are potentially of great significance for the development of a theoretically embedded archaeological practice. The very focus on the materiality of the world is resonant to archaeologists who examine the material residues of past human societies. Moreover, the New Materialisms challenge the separation of the social sciences and humanities, where so much archaeological theoretical and interpretative research is situated, from the natural sciences (Juelskjaer et al., 2021, 2) that inform much of the analyses of the empirical data. As such, the New Materialisms potentially provide fertile common ground between science-based archaeologies focusing on environmental and material analyses and theoretically embedded interpretative social archaeologies (Harris, 2014b; Govier and Steel, 2021). For example, a new materialist approach should close the intellectual gap between the study of human and nonhuman components of the archaeological record (see for example Conneller, 2011; Averett, 2021; Govier and Steel, 2021). Furthermore, assemblages (or agencement, see above) enable a multi-scalar examination of the archaeological record, from microscopic environmental data, to artifact analysis at all levels (from the material sciences through to the social life of the individual artifact), through to the geographical scale of landscape archaeologies; moreover, it encourages interpretations that take into consideration how these multiple entities variously interacted with, and were shaped by, the intangible, ephemeral and immaterial (Steel, 2018). The ongoing materialization of the world that is embedded in new materialist thought has important implications for our understanding of the taphonomic processes by which the archaeological record was created. Traditionally, the archaeological record has been viewed as a static snapshot of past human activity (Binford, 1983, 19–20, 23–4). The New Materialisms however, allow for a more dynamic reading. How the archaeological record came into being might be fruitfully explored through the relational lens of an assemblage (or perhaps better as an agencement (see above), or otherwise as an agential realist phenomenon or intra-action (Govier and Steel, 2021, 309–11). Likewise, excavation and post-excavational analyses might equally be framed within these relational ontologies (Edgeworth, 2012; Lucas, 2012). Harris, for example, has explored the matter flows on a single pot, from its production through to its excavation, as an assemblage, and highlights how the excavator also becomes part of the assemblage (Harris, 2014b, 331–4). Similarly, Joyce and Gillespie (2015) draw attention to the matter flows implicit in the itinerary of an archaeological artifact as it moves from archaeological context to excavation/discovery to museum piece: such objects are continually being framed in new relationships, including museum basements and displays, archaeological and popular texts and their possible online presence. The multivocality of the origins of the New Materialisms, informed by Posthumanist and feminist ideas in particular, bring to the fore the ethics of research practices and knowledge production. This approach challenges notions of scientific objectivity and instead encourages the archaeological researcher to be explicit about how their own research (research question, theoretical perspectives and practical methodologies) are culturally and personally situated (Haraway, 1988; Juelskjaer et al., 2021, 18). Moreover, an agential realist approach encourages archaeologists to recognize how they themselves are embedded within, indeed part of, the research process: the archaeologists and the archaeological knowledges that they produce are not separate from each other but are inextricably entwined. The questions asked, the data interrogated and the methodologies applied each enable specific understandings of the past. This research is inherently entangled with ethics, accountability and responsibility. In particular it draws attention to the messiness of research, which seldom follows a direct line from initial inception of a research question through to final publication, but which is frequently hidden away in a coherent presentation of methodology, data acquisition and analysis (Juelskjaer et al., 2021, 4–6, 15–18).
See Also: Marxist Archaeology.
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Beyond the “thingification” of worlds: archaeology and the new materialisms. J. Mater. Cult. 26 (3), 298–317. Hamilakis, Yiannis, Jones, Andrew, 2017. Archaeology and assemblage. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27 (1), 77–84. Haraway, Donna, 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privelege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3), 575–599. Haraway, Donna, 1992. The promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In: Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary, Treichler, Paula (Eds.), Cultural Studies. Routledge, New York and Abingdon, pp. 295–336. Harris, Oliver, 2014a. (Re-)assembling communities. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 21, 76–97. Harris, Oliver, 2014b. Revealing our vibrant past: science, materiality and the Neolithic. In: Whittle, Alistair, Bickle, Penny (Eds.), Early Farmers: The View From Archaeology and Science. Oxford University Press/British Academy, Oxford, pp. 327–345. Harris, Oliver, 2017. Assemblages and scale in archaeology. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27 (1), 127–139. Hodder, Ian, 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Ingold, Tim, 2010. Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials. Realities Working Paper 15. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, pp. 1–14. Ingold, Tim, 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, London and New York. Jones, Andrew, 2015. Meeting pasts halfway: a consideration of the ontology of material evidence in archaeology. In: Chapman, Robert, Wylie, Alison (Eds.), Material Evidence. Learning From Archaeological Practice. Routledge, London, pp. 328–338. Jones, Andrew, 2018. The archaeology of art: practice, interaction and affect. In: Jones, Andrew, Cochrane, Andrew (Eds.), The Archaeology of Art: Materials, Practices, Affects. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, pp. 19–30. Joyce, Rosemary, Gillespie, Susan, 2015. Making things out of objects that move. In: Joyce, Rosemary, Gillespie, Ssusan (Eds.), Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Perspective. SAR Press, Santa Fe, pp. 3–19. Juelskjaer, Malou, Plauborg, Helle, Adrian, Stine, 2021. Dialogues on Agential Realism: Engaging in Worlding Through Research Practice. Routledge, Abingdon and New York. Latour, Bruno, 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Latour, Bruno, 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press, Cambridge. Lucas, Gavin, 2012. Understanding the Archaeological Record. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Malafouris, Lambros, 2013. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. MIT Press, Cambridge. Marshall, Yvonne, Alberti, Benjamin, 2014. A matter of difference: Karen Barad, ontology and archaeological bodies. Camb. Archaeol. J. 24 (1), 19–36. Morton, Timothy, 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Olsen, Bjørnar, Witmore, Christopher, 2015. Archaeology, symmetry and the ontology of things. A response to critics. Archaeol. Dialogues 22, 187–191. Phillips, John, 2006. Agencement/assemblage. Theor. Cult. Soc. 23 (2–3), 108–109. Steel, Louise, 2018. Watery entanglements in the Cypriot hinterland. Land 7 (3), 104. Steel, Louise, 2020. Feats of clay: considering the materiality of late Bronze Age Cyprus. Sustainability 12. Steel, Louise, 2021. Inscribing bodies in Bronze Age Cyprus. In: Laneri, Nicola (Ed.), The Sacred Body: Materializing the Divine Through Human Remains in Antiquity. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 29–44. Witmore, Christopher, 2014. Archaeology and the new materialisms. J. Contemp. Archaeol. 1, 203–246. Witmore, Christopher, 2019. Symmetrical archaeology. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York.
Further Reading Averett, Erin Walcek, 2023. Beyond representation: Cypriot sanctuaries as vibrant assemblages. In: Watts, Christopher, Knappett, Carl (Eds.), Ancient Art Revisited: Global Perspectives From Archaeology and Art History. Routledge, London, pp. 170–198. Barad, Karen, 2010. Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today 3 (2), 240–268. Barrett, John, 2016. The new antiquarianism? Antiquity 90, 1681–1686. Boivin, Nicole, 2008. Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cipolla, Craig, 2018. Earth flows and lively stone. What differences does “vibrant” matter make? Archaeol. Dialogues 25 (1), 49–70. Conneller, Chantal, 2017. Commentary: materializing assemblages. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27 (1), 183–185. Coole, Diane, 2010. The inertia of matter and generativity of flesh. In: Coole, Diane, Frost, Ssamantha (Eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, Durham and London, pp. 92–115. Fowler, Chris, 2017. Relational typologies, assemblage theory and Early Bronze Age burials. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27 (1), 95–109.
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Hamilakis, Yiannis, 2017. Sensorial assemblages: affect, memory and temporality in assemblage thinking. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27 (1), 169–182. Haraway, Donna, 2008. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London. Harris, Oliver, Cipolla, Craig, 2017. Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium: Introducing Current Perspectives. Routledge, London and New York. Ingold, Tim, 2014. Is there life amidst the ruins? Response to Witmore’s archaeology and the new materialisms. J. Contemp. Archaeol. 1 (2), 231–235. Jones, Andrew, 2017. The art of assemblage: styling neolithic art. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27 (1), 85–94. Knapp, A. Bernard, 2018. The way things are. In: Knodell, Alex R., Leppard, Thomas P. (Eds.), Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity. Equinox, Sheffield, pp. 288–309. Knappett, Carl, Malafouris, Lambros (Eds.), 2008. Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Approach. Springer, New York. Lucas, Gavin, 2017. Variations on a theme: assemblage archaeology. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27 (1), 187–190. Nail, Thomas, 2017. What is an assemblage? Substance 46 (1), 21–37. Olsen, Bjørnar, 2010. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Altamira Press, London. Ribeiro, Artur, 2019. Against object agency 2. Continuing the discussion with Sørensen. Archaeol. Dialogues 26 (1), 39–44. Webmoor, Timothy, Witmore, Christopher, 2008. Things are us! Commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a “social” archaeology. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 41 (1), 53–70. Witmore, Christopher, 2007. Symmetrical archaeology: excerpts of a manifesto. World Archaeol. 39 (4), 549–562.
Behavioral Archaeology Michael J. O’Briena and Michael Brian Schifferb, a Department of Communication, History, and Philosophy, Department of Life Sciences, Texas A&M University, San Antonio, TX, United States; and b Independent Scientist, Alexandria, VA, United States © 2024 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction The Structure of This Entry Overview: The Birth of Behavioral Archaeology The Four Strategies Behavioral Archaeology Matures Formation Processes Key Issues: Similarities to Evolutionary Archaeology Culture vs. Cultural Transmission of Information Performance Characteristics Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Behavioral archaeology is the study of material objects regardless of time or space in order to describe and explain human behavior. Defining archaeology as the study of the relationships between human behavior and material culture establishes a foundation for building a new behavioral science that emphasizes the many roles that artifacts play in human societies. Human behaviors organize and create order in phenomena, while nature and other human behaviors subsequently disorganize and often destroy the original order. Without understanding and explaining the depositional history of an archaeological record, including natural and cultural processes, inference and explanation would be impossible. Behavioral archaeology has a fundamental nomothetic (laws or generalizations) component, and thus its adherents seek to formulate laws in ethnoarchaeological, experimental, and archaeological research contexts. Despite some ontological differences, behavioral archaeology and evolutionary archaeology have much in common. Key to understanding variation processes and behavior is the performance characteristics of tools, with performance characteristic defined as the activity-specific behavioral capability of an interactor, whether an object or a person.
Abstract Behavioral archaeology is the study of material objects regardless of time or space in order to describe and explain human behavior. It was founded at the University of Arizona in the early 1970s, but its roots go back a decade to what came to be known as processual archaeology. Defining archaeology as the study of the relationships between human behavior and material culture not only furnishes an integrative focus for the discipline but establishes a foundation for building a new behavioral science, one emphasizing the many roles that artifacts play in human societies, including those of the modern era.
Introduction Behavioral archaeology is the study of material objects regardless of time or space in order to describe and explain human behavior (Reid et al., 1974, 1975). It was founded at the University of Arizona in the early seventies, but its roots go back a decade to the University of Chicago and Lewis Binford (Fig. 1), who was dissatisfied with traditional, or what he called normative, archaeology, with its explicit definition of culture as a set of shared ideas, or norms (Binford, 1965). Binford argued that the normative theory of culture was inadequate for producing useful explanatory hypotheses of cultural processes, and as a substitute he offered an approach in which culture is not reduced to norms but rather is viewed as the system of the total “extrasomatic means of adaptation” (Binford, 1962:217)da term coined by Leslie White (1959), Binford’s mentor at the University of Michigan.
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Lewis R. Binford at home in Kirksville, Missouri, ca. 2000.
Archaeologists trained in the 1960s or early 1970s will remember that time as a period of intense interest in making archaeology more than what some saw as a descriptive and chronological exercise. This was, in some respects, an unfair characterization of that broad span of Americanist archaeology commonly referred to as the culture-historical period (Lyman et al., 1997), but it had some validity as well. The so-called new, or processual, archaeology that arose in the early 1960s at the hands of Binford and his studentsdfirst at Chicago and then at UCLAdwas first and foremost aimed at proving that archaeology could get at the “Indian behind the artifact,” as Robert Braidwood (1959:79) put it. It is easy to appreciate the excitement that the early behavioralists felt as they thought about the future of their disciplinedone built around science and the scientific method (O’Brien et al., 2005). As Schiffer (1995:3) put it years later, “by dismissing much of archaeology as traditionally practiced, Binford was wiping the slate clean, saying in effect that a young person entering archaeology” had an opportunity to write something significant on that slate. Although it had a few earlier roots, the systematic study of the processes that produce the archaeological record grew directly out of processual archaeology. This should not be surprising, given both an increased awareness of the various processes brought about through ethnoarchaeologydthe study of behaviors in living communities (Fig. 2)dand an increased interest in relationships between human behavior and artifacts. This interest was fostered by several of Binford’s early statements, one of the more significant being that “the loss, breakage, and abandonment of implements and facilities at different locations, where groups of variable structure performed different tasks, leaves a ‘fossil’ record of the actual operation of an extinct society” (Binford, 1964:425). As we will see, the term “fossil” would lead to major disagreement between the processualists and behavioralists. In his first major publication, “Archaeology as Anthropology” (Binford, 1962), Binford noted that the formal structure of artifact assemblages, together with the contextual relationships among the artifacts, present a systematic and understandable picture of the total extinct cultural system. In his chapter in Man the Hunter
Fig. 2 Lewis R. Binford (right) and a Nunamiut informant during an ethnoarchaeological research trip to north-central Alaska, ca. 1970. Binford made numerous trips to Anaktuvuk Pass between 1969 and 1973 to understand how the Nunamiut structured their behavior in living and working spaces as they hunted caribou.
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(Lee and DeVore, 1968), which was based on work he and his then-wife Sally Binford had done on Mousterian stone-tool assemblages from France (Binford and Binford, 1966), Binford (1968a) assumed that the size, composition, and spatial structure of an artifact assemblage are determined by both the size and composition of the social unit responsible for the assemblage and the form of differential task performance carried out by individuals (singly or jointly) in the social unit that left the assemblage. If these and similar assumptions were in fact correct, then the archaeological record indeed was a remarkably clean, crisp, and direct reflection of past human behavior. In particular, the relationship between human behaviors and artifactsdtheir forms, frequencies, spatial distributions, and associationsdwas direct and positive. In other words, the correlation coefficient between the two was one. This assumption of a perfect correlationdtermed by behavioralists an “equivalence assumption” or “equivalence transformation” (e.g., Schiffer, 1976)dled to a consideration of two questions. First, how could the correlation be exploited to its fullest? Second, was the correlation really perfect? The way in which each of these questions was addressed rested in large part on Binford’s (1968b:23) statement that “the practical limitations on our knowledge of the past are not inherent in the nature of the archaeological record; the limitations lie in our methodological naiveté, in our lack of principles determining the relevance of archaeological remains to propositions regarding processes and events of the past.”
The Structure of This Entry We structured this entry as a dive into what we see as some of the pivotal pointsdcritical topicsdin the evolution of behavioral archaeology. These include (1) understanding formation processes and constructing archaeological inferencesddescriptive statements about past cultural behavior or organization, supported by relevant principles and evidencedand (2) the relationship between behavioral archaeology and evolutionary archaeology. That relationship, which has been underreported, stems from how culture is defined and used analytically. The behavioralists and evolutionists view culture in terms of the transmission of information, whereas the processualists, as noted earlier, view culture as an extrasomatic means of adaptation. This ontological difference sent behavioral archaeology on a different trajectory from processualism almost from the start. Space precludes our covering the myriad products and important lines of inquiry that have stemmed from almost a half century of behavioral archaeology, but several excellent guides are listed in the bibliography, including a synopsis by Walker and Schiffer (2014) that was included in a previous edition of Springer’s Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. We saw no need to duplicate their coverage of more-modern achievements, all of which are rooted in the behavioral work that began in the early ’70s and became a leading archaeological movement in the United States.
Overview: The Birth of Behavioral Archaeology The term behavioral archaeology first appeared in a seminar paper that Michael Schiffer (Fig. 3) wrote in 1971, his second year in graduate school at the University of Arizona. During the spring semester of 1972, Schiffer and another graduate student, J. Jefferson Reid (Fig. 4), were teaching assistants for William Rathje (Fig. 3), helping him with two undergraduate courses. They were usually
Fig. 3 Michael B. Schiffer (middle of back row) and William Rathje (lower left, front row) at the 1975 Advanced Seminar in Ethnoarchaeology held at the School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Others are back row, left to right: Rhys Jones, Diane Gifford-Gonzales, Patrick Kirch, and Michael Stanislawski; front row, left to right: Ruth Tringham, Frank Hole, and Richard Gould. Courtesy School of American Research.
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J. Jefferson Reid (left) with William A. Longacre and Julie Lowell at Chodistaas Pueblo, Arizona, 1984. Courtesy Arizona State Museum.
perched in the back of the classroom, taking notes, and one day, Schiffer noticed Reid scribbling something presumably unrelated to the lecture (Schiffer, 1995). Soon, he showed Schiffer what he had been doing: developing a radically new definition of archaeology. Reid’s key insight was to recognize that all archaeologists have as their goal understanding the relationships between people and artifacts. There it was, as Schiffer recalls, elegantly laid out on the paper Reid had shoved in his face: “archaeology is the study of the relationships between human behavior and material culture in all times and all places.” Schiffer and Rathje immediately appreciated that Reid’s formulation had clearly captured something fundamental. Later that year, Reid and Schiffer used the framework as the first chapters of their dissertations, and a paper that formalized the idea of a behavioral archaeology appeared a few years later (Reid et al., 1975). To Reid and his colleagues, the irreducible core of archaeology was the study of material objects in order not only to describe human behavior but also to explain it. In the 1970s, this definition shifted the focus of explanation away from the adaptationist concerns of processualism and toward the explanation of behavioral variation at numerous scales. Importantly, behaviorally defined units of analysis and explanation could be designed to crosscut or even transcend temporal and spatial boundaries of cultural systems. Thus, behavioral archaeologists began to establish a science of human behavior that was grounded in nomothetic statementsdlaws or generalizations about people–object interactions under specified boundary conditions, ranging from highly specific to highly general.
The Four Strategies Relationships between human behavior and material objects can be approached from several directions, depending on the nature of the questions asked. To address that issue, Reid had sketched out on the paper he showed Schiffer in 1972 a simple two-by-two matrix that gave behavioral archaeology four interrelated strategies, which came to undergird behavioral programs for several decades. The four strategies appeared in the same paper that laid out the basic tenets of behavioral archaeology (Reid et al., 1975), although its roots lay in an article that appeared the year before (Reid et al., 1974). Reid and his colleagues pointed out that behavioral archaeology was not simply a substitute for other, traditional kinds of archaeology. Rather, they saw it as a means of integrating what archaeologists had always done but doing it in a coherent framework built around laws and strong inference (Schiffer and Reid, 2017). In their opinion, the diversification of archaeology into entities such as public archaeology, processual archaeology, and historical archaeology was expectable given the population explosion of archaeologists in the 1970s (O’Brien et al., 2005), but it made it difficult to identify commonalities that crosscut the different approaches. To Reid and colleagues, the thread that was common to all archaeology was this: Regardless of research interests or contexts, archaeology is a discipline comprising a body of methods and theories for describing and explaining human behaviors based on material culture. They then structured this commonality into four strategies based on the age (past or present) of the human behaviors and the age of the artifacts. As Reid (1995) later phrased it, strategy 1 is concerned with using material culture that was made in the past to answer specific questions about past human behavior. For example, one might ask about the size of the prehistoric populations that occupied Grasshopper Pueblo, located just below the Mogollon Rim in east-central Arizona, between AD 1275 and AD 1400. When was
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Cahokia, a large mound complex along the Mississippi River in western Illinois, occupied? What plant and animal resources were exploited by the inhabitants of Solutré, located in eastern France and the type site for the Solutrean period? Such specific questions, which are bound to particular time–space referents, form the basis of archaeology as it has traditionally been practiced. Research within strategy 2 pursues general questions in present material culture in order to acquire laws useful for the study of the past. For example, what are the traces of various techniques of manufacture on a given type of material? What is the relationship between the population of a community and its habitation area? What is the relationship between residential mobility and investment of time/energy in architecture? Why are whole, useable items discarded? These are general questions because they are not bound to specific time–space referents. The answers to those questions take the form of experimental laws. Experimental archaeology and ethnoarchaeology are variants of strategy 2. Strategy 3 is the pursuit of general questions in the study of past material remains to derive behavioral laws of wide applicability that illuminate past as well as present human behavior. The questions that typify this strategy, like those in strategy 2, are general and do not have specific time–space referents. Examples include: What are the determinants of variability in organizational complexity? What factors explain variability in storage capacity? How do cultural systems adapt to changes in population? Does the practice of irrigation agriculture lead to the formation of state-level societies? As in strategy 2, these questions are answered in terms of laws. Reid and his colleagues pointed out that because of years of research within the first three strategies, archaeologists possessed an ever-expanding body of theory, method, and behavioral laws for the study of material objects and human behavior regardless of time and space. As archaeologists in urban environments sought to test archaeological principles, they had turned to modern material culture as an untapped, renewable source of data. In exploring the relationships between archaeological principles and material culture, archaeologists had begun to discover that the discipline could make contributions to the understanding of present human behavior and began to open the door to strategy 4, which is the study of present material objects in ongoing cultural systems to describe and explain present human behavior. Its contribution to social science stems from the research possibilities of studying material culture in modern industrial and nonindustrial societies. The questions asked within strategy 4 are oftentimes specific to modern societies. For example, what patterns of meat and liquor consumption characterize different ethnic groups in Tucson, Arizona? Do members of higher socioeconomic groups in Houston, Texas, waste more nonrenewable resources than do lower socioeconomic groups? How many times is a television set in Tucson owned before it is discarded or sold/traded (Schiffer et al., 1981)? To Reid and his colleagues, the expansion of research into strategies 2–4 more accurately reflected the development of archaeology as a discipline and permitted the writing of a more meaningful processual history. The importance of this expansion was that it reflected the essential interrelatedness of all four strategies. The pursuit of strategy 1 had always required information gained through strategy 2, and the requirements did not have to be met exclusively by ethnologists. In like manner, strategy 3 was seen as embodying procedures that sought to contribute to anthropological theory and thereby to an understanding of contemporary behavior. Recognition of strategy 4 merely closed a logical set of research options to embrace the attainment of goals common to most archaeologists.
Behavioral Archaeology Matures The four strategies provided room in the discipline for various programs, especially ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology, both of which play important inferential roles in understanding human behavior, but by the mid- to late ’70s any room afforded processual archaeology was quickly disappearing. Although behavioral archaeology had its roots in the processual program developed by Binford and his students, behavioralists soon came to believe that an expanded archaeology (Reid et al., 1974)done focused on behavior and not on culturedwould overcome what they viewed as the many methodological and theoretical failings of early processualism. One of those purported failingsdperhaps the major onedresided in the allegedly nondiscriminatory way in which archaeologists viewed the formation processes that created, and modified, the archaeological record.
Formation Processes While a graduate student at Arizona, Schiffer began to explore in earnest the nature of, and influences on, how human behavior and artifacts are transformed into the archaeological record. Today, the study of these influences, or formation processes, occupies a good part of the archaeological literature, but this was not the case in the early 1970s. In one of the few early statements concerning formation processes, Ascher (1968) (Fig. 5) modeled an archaeological formational history consisting of three phases. The first phase is a time when both nature and people, often in combination, act as agents of disorganization. In other words, behaviors organize and create order in phenomena, and nature and other human behaviors subsequently disorganize and often destroy the original order. During the second phase, only natural agents disorganize materials that humans once arranged in patterns. The third phase begins when archaeologists alter the disorganization process, such as by stopping the corrosion of a metal artifact while at the same time removing it from its original depositional location. Ascher emphasized that an archaeologist needed to recognize the purposeful (human-constructed) arrangements of things found in the archaeological record, as opposed to those not arranged purposefully, which depends on distinguishing between the action of natural agents and that of human agents. He pointed out that although the path of disorganization that goes from stage one to stage two and then to phase three is irreversible, it must be figuratively reversed when inferring past human behavior. To underscore these points, Ascher mentioned the Greek town of Pompeii, which had been buried suddenly and catastrophically by
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Robert A. Ascher, ca. 2010.
volcanic ash that came from the AD 79 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Pompeii provided a unique disorganizational path because the catastrophic burial event instantly terminated phase one of its existence and sealed it off from agents of natural disorganization. In short, the disorganization and destruction of Pompeii was stopped at the transition between phases one and two. As we will see, Ascher’s remarks were not the last time that Pompeii would figure prominently in discussions of disorganization and destruction of the archaeological record and how those processes did or did not affect our explanations of past cultures. Systemic and Archaeological Context In an article published in American Antiquity in 1972 (Schiffer, 1972)dhis first scientific paperdSchiffer picked up where Ascher left off and distinguished between what he termed systemic context and archaeological context, the former referring to the past behavioral system in which an element participated and the latter referring to the geoarchaeological context of that element once it left the behavioral system. Although the term “artifact” is used casually in archaeology, technically, things such as stone axes, bone awls, and ceramic vessels were tools in their systemic context and artifacts in their archaeological context. If one is going to infer past behavior, it is essential to keep the systemic contextdwhat Binford (1977) termed “dynamics”dconceptually and operationally distinct from the archaeological contextdBinford’s “statics” (Schiffer, 1985b). Schiffer’s point was clear: The archaeological record consists of materialdfor example, stone tools, ceramic vessels, and animal bonesdand, depending on how a locale was used, perhaps evidence of structures and storage pits. The archaeological record also exhibits a structuredthe spatial distributions and associations of the items. Once the record is formeddmeaning things have left the behavioral systemdit can be affected, often dramatically, by natural processesdSchiffer and Rathje’s (1973) n-transformsdand by human activities as well. The latter are referred to as cultural formation processes, or, as Schiffer and Rathje termed them, c-transforms. It was becoming obvious to the behavioralists that without understanding and explaining the depositional history of an archaeological record, including natural and cultural processes, inference and explanation would be impossible. But another step was needed: the creation of correlates, which function to justify an inference by allowing the derivation or identification of some aspects of an operating cultural system from knowledge of those aspects, spatial and material, present in the archaeological record. Because data are silent and do not help the investigator understand the ways in which artifacts once participated in a behavioral system or how they reflect the organization of that system, a set of laws must be acquired and applied to the materials. These statements relate behavioral variables to variables of material objects or spatial relations. They also might involve organizational and environmental variables. Such statements have the important property of being operationally definable and therefore testable in an ongoing cultural system. Without principles of this sort, no archaeologist could possibly know anything about the operation of a cultural system, past or present. Once the distortions introduced by formation processes have been isolated and considered, correlates can be employed to infer specific behaviors, such as artifact manufacture and use, as well as more abstract behaviors, including religious rituals and aspects of social and political organization (Walker, 1995).
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In reacting to the processual archaeologists’ assertion that spatial patterns of artifacts in archaeological contexts represent systemic spatial patternsdthat is, artifact distributions reflect past activity areasdSchiffer (1972, 1976) defined several types of refuse. In his view, the identification of these refuse types, alongside c- and n-transforms, would enable archaeologists to formulate methods of activity analysis that were sensitive to variation in cultural formation processes. What he referred to as de facto refuse is produced when a place is abandoned and cultural materialsdoften still useabledare left behind. Primary refuse is trashdbroken artifacts and the likedthat is discarded at its location of use, whereas secondary refuse is discarded away from use locations. No one would suggest that this model solves archaeologist’s dilemma of sorting one kind of refuse from another or of identifying specific depositional events. It does not, for example, address the problem of identifying secondary refuse that was picked up and reused later or of secondary refuse that was removed from one locality to another, but it was not intended to. Rather, Schiffer’s model provides a logical means of structuring research into refuse disposal and the kinds of signatures left by each in the archaeological record. Pompeii Revisited Binford and other processualists were not happy with Schiffer’s emphasis on formation processes because it raised questions about Binford’s handling of inference. To the behavioralists, in the rush to be anthropological, the processualists had stridently adhered to Binford’s reasoning that the archaeological record was a good, reliable, valid, and undistorted (fossilized) reflection of human behavior. Schiffer’s point was that the quality of the reflectiondand its importance for specific inferencesddepended entirely on the formational history of the portion of the record under scrutiny and the behavioral questions being asked. Binford viewed the behavioralists as grossly misreading his original statements, and he soon published a paper titled “Behavioral Archaeology and the ‘Pompeii Premise’” (Binford, 1981), claiming that behavioral archaeology had adopted an inductive approach and thus inferred cultural and behavioral dynamics from the archaeological record. According to Binford, the behavioralists were surprised and perhaps dismayed to find that the archaeological record was not a set of miniature Pompeiis. Binford said that he had always held that the linkages between the dynamics of human behaviors and the statics of the archaeological record were not simple and direct and that the solution to this conundrum was to develop robust methods for making the linkages. He had attempted to lay out how to construct those linkages by means of what he labeled middle-range researchdfor example, ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology. Middle-range research was supposed to produce what Binford termed middle-range theory, which he characterized as a method of converting the static facts of the archaeological record, which are visible, to statements of dynamics (Binford, 1977). This was the primary reason for his trips to north-central Alaska to study contemporary caribou hunters (Binford, 1978) (Fig. 2). Whether that conversion worked was open to question (Schiffer, 1985b). For Binford, once the static record was converted into a dynamic cultural system, one could begin to understand the processes responsible for change and diversification in the organizational properties of living systems by turning to what Binford (1977) called general theory. The two kinds of theorydgeneral explanatory and middle rangedwere to be developed hand in hand, but his own efforts over the next decade or so emphasized the production of middle-range theory (e.g., Binford, 1978, 1984), not general theory. In the behavioralists’ view, Binford’s middle-range theory was primarily a rubric for labeling the sum total of principles (correlates, c-transforms, and n-transforms) needed for inferencedthat is, for going from statics to dynamics (Schiffer, 1985a). Schiffer responded to Binford (Schiffer, 1985b) by outlining how the Pompeii Premise as originally characterized by Ascher (1961) was in fact still a significant part of archaeology, at least in the American Southwest. With a nod to his own distinction between archaeological and systemic context, Schiffer (1985b) emphasized that archaeologists should abandon analytical strategies predicated on the assumption, implicit or explicit, that archaeological variability directly mirrors systemic variability. Continuing, he noted that only after the effects of formation processes, including recovery and analytical processes, have been factored out or controlled for, is one justified in seeking human behavioral causes for the remaining variation. It is one thing to advocate for the importance of understanding formation processes that create the archaeological record, but it is another to demonstrate that a failure to recognize the role played by cultural and natural processes has skewed analytical resultsdoften to the point that the results are unverifiable and thus meaningless. Two well-known examples, one from eastcentral Arizona and the other from southeastern Missouri, illustrate this. Both were hailed in the ’70s as excellent case studies of processual archaeology and its focus on inferring social organization, and both today underscore the need to distinguish among primary, secondary, and de facto refuse as they relate to abandoned rooms and structures. The examples also demonstrate that in addition to natural and cultural formation processes, analytical bias on the part of previous investigators needs to be considered as well when artifact assemblages are re-examined. Broken K Pueblo Broken K, excavated by James Hill (Fig. 6) in the early 1960s (Hill, 1970), is a large single-storey masonry pueblo of 95 rooms located east of Snowflake, Arizona, that was occupied for a few decades during the late 12th and early 13th centuries (Fig. 7). Hill’s analysis of features and artifacts on room floors led to inferences about room functions. Being inspired by Puebloan ethnographies, Hill inferred that large rooms, often containing mealing bins and firepits, were used for basic habitation activities such as preparing and serving food, whereas rooms without features were inferred to be storerooms. The manner in which artifacts were patterned on the floors of the two types was pronounced: Floors of habitation rooms contained more artifacts and more kinds of artifacts than
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James N. Hill at Broken K Pueblo, Arizona, ca. 1963.
floors of storerooms. Hill and his colleagues published the data from Broken K (e.g., Martin et al., 1967), inviting other investigators to reevaluate the inferences that made Broken K one of the best-known sites in the New World. There was little or no serious challenge to Hill’s inferences regarding room function, but there were numerous challenges to his inference of marital-residence pattern based on the distributions of ceramic design elements and ceramic types. Hill based his analysis on William Longacre’s (1970) hypothesis (correlate) that informed Longacre’s work at Carter Ranch (Fig. 8), a pueblo located a few kilometers from Broken K (Fig. 9). Longacre’s (1970:28) hypothesis was that “social demography and social organization are reflected in the material system. In a society practicing post-marital rules stressing matrilocality, social demography may be mirrored in the ceramic art of female potters: the smaller and more closely tied the social aggregate, the more details of design would be shared.” Hill’s factor analyses of the ceramic data yielded groupings of design elements and types whose distributions among the pueblo rooms led Hill to posit that Broken K had a matrilocal residence pattern, meaning that a married couple takes up residence with or near the wife’s family. Several archaeologists attempted to replicate Hill’s results by reanalyzing the published ceramic data (e.g., Dumond, 1977), but because of the many problems found in the factor analyses, few archaeologists believed that Hill successfully inferred marital-residence pattern. The same applied to Longacre’s work at Carter Ranch (Dumond, 1977). Insofar as gross formation processes are concerned, Broken K has always been a paradox (Schiffer, 1989). On the one hand, Hill’s analyses of room function strongly suggested that room floorsdespecially habitation roomsdcontained large amounts of primary and de facto refuse. Those analyses give the impression that Broken K, although not subjected to catastrophic abandonment, did have considerable, if not Pompeii-like, de facto refuse. On the other hand, 19 of 54 excavated roomsdmost of them habitation roomsdcontained secondary refuse in their fills, suggesting that Broken K underwent a gradual depopulation, during which time many habitation rooms were abandoned and used as dumps. Even more surprising is that a total of only twelve restored pots were reported from all rooms (Martin et al., 1967). Taken together, the large number of trash-filled rooms and the lack of restored pots suggested that Broken K was not Pompeii-like. Neither Hill nor the many critics of the Broken K work investigated the formation processes of the deposits that yielded the artifacts, particularly ceramic sherds, that provided the evidence for Hill’s inferences. One can begin with the proposition that the sherds in each floor assemblage probably resulted from the operation of different and independent formation processes. Treating all roomfloor data as equivalent, as in factor analysis, leads to a situation where variability caused by formation processes overwhelms any variability that might have been caused by behavioral and organizational phenomena. The result is a set of factors that monitors neither formation processes nor the behaviors of interest. As a remedy, Schiffer (1989) turned to an examination of formation processes at Broken K. A refitting study with a sample of sherds indicated that at least some of the “patterning” in the assemblage Hill identified resulted from unrecognized complete but broken vessels and large, conjoinable sherds. The “missed pots,” as well as the vessels restored by the excavators, determined to a large extent the patterns in Hill’s factor analysis of design elements in room fill and to a lesser extent those in the room-floor analysis. Moreover, the finding that pottery-type counts on room floors consisted of independently varying componentsdorphan
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Fig. 7
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Ground plan of Broken K, a 12th- and 13th-century pueblo in east-central Arizona. After Hill (1970).
sherds, pot fragments, and sherds from restorable vesselsdfurnished an explanation for why Hill’s type-frequency factor analysis lacked behaviorally meaningful patterns. The Powers Phase Project The Powers Phase Project was a multiyear archaeological program undertaken in southeastern Missouri by the University of Michigan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The project focused on the occupation of a large Pleistocene-age terrace in the Little Black River Lowlandda large expanse of low-lying land just east of the Ozark Highlanddthat occurred in the 14th century AD. The phase was named after a large mound complex, termed Powers Fort, which was the largest prehistoric settlement in the region (Fig. 10). The centerpiece of the project was the almost total excavation of two villages, Turner and Snodgrass, which were located
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Fig. 8
Ground plan of Carter Ranch, a 12th-century pueblo in east-central Arizona. After Longacre (1970).
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Map of east-central Arizona showing location of Broken K, Carter Ranch, and Grasshopper pueblos.
approximately 160 m apart on a large sandy ridge (Fig. 10). Most of the structures had burned by what excavators at the time erroneously referred to as a raging fire (Price and Griffin, 1979). Burned houses that date to the Mississippian period (ca. AD 900–1600) are not unique to Turner and Snodgrass. What set those sites apart from other excavated sites in the Midwest and Southeast was the apparent impressive state of preservation of the structures and related artifact-bearing deposits. Location of the sites on large sand ridges connected with Pleistocene-age braided-stream channels of the Mississippi Riverdlogical places for habitation and agriculture in a low-lying region susceptible to frequent floodingdhelped ensure the survival of the structures. Coarse sediments, which are constantly being reworked by wind and rain, spread over the villages from higher-elevation areas on the ridge network and created an effective barrier against erosion and destruction through modern plowing and disking. The prehistoric inhabitants of Snodgrass and Turner erected pole-and-thatch structures in scooped-out basins, which, after topsoil had been removed mechanically, showed up plainly against the white/yellow sand into which the basins had been excavated. There were considerable differences in the number of artifacts left on the floors of structure basins, but the artifacts were redundant and reflective of basic household activities such as cooking, food preparation and storage, and tool manufacture and maintenance. How long individual structures were occupied is speculative, although the evidencedlack of rebuilding, almost no midden build-up, and the likedsuggested it was a short period. James Price and his crew spent considerable effort in piece-plotting larger artifacts, and at the conclusion of the project, largescale maps of each basin were made, showing the locations of over 26,000 piece-plotted artifacts. When the structure basins
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Fig. 10 Map of southeastern Missouri showing the locations of Powers Fort, Turner, Snodgrass, and Gypsy Joint in the Little Black River Lowland. Other Powers phase sites (not shown) extend to the east and south of Powers Fort.
were excavated, there was an attempt to separate artifacts and architectural elements lying directly on the floor from what was above. In some cases, however, the basins, especially the shallower ones, appear to have been excavated as a single unit with little or no vertical control imposed. The records and photographs indicate that excavators pedestaled artifacts when possible, and in most cases a vertical measurement was taken off the site datum to the top of an artifact. However, it also is apparent that when the artifacts were plotted on the final large-scale drawings of the basins, artifacts were compressed vertically, regardless of depth within the basin. This created the effect of everything having been found on the basin floors when the artifacts might have been as much as 25 or 30 cm above the floors (Fig. 11). Assuming that, with two exceptions, all structures at Snodgrass were occupied simultaneously, and then burned simultaneously, Price and Griffin (1979) plotted the distribution of select artifact groups by structure (see below) to determine if there were nonrandom patterns that could be interpreted as a reflection of either differential function of various structures or differential status of the inhabitants of various structures. We know, however, that Price and Griffin’s basic assumptions were unsupportable. Field photographs and drawings show unmistakable signs of considerable refuse overlying burned architectural elements such as logs, cane, and thatch, which clearly demonstrated that much of the basin fill was added after the structure burned (Fig. 12). House pits in the central portion of Snodgrass contained an inordinate number of suspected high-status artifacts such as ceramic ear ornaments, pottery disks, and decorated ceramic vessels, which led Price and Griffin (1979) to suggest that those houses were occupied by people of higher social status. It might have been good evidence of social differentiation if the depositional history of
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Fig. 11
Photograph (looking south) of Structure 12 at Turner showing burned architectural elements and the structure basin.
Snodgrass were such that we could not explain the artifact distribution in any other waydif, for example, the artifacts used in the analysis were only those that were found lying directly on structure floors, or if we knew that refuse in a structure basin went only with that structure. In the case of Snodgrass, however, other causes cannot be ruled out. Rather, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that not only were structures at Snodgrass intermittently burned throughout the occupation of the village but that the abandoned structure basins were filled with large quantities of refuse. Both right/left matches of white-tailed deer elements (Zeder and Arter, 1996) (Fig. 13) and sherd refits showed that bone matches from the same animal and sherds from the same vessel occurred in numerous basins and pitsdcertainly not a sign of de facto refuse. Extensive reanalysis of Snodgrass (O’Brien, 2001) showed there was a positive correlation between structure size and location and number of artifacts. The 38 house basins in the west and central portion of the village, which comprised 59% of the total area of floor space, produced 80% or more of the proposed high-status artifacts. This might have been significant but given the way in which the site was excavateddcollapsing all basin fill, regardless of depth, into a single house-floor layerdwe will never know. However, painstaking reanalysis of 19 Snodgrass house basins that focused on using the height of pedestaled artifacts above the floor and the depth of charcoal layers that resulted from structure fires showed no evidence of status differences among households. Room Abandonment As Schiffer (1972) pointed out, Robert Ascher’s Seri study (1962) suggested a hypothesis, which, when generalized is relevant here for both Snodgrass and Broken K: Differential abandonment of a site changes the normal ratios of elements in various processes of their systemic contexts and the normal spatial distribution of elements. Specifically, Ascher was referring to activities that result in the removal of raw materials and useable items from abandoned areas of a site and their reuse in the still-occupied portion. Immediately prior to their abandonment, these elements were still in systemic context, and we would expect to find relatively fewer items in pre-discard processes of systemic contextdthat is, less de facto refuse in sites that undergo differential abandonment. Reid’s research at Grasshopper, a 500-room pueblo in eastern Arizona (Reid, 1973) (Fig. 9), is a case in point. He demonstrated that not all room floors contained comparable assemblages of de facto refuse. Some rooms abandoned early in the occupation apparently had most of their de facto artifacts removed and were then used as trash receptacles. Archaeologically, such accumulations were indicated by large numbers of sherds in room fills. Late-abandoned rooms, however, usually had few sherds in their fill and contained whole or restorable pots on their floors. Using fill-sherd density and quantity of floor pots as variables, Reid recognized four room-abandonment classes, each of which represented a set of rooms having (roughly) comparable formation processes. Conversely, sites abandoned rapidly and completely as a result of some catastrophedwhich does not apply to either Snodgrass or Broken Kdwill have relatively greater numbers of elements in manufacture, use, and maintenance processes.
Key Issues: Similarities to Evolutionary Archaeology Despite lingering ontological differencesdalthough many less than in the past (O’Brien et al., 1998; Schiffer, 1996)devolutionary archaeology and behavioral archaeology have much in common. We focus on two of the most significant similarities: How culture is viewed and the measurement of performance characteristics of artifacts.
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Fig. 12 (2001).
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Map of Snodgrass showing location of structures for which clear evidence existed of post-burning deposition of artifacts. From O’Brien
Culture vs. Cultural Transmission of Information Recall that the early processualists used Leslie White’s (1959:8) concept of culture, which he defined as the human “extrasomatic means of adaptation.” According to this definition, culture no longer is defined as a set of ideas transmitted individual to individual but strictly as an adaptive mechanism. Binford’s (1968c) chapter “Post-Pleistocene Adaptations,” which appeared in New Perspectives in Archaeology (Binford and Binford, 1968), is an excellent example of the adaptationist perspective. In the beginning, behavioralists adhered to the adaptationist view of culture, but they soon began to abandon it (Schiffer, 1995), concluding that the term “culture”
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Fig. 13 (1996).
Map of Snodgrass showing locations of right/left matches of white-tailed deer elements from structures and pits. From Zeder and Arter
itself was nonexplanatory. Early on, Schiffer (1972:157) defined culture “as a behavioral system of self-regulating and interrelated subsystems which procures and processes matter, energy, and information.” Once archaeologists began to realize that betweengroup differences have their roots in learningdthe transmission of informationdand not in biology, the adaptationist view of culture rapidly lost its explanatory value. In short, the emphasis on behavior rendered the concept of culture superfluous in proximate explanations of archaeological variability. Referencing the work of Robert Dunnell (1980) (Fig. 14), Schiffer (1996) stated that compared to genetic transmission of variation, cultural transmissiondthe process by which humans inherit, modify, and pass on information across the social
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Fig. 14
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Robert C. Dunnell (left) and Michael B. Schiffer at the Visiting Scholar Conference, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 1990.
landscapedinvolves different processes and mechanisms, and their understanding may require new laws and theories. In his opinion, neither adaptationist nor evolutionary explanations were furnishing adequate accounts of transformation-like changes in behavior. This situation would soon change, as a growing number of evolutionary archaeologists began using theory derived, not borrowed, from anthropology and genetics (e.g., Boyd and Richerson, 1985) to understand how those processes and mechanisms influenced cultural learning and the transmission of information and how they could be recognized in the archaeological record. Theoretical modeling of cultural transmission is based on the premise that genes and culture provide separate, though linked, systems of inheritance, variation, and evolutionary change (Laland and O’Brien, 2023). Cultural transmission produces similarity in behavior that cannot be accounted for by genetic transmission or continuity of environment (O’Brien and Lyman, 2008). The number of archaeological studies that examined the processes and mechanisms of cultural transmission grew steadily throughout the late ’80s and ’90s (e.g., Bettinger and Eerkens, 1999), soon becoming a dominant theme in evolutionary archaeology (e.g., Eerkens and Lipo, 2005; Mesoudi and O’Brien, 2008). As evolutionary archaeologists were focusing attention on the transmission of information, so too were the behavioralists (e.g., Stark et al., 2008). In one innovative application of behavioral archaeology, Schiffer and Miller (1999) designed an object-based model of communication that went beyond the roles of sender and receiver and added the emitter between them. The sender imparts information by modifying the properties of the emitter, just as a potter decorates a pot. It is the emitter’s performance that the receivers sense and that provides them information through inference. Schiffer and Miller’s theory permits interactors of all kindsdhuman or notdto play an informational role as long as they have the requisite performance characteristics. For example, an undecorated pot from western Illinois might have no performance characteristics in terms of signaling, whereas a decorated pot, like the one in Fig. 15, may act as an excellent emitter.
Performance Characteristics One important aspect of understanding the transmission of cultural information is the ability to identify and track variation. One behavioral example is Schiffer’s (2005) study of bursts of variety generation, whereby information arising from changed conditions in cultural-selective contexts can stimulate an increase in inventive activities of behavioral components, which can lead to the creation of new behavioral components. Variation created by this processdSchiffer termed it stimulated variationdis not directed by perceived future adaptive needs but rather is shaped by currently existing phenomena in a selective environmentdfor example, a tool that does not reach required performance levels in a specific activity. If stimulated variation happens to furnish a variant that becomes fixed very rapidly, the entire evolutionary process may be so telescoped that it appears transformational, although it was not (Schiffer, 1996). The isolation and measurement of variation, regardless of the process(es) that produced it, is key to both the behavioralists and evolutionists. One key to understanding variation and behavior is the performance characteristics of tools, with performance characteristic defined as the activity-specific behavioral capability of an interactordobject or person. Evolutionary archaeologists would agree completely with the behavioralists’ view that “although formal properties are the archaeologist’s window into processes of technological change, one must operate analytically at the level of performance characteristics” (Schiffer and Skibo, 1987:600).
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Fig. 15
Scene showing pottery from western Illinois, ca. AD 100, in use at the scale at which it would have been seen. From Braun (1991).
This kind of research agenda allows us to understand not only the evolutionary trajectories of the people responsible for the technological products but also the nature of the selective regimes that helped shape and transform them (O’Brien and Holland, 1995). As important as performance characteristics are, however, even as late as the late 1980s it was evident that evolutionary archaeology had made few contributions to the subject. Building on the base laid primarily by Dunnell (1980), archaeologists interested in evolution and its attendant processes began to construct an impressive theoretical machine, but even by the early ’90s, the machine had yet to stamp out more than a few marketable products. The problem stemmed in large part from the lack of connections between theory and data and the construction of analytical units appropriate to the kinds of historical analysis mandated by an evolutionary approach. The problem, in other words, was not that the theoretical machine was somehow flawed but rather that it lacked suitable raw materials to process (O’Brien et al., 1994). As a way out of this dilemma, evolutionary archaeologists turned to the experimental work of the behavioralists. Evolutionists have stated repeatedly (e.g., O’Brien et al., 1994) that when Schiffer and his students and colleagues in the Laboratory of Traditional Technology at the University of Arizona (e.g., Schiffer and Skibo, 1987) began breaking clay test tiles and carrying out numerous other experiments, they were carrying out the same kinds of studies that evolutionary archaeology requires. In fact, one does not need a university laboratory for experimentation. Some experiments can be carried out with everyday appliances such a kitchen stove (Fig. 16).
Fig. 16
Michael B. Schiffer testing the thermal response of a ceramic vessel in his kitchen, Tucson, Arizona, 1992.
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Summary and Future Directions As Reid (1995) pointed out almost 3 decades ago, in the 20-plus years that behavioral archaeology had been around, it had certainly evolved, but the new behavioral approaches still held together because they continued to share an approach to archaeology that was hatched in the ’70s. As originally conceived, behavioral archaeology was built around three major tenets. The first held that knowledge of the past is inferential and is based on modern material residues that owe their existence and structuredforms, quantities, distributions, and associationsdto human behaviors such as subsistence and ritual; to cultural formation processes such as discard and abandonment; and to noncultural formation processes such as earthquakes and earthworms. Thus, only after the variability introduced by formation processes is factored out or otherwise considered can the past behaviors of interest be inferred from the archaeological record. The second tenet was that archaeologists can study all sociocultural phenomena if such phenomena can be framed as people– artifact interactions. The third tenet was that defining archaeology as the study of the relationships between human behavior and material culture in all times and all places not only furnishes an integrative focus for the discipline but establishes a foundation for building a new behavioral science, one emphasizing the many roles that artifacts play in human societies, including those of the modern era (Skibo and Schiffer, 2008). Here, as elsewhere in behavioral archaeology, inference rests on experimental laws and empirical generalizations about people–objects interactions and on cultural formation processes. There is also the recognition that culture is defined in terms of knowledgeda system of learned information and the rules for processing and transforming it into behavior (Laland and O’Brien, 2023). This emphasis on behavior renders the normative concept of culture superfluous in proximate explanations of archaeological variability. Behavioral archaeology, like its parent, processual archaeology, has a fundamental nomothetic component, and thus its adherents seek to formulate laws in ethnoarchaeological, experimental, and archaeological research contexts. Explanation involves subsuming particularistic empirical phenomena under nomothetic statements, including boundary conditions. The unit of analysis is a behavior at any scale, ranging from discrete person–object interactions, to an activity made up of a patterned behavior, to a behavioral system made up of multiple activities that link a human group to the physical world and other behavioral systems. However, behavioralists have always acknowledged that asking historical questionsdseeking to understand contingent changes in specific societiesdis also fundamental (Reid et al., 1975; Schiffer, 1975). This puts it squarely in line with one of the basic premises of evolutionary archaeology, which, like behavioral archaeology, is interested not in the mere chronicling of a series of events but in a history of eventsdstatements about causal connections and explanation (O’Hara, 1988). In other words, history matters (Gould, 1986). We see the future of behavioral archaeology as being one that continues to act as the third leg of the archaeological stool, alongside evolutionary archaeology and processualism, that governs most of what archaeologists do. Archaeology, as Jeff Reid and his colleagues Mike Schiffer and Bill Rathje, put it in their early manifesto on behavioral archaeology (Reid et al., 1975), archaeology is a discipline comprising a body of methods and theories for describing and, importantly, explaining human behaviors at all scales based on material culture. The bottom line is, archaeologists no longer have to label themselves as behavioralists or evolutionists, or even processualists, to adopt a common research agenda that leads to an understanding of not only the evolutionary development of the people whose behaviors are recorded in material culture but also the nature of the selective regimes that helped shape and transform them.
See Also: Archaeology and the New Materialisms; Global Theories of Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Social Theory in Archaeology.
References Ascher, Robert, 1961. Analogy in archaeological interpretation. SW. J. Anthropol. 17, 317–325. Ascher, Robert, 1962. Ethnography for archaeology: a case from the Seri Indians. Ethnology 1, 360–369. Ascher, Robert, 1968. Time’s arrow and the archaeology of a contemporary community. In: Chang, K.C. (Ed.), Settlement Archaeology. National Press, Palo Alto, Calif, pp. 43–52. Bettinger, Robert L., Eerkens, Jelmer, 1999. Point typologies, cultural transmission, and the spread of bow-and-arrow technology in the prehistoric Great Basin. Am. Antiq. 64, 231–242. Binford, Lewis R., 1962. Archaeology as anthropology. Am. Antiq. 28, 217–225. Binford, Lewis R., 1964. A consideration of archaeological research design. Am. Antiq. 29, 425–441. Binford, Lewis R., 1965. Archaeological systematics and the study of culture process. Am. Antiq. 31, 203–210. Binford, Lewis R., 1968a. Methodological considerations of the archeological use of ethnographic data. In: Lee, Richard B., DeVore, Irven (Eds.), Man the Hunter. Aldine, Chicago, pp. 268–273. Binford, Lewis R., 1968b. Archeological perspectives. In: Binford, Sally R., Binford, Lewis R. (Eds.), New Perspectives in Archeology. Aldine, Chicago, pp. 5–32. Binford, Lewis R., 1968c. Post-Pleistocene adaptations. In: Binford, Sally R., Binford, Lewis R. (Eds.), New Perspectives in Archeology. Aldine, Chicago, pp. 313–341. Binford, Lewis R., 1977. General introduction. In: Binford, Lewis R. (Ed.), For Theory Building in Archaeology: Essays on Faunal Remains, Aquatic Resources, Spatial Analysis, and Systemic Modeling. Academic Press, New York, pp. 1–10. Binford, Lewis R., 1978. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. Academic Press, New York. Binford, Lewis R., 1981. Behavioral archaeology and the “Pompeii premise”. J. Anthropol. Res. 37, 195–208. Binford, Lewis R., 1984. Faunal Remains From Klasies River Mouth. Academic Press, Orlando, Fla. Binford, Lewis R., Binford, Sally R., 1966. A preliminary analysis of functional variability in the Mousterian of Levallois facies. Am. Anthropol. 68, 218–295. Binford, Sally R., Binford, Lewis R. (Eds.), 1968. New Perspectives in Archeology. Aldine, Chicago.
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Boyd, Robert, Richerson, Peter J., 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Braidwood, Robert J., 1959. Archaeology and the evolutionary theory. In: Meggers, Betty J. (Ed.), Evolutionary Archaeology: A Centennial Appraisal. Anthropological Society of Washington, Washington, D.C., pp. 76–89 Braun, David P., 1991. Why decorate a pot? Midwestern household pottery, 200 B.C.–A.D. 600. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 10, 360–397. Dumond, Donald E., 1977. Science in archaeology: the saints go marching in. Am. Antiq. 42, 330–349. Dunnell, Robert C., 1980. Evolutionary theory and archaeology. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theor. 3, 35–99. Eerkens, Jelmer W., Lipo, Carl P., 2005. Cultural transmission, copying errors, and the generation of variation in material culture and the archaeological record. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 24, 316–334. Gould, Stephen J., 1986. Evolution and the triumph of homology, or why history matters. Am. Sci. 74, 60–69. Hill, James N., 1970. Broken K Pueblo: Prehistoric Social Organization in the American Southwest. Anthropological Papers No. 18. University of Arizona, Tucson. Laland, Kevin N., O’Brien, Michael J., 2023. The cultural contribution to evolvability. PaleoAnthropology 114, 7782–7789. Lee, Richard B., DeVore, Irven (Eds.), 1968. Man the Hunter. Aldine, Chicago. Longacre, William A., 1970. Archaeology as Anthropology: A Case Study. Anthropological Papers No. 17. University of Arizona, Tucson. Lyman, R. Lee, O’Brien, Michael J., Dunnell, Robert C., 1997. The Rise and Fall of Culture History. Plenum, New York. Martin, Paul S., Longacre, William A., Hill, James A., 1967. Chapters in the Prehistory of Eastern Arizona. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. Mesoudi, Alex, O’Brien, Michael J., 2008. The cultural transmission of Great Basin projectile-point technology I: an experimental simulation. Am. Antiq. 73, 3–28. O’Brien, Michael J., 2001. Mississippian Community Organization: The Powers Phase in Southeastern Missouri. Kluwer Academic//Plenum, New York. O’Brien, Michael J., Holland, Thomas D., 1995. The nature and premise of a selection-based archaeology. In: Teltser, Patrice A. (Ed.), Evolutionary Archaeology: Methodological Issues. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, pp. 175–200. O’Brien, Michael J., Holland, Thomas D., Hoard, Robert J., Fox, Gregory L., 1994. Evolutionary implications of design and performance characteristics of prehistoric pottery. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 1, 259–304. O’Brien, Michael J., Lyman, R. Lee, 2008. Evolutionary archeology: current status and future prospects. Evol. Anthropol. 11, 26–36. O’Brien, Michael J., Lyman, R. Lee, Leonard, Robert D., 1998. Basic incompatibilities between evolutionary and behavioral archaeology. Am. Antiq. 63, 485–498. O’Brien, Michael J., Lyman, R. Lee, Schiffer, Michael B., 2005. Archaeology as a Process: Processualism and Its Progeny. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. O’Hara, Robert J., 1988. Homage to Clio, or, toward an historical philosophy for evolutionary biology. Syst. Zool. 37, 142–155. Price, James E., Griffin, James B., 1979. The Snodgrass Site of the Powers Phase of Southeast Missouri. Anthropological Papers No. 66. University of Michigan, Museum of Anthropology, Ann Arbor. Reid, J. Jefferson, 1973. Growth and Response to Stress at Grasshopper Pueblo. Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Arizona, Tucson. Reid, J. Jefferson, 1995. Four strategies after twenty years: a return to basics. In: Skibo, James M., Walker, William H., Nielsen, Axel E. (Eds.), Expanding Archaeology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, pp. 15–21. Reid, J. Jefferson, Rathje, William L., Schiffer, Michael B., 1974. Expanding archaeology. Am. Antiq. 39, 125–126. Reid, J. Jefferson, Schiffer, Michael B., Rathje, William L., 1975. Behavioral archaeology: four strategies. Am. Anthropol. 77, 864–869. Schiffer, Michael B., 1972. Archaeological context and systemic context. Am. Antiq. 37, 156–165. Schiffer, Michael B., 1975. Archaeology as behavioral science. Am. Anthropol. 77, 836–848. Schiffer, Michael B., 1976. Behavioral Archeology. Academic Press, New York. Schiffer, Michael B., 1985a. Review of Lewis R. Binford’s working at archaeology. Am. Antiq. 50, 91–93. Schiffer, Michael B., 1985b. Is there a “Pompeii” premise in archaeology? J. Anthropol. Res. 41, 18–41. Schiffer, Michael B., 1989. Formation processes of Broken K Pueblo: some hypotheses. In: Leonard, Robert D., Jones, George T. (Eds.), Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 37–58. Schiffer, Michael B., 1995. A personal history of behavioral archaeology. In: Schiffer, Michael B. (Ed.), Behavioral Archaeology: First Principles. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, pp. 1–24. Schiffer, Michael B., 1996. Some relationships between behavioral and evolutionary archaeologies. Am. Antiq. 61, 643–662. Schiffer, Michael B., 2005. The devil is in the details: the cascade model of invention processes. Am. Antiq. 70, 485–502. Schiffer, Michael B., Downing, Theodore, McCarthy, Michael, 1981. Waste not, want not: an ethnoarchaeological study of reuse in Tucson, Arizona. In: Gould, Richard A., Schiffer, Michael B. (Eds.), Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of US. Academic Press, New York, pp. 67–86. Schiffer, Michael B., Miller, Andrea R., 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication. Routledge, London. Schiffer, Michael B., Rathje, William L., 1973. Efficient exploitation of the archeological record: penetrating problems. In: Redman, Charles L. (Ed.), Research and Theory in Current Archeology. Wiley-Interscience, New York, pp. 169–179. Schiffer, Michael B., Reid, J. Jefferson, 2017. The strong case approach. In: Schiffer, Michael B., Riggs, Charles, Reid, J. Jefferson (Eds.), The Strong Case Approach in Behavioral Archaeology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, pp. 1–11. Schiffer, Michael B., Skibo, James M., 1987. Theory and experiment in the study of technological change. Curr. Anthropol. 28, 595–622. Skibo, James M., Schiffer, Michael B., 2008. People and Things: A Behavioral Approach to Material Culture. Springer, New York. Stark, Miriam T., Bowser, Brenda J., Horne, Lee, 2008. Why breaking down boundaries matters for archaeological research on cultural transmission: an introduction. In: Stark, Miriam T., Bowser, Brenda J., Horne, Lee (Eds.), Cultural Transmission and Material Culture: Breaking Down Boundaries. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, pp. 1–16. Walker, William H., 1995. Ceremonial trash. In: Skibo, James M., Walker, William H., Nielsen, A.E. (Eds.), Expanding Archaeology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, pp. 67–79. Walker, William H., Schiffer, Michael B., 2014. Behavioral archaeology. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, pp. 837–845. White, Leslie A., 1959. The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. McGraw–Hill, New York. Zeder, Melinda A., Arter, Susan, R., 1996. Meat consumption and bone use in a Mississippian village. In: Reitz, Elizabeth J., Newsom, Lee A., Scudder, Sylvia J. (Eds.), Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology. Plenum, New York, pp. 319–337.
Further Reading David, Nicholas, Kramer, Carol, 2001. Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Eren, Metin I., Buchanan, Briggs, O’Brien, Michael J., 2015. Social learning and technological evolution during the Clovis colonization of the New World. J. Hum. Evol. 80, 159–170. LaMotta, Vincent M., Schiffer, Michael B., 2001. Behavioral archaeology: toward a new synthesis. In: Hodder, Ian (Ed.), Archaeological Theory Today. Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 14–64. Longacre, William A., 1968. Some aspects of prehistoric society in east-central Arizona. In: Binford, Sally R., Binford, Lewis R. (Eds.), New Perspectives in Archeology. Aldine, Chicago, pp. 89–102. Longacre, William A. (Ed.), 1970. Reconstructing Prehistoric Pueblo Societies. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
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Longacre, William A. (Ed.), 1991. Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Longacre, William A., Reid, J. Jefferson, 1974. The University of Arizona archaeological field school at Grasshopper: eleven years of multidisciplinary research and teaching. KIVA 40, 3–38. Longacre, William A., Skibo, James M. (Eds.), 1994. Kalinga Ethnoarchaeology: Expanding Archaeological Method and Theory. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Longacre, William A., Holbrook, Sally J., Graves, Michael W. (Eds.), 1982. Multidisciplinary Research at Grasshopper Pueblo, Arizona. University of Arizona, Tucson. Anthropological Papers No. 40. Lyman, R. Lee, O’Brien, Michael J., 1998. The goals of evolutionary archaeology: history and explanation. Curr. Anthropol. 39, 615–652. O’Brien, Michael J., Lyman, R. Lee, 2000. Applying Evolutionary Archaeology: A Systematic Approach. Springer, New York. Prentiss, Anna M. (Ed.), 2019. Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology. Springer, Cham, Switzerland. Rathje, William L., Murphy, Cullen, 1992. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. Harper Collins, New York. Reid, J. Jefferson, 1975. Comments on environment and behavior at Antelope house. KIVA 41, 127–132. Reid, J. Jefferson, Whittlesey, Stephanie, 2005. Thirty Years Into Yesterday: A History of Archaeology at Grasshopper Pueblo. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Schiffer, Michael B., 1983. Toward the identification of formation processes. Am. Antiq. 48, 675–706. Schiffer, Michael B., 1987. Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Schiffer, Michael B., 1991. The Portable Radio in American Life. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Schiffer, Michael B., 2008. Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Schiffer, Michael B., 2011. Studying Technological Change: A Behavioral Approach. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Schiffer, Michael B., 2017. Archaeology’s Footprints in the Modern World. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Schiffer, Michael B., Butts, Tamara C., Grimm, Kimberly K., 1994. Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington D.C. Schiffer, Michael B., Skibo, James M., Griffitts, Janet L., Hollenback, Kacy L., Longacre, William A., 2001. Behavioral archaeology and the study of technology. Am. Antiq. 66, 729–737. Skibo, James M., 1999. Ants for Breakfast: Archaeological Adventures Among the Kalinga. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Skibo, James M., 2013. Understanding Pottery Function. Springer, New York. Skibo, James M., Schiffer, Michael B., Kowalski, Nancy, 1989. Ceramic style analysis in archaeology and ethnoarchaeology: bridging the analytical gap. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 8, 388–409. Skibo, James M., Graves, Michael W., Stark, Miriam T. (Eds.), 2007. Archaeological Anthropology: Perspectives on Method and Theory. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Sullivan III, Alan P., 1978. Inference and evidence in archaeology: a discussion of the conceptual problems. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theor. 1, 183–222. Walker, William H., Skibo, James M. (Eds.), 2015. Explorations in Behavioral Archaeology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Walker, William H., Skibo, James M., Nielsen, Axel E. (Eds.), 1995. Expanding Archaeology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Wilk, Richard, Schiffer, Michael B., 1979. The archaeology of vacant lots in Tucson, Arizona. Am. Antiq. 44, 530–536.
Biblical Archaeology Neil Smith and Thomas E. Levy, Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability, Qualcomm Institute, University of California, La Jolla, CA, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Summary and Future Directions References
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Biblical Archaeology can be defined as a sub-discipline of Levantine Archaeology focused around the historical and cultural setting of the biblical period Defining the limits of the biblical period and the disciplines’ period of study is complex The extent of the region the discipline covers goes beyond Israel to encompass many neighboring countries There have been several major paradigm shifts that have occurred within the discipline over the last century Current research of the discipline has matured to go beyond historical debates to address anthropological questions and embrace pragmatism and advancements in scientific research Future developments of the discipline will see further integration of technology by interdisciplinary teams in the hard sciences and development of collaborative virtual environments to breach physical limitations of the research
Abstract In this entry, we define Biblical Archaeology in respect to its historical and modern development as a discipline within anthropological archaeology. Today Biblical Archaeology and those who continue to use the term generally categorize it as a specialized sub-discipline of Levantine Archaeology hyper-focused on the elucidation of the historical and cultural setting of the biblical period. Despite attempts in the past of deconstructing Biblical archaeology, it has stood the test of time, evolving into one of the most unique, interdisciplinary and cutting edge forms of archaeology that continues to illuminate our understanding of past culture in Israel and neighboring lands.
Introduction The meaning, purpose and application of Biblical Archaeology has evolved and been transformed over the past century. Today Biblical Archaeology and those who continue to use the term generally categorize it as a specialized sub-discipline of Levantine Archaeology hyper-focused on the elucidation of the historical and cultural setting of the biblical period. Over the past two decades, the field has enthusiastically adopted all the tools of the archaeological sciences, so much so that it is more appropriate to refer to the discipline as “Historical Biblical Archaeology” rooted in the scientific method (Levy, 2010). In this way, the objective research methods of Biblical Archaeology today are different than any type of historical archaeology where sacred and historical texts can be related to the archaeological record. Defining the time span of what can be considered Biblical Archaeology is complex. Since the Hebrew Bible starts with the creation of the cosmos and covers humankinds’ spread across the earth, the rise of tribal societies, the establishment of urbanism, and the 2nd millennium BCE Hebrew settlement in the land of Israel, one could argue Biblical Archaeology starts with the first appearance of Homo sapiens living in social groups in the Levant. However, most Biblical Archaeology courses and textbooks start with the Natufian and Neolithic periods (e.g. Mazar, 1992; Stern, 2008) when the Mediterranean subsistence economy was beginning to be formed. Archaeological data concerning the early foundation stories in Genesis – the Flood, Tower of Babel, and the journeys of Abraham – are highly problematic. Discoveries of parallel Sumerian and Babylonian creation and flood stories can only loosely be tied with the biblical stories in Genesis to archaeological correlates for the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age periods (Finkel, 2014; Rast, 1987). The Patriarchs and Matriarchs migration stories from Ur and social cultural interactions within Syria, Israel and Egypt are generally dated to the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1550 BC) and reflect incidental information paralleled in contemporary excavations and Egyptian and west Semitic writings (e.g. Story of Sinuhe, Mari archives, Beni Hasan wall painting). However, Biblical minimalists argue that prior to the Omride dynasty (Late Iron II) and even later, the archaeological record and the
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Hebrew Bible (mainly finalized in the Hellenistic period) reflect anachronistic stories of the local culture, religion, and complexity of the Israelite kingdom. In this sense, there can never really be a “biblical” archaeology unless it is limited to the Persian and Hellenistic periods and focuses on understanding the cultural background of its priestly writers (see Davies, 1992; Thompson, 1999). Drawing a line for the end of Biblical Archaeology is equally complex. The end of the biblical period can be taken as the deportation of Judah in 586 BC, the end of the late Persian second temple period, or continue to include 1st century New Testament archaeology and later. In this sense, survey courses in Biblical Archaeology should cover the late prehistoric periods noted above through the destruction of Solomon’s temple in 586 BC, to the Muslim conquest in CE 640 (Magness, 2012).
Overview and Key Issues While the predominance of Biblical Archaeology is focused on excavations in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories, both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament stories are globally comprehensive and not bounded by modern political boundaries. Archaeological work in Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia contributes immensely to the Biblical archaeological record. However, most archaeologists would not define Biblical Archaeology as W.F. Albright did as covering “all the lands mentioned in the Bible”, and thus as being coextensive with the cradle of civilization (Albright, 1971). This region extends from the western Mediterranean to India, and from southern Russia to Ethiopia and the Indian Ocean. Dever (1981) argued in the early 1980s such a definition causes loss of meaning as a defined field. Nevertheless, work in these adjacent regions has proven critical to resolving our understanding of the historical, technological, and cultural settings of the biblical period and it has driven archaeologists to be more inter-disciplinary and collaborative. Both the Egyptian and Assyrian/Babylonian chronologies play a critical role in biblical chronology by providing archaeological anchors and synchronic events. Of special note is the work by Bietak (2016), Hoffmeier (2005) and others that has clarified the Hyksos period within its global context and relationship with Canaan, “Asiatics” and the important site of Tell el-Dab’a (Avaris) and its material culture that permeated Israel and Lebanon. There are very few preserved inscriptions from the inhabitants of Israel during the Iron Age, which makes written evidence by its neighbors, such as the Mesha Stele and Aramean Tel Dan inscription, critical extra-biblical sources. Excavations in Jordan and Lebanon/Syria have furthered our knowledge of Israel’s neighbors and the Israelite tribes that lived outside the modern borders of Israel. Despite what was thought would be the end to the use of the term in the 1980s when Dever suggested Biblical Archaeology be changed to Syro-Palestinian archaeology, the intersection of the biblical narrative and the archaeological record has continued to be a hotly debated and researched topic in the Levant until today (Finkelstein and Silberman, 2001). Although the self-ascription of being a “Biblical Archaeologist” is now only used by faith-based universities and the “biblical” modifier has been removed from American universities, it remains a specialized sub-discipline of Levantine archaeology with one of the highest annual frequency of excavations, publication, and public interest among any sub-discipline in archaeology. Its resilience and relevance today are a product of several transformational developments over the last century. The major elements of these transformational periods have been categorized by several authors (Bunimovitz and Faust, 2010; Cline, 2009; Dever, 2020; Mazar, 1992; Moorey, 1991). The Golden Age: This was a period dominated by scholars such as W.F. Albright, E. Wright, N. Glueck, when archaeology served the role of proving the historicity of the Hebrew Bible. It was a period of great discoveries when large-scale excavations at prominent sites in Israel and Jordan began to be carried out annually by emerging field schools primarily from America and European countries. The discipline grew rapidly forming institutes, graduate programs, and gaining international public recognition. Although archaeology was unabashedly the handmaiden of the Bible, many of the key archaeological methodologies still practiced today were developed and advanced upon, e.g. ceramic seriation, Wheeler-Kenyon method of excavation, stratigraphic field recording. Secularization: This was a movement toward extricating the Bible from influencing archaeological interpretation and the application of the scientific method (processual archaeology) to “objectively” understand the Levant’s cultural past from a secular perspective. Dever (1981) called into question the very foundations of the discipline arguing that the name should be abandoned for a more secular “Syro-Palestinian” Archaeology. In its place, Syro-Palestinian archaeology would be focused on applying the scientific method to discover the underlying historical and cultural processes at the root of Israel and its contemporary neighbors’ cultural evolution. This period of Biblical Archaeology’s secularization also coincided with several well-established archaeology programs within secular universities in Israel. Israeli archaeologists were now at the forefront of applying new scientific and technological advances in field excavations as well as the “New Archaeology” thought on culture change. The whole enterprise of earlier scholars’ work to connect “events” in the biblical narrative with the archaeological record was now irrelevant and unnecessary. This paradigm shift was also greatly influenced by many surveys that were conducted throughout the country shortly after the Six-Day war (Cline, 2009; Faust, 2010). The movement away from just tell centric excavations to extensive survey provided a new picture and voice of the Holy Land from the ancient rural population. The emergence of the early Israelites in the highlands became much more well defined, as was the complexity of the overlapping material cultures and transformations of subsistence and transhumance from the Early Bronze to Iron Ages. The simple diffusionist models and cultural-historical interpretations proposed in the Golden Age did not fit the archaeological record. Although highly influenced by ecological determinism, new models were proposed by Dever, Finkelstein, and others that called into question the biblical account of the origin of the Israelites, how they entered Israel, associated with their neighbors, and practiced their religion or cult. The Great Minimalist Maximalist Debate: In the 1990s, coinciding with the postmodern movement, “minimalist” schools emerged that fully rejected the historicity of the biblical texts and their connection with archaeology in the Levant. While most of the views proposed by the minimalists were not new and rooted in work by Julius Wellhausen and modern textual criticism, they achieved
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a new global audience through popularized books (e.g., Davies, 1992; Thompson, 1999). More significant to their popularization was the adoption of their views by prominent archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman who published not only popularized books but compelling scholarly articles (Finkelstein and Silberman, 2001). Finkelstein’s low chronology rightly called into question fundamental assumptions and biases of dating and the historicity or lack thereof of the Davidic and Solomonic kingdoms in the archaeological record. This led to a polarizing effect among archaeologists working in Israel and Jordan and functioned as a subterfuge embroiling many who up to this point had stayed out of the biblical historicity debate. Bunimovitz and Faust (2010: 46), commenting on this period ironically note, “the anthropologically oriented research program that developed in the 1980s was abandoned, and once again the central themes include the United Monarchy, the emergence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the status of Jerusalem as a capital, etc.dall issues stemming from biblical historiography.” Although polarizing, this period opened up archaeological research to question every assumption. The discovery of the Tel Dan Inscription in 1993 played a critical role in silencing early arguments that David was purely legendary but the extent and complexity of his and Solomon’s kingdom was now strongly challenged (Biran and Naveh, 1993). The back-and-forth rebuttals in publication, and ASOR (American Schools of Overseas Research) annual meeting sessions on the topic drove new innovative techniques in archaeological research that have impacted archaeology beyond the Levant. The Digital Revolution and Multi-disciplinary advancements: Initially centering around the low vs high chronological debate, extensive radiocarbon sampling of archaeological sites was introduced with the hope to anchor relative dating in objective absolute dates (Finkelstein and Piasetzky, 2006; Mazar and Carmi, 2001). However, the approach to calibration of these dates and the laboratory conducting the tests led to support neither the low nor the high chronologies. It became apparent that better controlled excavations and introduction of much more precise and rigorous digital recording techniques were needed (Levy et al., 2015). This led overall to a second scientific revolution in the field accelerating the rapid adoption of multi-disciplinary scientific techniques in excavations, such as Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) scanning, Real-Time Kinematic Global Positioning Systems (RTK GPS), digital field recording, drone Photogrammetry, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Multi-spectral (macro, micro) archaeology, Xray fluorescence (XRF), Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA), Petrographic thin-sections, etc. These new approaches also opened new means to explore anthropological questions over-shadowed by the continued minimalist-maximalist debate. Although archaeologists working within the Levant are still fairly polarized between low and high chronologies, the scientific methods have achieved compromises from both sides. This has been a central discussion over the last 30 years within Biblical Archaeology so we seek to summarize it here. To address the low vs. high chronology debate, both groups turned to radio-carbon dating as a way to nail down absolute dates for the transitions of the periods between Iron I to Iron IIB. In 2005, a radiocarbon study by A. Mazar of 66 samples from Tel Rehov led to a refinement of dating now called the Modified Conventional Chronology (MCC) for the Iron IIA (980–830 BC). It upholds that the Iron IIA does start prior to Shoshenq’s invasion (925 BC), while at the same time extends into the 9th century BC as proposed by Finkelstein. The large number of Iron Age IIA dates from Southern Jordan’s (Biblical Edom) Faynan district also supports the MCC (Levy et al., 2008, 2014). A general consensus was reached from both sides that the Iron IIA can be divided into an early and a late phase. This led to the abandonment by Finkelstein of associating Late Iron I destruction levels to Shoshenq but also a new theory that the monumental strata belong to the Late Iron IIA (after David, Solomon and Shoshenq’s campaign). In 2010, Finkelstein and Piasetzky (2010) published an extensive radiocarbon study of 339 determinations on 142 samples taken from 38 strata at 18 sites. A major conclusion drawn from their interpretation was that the Iron I was a slow transition that continued into the 10th century BCE in the North of Israel. Mazar and Ramsey (2008) strongly refute a later Iron I noting that the great destructions at Megiddo and Tel Qasile of the Iron I are immediately followed by Iron IIA material culture preventing the possibility for a long Iron I transition. Overall, the abundance of radiocarbon samples has created a scattered picture with calibrated dates for key destruction layers in Iron IIA falling into Early and Late dating. Therefore, depending on which samples one chooses as more reliable, the monumental architecture traditionally associated with King Solomon has the possibility of being a part of the early Iron IIA or late Iron IIA. As radiocarbon sampling techniques became the norm and new excavations were conducted in Judah, especially at Khirbat Qeiyafa and its philistine rival Tel es-Safi, more evidence emerged of state level activities in the early Iron IIA irrespective of one’s conclusions about the monumental architecture of the northern Israel sites. Much of the debate moved to focus around Khirbat Qeiyafa, which showed for the first time a clear picture of the Iron I to Iron IIA transition in Judah supported by modern excavations and extensive radiocarbon absolute dates (Garfinkel et al., 2012). Excavations in Jerusalem were also renewed revealing contemporaneous pottery to Khirbat Qeiyafa in Mazar’s (2011) excavations of the Ophel and A. De Groot and H. Bernick-Greenberg’s excavations of the City of David. Katz and Faust (2014) analysis of ceramic assemblages across the Judahite sites further reinforces the presence of early Iron IIA assemblages at Timnah, Lachish, Tel Beit Mirsim, Arad, Beersheba and the sites mentioned above in Jerusalem. The current era of biblical archaeological scholarship has become tempered by pragmatism and hyper-awareness of one’s biases toward interpretation and treatment of the biblical texts (Levy, 2010). Many archaeologists including Dever have used the term “Centralist” to describe their current approach to the Hebrew Bible and the archaeological record as two sources that must be equally scrutinized, dissected and investigated. Moreover, the Hebrew Bible should not only be treated like any other historical text but as a “cultural document” from which anthropological insight can be made. Both the biblical text and the regions’ material culture are cultural products of the very same society. They reflect the perception and beliefs of the society that produced them. Levy (2010: 13) has argued that as one moves away from the historical debates to addressing problems of broader anthropological interest, researchers become more inclined to employ “science-based methods and analytical techniques to be able to test hypotheses with as objective methods as possible.” This pragmatic approach leads to innovative interpretations that are able to encompass both the Hebrew Bible and the archaeological record and identification of important confluences between them. Recent
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publications such as “Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance” (Faust, 2006) and “The Social Archaeology of the Levant” (Yasur-Landau et al., 2018) epitomize this movement toward more anthropologically driven inquiries into the biblical record. Biblical archaeological research has matured (Fig. 1).
Summary and Future Directions The development of Biblical Archaeology and the paradigm shifts undergone over the last century provide insight on how it will continue to adapt and grow over the next several decades. During the first decade of the 21st century, two large scale projects helped push Biblical archaeology to adopt archaeological science: one in Israel (Finkelstein et al., 2016) and one in the United States (Gidding et al., 2011; Levy, 2013). Biblical archaeology has embraced out of necessity interdisciplinary teams in the hard sciences which has led to cutting edge work in archaeology. This will lead to new methods for studying the archaeological record that are just as informative as radiocarbon dating, seriation, and the Kenyon-Wheeler excavation method were for the last century. A wealth of new scientific methods are now being applied in the field such as archaeomagnetism (Vaknin et al., 2022), high resolution elemental characterization studies (Finkel et al., 2022), OSL (Optically stimulated luminescence) dating (Shtienberg et al., 2022), Bayesian statistics for modeling radiometric dates (Higham et al., 2005), decipherment of inscriptions using hyperspectral imaging (Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., 2017), X-ray diffraction (Bliss and Levy, 2016), and more. Secondly, archaeology is a destructive science, and we can only make sense of what was excavated by what was recorded. We cannot rewind the excavation and go back to what the site was the day before. Therefore, it has been historically difficult in archaeology to reproduce excavators’ work. What has been recorded and stored within the basements of universities and the Israel Antiquities Authority warehouses is not easily accessible to other archaeologists. Reproducibility which is a major tenet of the scientific method and a primary means of enabling validation of archaeological theories and interpretations has been an obstacle. The recent transformation within Biblical Archaeology to go fully digital and create real-time 3D immersive environments will change this, enabling one to virtually rewind a field excavation (Smith et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2015; Smith, in press). The next necessary step is the development of tools to allow collaborative virtual environments in which this data can be made accessible to other archaeologists (even ones of opposing views) to study and derive their own conclusions (Fig. 1). This will transform how typologies are synchronized, stratigraphy is correlated from one site to another and how architectural design/manufacture are understood. It will enable better doctoral research and comprehensive studies that can overcome the myopia of Tell-centric excavations. Finally, the archaeological record and biblical text is a multivariate problem that has proven like many other fields of research impossible to minimize in objective functions. The application of deep neural networks (DNN) to the avalanche of digital data created over the last century will open new ways of sensing, understanding, and generating predictive models in the analysis of the archaeological record and validation of anthropological models. The real advantage of DNNs for Biblical Archaeology is their potential to discover complex patterns and make predictions from millions of parameters within massive amounts of data. Both the archaeological record and the text of the Hebrew Bible can be codified into digital data and innovative investigative models can be built to extract insights that may seem unimaginable today. Despite attempts in the past of deconstructing Biblical Archaeology as a discipline, it has stood the test of time evolving into one of the most unique, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge forms of archaeology today that continues to elucidate the historical and cultural setting of the Biblical periods.
Fig. 1 Examples of laser scanned artifacts from excavations at the biblical site of Tel Dan that can now be visualized and studied inside real-time 3D immersive environments. From left to right: Late Bronze Age Mycenaean Charioteer Vessel, Tel Dan inscription stela (first historical evidence of King David), Iron Age temple incense shovel. Scans courtesy of Yitzhak Marmelstein and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
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See Also: Post-Processual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Settlements, Tell Formation.
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Radiocarbon dating of the Khirbat-en Nahas site (Jordan) and Bayesian modeling of the results. In: Levy, Thomas E., Higham, Tom (Eds.), The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating – Archaeology, Text and Science. Equinox, London, pp. 164–178. Hoffmeier, James Karl, 2005. Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Katz, Haya, Faust, Avraham, 2014. The chronology of the Iron Age IIA in Judah in the light of Tel ‘Eton Tomb C3 and other assemblages. BASOR 371, 103–127. Levy, Thomas E., Schneider, Thomas, Propp, William H.C. (Eds.), 2015. Israel’s exodus in transdisciplinary perspective – text, archaeology, culture, and geoscience. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Science. Springer, New York, NY. Levy, Thomas E., 2010. The new pragmatism: integrating anthropological, digital, and historical biblical archaeologies. In: Levy, Thomas E. (Ed.), Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future – The New Pragmatism. Equinox Publishing, London, pp. 3–44. Levy, Thomas E., 2013. Cyber-archaeology and world cultural heritage: insights from the holy land. Am. Acad. Arts Sci. Bull. LXVI, 26–33. Levy, Thomas E., Najjar, Mohammed, Higham, Thomas, Arbel, Yoav, Muniz, Adolfo, Ben-Yosef, Erez, Smith, Neil G., Beherec, Marc, Gidding, Aaron D., Jones, Ian W.N., Freses, Daniel, Smitheram, Craig, Robinson, Mark, 2014. Excavations at Khirbat en-Nahas 2002–2009: an Iron Age copper production center in the lowlands of Edom. In: Levy, Thomas E., Najjar, Mohammed, Ben-Yosef, Erez (Eds.), New Insights into the Iron Age Archaeology of Edom, Southern Jordan – Surveys, Excavations and Research from the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP). UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles, CA, pp. 89–245. Levy, Thomas E., Higham, Thomas, Bronk Ramsey, Christopher, Smith, Neil G., Ben-Yosef, Erez, Robinson, Mark, Münger, Stefan, Knabb, Kyle, Schulze, Jurgen P., Najjar, Mohammad, Tauxe, Lisa, 2008. High-precision radiocarbon dating and historical biblical archaeology in southern Jordan. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105 (43), 16460– 16465. Magness, Jodi, 2012. The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mazar, Amihai, 1992. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Doubleday, New York, NY. Mazar, Amihai, 2005. The debate over the chronology of the Iron Age in the southern Levant: its history, the current situation, and a suggested resolution. In: Levy, Thomas E., Higham, Thomas (Eds.), The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating – Archaeology, Text and Science. Equinox Publishing, London, pp. 15–30. Mazar, Amihai, Carmi, Israel, 2001. Radiocarbon dates from Iron Age strata at Tel Beth Shean and Tel Rehov. Radiocarbon 43 (3), 1333–1342. Mazar, Amihai, Bronk, Ramsey, 2008. 14C dates and the Iron Age chronology of Israel: a response. Radiocarbon 40 (2), 159–180. Mazar, Amihai, 2011. The Iron Age chronology debate: is the gap narrowing? Another viewpoint. Near E. Archaeol. 74 (2), 105–111. Mazar, Eilat, 2011. Discovering the Solomonic Wall in Jerusalem: A Remarkable Archaeological Adventure. Shoham Academic Research and Publication, Jerusalem. Moorey, P., 1991. A Century of Biblical Archaeology. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, Louisville, Kentucky, KY. Rast, Walter E., 1987. Bab Edh-Dhra and the origin of the Sodom Saga. In: Perdue, Leo G., Toombs, Lawrence E., Johnson, Gary L. (Eds.), Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation. Routledge, London, pp. 185–201. Shtienberg, Gilad, Cantu, Katrina, Mischke, Steffen, Sivan, Dorit, Norris, Richard D., Rittenour, Tammy M., Edelman-Furstenberg, Yael, Yasur-Landau, Assaf, Sisma-Ventura, Guy, Levy, Thomas E., 2022. Holocene sea-level rise and coastal aquifer interactions: Triggering mechanisms for environmental change and impacts on human settlement patterns at Dor, Israel. Quat. Sci. Rev. 294, 107740. Smith, N. in press. New approaches to real-time rendering in cyber-archaeology. In: Ben-Yosef, Erez, Jones, Ian W. N. (Eds.), And in Length of Days Understanding (Job 12:12) – Essays on Archaeology in the 21st Century in Honor of Thomas E. Levy. Springer Nature, Cham. Smith, Neil, Howland, Matt, Levy, Thomas, 2015. Digital archaeology field recording in the 4th dimension: ArchField Cþþ a 4D GIS for digital field work. In: Proceedings of Digital Heritage International Congress (DigitalHeritage) 2015, September 28–October 2, 2015.
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Smith, Neil, Knabb, Kyle, DeFanti, Connor, Weber, Philip, Schulze, Jurgen, Prudhomme, Andrew, Kuester, Falko, Levy, Thomas, DeFanti, Thomas, 2013. ArtifactVis2: Managing Real-Time Archaeological Data in Immersive 3D Environments. In: 2013 Digital Heritage International Congress, pp. 363–370. Stern, Ephraim (Ed.), 2008. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 5. Israel Exploration Society and Biblical Archaeology Society, Jerusalem and Washington, DC. Thompson, Thomas L., 1999. The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. Basic Books, New York, NY. Vaknin, Yoav, Shaar, Ron, Lipschits, Oded, Mazar, Amihai, Maeir, Aren M., Garfinkel, Yosef, Freud, Liora, Faust, Avraham, Tappy, Ron E., Kreimerman, Igor, Ganor, Saar, CovelloParan, Karen, Sergi, Omer, Herzog, Zeev, Arav, Rami, Lederman, Zvi, Münger, Stefan, Fantalkin, Alexander, Gitin, Seymour, Ben-Yosef, Erez, 2022. Reconstructing biblical military campaigns using geomagnetic field data. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 119 (44) e2209117119. Yasur-Landau, Assaf, Cline, Eric, Rowan, Yorke, 2018. The Social Archaeology of the Levant: From Prehistory to the Present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Cognitive Archaeology Marc A. Abramiuk, Anthropology Program, California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI), Camarillo, CA, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Historical and Theoretical Overview The Approaches Utilized by Cognitive Archaeologists Key Issues Topical Debates in Cognitive Archaeology Debates in Ideational Cognitive Archaeology Debates in Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology Room for a Middle Ground? An Example of Reconciling Darwinian and Non-Darwinian Conceptions in Visual Representation Summary and Future Directions References
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Definition and goals of cognitive archaeology, and data used to make cognitive archaeological inferences Historical and theoretical overview of cognitive archaeology The different kinds of approaches utilized by cognitive archaeologists Topical debates in ideational cognitive archaeology and evolutionary cognitive archaeology Summary and emerging trends in cognitive archaeological practice
Abstract Cognitive archaeology, also known as archaeology of mind, is a rapidly burgeoning specialty within archaeology with the particular purpose of studying the mind in the past. Cognitive archaeology makes use primarily of material cultural remains to make inferences concerning how and what people thought in the past. More specifically, cognitive archaeologists are involved in reconstructing the mind frames (i.e., concepts and percepts) of people in the past, and inferring how cognition evolved throughout our lineage from our earliest shared common ancestor with apes to modern Homo sapiens. These two foci within cognitive archaeology have recently come to be known as ideational cognitive archaeology and evolutionary cognitive archaeology, respectively. Although cognitive archaeologists mainly use material cultural remains as their data, they also rely on evidence obtained in fields like biological anthropology, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy for understanding the nature and functioning of the mind. Cognitive archaeology is a field replete with debates that largely stem from different epistemological as well as ontological points of view. Debates in ideational cognitive archaeology tend to be rooted in epistemological differences whereas those in evolutionary cognitive archaeology tend to derive from ontological differences. A healthy amount of debate is important in any burgeoning discipline and provides us with a framework that can lead to greater insight as new data are acquired. To this end, the future of cognitive archaeological practice will no doubt involve incorporating increasingly more data from the fields of genetics and experimental archaeology for understanding the mind in the past.
Introduction Cognitive archaeology is a specialized field within archaeology that focuses on elucidating the mind in the past through material cultural remains in conjunction with other forms of evidence (e.g., skeletal, genetic). Cognitive archaeology has two major objectives. The first objective is to infer how people thought and planned tasks in the past, as well as to reconstruct past people’s mind framesdpercepts, concepts, as well as constellations of concepts that form belief systems. The second objective is to study how the human mind evolved, the aim being to answer questions about the rise of cognitive capabilities and to explain cultural developments in the past. More recently, the terms ideational cognitive archaeology and evolutionary cognitive archaeology have been used for these two divergent but related objectives (Wynn et al., 2022). Cognitive archaeologists make use of several forms of evidence to make informed claims about the mind frames and cognitive capabilities of people in the past. The main data that cognitive archaeologists rely on to make inferences concerning cognition are
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material cultural remains. Using a number of approaches, cognitive archaeologists attempt to infer instances of thought and thought processes from these cultural remains and their distributions. Toward these ends, cognitive archaeologists are all involved in studying how humans interact with material culture, not only because certain types of material culture and their distributions can function as indicators for certain mind frames and cognitive capabilities, but because material culture itself can have an effect on the mind that these archaeologists seek to elucidate. With this said, cognitive archaeological inquiry is interdisciplinary and involves incorporating theory and data from other fields, such as biological anthropology, cognitive anthropology, genetics, neuropsychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy to understand how and what people in the past thought. This interdisciplinary perspective combined with a distinctive vantage point for studying material culture over time places cognitive archaeologists in a unique position not only to study mind frames in the past, but to contribute to our knowledge of the nature of the human mind and its origins.
Overview Historical and Theoretical Overview The term, cognitive archaeology first began to be used in the 1970s to describe the kind of research that explained material cultural patterns in the archaeological record to be the result of the belief systems that people maintained in the past (e.g., Flannery and Marcus, 1976; Hall, 1976). It was not until the 1980s that the term began to be used to refer to a more general field of inquiry aimed at recognizing as well as making inferences about “intelligent behavior” from archaeological remains (Renfrew, 1982). The implication of this broader definition is that it encompassed not only research attributing certain patterns in the archaeological record to an ancient people’s beliefs, but also paleoarchaeological research that had recently begun making inferences about the cognitive capabilities of early humans (e.g., Wynn, 1979). At this time, cognitive archaeology was part of a larger movement which was intent on moving away from the logical empiricism motivating much of processual archaeological research (e.g., Binford, 1968). This movement included not only cognitive archaeology but post-processual archaeology (Hodder, 1982a,b), which in large part was also concerned with studying the mind in the past albeit using different approaches, deemed “idealist” by processual archaeologists (Renfrew, 1994:4). Cognitive archaeology’s earliest detailed articulation of its objectives came in the mid-1990s (Renfrew, 1994). This more cohesive layout of the goals of cognitive archaeology was in part meant to delineate it from post-processual archaeology. Beginning in the early-1980s, post-processual archaeologists led by Ian Hodder (1982a,b, 1984) challenged processual archaeologists’ adherence to a materialist view of culture and the notion of archaeology as a science, which post-processualists asserted were incompatible with making inferences about the ideational realms of past people. Cognitive archaeologists, on the other hand, were less inclined to give up on processual precepts for studying the mind in the past. However, the consequences of maintaining a foothold in both processual archaeology and mind-related research for cognitive archaeologists meant limiting the scope of the kinds of research questions that fall under the purview of cognitive archaeology. Influenced in part by Merlin Donald’s (1991) research, cognitive archaeology began to be envisioned as the study of the ways in which material symbols were used in the past which, in turn, could be used to understand more precisely how people used material symbols to think (e.g., design, plan, and measure) in the past (Renfrew, 1994). This narrowing of objectives was meant to distinguish cognitive archaeology from post-processual archaeology’s concern with interpretive approaches for understanding how the archaeological record is meaningfully constituted (e.g., Hodder, 1986). The 2000s were characterized by attempts to search for the foundations of cognitive archaeology. The earliest of these attempts involved an ontological reexamination of certain key concepts that were outlined in cognitive archaeology’s earliest articulation of its objectives, such as what “mind” (or “concept”) is and what a “symbol” is. In “Symbol before Concept,” for example, Renfrew (2001) begins to question the mind-matter dualism that had been inherent in earlier mind-related archaeological research (including his own), which viewed the human mind as a system for manipulating symbols and effecting behavior (Renfrew, 1994:5–6). This dualism was noticeable in archaeologists’ propensity for envisioning human thought, whether in the form of beliefs or mental templates, as preceding human action and the material products of that action. Renfrew (2001) further implied that dualism was responsible for obfuscating what archaeologists could hope to infer about the mind from material culture. An example is the futility often involved in attempting to decode the meaning of material culture by archaeologists. The futility stems from the fact that the endeavor requires that archaeologists have some insight into the arbitrary meanings that ancient people attributed to things to begin with. This dilemma for archaeologists, it was proposed, could all be done away with by viewing meanings as non-arbitrary, and envisioning the mind as non-symbolic or non-representational and more tightly bound todif not conflateddwith material culture itself. This view of the mind was elaborated upon in “Rethinking Materiality” (Demarais et al., 2004) by Renfrew (2004) and by others at Cambridge University (Boivin, 2004; Knappett, 2004; Malafouris, 2004), and subsequently developed along slightly different lines (e.g., Boivin, 2008, 2009; Knappett, 2005; Malafouris, 2007, 2010). Taking stock of the phenomenological research in anthropology (Gosden, 1994; Miller, 1987; Thomas, 1996; Tilley, 1994) and its roots in phenomenological philosophy (Merle-Ponty, 1962(1945); Heidegger, 1971, 1977) and ecological psychology (Gibson, 1977, 1979), much of the work out of the Cambridge school advocated an anti-dualist foundation for cognitive archaeology by emphasizing the indivisibility of the human mind and the material surroundings with which the human engages. This ontological viewpoint persists for many cognitive archaeologists. As such, the main questions these cognitive archaeologists attempt to answer
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concern how humans think through their engagement with physical features and objects (and material culture in particular), and what the cognitive and cultural implications of this engagement are. Whereas archaeologists of the Cambridge school have primarily been involved with seeking an ontological foundation for cognitive archaeology and building a research program around the notion of materiality of mind (Malafouris, 2013), other researchers have been involved in searching for cognitive archaeology’s epistemological foundations (Abramiuk, 2012; Currie and Killin, 2019; Garofoli and Haidle, 2013; Killin and Pain, 2021; Osiurak et al., 2020). The search for cognitive archaeology’s epistemological foundations is concerned with the justification and limitations of the approaches archaeologists use to gain knowledge of instances of thought and thought processes of people in the past. For example, in “The Foundations of Cognitive Archaeology,” Abramiuk (2012) addresses cognitive archaeology’s epistemological foundations by examining six fundamental approaches that archaeologists involved in mind-related research have used to infer mind frames and cognitive capabilities of humans and their related antecedents. Abramiuk then proceeds to justify the use of these approaches through examining the logical and empirical support for using them. In so doing, committing ontologically to a single theory concerning the nature of the mind and developing a research agenda around it becomes secondary to inquiring how archaeologists know what they know about the mind in the past. This latter query depends less on the need for an all-encompassing theory of the mind and more on directly assessing the multiple strands of empirical evidence (e.g., experiments) used to support archaeologists’ approaches to elucidating mind frames and cognitive capabilities in the past.
The Approaches Utilized by Cognitive Archaeologists From an epistemological standpoint, cognitive archaeologists are guided by a number of research questions that simply cannot be answered using one approach. Accordingly, the “materiality approach” taken by the Cambridge school is viewed as just one of six general approaches that attempt to glean information on a particular aspect of the mind. All six approaches, however, have proven to be useful in enriching our knowledge of what and how people thought in the past. The general comparative approach is an approach that has been used by archaeologists since the beginning of the 20th century (e.g., Reinach, 1903). This approach attempts to glean insight into the mind frames of a group of people in the past by studying a contemporary ethnographic group that is characteristically similar to the group in the past. Fundamentally, it needs to be shown that the shared characteristics in question, such as adaptive strategy, social organization and other common delimiting factors, help to generate the same sorts of material culture and mind frames associated with that material culture. The approach can be seen to have three general steps: (1) select the ancient group and material cultural remains associated with this group from which one wants to infer mind frames, (2) identify an ethnographic group resembling the ancient group, which also produces the same material cultural remains, and (3) certify that the mind frames associated with the material culture can be explained as the result of the characteristics that both the ethnographic group and ancient group share. In undertaking these three steps, the analyst can effectively argue that the mind frames of the people in the past that the archaeologist is studying are the same or similar to those maintained by the people in the ethnographic group. David-Lewis Williams (2002), building off of earlier research (Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1988), used this approach in attempting to explain the meaning of the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings of the FrancoCantabrian region. He did so, by pointing out that the San and Shoshonean Coso, among other groups known for painting images on rock faces share similar social characteristics (including having a shamanic tradition) to those who were responsible for the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings. He further showed that these social characteristics can lead to the production of similar kinds of material culture. In particular, he found that it was the similar physical conditions to which shamans in present and past societies would have subjected themselves that would have generated in shamans the same kinds of mind frames reflected in the groups’ similar painted imagery. That is to say that the mind frames associated with the Upper Paleolithic paintings could be regarded to be the result of altered states of consciousness induced by the same delimiting factors responsible for producing the more recent paintings of the San and others. The direct historical approach has also been around since the beginning of the 20th century; however, its specific use for uncovering mind frames did not achieve a definitive articulation until the publication of Marcus and Flannery’s (1994) work. Like the general comparative approach, the direct historical approach is used similarly to infer mind frames of a people in the past through ethnographic comparison. Unlike the general comparative approach, however, the direct historical approach begins by selecting a group in recent history or in the present that is culturally if not genealogically related to the people in the past that the archaeologist is investigating. The premise behind the direct historical approach is that semantic conceptsdthe kinds of concepts that the direct historical approach targetsdare passed down inter-generationally in the art, folklore, myths, and other cultural forms. The archaeologist, therefore, has only to look at the the concepts embedded in the descendant group’s cultural forms and the concepts recounted in any pertinent first-person or second-hand descriptions to infer what concepts were maintained by those in the ancestral group. Whether this approach can be used, however, depends on the degree of cultural continuity between the two groups. Evidence of cultural continuity is supported if the two groups share material cultural attributes tying them to the same practices and belief systems. Marcus and Flannery (1994), for example, establish long-term cultural continuity by showing that certain ritual practices reflected in the material culture displayed by the Colonial Zapotec (e.g., perforators used in autosacrificial rituals) are also exhibited at earlier Zapotec sites. This, in turn, permits the authors to reconstruct certain aspects of the earlier Zapotec belief system related to these rituals from the ethnohistoric descriptions of the Colonial Zapotec belief system. The associative approach first began to be utilized specifically as a method for inferring mind frames in the mid-20th century. For example, Spaulding (1953) used this approach in asserting that artifact types are constellations made up of attributes that were
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envisioned as belonging together by the artifacts’ makers. In other words, Spaulding suggested that an artifact type was a concept maintained by people in the past just as much as it is a category constructed by archaeologists. The associative approach can also be extended to account for assemblages (Spaulding, 1960). Flannery (1976), for example, utilizes an associative approach, or what he calls “contextual analysis,” to infer the meaning of Formative period ritual assemblages in Oaxaca. Unlike the general comparative and direct historical approaches, the associative approach does not depend on ethnographic comparison. Rather, it depends on patterns borne through successive observations of either certain attributes that archaeologists use to designate a type, or certain types of cultural remains within a specific context that archaeologists use to characterize an assemblage. In cognitive scientific terms, the associative approach involves uncovering categorically or thematically related concepts and the conceptual archetype (e.g., prototype or exemplar) with which they are associated. The associative approach is based on the notion that concepts come to be related in the minds of all people through observing and constructing correlations among the myriad material attributes and types in the world in which they live. The associative approach then is simply a means by which an archaeologist, through material remains, reassembles the concepts and the relationships among them that people acquired in the past to form their conceptual archetype (Abramiuk, 2012:77–92). The structural archaeological approach first began to be utilized as a theoretical approach by archaeologists in the mid-20th century to unlock the meaning of the Upper Paleolithic paintings of the Franco-Cantabrian region (e.g., Leroi-Gourhan, 1964). The objective of the structural archaeological approach is to reconstruct the opposite analogies that motivated the behavior responsible for the material cultural patterns that the archaeologist is studying. This approach finds support in the cognitive scientific research on the universality of the main stages of analogical reasoning and the cross-cultural salience of oppositional relations. The structural archaeological approach begins like the associative approach by uncovering material cultural types and the relations among them, but also seeks the oppositional relations connecting these types (or concepts). For example, in studying the Thule, McGhee (1977) identified a distinct pattern between the composition of Thule artifacts and the type of environment in which the artifacts were used. Artifacts made from antler were generally used for land-based, summer activities, while those made from ivory were used for sea-based, winter activities. However, he also noticed that ivory tended to be used mainly by females or was related to females in some sense, and that antler artifacts were associated with the male domain. In both of these observed sets of thematic relations he noticed that oppositional relations, namely those between sea and land, winter and summer, and male and female, crosscut the sets of thematic relationships. In short, he identified an opposite analogy underlying the material cultural pattern he observed, which he further managed to substantiate through identifying these same associations in the mythology of the descendants of the Thule. The materiality approach is a general term used to refer to a number of variant approaches that are all concerned in some way with analytically situating the mind in the material world and studying the cognitive and cultural implications that arise from this analytical placement. Although phenomenological archaeologists in the 1990s had been involved in using what could be termed a materiality approach (Tilley, 1994; Barrett, 1994), it was not formalized and coined until a decade later (DeMarrais et al., 2004). Unlike the other approaches thus far discussed, the materiality approach is mainly concerned with how people thought in the past, rather than what they thought. This is accomplished through understanding how past people are believed to have engaged with things. Barrett (1994) demonstrates this approach by visualizing how the mortuary practices of ancient Britons from the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age contributed to the changing burial landscape and how this changing landscape, in turn, changed ancient Britons’ perceptions of the dead. Over time, the mortuary sites through these two periods afforded different practices due to differential accessibility to the dead. By considering how the ancient people would have engaged with their mortuary sites, Barrett could infer that the dead went from being considered part of the living world to being segregated from the living. One of the more popular variants of the materiality approach is Material Engagement Theory (MET) initially put forth by Renfrew (2001, 2004) and subsequently developed and applied to a more diverse set of research questions (Malafouris, 2013). The premise behind MET and other developed variants of the materiality approach (e.g., Boivin, 2008) is the assertion that thinking is not confined to the firing of neurons in one’s brain; rather, cognition extends to our actions and all the things in the world with which we engage. In this way, the mind is embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted. For the cognitive archaeologist, this 4E ontological commitment guides the way in which one studies how people in the past thought. Archaeologists relying on MET do not infer thought from material cultural remains, but analyze how people might have thought through material culture while they were engaging with it, and how this engagement might have led to new ways of thinking. The final approach that will be discussed is the conditional approach. It was Renfrew (1982, 1994) who first advocated explicitly for using deductive reasoning to infer thought processes, such as planning and measurement, as logical consequences of the presence of certain cultural remains. The manner in which cognitive archaeologists deductively frame their inferences about the cognition of people in the past based on the presence (or absence) of specific cultural remains can be found in many archaeologists’ work, and it has come to be known as the “conditional approach” (Abramiuk, 2012:141–152). Weak attempts at using what could be termed a conditional approach can be identified at least as far back as the early 20th century. For example, the Maya archaeologist Thompson (1911:502) attempted to make use of the approach to discern the meaning of different ancient Maya architectural forms. However, the success of the conditional approach is more noticeable in the study of cognitive evolution, where certain cognitive capabilities, such as enhanced working memory or semantic long-term memory, are inferred from the appearance of particular artifacts in the archaeological record. The conditional approach has been used for this purpose since the 1970s when it was used to understand the intelligence of late Acheulean toolmakers based on their toolkits (e.g., Wynn, 1979). The idea behind the conditional approach is to deduce the cognitive capabilities that would have been required for manufacturing and utilizing the material culture left behind by people in the past. Conditional statements are used to articulate the archaeologist’s reasoning about what the archaeological data implies about cognition in the past, such as whether the inferred cognitive capability is a necessary or sufficient
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condition for producing the particular material cultural form in question. In this way, the conditional approach offers a systematic manner for objectively analyzing the cognitive implications of certain material cultural forms, as well as a venue for verifying or invalidating the reasoning behind the archaeologist’s claims. The conditional approach is one of the most powerful tools for approaching the study of cognitive evolution. This is because although the approach can be used to detect modern cognitive traits, it makes no assumptions that the ancient people being investigated thought as we do. As such, the conditional approach can be used to infer the cognitive characteristics of neuroanatomically modern humans as well as other species in our lineage.
Key Issues Topical Debates in Cognitive Archaeology Cognitive archaeologists over the past three decades have produced a significant amount of research. As such, it is helpful to distinguish two branches of cognitive archaeology having different but related objectives: ideational cognitive archaeology and evolutionary cognitive archaeology. In ideational cognitive archaeology, the purpose is to elucidate the mind frames of people in the past through attempting to reconstruct concepts and percepts. In evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the purpose is to use archaeological data to study the evolution of the mind (i.e., cognitive evolution) within the human lineage (Abramiuk, 2019). Much of evolutionary cognitive archaeology entails mainly understanding when and how certain cognitive capabilities and, by implication, certain cultural developments appeared. Today, cognitive archaeology is just as involved in debating what mind frames people maintained in the past and how the mind worked, as it is about learning new things about the ancient mind through the approaches discussed above.
Debates in Ideational Cognitive Archaeology In ideational cognitive archaeology, the assumption is made that the people in the past being studied were capable of perceiving and maintaining concepts and that these percepts and concepts can be examined. This being said, the debates that occur in ideational cognitive archaeology tend to be epistemological and revolve around how archaeologists know what people were thinking in the past (or what something meant to someone in the past), and how archaeologists can assert something about the concepts or beliefs that people held. An example is the long-held view that ancient Maya and Aztec warfare was governed mainly by cosmological or religious beliefs and that Maya religion demanded war in order to obtain captives to be sacrificed. This view that religious beliefs are central to warfare and that dispatched captives were seen as “sacrifices” to the gods, rather than seen more profanely as casualties of war, has been recently contested. This new understanding of ancient Maya and Aztec beliefs is not so much a consequence of new data that we have; rather, it is the result of adopting a critical view of our previous assumptions, and realizing that there is a fundamental lack of support for the “sacrifice” concept in the linguistic, epigraphic, and archaeological data (Graham, 2019:30). In a similar way, the motives for what Maya archaeologists have termed “ritual caches” has also been questioned. This reevaluation is attributed to the fact that our assumption regarding the meaning of these caches has tended to be colored by our interpretations of the epigraphic data over what ethnoarchaeological research informs us about these caches (Abramiuk, 2023). Other work in ideational cognitive archaeology has focused more on how certain symbols gave rise to complex societies and associated new ways of thinking and conduct. The meaning of Mesopotamian motifs on Egyptian objects is a case in point. Whereas previous work has attempted to tackle the meaning of motifs through using later sources to decode the meanings, Prezioso (2020) argues that a more productive approach should consider the factors that led to the adoption of these motifs and what the consequences were. Prezioso’s analysis of figurative motifs suggests that Mesopotamian motifs on Egyptian objects helped shape society through their foreignness, which immediately struck Egyptians. Through their exoticness, Mesopotamian motifs afforded the basis for an elite class to rise in Egypt together with the beliefs that surround such hierarchical structuring. Applying a similar approach to a different topic, Overmann (2016) argues that the meaning attributed to written symbols (and later the advent of literacy) arose as the result of people’s engagement with things that they were trying to depict and with the depictions themselves. Writing initially arose to depict things with fidelity, and then gradually as the depictions became recognized topologically, they could afford to become more abstract. At the same time, our brains became trained to attune to specific written features, which became subtler in the more abstract written forms. This process, which led to writing becoming simpler, not only afforded speed of production, but allowed humans to learn to assign lexical meaning to the written symbols. Regarding a different topic but using a similar tactic, O’Neil (2011) makes a compelling argument concerning how shifts in practices led to certain lintels at the ancient Maya center of Yaxchilan acquiring different meaning. O’Neil argues that the fact that the inscribed lintels, which date to the 6th century AD, were reset in a building dating to the 8th century AD suggests that they became valued for their antiquity and associations with ancestors and, therefore, were meant to be on display. This, taken together with the fact that the lintels’ arrangement would have afforded circumambulation, suggests to O’Neil that the lintels were meant to be viewed during ritual processions in which ancestors were venerated.
Debates in Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology In evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the objective is not to devise ways of inferring beliefs and perceptions. This, of course, would assume that people in the past maintained the requisite cognitive capabilities for generating these types of mind frames. Instead, the objective for evolutionary cognitive archaeologists is to identify the cognitive capabilitiesdand more broadly the kind of minddpeople in the past had. This objective, however, also hinges on certain assumptions. These assumptions specifically relate
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to the long-term processes that undergird the nature of the mind. Therefore, in evolutionary cognitive archaeology, debates tend to be rooted in ontologydand specifically in process ontology. There are two process ontologies that tend to characterize the work of evolutionary cognitive archaeologists: Darwinian and non-Darwinian (Abramiuk, 2019, 2021). Nowhere is the contrast between these two ontologies more apparent than in how evolutionary cognitive archaeologists attempt to explain the emergence of representational thought, responsible for language, art, religion, and other related cultural developments. Traditionally, evolutionary cognitive archaeology has been approached through a Darwinian understanding of how the mind has evolved. It envisages, like Darwin (1888) did, that the brain was the seat of cognition, and that natural selection and “chance” have played a central role in the evolution of cognition. Since the time of the modern synthesis (Huxley, 1942), this has been taken to mean that cognition evolves through natural processes centered on the passing on of genes that select for certain cognitive capabilities. Thus, there are now considered to be mechanisms involved in cognitive evolution other than natural selection and what Darwin called “chance,” for explaining how cognitive capabilities evolve. Nevertheless, because of the indispensibility of natural selection in particular for understanding how cognition evolves, the term “Darwinian” (instead of the term “neo-Darwinian”) will be retained to describe this ontological view of cognitive evolution. The Darwinian conception of cognitive evolution has generally functioned as the modus operandi in evolutionary cognitive archaeology. For example, the Darwinian conception is evident in the work of Robin Dunbar (2003) who argues that the social environment produced the conditions conducive to increased brain size over time. Known as the social brain hypothesis, Dunbar argued that brain size (measured as neocortical volume) increased because of the augmented cognitive demands placed on living in social groups, which grew in size and complexity over time. The associated cognitive capabilities that were deemed to have emerged along with an increased neocortex were rudimentary language capability and the capability to meta-represent (beyond that which is deemed capable of chimpanzees) by about 500,000 years ago. Steven Mithen (1996), another advocate for Darwinian cognitive evolution, argued along the lines of evolutionary psychologists that the mind is comprised of mental modules, each designated with a specific purpose that had evolved by way of natural selection in the distant past. Mithen then uses the appearance of specific types of material culture as indicators for the appearance of certain mental modules and the interconnections among them. Mithen proposed three stages of cognitive development. The first stage was characterized by a domain-general mind which likely predated the appearance of anthropoids. The second stage is one in which the mind was modular consisting of specialized intelligences. And the third stage for Mithen designated a time at which the mind became more fluid and less compartmentalized between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago. According to Mithen, the advent of the third stage contributed to the emergence of representational thought, indicated by the appearance of symbolic material culture and art. According to evolutionary cognitive archaeologists who take a Darwinian view, the emergence of new cognitive capabilities and psychological traits are sometimes explained through “neo-Darwinian” mechanisms such as mutations, as well as natural selection acting on previously uncommon genetic variants (Ambrose, 2010: S142). For example, one well-researched cognitive capability believed to have mutated between 130,000 and 60,000 years ago, based on evidence of differences between the toolmaking abilities of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, was working memory and, more specifically, the phonological loop that allows humans to store more concepts (Coolidge and Wynn, 2005; Wynn and Coolidge, 2004). Such a novel capacity would have been integral for acquiring modern language as well as conceptual metaphors, which might have contributed to the development of mathematics (Coolidge et al., 2015). The acquisition of language, although framed as a process that began with the earliest of our genus, is often seen as a development arising from mutations, the last one of which has been argued to have occurred as late as 50,000 years ago (Klein, 2017). The Darwinian view that cognitive evolution is the result of natural selection and “chance,” albeit punctuated by genetic mutations, has come under recent attack by MET advocates. Although MET does not explicitly discount biological mechanisms as playing a role in cognitive evolution (Malafouris, 2013:38–43), it effectively sidetracks them, putting into question their role in ratcheting cognition in our lineage over time. MET proposes that the evolution of cognition and the cultural developments that characterize it can be explained through humans’ use of material surroundings (e.g., material culture) as cognitive scaffolding. The notion of cognitive scaffolding is related to the ecological psychological concept known as an affordance (Gibson, 1977). The idea behind cognitive scaffolding is that the things with which we engage as well as certain actions (called epistemic actions) we perform afford us with new capabilities and ways of thinking. In so doing, it is asserted that it is our material surroundings, both natural and manufactured, that provide the cognitive ratcheting that in the Darwinian view unfolded biologically, and was traditionally reserved for natural selection and “chance.” In MET, the implication is that the evolution of cognition need not rely on perpetual neurophysiological changes inculcated through biological mechanisms. Rather, it is effected through the permanence of objects we use and the actions we practice, which are passed down not ultimately genetically, but rather extrasomatically. Malafouris (2007, 2013), for example, asserts that the earliest painted images in Europe, such as those that decorate the chambers of Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, were the products of a lengthy process in which humans had been involved in a reflexive engagement with mark-making. The earliest definitive mark-making dates to about 100,000 years ago and is found on pieces of ochre at Blombos Cave; it would have been through marks such as these and successively more complex ones that new ways of thinking emerged (i.e., thinking of marks as images or as having meaning). Garofoli (2018) has proposed that through a similar process, spoken language and the meaning we attribute to certain sounds arose. Perceptual invariances in vocalizations voiced in the presence of particular objects or actions would have come to be used as referents for those objects or actions. Perceptual invariances in vocalizations in specific social contexts, on the other hand, would have facilitated in this process and aided in the emergence of vocalizations meant to convey abstract concepts. One can imagine in the pre-linguistic past that there were successive occasions where one might have found oneself in the presence of another individual with more adornments for example. One might further
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imagine issuing an utterance in these contexts which eventually became more articulate and came to signify “prestige” (Abramiuk, 2021:275).
Room for a Middle Ground? An Example of Reconciling Darwinian and Non-Darwinian Conceptions in Visual Representation Insofar as visual representational thought is concerned, there are two issues at stake in considering the rise of representational thought in a non-Darwinian way, as exemplified by MET. The first issue has to do with how two-dimensional images first appeared. According to MET, the advent of images is seen as the result of incrementally accrued epistemic actions leading to mark-making and the gradual buildup of cognitive scaffolds with each mark. Humans did not conjure an image in their mind, which they then proceeded to draw or paint. Rather representational thought and all the incremental stages that led to it are explained to be the result of epistemic actions and material cultural agency, as well as human agency. In other words, the idea or image in the mind can be explained as the product of a feedback system involving the individual and the individual’s engagements with things over time. The second issue concerns how meaning was attributed to two-dimensional images. According to MET, the incremental stages that led to the creation of images are not necessarily meaningful in their own right. According to MET, meaning comes about later as people come up with new ways of thinking about their actions and the things they create. Lewis-Williams (2002, 2009) touches on both these issues in his research on the meaning of humans’ earliest images, and in some sense his work serves as a middle ground between a non-Darwinian conception and a Darwinian conception of cognitive evolution. Using a general comparative approach (see above), Lewis-Williams proposes that the Upper Paleolithic paintings in the caves of the Franco-Cantabrian region were in many cases painted by shamans or other selected individuals in the throes of an altered state of consciousness (ASC). ASC experiences are well documented phenomena in many groups with shamanic traditions (Whitley, 1998). Moreover, experiments have shown that there is a universal pattern in the kinds of images envisioned by subjects no matter their background, which indicates that ASC experiences are neurologically based (Lewis-Williams, 2002, 2009) and by implication the product of biological evolutionary mechanisms. Based on Lewis-Williams’ work then it would seem that, the earliest images were indeed construed internally with some, such as the entoptic images that are found on cave walls, envisioned with little or no material engagement. Contrary to MET then, it would seem that Lewis-Williams’ (2002, 2009) research suggests that images were first envisioned by the individual, and then were projected onto the walls of caves during the Upper Paleolithic. However, Lewis-Williams does hold a similar view to MET advocates concerning the meaning of the images that were painted by the Upper Paleolithic painters. Lewis-Williams falls short of asserting that these earliest images had aesthetic meaning in the sense that the image of, say, a bison represented a bison. Rather, he asserts that it is more likely that the painter was simply tracing what he envisioned on the wall, and did not even recognize the two-dimensional image as representing a bison. The realization that what was depicted was a bison would come later, through individual recollections and as more individuals engaged with the image.
Summary and Future Directions Cognitive archaeology began in the 1970s as a line of inquiry that attempted to explain cultural patterns in the archaeological record through a consideration of past people’s mind frames and thought processes. This was a divergence from the processual explanations of cultural patterns which were largely behaviorist at the time. Cognitive archaeology soon came to encompass not only mind frames and thought processes, but also research concerned with examining the evolution of cognition through the study of cultural remains. By the 1990s, cognitive archaeology had more or less distinguished itself from the mind-related research post-processual archaeologists were involved in, and had established a clear mission which was to study how people thought in the past, a large part of which was understanding how people used symbols. With the turn of the millennium, archaeologists have largely been involved in establishing the foundations for cognitive archaeology, which have been sought along ontological as well epistemological lines of inquiry. Today, the quantity of published research in cognitive archaeology has grown to the extent that it warrants distinguishing two bodies of research. The first is ideational cognitive archaeology which entails the kind of research that involves uncovering or reconstructing the mind frames of people in the past. The second is evolutionary cognitive archaeology which concerns the study of how human cognition evolved. As with any burgeoning discipline, findings can sometimes lead to healthy debate both within the field and with specialists in other fields, such as cognitive science. In ideational cognitive archaeology these debates tend to be over epistemology, while those in evolutionary cognitive archaeology tend to be over ontology. Although debates rooted in ontology may be more difficult to reconcile, the prospect of reconciliation is possible as was shown above. Aside from the theoretical debates in cognitive archaeology which will no doubt continue, the future of cognitive archaeological practice can be evinced through two emerging trends in research. The first trend entails the use of genetic evidence along with archaeological evidence to better understand how the mind evolved. The second trend is the use of experiments involving material culture to understand how the mind works. The hypothesis that gene mutations were responsible for certain changes in brain and cognitive development in the past (Coolidge and Wynn, 2005; Klein, 2000; Wynn and Coolidge, 2004) is now finding support from outside of archaeology, namely in genetics. For example, mutations of the ASPM gene, known to play a role in brain development, have been proposed to explain the beginning of the accelerated expansion in brain size that began around 2 million years ago (Zhang, 2003). More recent research has supported this hypothesis for hominins in general and has found that acceleration events in brain size within the hominin lineage are related to the acceleration of substitution rates in the ASPM gene (Leyva-Hernández et al., 2021). In this way, genetics
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will gradually play a larger role in our understanding of cognitive evolution. Archaeologists will not only need to interpret what the material cultural remains tell us about people’s cognitive capabilities in the past, but they will also need to consider how these data match up with the genetic data. Future research will also consider more closely in what ways neuroanatomically modern humans differ from their closest extinct relatives (e.g., the Denisovans and Neanderthals), which may in turn shed some light on the differences in material cultural assemblages and skeletal remains that we see among these different groups. Indeed, genetic research has been initiated in this regard and has identified positive selection on a number of genes that play roles in human brain functioning and behavior, including the FOXP2 gene, which plays a role in the development of speech and language (Neubauer et al., 2018). At the same time, archaeologists will also need to consider why these genes are undergoing selection. Experiments also have been gaining traction in cognitive archaeology to better understand the mind in the past. These are experiments that fall into a sub-branch of evolutionary cognitive archaeology known as neuroarchaeology. Such experiments involve looking at how the brain functions as one manufactures and uses tools and other material cultural forms. To arrive at this information, experimenters rely extensively on brain images of human subjects in the midst of a task, such as flint knapping (Stout and Khreisheh, 2015). Brain images show which brain parts were involved in the task in question and may provide clues as to how the brain functioned in the past. Still, caution must be taken in inferring too much from these scans, as the brains of earlier species in our lineage may have worked differently. Experiments will also be the way forward in ideational cognitive archaeology. Exploratory experimental work is a relatively common technique for inferring the meaning of architectural features (Tilley, 2008), and of artifacts (Molloy, 2008). These experiments unfold by personally engaging with features and artifacts in order to learn more about how they might have been perceived and how they might have been used. More systematic experimental research, looking beyond direct perception (e.g., Pearson et al., 2021), however, will begin playing a larger role in ideational cognitive archaeology. In so doing, experiments will provide archaeologists with another form of data that they will be able to use to evaluate their hypotheses about past human mind frames.
See Also: Evolutionary/Neo-Darwinian Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Social Theory in Archaeology.
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Community Archaeology Helmut De Nardia,b and Laura McAtackneyc,d, a King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; b Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia; c Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland; and d Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Sustainability Resistance Co-production Some Examples of Inclusive, Resilient Community-Centered Archaeology in Uncertain times Notes From the FielddDe Nardi Notes From the FielddMcAtackney Summary and Future Directions References
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How community archaeology differs from public archaeology Key terms Recent trends and ideas in community archaeology Case studies that expand on the theoretical-methodological discussion
Abstract In this entry, we outline and discuss some of the main ideas and practices in community archaeology and exemplify these through some of our own projects. We introduce key terms and identify trends and perspectives of community archaeology. We then use a case study drawing from our own research to elucidate the main ideas. Author 1, De Nardi, draws on their experience as editor of the leading journal in this field and reflects on the perspectives, approaches and notions enacted by professionals in the field. Author 2, McAtackney, similarly reflects on her editorial experiences for a large archaeology journal, and teases out the links between practice and theoretical perspectives that emerge from the discipline.
Introduction Community archaeology is a new entry in this edition of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology. The original edition offered a Public Archaeology entry, but this one has both; they are distinct entries, and we find this interesting, as well as timely. We believe that this difference and differentiation of terms entail more than a matter of semantics, however: this differentiation, rather, has to do with the methods, and often the “mission,” of the archaeological endeavors that come under these two rubrics. The aims of this entry are twofold. We introduce key terms and identify trends and perspectives of community archaeology. We then use a case study drawing from our own research to further reflect on the main ideas we introduced. Author 1, De Nardi, draws on their experience as the editor of a leading journal in community archaeology and heritage and reflects on the variety and richness of perspectives, approaches and notions enacted by professionals in the field. Author 2, McAtackney, similarly reflects on her editorial experiences for a large archaeology journal, and teases out the links between practice and theoretical perspectives that emerge from the discipline. Together, we wish to place some central concepts in conversation, starting from the commitment to social justice in the practice of community archaeology, and how some practitioners are leading the way in this respect; we also highlight some challenges in the sustainability of the very nature of archaeological work and its modes of development and dissemination. We then analyze the impact of the pandemic as the “peak” of the disruptions and restrictions to the potentially fruitful and truly collaborative process of involving communities into our work. Community archaeology, as a fundamentally participatory practice, can take many forms. It can include collaborative research, citizen science, survey, excavation and post-excavation analysis and dissemination. It can simply mean including members of the community as volunteers in our fieldwork teams through to reflexively involving the ideas, experience and wishes of community
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members in every facet of our fieldwork planning, processes and outcomes. It is a term that can mean many different things to different people and so a project couched within the community archaeology approach can do many of these things-sometimes, more than one step or feature is embedded in the project. Community archaeology is done with, and in, a community; as such, it relies on the understanding that learning about the past in the present reaffirms or challenges notions of nation, home and belonging. While different in scope, community archaeology projects that are mindful of the situated nature of the participation with communities can disrupt with equal poignancy the notion of emplaced identity, exploring ideas of right to place, knowledge and enjoyment in ways that transcend the assumptions of “belonging.” But archaeology can sometimes incur the risk of being fossilized as static, time-dependent, and stagnant in some ways that do not express the dynamic and multifaceted sense of place for communities (De Nardi, 2014). There are increasing calls to actively avoid this pitfall, and we argue this shift is already happening at a broad scale in the discipline of community archaeology today. Next, we introduce some key ideas about the ways that community archaeology is conceptualized, practiced and enacted.
Overview and Key Issues We believe that community archaeology should not be extractive, but rather should adopt a social justice lens as an overarching standard of practice. Community archaeology can be a tool for social justice when it responds to felt community-led agendas, ambitions and needs of self-representation and fairness, rather than being a box-ticking exercise to be filed under the “impact” section of funding applications. Community archaeologists can work with complex and sensitive ideas of social, economic, gender and ability disparities and inequities in the communities with which they collaborate. Depending on the context where they operate, there can be challenges that the archaeologist needs to overcome in building trust with communities, especially if they are more marginalized or have had poor previous experiences. They can come up against reluctance to engage with elite institutions, fear of bureaucracy or the official, or simply a disenchantment with archaeology as a community-led process. Archaeology, as a discipline, for far too long has exploited community and non-professional scholars and the public or simply treated them as a cautious footnote in their interpretation and write-ups of research.
Sustainability As far back as 2008, Simpson and Williams argued good practice in community archaeology must ensure a balance in projects so they are co-produced and dialogic but they also must allow space for archaeological expertise (2008, 72). This is a challenging balance to maintain as including the role of the “expert” ensures a hierarchy of knowledge is included in the collaboration which is not always agreed or accepted by the community members involved in the archaeology project. Likewise, Moshenska et al. (2011) have stressed that community projects must explicitly address community needs while communicating the importance of archaeology and thereby ensuring it is sustainable for all parties. Such a balance is difficult in any archaeological project but it must be especially difficult to navigate when archaeologists work with communities who are marginalized and sidelined from dominant heritage representations in their society and especially when the archaeologists do not come from those communities. It is especially important to question the basis of expertise and academic knowledge when archaeologists are working with communities who have not only been ignored and sidelined but also systematically abused by official institutions in the recent past, as it the case with residential school survivors in Canada who are working with archaeologists to locate and record mass graves (Supernant, 2018). While this may seem an extreme example, it ties into wider issues of the need to questiondand even disruptdthe basis of knowledge and how we understand the recent past for marginalized communities in many Global North countries. The issue of the sustainability of community work is also an important facet of this discussion to bear in mind. Sustainability has become a buzzword in heritage and archaeology in recent years but often the implicit focus is on ecological and economic aspects without considering how that other pillardof social and cultural sustainabilitydis incorporated into our projects. The short-term nature of much of community archaeology, especially that which is mandated or funded as part of development processes, tends to create problems maintaining projects over a long period of time and also often results in the neglect of “aftercare” of the communities we work with and are situated in (Moshenska et al., 2011). The lack of funding for follow up engagement is a prime example of this shortcoming and is a frequent issue in terms of funding often being specific to excavation rather than being based around a long-term engagement with the community. Moshenska et al. (2011) provide inspiration in terms of how a detailed, multi-year plan at Hendon School allowed a project to progress, even with limited funding, because it was in consultation with the school community in ways that allowed their participation beyond excavation and to extend to new participants over time.
Resistance As with any practice, community archaeology can engender forms of resistance against top-down approaches typical of the academic and funding frameworks. For a broad theoretical appreciation of how resistance in the everyday can occur, we can draw on a rich literature on resistance and creative responses to structural inequalities, starting with Michel de Certeau’s work. In the processes of interactive, dynamic community-focused projects there is plenty of room for the telling and enacting of multiple stories. Our cocreation of archaeological projects and initiatives would ideally enable the emergence of multiple versions of the past, and offer a resistance to mainstream academic narratives: de Certeau calls these acts of resistance “tactics” or “coping mechanisms” (de
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Certeau, 1984; xxii). In horizontal and participatory practice, then, non-hegemonic, marginalized voices have the possibility of infiltrating their own innumerable differences, multiple identities and motives in to the dominant archaeological narrative (de Certeau, 1984, 41). Our practices in community archaeology are often methods-orientated rather than theory-heavy, because what we do differently from most archaeological practices, is that we bring an archaeological lens to often community-started projectsdnot the other way around. We use archaeological fieldwork approaches and engagement methods to respond to real community needs and work with agendas our participants and collaborators have identified, created, shaped or influenced themselves. The key aspect to ensuring the balance of power in the collaboration does not always lie with the “expertise” of the archaeologists; instead it is to allow for the projects to be working with real, identified needs of the community.
Co-production Community archaeology is often about creativity and aims for co-production. Co-production can be broadly understood as the participatory and collaborative generation of knowledge by practitioners with their publics, participants and users (Jasanoff, 2004). In the context of archaeology, coproduction can mean many things, but usually we take it to represent an ethos rather than a specific practice or set of practices. This ethos underlies all stages of a project’s life, from planning to delivery. A commitment to knowledge co-production can lead to the meaningful co-creation of projects and outputs that meet community needs and vision, as well as academic deliverables. Waterman postulates that “equality, justice and democracy are social practices that take place” (2020, 3). This idea, and much of community archaeology, is the active search for more just and better representative ways of sharing the knowledge about the past in the present: using the lens of the past in locating self and agency. It is with the ethos of co-production and equality, justice and democracy in mind that we introduce some recent and current trends in “community archaeology” below. In so doing we do not aim to be exhaustive, as this growing practice is ever changing and ever more eclectic; we rather seek to provide some examples that we feel represent key concerns and central ideas within this ‘subfield’ of archaeology and cultural heritage work.
Some Examples of Inclusive, Resilient Community-Centered Archaeology in Uncertain times The overall praxis of community-led archaeology should be mindful of the perspectives of the communities we work with and their understandings of archaeology. There is a range of research on the positive impacts of archaeology and heritage on key wellbeing indicators (Sayer, 2015; Pennington et al., 2019). The arts, archaeology and cultural heritage engagements may have potential to deliver opportunities to draw communities together in establishing meaningful links to pasts and place, and to affect physical and mental wellbeing through fieldwork and collaborative projects for participants in the present. This potential can only be realized if archaeologists embrace challenges: using creative arts to express archaeological findings, accepting that diverse publics have agency as co-creators and co-curators of knowledge and interpretation, and protecting their community co-researchers' agency and Intellectual Property in every endeavor from project design to output. Ultimately community archaeology is about acknowledging the centrality of coproduction, outreach and the integrity of our disciplines as a central and vital aspect (Mullins, 2007). We are mindful here of Sara Perry’s work on enchantment (2019), where she explores the diverse ways in which communities communicate their attachment and fascination with the past through creative, imaginative ways. The concept also encompasses community archaeology practitioners' own moments of joy and wonder, with an emphasis on the excitement that leads many of us to feel passionate about the projects we work on in spite of the obvious restrictions and difficulties we encounter as practitioners. Rebecca Hearne’s grassroots work is particularly noteworthy as she evokes the “archaeological imagination” to argue for us to embrace the potential of our disciplinary lens in prompting emotional and intellectual responses in those who engage with the historic landscape (Hearne, 2022). As editors of archaeology and heritage journals, we have both accrued extensive experience of the fields we work in, the concepts and ideas writers and researchers focus on, and the success stories and lessons learned that emerge from completed research projects in the diverse field of community archaeology. We have both come across research and projects that do much more than attempt to answer research questions, but that actively serve the wants and needs of the communities with which authors work. We find evidence of crowdsourcing for community projects (see Seitsonen, 2017). We get excited about indigenous projects that are shaped and co-authored by indigenous voices (Gonzalez and Edwards, 2020; Smith et al., 2021). We appreciate the immense importance and implications of community archaeological work that seeks to empower and give new voice to the material and archival traces and stories of captive Africans and the descendants of African Americans, by delivering projects that open up novel and more nuanced understandings of sites of slavery and violence in the United States (BattleBaptiste, 2011). We learn about the “photovoice” method that seeks to decolonize archaeological storytelling (Dedrick, 2018). We acknowledge that archaeologists can publicly accept instances when their expertise is contradicted by local knowledge, and the latter is proved more accurate. This can happen when the remains of past events, long before lived memory, can remain in local knowledge in the delicate arena of community archaeology in post/conflict contexts, such as the location of an early modern battle site in the North of Ireland (Mullan, 2021). Our community archaeology engagements can not only be extensive and long-lasting but can make real differences to the communities we work with, including with the difficult task of uncovering how they were marginalized and displaced by our own institutions. The community archaeology work of Paul Mullins is a special case-study due to the longevity and deep
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community connections he made in exploring the impact of the historic expansion of his own university campus in Indianapolis. Over decades, he conceived his work with various community groups as inherently political due to revealing the material nature of the displacement communities had experienced and remained largely unacknowledged. As he discussed on his engagement with the Ransom Place Neighborhood Association, “the initial archaeology step toward concrete archaeological activism in the nearWestside is to actually raise consciousness of the landscape’s history” (2007, 97). He also revealed the role of excavated material culture as not simply being a focus for contemporary engagement but making real differences in our communities' sense of self. In Indiana they worked as memory devices for older members of the community but also allowed the community to refute racist stereotypes of historic Black communities being socially “unstable” (2007, 98). In 2022 his research was instrumental in changing a coroner’s verdict on the death of a young Black man, George Tompkins, from “suicide” to “homicide”. In this sensitive case, community groups and academics worked together to successfully lobby for the death certification to be changed to acknowledge the lynching that had been covered up in 1922 (Indiana Remembrance Coalition, 2022). Our work as supportive and collaborative archaeologists is difficult enough in ordinary circumstances. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic happened; this obviously disrupted the ways in which we could work with communities, as in person contact with communities rightfully closed up and the traditional spaces of interactions became unavailable. Community archaeology by its very definition relies on peopledcommunitiesdcoming together in their explorations of (past) worlds and this was one of the things that has not been possible, to various degrees, since the outbreak of the pandemic. And yet there have been some real trailblazers, practitioners who managed to find inventive ways to stay abreast of the social distancing rules and connect to community groups. Some, like Rachael Kiddey and her team of refugee co-researchers, accomplished a thoughtfully curated remote exhibition as an example of enduring online community engagement (Kiddey, 2020). Moreover, community archaeology organizations like DigVentures were quick to counter the assumption that social distance had to mean social isolation through their pivot to online formats. One initiative from the first phase of Global North lockdowns facilitated members of the public to excavate their own gardens and share what they found with an engaged, online community (ArchaeoBalt, 2020).
Notes From the FielddDe Nardi I have worked for over a decade with the most diverse communities, responding to various briefs and projects that sought to foreground bottom-up voices in the understanding of place, the past and its role in the present world. I have also been a cultural justice activist for nearly 20 years, with a recent focus on vulnerable young migrants and trafficking survivors in Italy. In what could be framed as participatory action research, I have been working with and on behalf of migrant resettlement NGOs to their set brief: that of creating a portfolio of activities and resources for staff, to use in the national program of young migrant resettlement citizenship education and upskilling. The idea of citizenship education can bring an interesting approach in designing community archaeology programsdfrom the focus on sharing and co-creation of knowledge, to the aim to create resources that empower and transfer skills and competencies. In the project I worked on with the migrant NGOs in Italy, a starting point was the centering of creative agency with the linguistically and culturally diverse participants in order to move away from the ethnocentric Western paradigm of archaeology and heritage education. An example can best clarify the mechanisms of pedagogical thinking and practice. In 2018 I found myself in an Italian city, sharing a room with a group of young homeless men, most of whom identified as sub-Saharan African. I was tasked with facilitating a series of workshops that would help them apply for settled status and, in one case, Italian citizenship through completion of a module on “cultural belonging and citizenship.” As someone who seeks to be a mentor and an ally in horizontal practice with diverse communities, the idea at the core of the task was a little uncomfortable: that a white, middle-class citizen academic should attempt to influence young socially unsettled people’s minds, aligning their thinking with the prescriptive State ideas of the past, cultural heritage values, belonging and right to place. We started from places, things, and photography as concepts that the young men were already familiar with: they slept on or near city squares, on the sea front, in parks. Their materiality entangled with that of the evolving city, with its old buildings, the historical street names, the statues on their pedestals at the center of the piazzas. Italy is an ancient country: one cannot go far without experiencing the remnants of an often remote past. And still, archaeological ruins, historic monuments and “old things” in general took center stage in our exercise only when already meaningful to the participants; I did not spoon-feed them abstract spatial and material data, neither did I ask leading questions such as “What is this statue on Piazza Grande?”; not knowing an answer might have been mortifying. Rather, we worked with their lived experience in finding the interesting and exceptional in everyday narratives of place, study and work. In exploring and mapping train stations, old disused buildings, quaint neighborhood names and the city squares, I did not get the young participants to work on established, traditional heritage sites: instead, they chose sites and places that were meaningful to them. Such locales and objects happened to have a past, a multiple past that we explored together. Participants asked about the name of a historic neighborhood, and the contents of a prominent museum. Then they googled the sites all together, and pieced together clues to make sense of these new data. A participant announced that since the square where he effectively lives had multiple lives and facets through time, he felt like he contributed to the latest phase of the life of the place. By applying a stratigraphic approach to the places of their everyday, young participants came to grips with the variegated and deep stories of their new home. The co-production of an embodied and openended form of diachronic storytelling served the participants, in that they used their individual outputs in the pathway to permanent residency in Italy and some even to citizenship. While it may be argued that this particular project did not respond to a strictly
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archaeology-facing research agenda or questions per se, I would suggest that the participants' agency shaped a new way of doing things both for the NGO I worked with, and for urban archaeology and heritage.
Notes From the FielddMcAtackney I have used co-productive approaches with various marginalized groups and communities throughout my almost 20 years of contemporary archaeology projects, primarily in Ireland. This initially happened as a response to the inaccessible nature of the actual site I was supposed to study: Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland (McAtackney, 2014) but it became an integral part of my methodological approaches to finding an appropriate way to record a disused Magdalene Laundry in Ireland. This was at a time when we were scrambling to deal with legacies of religious institutional abuse on the island as the material sites of incarceration were being redeveloped or left to ruination. The insights and opinions of the communities associated with such potentially difficult and loaded places have always been integral to my attempts to understand how they functioned in the past and what they meant and mean to those who were their forced occupants now that they were, largely, crumbling ruins. The first time I used co-productive approaches was in studying the Long Kesh/Maze prison (2004e2008), this site was largely inaccessible to me as a so-called “high-security zone,” in the immediate post-Good Friday Agreement (1998) period. But the rejection of access requests from government officials allowed for me to take a more creative approach to archaeologically exploring such a contentious place in the early years of the peace process. Alongside working with visitors and staff from the prison, I was permitted to visit the site with three ex-IRA prisoners, who had spent various periods at the prison from the 1970s through to the 1990s, to record their responses to the site. This fascinating process, which I have written about as “site-responsive oral testimonies” (McAtackney, 2022), not only brought the abandoned institutional space to life but it also allowed for multi-narratives and understandings of the place to be recorded simultaneously. In the end these engagements with specific communities have evolved into enduring connections with some of the participants that have allowed for their reflections overtime to reveal the mutability of memory (Fig. 1). Ultimately, these site-responsive practices revealed that even such a highly public and recently active site as Long Kesh/Maze prisons shaped very different experiences and subsequent memories have continued to evolve in the ever-changing present. Working with victims and survivors of Magdalene Laundries was in many ways a similar but more difficult prospect despite the methodology of using site-responsive techniques being the same in ethos. This was mainly due to the more vulnerable nature of the community, the women’s ages and also the timescales since many of them had been forced occupants of these gendered institutions (both women I worked with had been enforced occupants in the 1960s or 1970s and we were coproducing knowledge of the former
Fig. 1 A “comm” (communication, often written on toilet paper. These notes would have been illicitly passed between prisoners at Long Kesh/Maze prison). Example is depicting two men on protest in the H Blocks communicating “down the pipes”, which involved communicating through the gaps around heating pipes that ran down each side of the individual cells in the wing.
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Fig. 2 Photograph of a woman's arm pointing to a blue crate. She was indicating such crates were used by smaller women and girls working in Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry to stand on to allow them to reach laundry at the back of the large industrial machines.
Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry in 2018). The aim of working with this community was to allow for victims and survivors of these institutions to add their narratives to the planning-mandated archaeological recording exercise so that their memories and perspectives were incorporated into the official record for the site. Primarily, it acted as a form of, what Homi Bhabha has called, “a right of narration” (2003) so their narratives were directing our knowledge of the site during recording. Of secondary importance was the hope the testimonies would have practical implications in providing narratives that would provide insights into how various elements of the extant material world had meanings otherwise unknown to us from its long time as an operational site (Fig. 2). In the end the process was successful in all these aims and it also extended beyond these initial hopes. The women’s recollections assisted in the selection process for the National Museum of Ireland to collect and eventually interpret objects from the laundries to be part of the national collections, including a forthcoming 20th century gallery (McAtackney, 2022).
Summary and Future Directions Drawing from the work outlined above, we can bring to the fore some important thoughts about the practice and the very ontology of community archaeology. We have illustrated ways that we work with, and for, communities, in ways that create new knowledge about the past in the present, and that illuminate perceptions of the past through the lens of personal and shared agency. We hope this overview and closer look at some of the core ideas in community archaeology lead emerging and established archaeology practitioners to add them to their toolkit. We have sought to demonstrate that the ethos of community-facing work can enrich any project, from the inception of fieldwork planning, through to archaeological excavation and surveys to the collaborative interpretation and dissemination of data and the stories we create to share knowledge about the past. Even when limited resources and funding and publishing restrictions threaten to limit the extent to which we involve communities in our thinking, practice and dissemination, it is worth bearing in mind that community voices can be enmeshed in our work in multiple, subtle ways. From building a local school engagement to acknowledging different, even contradictory perspectives, stories and interpretations, we allow for multivocality. The potential to bring a community inclusion mission to our projects is obvious: even in the small details, using the past to empower people in the present can open up alternative pedagogies, celebrate a diverse sense of place, and even aid reconciliation in societies that have experienced social and political rifts. We are confident that this way of “doing” archaeology, which is committed to co-production and inclusivity, will establish itself more and more.
See Also: Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Archaeology; Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution in Archaeology and Heritage.
References ArchaeoBalt, 2020. ArchaeoTourism and Social Media Round Table. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDZsqKnY. (Accessed January 2021). Battle-Baptiste, Whitney, 2011. Black Feminist Archaeology. Routledge, New York. Bhabha, Homi K., 2003. Democracy de-realized. Diogenes 50, 27e35. de Certeau, Michel, 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Penguin, London. De Nardi, Sarah, 2014. Senses of place, senses of the past: making experiential maps as part of community heritage fieldwork. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 1, 5e22. Dedrick, Maia, 2018. Photovoice as a method for the development of collaborative archaeological practice. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 5, 85e100.
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Gonzalez, Sara L., Edwards, Briece, 2020. The Intersection of Indigenous thought and archaeological practice: the field methods in Indigenous archaeology field school. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 7, 239e254. Hearne, Rebecca L., 2022. “The Archaeological Imagination”: new ways of seeing for mental health recovery. In: Darvill, Timothy, et al. (Eds.), Historic Landscapes and Mental WellBeing. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 153e163. Indiana Remembrance Coalition, 2022. Acknowledged at Last: A Whitewashed Lynching in 1922 Indianapolis. https://ircoalition.com/. (Accessed May 2023). Jasanoff, S., 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order. Routledge, London. Kiddey, Rachael R.M., 2020. Genuinely Collaborative Archaeological Work is “Slow,” Or It is Nothing: Lessons From the “Migrant Materialities” Project. https://core.tdar.org/ document/457515/genuinely-collaborative-archaeological-work-is-slow-or-it-is-nothing-lessons-from-the-migrant-materialities-project. (Accessed July 2023). McAtackney, Laura, 2014. An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze Prison. Oxford University Press, Oxford. McAtackney, Laura, 2022. Transitional sites and “material memory”: impermanence and Ireland’s derelict magdalen laundries. In: Geismar, Haidy, Otto, Ton, Warner, Cameron (Eds.), Impermenance. UCL Press, London, pp. 226e244. Moshenska, Gabriel, Dhanjal, Sarah, Cooper, Don, 2011. Building sustainability in community archaeology: the Hendon school arch project. Archaeol. Int. 13, 94e100. Mullan, Paul, 2021. Community archaeology and the heritage fund in northern Ireland. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 8, 245e255. Mullins, Paul, 2007. Politics, inequality and engaged archaeology. In: Little, Barbara J., Shackel, Paul A. (Eds.), Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement. Altmira Press, New York, pp. 92e108. Pennington, Andy, Jones, Rebecca, Bagnall, Anne Marie, South, Jane, Corcoran, Rhiannon, 2019. Heritage and Wellbeing: The Impact of Historic Places and Assets on Community Wellbeing e A Scoping Review. What Works Centre for Wellbeing, London. Perry, Sara, 2019. The Enchantment of the archaeological record. Eur. J. Archaeol. 22, 354e371. Sayer, Faye, 2015. Can digging make you happy? Archaeological excavations, happiness and heritage. Arts Health 7, 247e260. Seitsonen, Oula, 2017. Crowdsourcing cultural heritage: public participation and conflict legacy in Finland. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 4, 115e130. Simpson, Faye, Williams, Howard, 2008. Evaluating community archaeology in the UK. Publ. Archaeol. 7, 69e90. Smith, Claire, Jackson, Gary, Ralph, Jordan, Brown, Nell, Rankin, Guy, The Barunga Community, 2021. An engaged archaeology field school with a remote aboriginal community: successes, failures, and challenges. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 8, 105e126. Supernant, Kisha, 2018. Reconciling the past for the future: the next 50 Years of Canadian archaeology in the post-TRC era. Can. J. Archaeol. 42, 144e153. Waterman, Tim, 2020. Introduction: landships. In: Waterman, Tim, Wolff, Jane, Wall, Ed (Eds.), Landscape Citizenships. Routledge, London.
Conflict Archaeology John Carman, Bloody Meadows Project, School of History & Cultures, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview A History of Conflict Archaeology Conflict Archaeology in Practice Related Fields Distinctive Methodologies The Conflict Archaeology Community Impact of Conflict Archaeology Key Issues Summary and Future Directions References
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Key Points
• • • • •
Conflict Archaeology is an area of rising interest and significance It provides wide coverage into all aspects of conflict, past and present It is not to be confused with or limited to any particular aspect of conflict (such as battlefields)dall are included within the wider field It has a longer history than often supposed It has a capacity to inform fields beyond studies of the past
Abstract The study of conflict has emerged over the first two decades of the 21st century to become an increasingly interesting and respected branch of archaeology. It covers a diverse range of phenomena related to violence and military practice, addresses all periods from the deepest human past to the present, and goes beyond a concern with the past to offering therapeutic opportunities in the present. This entry provides an introduction to the breadth of the field by a review of its historical development from the 19th century, of how it works in practice in the present, and current themes of concern.
Introduction Conflict archaeology is the overarching term given to the study of the material culture of all aspects of conflict, past and present. Not all those who engage in the study of conflict necessarily recognize themselves as part of any sub-discipline or community of conflict archaeologists, and strictly speaking there is no such thing as a conflict archaeologist and no such job title exists. Nonetheless, archaeologists who study conflict come together at a series of specialist conferences, contribute to a journal dedicated to the topic, and communicate via online resources also dedicated to the subject area. It is a mistakedas so many dodto assume that those engaged in conflict archaeology focus only on sites of actual combat. This is the specialist area of battlefield archaeology out of which conflict archaeology developed most recently and especially out of work conducted in the 1980s and 1990s at the Little Bighorn in the USA (Scott, 2013), and Towton (Fiorato et al., 2007) and Naseby (Foard, 1995) in the UK. The field has emerged as a specialist area of interest particularly over the first two decades of the 21st century, especially in the Anglophone world and has spread into mainland Europe and South America. It has however a longer and deeper history than this, as is discussed below, and is also subdivided into various sub-specialisms as is also discussed below. Among these are battlefield archaeology, modern conflict archaeology, Holocaust archaeology, archaeologies of internment and confinement, studies of forts and defensive sites, studies of military logistics and organization, and work undertaken by archaeologists with military organizations. Most recently it has been suggested that conflict archaeology has the capacity to contribute to the emerging field of Critical Military Studies but this has yet to be developed (Carman, 2012).
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Overview This section reviews the history of conflict studies in archaeology and the emergence of such studies as a unified field since 2000. It goes on to outline how the various sub-topics of the field operate in practice.
A History of Conflict Archaeology The mid-nineteenth century in England saw the first steps toward the archaeological study of conflict sites. In the 1840s, Edward Fitzgerald investigated the site of the Battle of Naseby (1645) near his own home, identifying landscape features key to the action, retrieving scattered objects, and excavating a mass grave from the battle (Evans, 2009). At around the same time, Richard Brooke was identifying and investigating the sites of battles from the late medieval Wars of the Roses: he too identified mass graves from some such actions (Brooke, 1854). This was also the period in which archaeology was developing its particular approach to the study of the past, and so in the 19th century there were studies of upstanding remains of structures frequently identified as conflictrelateddespecially earth-and-rampart structures from prehistory, the Classical and medieval periodsdwhere the focus was placed on how they operated as defensive sites (see e.g. Fagan, 2018, 182; Fagan and Durrani, 2016, 96). It is also no accident that some of the leaders in the development of archaeology in the 19th century had close connections with military lifedespecially figures such as Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers in the UK (Evans, 2014). The Archaeological Survey of India was established under British military governance and made significant contributions to the study of ancient civilization in the sub-continent. The British Ordnance Surveydcharged with preparations to defend against invasiondproduced maps which among other features included above-ground archaeological sites as landmarks. Such a background for archaeologists encouraged them to identify a conflict role for sites. Despite claims of a long-term “pacification” of the past (Keeley, 1996), the 20th century saw further developments in the study of conflict sites. Pritchett’s work on sites of ancient Greek conflictdspecially Thermopylae and Plataea (Pritchett, 1957)dfirmly established the most likely locations. In Portugal, work at the site of the Battle of Aljubarotta (do Paço, 1963; Cunha and Silva, 1997) confirmed the location and identified stakeholes from the chevaux de frise that defended the Anglo-Portuguese position and a mass grave. The big breakthrough in battlefield research came in the 1980s with work at the Little Bighorn (Scott, 2013) where the use of metal detectors produced bullets from the fight, analysis of which allowed the identification of individual weapons and their movement (and therefore that of individuals) through the battlefield space. Excavation also revealed the remains of those involved and allowed their identification. Together these provided the basis for an archaeological interpretation which challenged the accepted sequence of events and served to confirm the Native American oral traditions and pictorial representations. It opened the way to a methodology to be applied in any site of conflict involving firearms. Application of the approach on British battlefields led to reinterpretations of the fights at Naseby (1645; Foard, 1995), Edgehill (1643; Foard, 2005) and Culloden (Pollard, 2019) among others. At Towton (1460; Fiorato et al., 2007) the chance discovery of a mass grave opened the opportunity for further investigation of a medieval site of battle. Battlefield studies such as thesedand indeed others ongoing in the USA on Civil War battles and fights against Native Americansdwere represented at the first Fields of Conflict conference held in Glasgow, Scotland in 2000 (Freeman and Pollard, 2001); this conference has since spawned a series held biannually in Finland, the USA, England, Belgium, Hungary, Germany and with another delayed by the Covid crisis due in Edinburgh (see also Scott et al., 2007). The evident interest in the discipline shown by the conferences led to the establishment of an academic journal dedicated to the field, the Journal of Conflict Archaeology (Pollard and Banks, 2005). The claim of a pacification of the distant past (Keeley, 1996) spurred on those with an interest in earlier conflict. A series of edited volumes (Carman and Harding, 1999; Otto et al., 2006; Arkush and Allen, 2006) considered prehistoric warfare anew and while some (e.g. Kristiansen, 1999) concurred with Keeley’s estimate, others (e.g. Ferguson, 2006) were able to challenge it with evidence. It was the combination of this revived (or more prominent) interest in prehistoric conflict and developments in battlefield archaeology that led to the identification of what may be the first known battle in Europe: in the Tollense valley of Germany, c. 1200 BCE (Jantzen et al., 2011; Brinker et al., 2013; Lidke et al., 2018). A few years earlier amateur archaeology at Kalkriese, north Germany, firmly established the site of the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald (also known as the Varus Battle) of 9 CE (Wells, 2003). More recently, the site of an otherwise unknown 3rd century CE fight between Romans and German warriors was discovered in the Harzhorn mountains of north Germany (Wiegels et al., 2011). This focus on battlefields was matched elsewhere by studies of other evidence of past conflict. A conference session at the 4th World Archaeological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa in 1999 (published as Schofield et al., 2002) concentrated on the conflicts of the 20th century, especially World War 2 and after. This has since developed into a sub-discipline in its own right with a dedicated conference series. Schofield (2005) gives a good outline of topics covered, concentrating especially upon the remains of the Cold War (1946 to 1989) in the UK and elsewhere (and see Leech, 2002). Since the Cold War involved no fighting in Europe or North America, the material consists of anti-nuclear defenses, airfields, coastal sites and related technology, including nuclear testing sites. Others have looked at similar structures surviving from World War 2 in Europe (e.g. Burt et al., 2007; Leech, 2002; Kauppi, 2002) and beyond, such as Pacific islands (Christiensen, 2002; Bulgrin, 2006) as well as conflict sites from the Korean War (Silverstein et al., 2007). Work at prisons of war camps from World War 2 (e.g. Doyle et al., 2007; Myers and Moshenska, 2011) developed at the same time as studies of sites of the Nazi Holocaust (Sturdy Colls, 2016) and occupation (Carr, 2010); alongside but quite independent was the involvement of forensic archaeologists in uncovering the evidence of murderous regimes in South America (Crossland, 2002) and Asia and genocides such as that in Rwanda. Deriving out of battlefield concerns also came studies of
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Table 1
Contents of Conflict archaeology.
Topic
Associated discipline
Approach
Key texts
Battlefields Fig. 1
Military history
Forensic archaeology and work with military organizations
Forensic science/cultural heritage management
Metal detector survey Landscape approaches Artifact analysis Experimental archaeology Survey Excavation Human remains analysis
Holocaust sites, internment, occupation Fig. 2 Military logistics, encampments
Cultural heritage
Freeman and Pollard (2001) Scott et al. (2007) Geier and Potter (2000) Carman and Carman (2006, 2020) Sturdy Colls (2016) Crossland (2002) Saunders (2002) Rush (2010) Sturdy Colls (2016) Myers and Moshenska (2011) Carr (2019) Haldon (2006) Geier et al. (2010)
Military history
Survey Metal detector survey Excavation Survey Metal detector survey Excavation Community archaeology Survey Excavation Artifact analysis Skeletal analysis
Prehistoric conflict and conflict in antiquity
Anthropology
Remembrance and memorialization of conflict Fig. 3 Modern conflict Fig. 4
Cultural heritage
Survey Semiotic analysis
Cultural heritage
Building survey Metal detector survey Aerial photography
Keeley (1996) Carman and Harding (1999) Arkush and Allen (2006) Otto et al. (2006) Fernández-Götz and Roymans (2018) Login (2017) Carman and Carman (2006) Schofield (2005, 2009) Saunders (2012)
military logistics (e.g. Haldon, 2006; Thomas and Stallibrass, 2008) and military encampments (Balicki, 2000, 2007; Geier et al., 2010). The involvement of Western forces in zones of conflictdespecially the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistandbrought archaeologists to work with the military in a number of roles: first, in a concern with protecting and preserving sites of archaeological concern in war zones (Rush, 2010) and in helping to rebuild after the fighting ceased; subsequently, to work with damaged and traumatized soldiers, using archaeological fieldwork as a means of rehabilitation (Evans et al., 2019; Winterton, 2014). An ancillary subject of studydalthough those involved may not necessarily think of themselves as archaeologists of conflictdis the remembrance and memorialization of war, which has a longer history than some suggest and takes a wider range of forms; it extends beyond the immediate aftermath of conflicts into the present and future (Login, 2017). Conflict archaeology has consequently grown over time from a narrow concern with specific sites where people inflicted harm on one another, to a broader consideration of the place conflict has in all our lives and an assessment of the extent to which our modern society is militarized (Schofield, 2009).
Conflict Archaeology in Practice As indicated above, conflict archaeology is a much wider field than the study of sites of actual conflict and extends into ancillary and related areas with a potential to say something about our own world. One study of the current state of the field (Carman, 2012) has offered a tripartite chronological divisiondprehistoric studies, historic battlefield archaeology, and modern conflictdeach of which is concerned with specific types of material and derives its origin and agenda from a discipline outside of archaeology (see Table 1). This argument can be challenged on several grounds, not least its simplistic nature, and as Table 1 and the discussions above and to follow indicate, the areas of conflict archaeology are more than chronologically divided and intersect in potentially complex ways. This section will look especially at the distinctive approaches that conflict archaeology offers.
Related Fields As Table 1 suggests, none of the areas of conflict archaeology derive their initial impetus purely out of archaeology: they each have roots in related but non-mainstream archaeological concerns. The interest in battlefields (Fig. 1) echoes mostly the concerns of a fairly traditional military history: troop dispositions on the field, movements of those troops, the effects of weapons and ultimate outcomes. The choice of sites to investigate is frequently made
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Fig. 1 The battlefield of Oudenaarde, Belgium (1708). The remains of Bruwaan castle from which the allied commander directed the battle. Author’s photo.
on the basis of historic interest rather than on archaeological grounds, hence the interest in the USA on battles of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and in England on the Wars of the Roses and Civil Wars, in Scotland on the Wars of Independence and insurrections against English dominance, and for others on major battles such as the Varusschlacht, Lützen, Leipzig and Waterloo. Some modern conflict archaeology draws on a similar influence, especially investigations on major World War 1 and D-Day sites, and to some extent this influences work on prehistoric sites such as Tollense and other sites such as that of the Harzhorn event, as well as sites of industrial conflict (e.g. the Colorado Coal Field War, USA: Saitta 2007). This is also the driver for much investigation of encampments from the American Civil War (e.g. Balicki, 2000, 2007) and prisoner-of-war camps, especially the search for remains of the socalled Great Escape from Stalag Luft III in 1944, where tunnels and other features were uncovered by survey and excavation (Doyle et al., 2007). More typically, studies of military logistics and fixed establishments, as well as of prisons and concentration camps (Myers and Moshenska, 2011, Fig. 2) draw upon cultural heritage management (a term to be interpreted broadly) to provide a purpose. The same applies to other studies of modern conflict, which may be directed toward preservation and remembrance (Schofield, 2005). The primary concern here is investigation in order to identify significant remains that are worthy of preservation and public access: there is a particular poignancy in the case of sites associated with the Holocaust and other examples of genocide because these are also sites of remembrance and commemoration which should be made available to survivors and their successors. Similarly, an
Fig. 2
The entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi “death camp”, Poland. Author’s photo.
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interest in war memorialization (Login, 2017) derives largely from heritage concerns about preservation and access, as well as issues of control on use and indeed ownership. However, it is to be stressed that this work is also and primarily investigative: efforts to preserve and provide access follow from research activity which provides the justification for these ongoing management practices. There is a close relation between studies of genocide sites and other forms of forensic archaeology in conflict zones. Much work on World War 1 and 2 sites has developed into the identification of individuals in mass graves with the intention of returning them to their country of origin for reinterment (see e.g. Saunders, 2001). Similarly, work on the disappeared from various conflictsdLatin American “dirty” wars, the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, etc.dis devoted to the discovery and identification of individuals (Saunders, 2002; Crossland, 2002). While the retrieval of human remains from Holocaust sites is impossible for a number of reasonsdincluding mass cremation and disposal, as well as religious and other taboos on the treatment of the dead (Sturdy Colls, 2016)dsuch sites are also made available as sites of remembrance and commemoration. Much of this work is carried on in conjunction with or under the auspices of other organizationsdfor the retrieval of war dead, national military organizations; for the identification of those killed by vicious regimes, appropriate international agencies and NGOs; and for Holocaust sites, especially Jewish organizations. Other collaboration with military organizations involves the use of archaeology as a therapeutic tool for those soldiers returning from combat zones: archaeological work has some affinity with soldiering in that it is team-work, conducted in the open air, and involves physical labor; but it lacks the dangers associated with zones of conflict. As a device to reintroduce ex-soldiers to civilian life and provide a useful work for them in a convivial context, it has proved especially effective (Winterton, 2014). While all conflict archaeology is anthropological in a broad sense, and indeed in North America archaeology is regarded as a subfield of anthropology, prehistoric and early historic conflict archaeology derives very particularly from an anthropological base. The focus is less on individual sites of combat (but for rare examples see Tollense: Jantzen et al., 2011; Brinker et al., 2013; Lidke et al., 2018; and Harzhorn: Wiegels et al., 2011) than on identifying the incidence and forms of violence in the deep past (Otto et al., 2006; Fernández-Götz and Roymans, 2018).
Distinctive Methodologies While many of the methods applied in the study of conflict sites are common to other areas of archaeology, one that has emerged out of the study of battlefields in particular that is controversial elsewhere is the use of the metal detector. Survey by such tools is the main way of finding the residue of conflict from periods where firearms were employed. This was the key to unlocking the hidden history at Little Bighorn and has since been employed across North America, in the UK and on sites in Europe. The device can be set to look only for certain metalsdsuch as copper or lead employed to make bulletsdand thus ignore more common metals such as iron. By mapping the distribution of spent bullets across the survey area, it becomes possible to identify areas where troops stood and fought: at the Little Bighorn application of weapon identification techniques from ballistics allowed the identification of individual weapons (and thus individuals) and their movement through space (Scott, 2013). For earlier periods of smooth-bore firearms, identification of individual weapons is not possible (because of the lack of distinctive marking from rifling) but it is possible to identify from scorching and stippling those that have been fired and those that were merely dropped; it therefore allows the identification of where troops stood and the targets they aimed at. This method has allowed reinterpretations of battles from the English Civil War (Foard, 2012) and the same period in Europe (e.g. at Lützen [1632]: Schürger, 2015). This can be linked with experimental work to indicate the range, firing capacity and delivery of projectiles (Allsop and Foard, 2007). The effects of weapons is also a concern of those who have looked at the geology of battle sites (e.g. Doyle and Bennet, 2002). Applied mostly to the World War 1 Western Front landscape, this approach seeks to understand how surface geology affected military operations. Since this landscape is one of lines of fixed defenses separated by a narrow belt of no-man’s land, it is possible to identify aspects such as drainagedor the lack thereofdand what this meant for troops occupying the defenses, and the effects especially of bombardment with high explosives and how this altered the environment over the period of conflict. Other distinctive methodsddrawn from landscape studies in prehistorydinclude the so-called phenomenological approach to battlefields as landscapes (Carman and Carman, 2006) which allows a comparative approach across space and through time. Rather than offering reanalysis of battlefield actiondas metal detector survey doesdit has identified the way in which broadly similar kinds of places are sought as places of battle in different chronological periods. In broad, and on average, ancient Greek battles were fought in valleys overlooked by settlement; medieval battles were fought on high ground visible from towns; early modern battles were fought in valleys away from major settlements; later battles involved every feature of the space. This tells us little about military planning or thinking, and offers no reinterpretation of individual events, but gives some insight into how landscape was perceived at different times in the past. The work also examines how the sites are remembered and memorializeddor are forgottendafterward and explores the diversity of forms of memorialization, which contributes to the wider interest in remembrance (e.g. Login, 2017, Fig. 3). Aerial photography plays a significant role in understanding modern conflict. Since the wars of the 20th centurydespecially the major campaigns of the World Wars in Europedcovered large areas, they are less amenable to ground survey than earlier periods. Images taken at the time provide valuable evidence for landscape changes during the conflict, such as the Western Front of World War 1 (Stichelbaut and Cowley, 2016) and home front defenses in World War 2 (Berry, 2016). They can also however provide valuable information on events at a smaller scale: the Pointe du Hoc was one location subjected to heavy attack on D-Day (Normandy, France, 1944) and before that by aerial bombardment; aerial photographs taken at various stages allowed researchers working in site to identify when specific damage was inflicted, and therefore by ground assault or by bombing (Burt et al., 2007). More recent aerial photographs also make a contribution to the study of older sites by providing a base against which artifact scatters and troop
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Fig. 3 The military cemetery at Sedan, France. Reconstructed obelisk in memory of losses at the battle (1870) and crosses marking graves of soldiers from World War One (1914–1918). Author’s photo.
dispositions can be mapped (see references in Foard and Morris, 2012). Geographical Information Systems which can be combined with aerial photographs provide the technology to examine lines of site (viewsheds) across a site, and so-called firesheds which indicate the targeting effectiveness of weapons. The methods applied at static sitesdmilitary bases, encampments, defensive installations (Fig. 4), forts, prisons, and concentration campsdare broadly similar (Geier et al., 2010) and can encompass the usual range of any such work including excavation. Holocaust sitesdsuch as the extermination camp at Treblinka (Poland)dpresent a problem for excavation, however, because of Jewish sensitivities to the treatment of human remains. This led Sturdy Colls (2016) to develop a technique of non-invasive investigationdderived from mainstream archaeological surveydthat allowed confirmation of the site’s history (to challenge the claims of Holocaust deniers) without offending sensitivities. The approach also involved close engagement with interested communities, one shared with investigations of the occupied Channel Islands (Carr, 2019) where memory of occupation was a controversial issue for some. Conflict archaeology here adopted mainstream approaches but also others from more politicized and difficult areas of archaeological work.
Fig. 4 Blockhouse showing marks of fighting, on the bridge over the Albert Canal, Reimst, Belgium: site of first landings of German paratroops, 1940. Author’s photo.
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The Conflict Archaeology Community It is debateable whether those archaeologists who undertake studies of conflict are a community in themselves, although the reappearance of similar names in various publications indicates how small the number of leaders in the field is. Some (e.g. Carman, 2018) argue that it is a community, but responses differ. The strongest evidence for such a community is perhaps the journal founded in 2005 dedicated to the field: the Journal of Conflict Archaeology is edited out of the Glasgow Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, offers three issues a year and covers all aspects of the field. In addition to journals and publications (including edited volumes listed in the bibliography and Table 1) there is a dedicated online resource: the Conflict Archaeology International Research Network is a managed site which advertises conferences such as Fields of Conflict and provides a forum for debate and for the exchange of information. Similarly, the UK Battlefields Resource Centre provides information on sites of conflict throughout the UK and draws extensively on archaeological work as well as historical sources. As indicated above, a number of dedicated conference series have also emerged at which the community of conflict archaeologists come together. The leading series is the Fields of Conflict (Freeman and Pollard, 2001; Scott et al., 2007), first held in Glasgow in 2000. Originally planned as an afternoon workshop on the assumption that it would attract few participants, it was rearranged to be a three-day event to accommodate all those who wished to participate. Held biannually, its initial focus was on battlefield archaeology but since those held in Belgium (2008) and Germany (2011), it has represented all aspects of conflict archaeology. The pattern is similar in all versions: the presentation of individual papers over several days including a fieldtrip to a local conflict site and social events such as a dinner and reception. They are often held in conjunction with other bodies: in Leeds (2006) the Royal Armouries, in the USA (2005 and 2014) the American Battlefields Protection Program of the National Parks service and (in 2018) Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, in Belgium (2008) with the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation and the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Oudenaarde, in Germany with the Museum und Park Kalkriese, and in Hungary (2012) with the National Military Museum. There is a solid core of regular attendees to the conference who also tend to publish together and collaborate on projects. Other conferences attract either specific audiencesdsuch as research students to the periodic Postgraduate Conflict Archaeology conferencedor focus on aspects such as modern conflict archaeology. It is common for sessions at other major archaeological conferencesdsuch as the annual meetings of the Society for American Archaeology or European Association of Archaeologists, or the World Archaeological Congresses held every 4 yearsdto focus on aspects of conflict archaeology. Indeed, over the second decade of the 21st century this became almost expected. Despite a strong nationalist trend in conflict archaeologydso that US researchers study American sites, British study UK sites, Swedes study sites involving Swedish forces, Spanish scholars devote their energies to sites within Spain, and so ondthere is also some measure of international cooperation. Teams involving American scholars, Swedish investigators and British archaeologists as well as German individuals worked on the Lützen site (Schürger, 2015) as well as at Waterloo (Belgium 1815: Pollard, 2020). The work at Oudenaarde (Belgium 1708; Foard and Partida, 2018) in advance of the 300th anniversary commemoration similarly involved British archaeologists and metal detectorists; the associated Fields of Conflict conference also attracted participants from across the world who also visited the site and took part in commemorative activities. Following this, further collaboration took place at the site of the Battle of Laffeldt (Belgium 1745; Foard and Partida, 2018) and other new initiatives were instigated.
Impact of Conflict Archaeology It has been the practice in some countries to grant official protected status to some sites of conflictdespecially in the USA under the auspices of State and National Parks services. Apart from modes of memorialization, this had not been the practice in Europe. However, in 1995 English Heritage promulgated a Register of Battlefields (English Heritage, 1995) which offered limited protection from development to 43 sites regarded as historically important. Scotland and Wales followed suit, as did Ireland, each of which territories produced their own lists of protected sites. These differ in some respects: in England the designation is based entirely upon historical concerns and takes no account of surviving archaeology, whereas in Scotland archaeology is taken into account; and the Welsh register is currently devoid of entries. Following directly from the successful collaborations at Oudenaarde, there were a series of meetings instigated involving British and Belgian representatives to discuss the possibility of a Flemish Register which would include not just major battlefields but also sites of smaller internecine conflicts and which also required wider changes to the Flemish legal regime for archaeology (Foard and Partida, 2018).
Key Issues Most of the early internal differences between practitioners of conflict archaeology have been resolved or overcomedespecially by recognizing that despite differences of focus or period, they all fall within the broader area of conflict and that methods and experiences can be shared to the benefit of alldbut some key issues remain to offer lines of productive future research. While the approaches to studying battlefieldsdespecially by metal detector surveydare proven, problems exist with both finding and identifying sites of early fighting. The work at Towton (Fiorato et al., 2007) seemed to suggest that metal detectors could be used effectively on sites from periods prior to those of the firearm era by locating the fall of iron- and steel-tipped arrows but work at other sites has demonstrated that this assumes too much: even where it is known from historical sources that bows were used, the iron heads have proven elusive. Work (albeit disputed by many in the field) at Fulford (Yorkshire, England, 1066: Jones, 2011) instead identified what seems to be evidence for work on weapons prior to and possibly after the fighting and this may represent
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a more appropriate archaeological signature for sites prior to the gunpowder era. However, on this the jury remains undecided and awaits firm resolution. Others choose to focus less on the identification of battlefield sitesdalthough such work continuesdthan on changes in warfare practice. One such is the adoption of firearms during the period of the later middle ages. Work to identify the site of Bosworth (England, 1484: Foard and Curry, 2013) showed the presence of hand-held firearms, previously unknown from historical accounts, while other work (such as Allsop and Foard, 2007) tested reconstructed early artillery for effectiveness and fall of shot. Such ongoing work will contribute to an understanding of the gradual adoption of firearms to become the dominant weapons on the battlefields of Europednot only how the change took place but why, and why it took so long after firearms first became available. It will be evident from the references in this entry that conflict archaeology remains largely an Anglophone and indeed largely an Anglo-American initiative. There have been efforts to internationalize and, as mentioned, a number of projects have involved teams drawn from a range of countries. The numbers of practitioners in countries outside the UK and USA however remain limited: the work in Flanders (Foard and Partida, 2018) has yet to see any real fruition in developments and work in non-English speaking countries of Europe remains limited. It is true that contributions to the Journal of Conflict Archaeology cover a wide and increasingly diverse range of territories across the world and that work in the Netherlands and Spain catches attention, but still the key developments come from the UK or the USA and yet conflict is a universal phenomenon: the day when conflict archaeology becomes a truly global enterprise is yet to come.
Summary and Future Directions Conflict archaeology is a sub-field of archaeology which covers almost all of human history to the present, has developed some specific techniques and approaches, and contributes directly to the welfare of others. As a community of like-minded scholars, it excites interest among archaeologists and others, attracts increasing numbers of students and offers a growing body of literature to support its existence. It has gained increasing recognition and respect over the first two decades of the 21st century and shows signs of continuing to do so. Its capacity to inform on issues of conflict can only be enhanced as it develops, especially to take a more critical stance toward the study of conflict. Such work is already in train by those who seek to challenge the conventional discourses of militarization and the impulse toward the use of violence for policy ends. This includes studies of forms of peaceful protest against war (e.g. Schofield and Anderton, 2000) and the study of battlefields as landscapes in an effort to undermine the accepted discourses around war-making (Carman and Carman, 2007). It also includes work to reveal how memorialization of past conflictdor lack thereofdaffects subaltern groups within society (Tveskov and Bissonnette, 2023). Together these new directions will give Conflict Archaeology a distinctive voice in crucial issues of our time.
See Also: Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution in Archaeology and Heritage; Site Formation: Conflict Sites.
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Oxford University Press, New York. Kristiansen, Kristian, 1999. The emergence of warrior aristocracies in later European prehistory and their long-term history. In: Carman, John, Harding, Anthony (Eds.), Ancient Warfare: Archaeological Perspectives. Sutton, Stroud, pp. 175–190. Leech, R., 2002. The battlefield of the Dukla Pass: an archaeological perspective on the end of the Cold war in Europe. In: Schofield, John, Johnson, William G., Beck, Colleen (Eds.), Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of 20th Century Conflict. Routledge, London, pp. 41–48. Lidke, Gundula, Jantzen, Detlef, Lorenz, Sebastian, Terberger, Thomas, 2018. The bronze age battlefield in the Tollense valley, Northeast Germany: conflict scenario research. In: Fernández-Götz, Manuel, Roymans, Nico (Eds.), Conflict Archaeology: Materialities of Collective Violence From Prehistory to Late Antiquity, Themes in Contemporary Archaeology, vol. 5. Routledge, London, pp. 61–68. Login, Emma, 2017. Set in Stone? 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Contextual Archaeology Brent Whitford, Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo SUNY, Buffalo, NY, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Defining Context From Context to Contextual From the Contextual to Contextual Interpretation Key Issues Summary and Future Directions References
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Contextual archaeology adopts a holistic interpretation of the archaeological record, using the hermeneutic method to integrate diverse information. It acknowledges the plurality of context and the multivocal potential of interpretation.
Abstract Contextual archaeology is a holistic approach to the interpretation of the archaeological record. Notably, contextual archaeology does not rely on any one theory, but rather consists of moving back and forth between context and theory using the hermeneutic method until all the available information is incorporated into a coherent interpretation. Its primary components are an understanding of context and how archaeological theory influences the interpretation of context. Ultimately, to practice a contextual archaeology is to acknowledge the plurality of context and the multivocal potential of interpretation.
Introduction Contextual archaeology is an approach to the interpretation of the archaeological recorddto interpret the meaning of material culture much like one would interpret the meaning of a word in a text, in relation to its position and standing relative to the rest of the text. Contextual archaeology is, therefore, an inherently holistic approach to interpretation that considers all relevant aspects of variation when deciding on how to interpret the archaeological record, rather than rely on any single theory (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). Though Hodder (1986) first explicitly defined the practice of contextual archaeology in his book Reading the Past, it should be recognized that the concept of contextdfrom which the practice of contextual archaeology is deriveddhas held an important place in archaeology since the very onset of the discipline. In fact, it could even be said that a preoccupation with context is what separates archaeology from mere treasure hunting and/or from pure speculation regarding the past (see antiquarianism; Barrett, 2006:194; Hodder and Hutson, 2003:171; Lyman, 2012:233). As such, all archaeology is, in some sense, contextual (Barrett, 2006:194; Biehl, 1999; Hodder and Hutson, 2003:171; Lyman, 2012:233). That the concept of context has figured in archaeological practice since the very onset of the discipline, however, does not imply that it has always remained consistent in terms of its interpretation. Quite the contrary, as the discipline has progressed, the interpretation of context has become increasingly ambiguous. For example, one can speak of the depositional, the cultural, the chronological, and/or the environmental context. Likewise, one could invoke the ecological, functional, behavioral, and/or systemic context. Furthermore, one could conceive of the symbolic/ideological, agentive, historical, or even the reflexive context. To practice a contextual archaeology, therefore, is to contend with all possible variations of context and ultimately to arrive at a truly contextualdqua holisticdinterpretation of the archaeological record. It then follows that in order to properly understand the practice of contextual archaeology one must consider how the concept of context was developed in archaeology over time and, also, how the interpretation of context has shifted alongside major changes in archaeological theory and practice.
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Overview Defining Context The concept of context was first developed in archaeology alongside the scientific principles of stratigraphic excavation. Building from the principles of stratigraphy as were first developed by Steno and Winter (1916 [1669]), the law of faunal succession later developed by Smith (1816–1819) and Cuvier (1812, 1835), and particularly from the principle of uniformitarianism as developed by Lyell (1830), early archaeologists were rather quick to recognize that material culture too could be spatially and chronologically classified in accordance with the laws of stratigraphic succession. As such, early archaeologists who abided by the principles of stratigraphic excavation would meticulously record the 3D location and general stratum within which evidence of material culture was found. This rather early form of stratigraphic recording in archaeology would later be termed provenience. Additionally, it was recognized that if two or more objects shared some similarity in terms of their proveniencedi.e., they are found close together and within the same general geologic stratumdit could then be inferred that they had been deposited at the same time and hence must have been made and/or were in use at the same time. In other words, evidence of material culture having a similar provenience are considered spatiotemporally associated (i.e., the principle of archaeological association; Worsaae, 1849 [1843]). However, provenience can be measured at varying resolutions (Lyman, 2012). For instance, a low-resolution provenience merely indicates the general geographic area in which evidence of material culture is found (e.g., in Western Canada), whereas a highresolution provenience indicates the precise 3D stratigraphic origins of an object down to the nearest centimeter. The same is true as regards temporal resolution, which today can range from the low-resolution indication of a relative time period down to the high-resolution absolute radiometric determination providing a discrete calendar age. Because provenience can be measured at varying resolutions, the associations inferred from such proveniences can also then vary in terms of their degree (Lyman, 2012). For example, two sites might be considered as sharing a weak degree of association because they are in the same general geographic area and relative time period, whereas two artifacts might be considered as sharing a very strong degree of association because they are located close together and in precisely the same archaeological stratum. Degrees of association, therefore, are dependent on the resolution of provenience (Lyman, 2012). Finally, by combining provenience and association we arrive at the definition of contextdan archaeological context, in essence, is an object of study’s provenience plus its associations. In other words, an archaeological context specifies an object of study’s spatiotemporal position and its surroundings (including the soil matrix), as to infer that the object and its surroundings go together in some culturally or behaviorally meaningful way (Lyman, 2012:213; Renfrew and Bahn, 2016:46). Because provenience and associations vary in terms of their resolution and degree, respectively, so too might an archaeological context range in terms of its specificity. For example, a general context might include simply noting that two sites are found in the same geographic region and date to the same relative time period (e.g., both sites are in the context of Early Neolithic region A), whereas a highly specific context might include noting that an artifact was found at the bottom of a pit, located within a house, located within a site, located within a landscape, and dated to a certain absolute time period (e.g., artifact A is in the context of pit B, inside of house C, from site D, from landscape E, and dates to between 5350 and 5300 BC). Context, therefore, is multi-scalar and ranges in terms of its specificity due to its dependence on the resolution and degree of provenience and association, respectively (Lyman, 2012). It then follows that not only must a context be identified when practicing contextual archaeology, but so too must the relevant scale of analysis (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). To that regard, Harris (1979), having recognized many differences between geologic and archaeological stratigraphy, and wanting, in some sense, to increase specificity when identifying and recording context during the process of archaeological excavation, wrote his Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy. Harris (1979) noted that human-made structuresdsuch as graves, pits, postholes, walls, floors, artifact scatters, etc.deach have their own unique spatiotemporal boundaries and, therefore, depositional histories, such that they might be considered spatiotemporally discrete stratigraphic units in their own rights. Considering that the boundaries of such human-made structures are also often observable with the naked eye, they then can be identified, excavated, and recorded in stratigraphic order during the process of archaeological excavationdthat is, independent from geologic strata and general layers (Harris, 1979). Harris (1979); see also Schiffer (1976), then negated the importance of noting provenience simply based on an artifact’s position within some general geologic stratum (i.e., a layer) in favor of focusing on evermore discrete archaeological units of stratification, effectively identifying the smallest pertinent scale of contextual analysis. In other words, considering that archaeological depositional units of stratification are spatiotemporally discrete, then the materials found within such discrete deposits by default share the same high-resolution provenience and strong degree of association. Therefore, each discrete archaeological unit of deposition is, in fact, a unique high-resolution archaeological context. Notably, Harris’s (1979) definition of the discrete archaeological depositional unit as high-resolution context forms the basis of the single-context excavation methodology, widely practiced today (see for example MoLAS, 1994), and from which high-resolution contextual interpretations of the archaeological record can ultimately be derived.
From Context to Contextual At present, I argue that few archaeologists would seriously disagree on the definition of an archaeological context as the combination of provenience and associationdnotwithstanding the issues of resolution and degree. Furthermore, it is today common practice to consider discrete archaeological deposits as the smallest pertinent scale of contextual analysis, such that all aspects of material culture found within such discrete high-resolution archaeological contexts can, by default, be interpreted as belonging together in
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some culturally or behaviorally meaningful way. However, considerable disagreement remains as to how one should go about interpreting the cultural or behavioral meaning of material culture in context. In other words, there is considerable disagreement about how one should move from the context to the contextual (see Shanks and Tilley, 1987). In all cases, such disagreements are rooted in the development of archaeological theorydfrom the culture-historical approach, to the new archaeology (processualism), and finally with the post-processual turn. During the culture-historical period of archaeology (i.e., from the beginning of the 20th century until about 1960), it was thought only possible to point out that similar instances of material culture must have been made and/or were used by the same populationda logical abstraction derived from the law of association. As similar instances of material culture were found in different archaeological contexts, it was also then inferred that a population sharing the same culture must have produced and/or occupied all such contexts (see the culture historical approach; normative theory of culture; Trigger, 2006; Webster, 2008). The idea was that comparable assemblages of material culture could be grouped together to form geographically and temporally bounded units that in turn should represent distinct cultural units (i.e., archaeological cultures). Rather than view the archaeological record as the remains of culture itself, culture-historians viewed material culture as the physical product of cultural norms and ideals that were shared by a distinct population. Their main preoccupation then was to classify material culture into distinct types based on its elements of variation (e.g., particularly raw material, form, and style), focused on elements of variation that should reflect cultural ideals and norms rather than utility, and then assign such types to their appropriate geographic and cultural boundaries (Webster, 2008). As such, we arrive at what is perhaps the most rudimentary form of contextual interpretationdthat is, instances of material culture interpreted as situated within the macro-context of a specific geographic region and archaeological culture. Furthermore, as it became recognized that certain assemblages of material culture either preceded or succeeded different assemblages in time, as inferred from the archaeological principles of stratigraphy and derived from the practices of typology and seriation (see Webster, 2008), culture-historians also interpreted the chronological context. For example, as a particular type of material culture became associated to a certain relative time period (e.g., the Acheulean handaxe ¼ Lower Paleolithic, polished stone tools ¼ Neolithic, etc.), we might say that other examples of material culture found in association are also then in the macro-context of said relative time period. With the advent of absolute dating techniques, we may get even more specific and say that an artifact is in the context of the nth millennium, century, or even decade. The implications are that the cultural and chronological contexts of material culture in some way inform to what other examples of material culture they are associated (or not), implying further contextual meaning and opportunities for interpretation. However, further contextual interpretation was typically not practiced during the culture-historical period of archaeology (see Taylor, 1948 for a notable exception). In other words, description and/or explication of the archaeological record in its chrono-cultural context was taken as an end rather than as a means to further interpretation. Another early form of contextual interpretation, it could be said, concerns the environmental context (Butzer, 1964; Clark, 1952). As environmental data are collected alongside archaeological data, the former is often used to contextualize the latter, such that certain expressions of material culture might then be taken as situated within a particular environment. Therefore, we arrive at such statements as the culture/site/artifact is in the context of a rainforest, a desert, a tundra, and so on. In all such cases, however, be it the cultural, chronological, or environmental context of material culture, we are dealing with rather coarse and/or general forms of contextual interpretation. Indeed, to suggest that a particular type of material culture is found within a certain cultural, chronological, and/or environmental context is to infer from a rather low-resolution provenience and from a weak degree of association. What such general contextual interpretations do not provide is further grounds for specificationdthey merely describe the general contextual setting within which supposed common instances of material culture are found (Hodder and Hutson, 2003), rather than explain the source of such variability in the archaeological record. Nearing the end of the culture-historical period, theoretical developments in the field of anthropology began to further influence the interpretation of the archaeological record. Chief among them was the framework of cultural ecology as developed by Steward (1955). In essence because culture was embedded within an environmental context, it was believed that culture had arisen as an adaptive response to said environment (see evolutionary archaeology; Steward, 1955). Culture, therefore, was viewed as an adaptive system or, more explicitly, as humanity’s “extrasomatic means of adaptation” (White, 1943). By association, material culture could then be understood in light of its adaptive implications in relation to its position within a cultural, chronological, and environmental context. In essence, by combining the cultural, chronological, and environmental contexts of material culture we could arrive at an interpretation of the adaptive ecological context (Binford, 1962). Though Steward (1955) recognized that different cultures could adapt to the same environment in fundamentally different waysdthat is, contingent on its particular culturehistorical trajectorydhis theory of cultural ecology nonetheless privileged the adaptive/functional (physical) rather than the conceptual and symbolic (ideological) implications of culture, effectively shifting attention away from interpreting material culture as the product of cultural norms (i.e., as the product of the ideologicaldas was common practice during the culture-historical period of archaeology) toward the interpretation of material culture as primarily serving adaptive functional needs (i.e., as the product of the physical). Following on the heels of such theoretical developments, during the 1960s the new archaeology (i.e., processualism) emerged as a reaction to the general interpretive limitations of the culture-historical approach (Trigger, 2006). The new archaeology, which sought to explain rather than merely describe or explicate variation in the archaeological record, embraced the adaptiveecological conception of culture and began to think of context in different ways. Namely, practitioners of the new archaeology (later called processualists) recognized the functional, behavioral, and systemic contexts of material culture (Binford, 1962; Flannery, 1968; Schiffer, 1976). For example, if stone tools were found alongside butchered animal remains within a discrete archaeological
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deposit (i.e., a specific archaeological context), such a context could then be interpreted as the remains of a butchery location, perhaps then extended as being situated within a hunting camp based on the interpretation of adjoining archaeological deposits found at the same site. The stone tools, in turn, with the help of new scientific methodologies, such as residue, use-wear analyses, and experimental archaeology, could be determined as having served the adaptive function of meat preparationde.g., scrapers for scraping, choppers for chopping, blades for cutting, etc. Previously, variation in the functional character of material culture found at different sites was thought to represent normative cultural differences in line with the culture-historical approach, and hence was often used only to frame the general cultural and/or chronological context (e.g., Bordes, 1961; Bordes and de Sonneville-Bordes, 1970). With the important addition of function, however, the possibility that such archaeological deposits were not, in fact, culturally or chronologically different, but rather that they may simply represent different functional contexts situated within the same culture and/or time period, was critically raised (see the Bordes v. Binford debate; Binford and Binford, 1966). As such, the processual approach highlighted that material culture can vary not only in terms of its general cultural, chronological, and/or environmental context, but more specifically also in terms of its functional and behavioral context. Processualism, therefore, raised the possibility that the archaeological record could be interpreted as the static physical remains of various dynamic human behaviors, rather than limited by the assignment of variation to different archaeological cultures (Binford, 1962). The goal of archaeological interpretation was then shifted away from the description of the general chrono-cultural context toward the development of laws and explanations of human behavior, as was thought reflected by the patterned spatiotemporal distribution of material culture in highly specific contexts (Binford, 1962). Furthermore, it was believed that different behaviors could be primarily attributed to different fundamental social sub-systems (e.g., butchery ¼ subsistence, manufacturing ¼ economy, ritual ¼ religion, palace construction ¼ politics, etc.). Such behaviors were then interpreted as essentially serving the adaptive functions of their respective sub-systems. Once all behaviors and the functioning of the different subsystems were understood in unison, one could get at a functional explanation of the entire social systemdi.e., the culture (see systems theory; Flannery, 1968). Therefore, the new archaeology (i.e., processualism) was an order of magnitude more specific than was the culture-historical approach insofar as contextual interpretation is concerned, as it examined material culture using high-resolution provenience and strong degrees of association typically on a deposit-by-deposit (qua context-by-context) basis, before extrapolating from the specific to make general claims regarding the archaeological record, and indeed about humanity, writ-large. Processualism then effectively introduced a whole new set of contextual considerations, including the adaptive/ecological, functional, behavioral, and systemic contexts of material culture. Not only so, but it was recognized that the multi-scalar nature of context allowed for the possibility of nested contexts, such that different functional, behavioral, and systemic contexts could coexist within the bounding parameters of the more general cultural, chronological, and environmental contexts, which were largely the preoccupation of culture-historians. However, the processual approach faltered in its search for the absolute (read physical) properties of material culture, as opposed to the ideological and symbolic properties of material culture, and by its commitment toward the use of highly positivist, reductionist, and deterministic theories (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). By privileging the adaptive, functional, behavioral, and the systemic, the focus was placed on the development of cross-cultural laws of human behavior that again, like the culturehistorical approach, would ultimately generalize rather than make specific the meaning content of material culture in context (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). In other words, by privileging similarities rather than differences between archaeological contexts, processualists had only attained what might be characterized as a meso-scale level of contextual interpretation. Consequently, by the 1980s processualism was heavily criticized for focusing too much on similarities, on the social system, and on the physical aspects of material culture, as opposed to the specific and symbolic/ideological aspects of material culture (see Leach, 1973). Those who recognized and privileged the symbolic/ideological aspect of material culture then noted that social systems operate in accordance with certain rules and norms that often lie outside the realm of pure functionalism. In other words, though functionalist explanations may be logical, little could be said about why certain types of materials were selected to serve certain functions when other equally (and sometimes more) functionally suitable materials were also readily available (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). To truly understand the archaeological record, some understanding of the underlying social ideology was then required. As such, structuralism emerged to, once again, emphasize that ideological superstructuresdi.e., norms, beliefs, and symbolic conceptsdare ultimately responsible for the operation of the social system as opposed to material infrastructures (see structuralism; LeroiGourhan, 1965). Thus, though opposed to the strict physicalist stance of processualism, we also arrive at the symbolic/ideological context of material culture through the systemic emphasis of the new archaeology via the structuralist approach. The structuralist approach, however, never really took hold in archaeology and, when practiced, often served processualist aims (i.e., ideology interpreted as the predictable outcome of functional adaptation; Hodder and Hutson, 2003). Before long, it was also recognized that the ideological superstructures privileged by structuralists did not simply emerge out of nowhere nor were they always the deterministic products of ecological adaptation. In fact, because they are borne from the human mind, such ideological superstructures must be the product of individuals who work in concert either for or against the maintenance of said superstructures, often without necessarily being conscious of their existence, and ultimately over time transforming them. The latter then called for a better understanding of agency and of history in the interpretation of the archaeological record (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). A series of critiques, collectively referred to as post-structuralism, then emerged to emphasize the role of agency and of history in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of ideological superstructures. Important works, such as Bourdieu’s (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice and Giddens’ (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration contributed to post-structural
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scholarship in both sociology and anthropology and were quickly taken up by archaeology, ultimately leading to the postprocessual turn (see post-processualism; Hodder, 1985). Through emphasizing the role of agency and of history in the production of material culture, post-processualism acknowledged that every instance of material culture is produced by an individual (or group of individuals) rather than by an ideological social system (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). In other words, material culture is produced and used by individuals in accordance with those individuals’ own unique dispositions (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). Meaning is, therefore, not absolute or inherent in the archaeological record, as had previously been proposed by processualists; rather, it is relational and historically contingent. That is to say, the interpretation of the archaeological record should account for the relationship between the agent who uses material culture and the conditions of the situation for which the use of said material culture is a component (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). The implication, therefore, is that every archaeological context is fundamentally unique, not only spatiotemporally but also conceptually, and must then be understood as such prior to drawing any generalized conclusions based on apparent cultural, behavioral, and/or functional similarities. By recognizing that each archaeological context is, indeed, both spatiotemporally and conceptually unique we then can truly emphasize the particular (i.e., the specific) as opposed to privileging only the generaldas had the culture-historical, processualist, and structuralist approaches. A truly contextual archaeology can then strive to understand each archaeological context as a unique occurrence that was produced by the practices and dispositions of particular agents and that together come to form the archaeological record. Furthermore, a proper contextual archaeology should also take into account the fact that such practices and dispositions are constraineddthough not determineddby the environment, by the physical, and by ideological superstructures (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). As such, one cannot wholly abandon the important insights learned from the culture-historical, processual, and structural schools of thought when practicing contextual archaeology, but instead should continue to build on them by emphasizing differences as well as similarities in the archaeological record. By studying such differences, we then can arrive at an interpretation of the agentive contextdthat is, of behavior as mediated by the individual’s own unique practices and dispositions. By noting differences in practice and disposition over time, we can also then arrive at the historical context. Therefore, only by considering all manner of contextual variation can we truly arrive at a holistic interpretation of the archaeological recorddone that considers all the evidence as opposed to privileging a single theory and/or approach. To complicate matters even further, not only is the archaeological record embedded within a plurality of context, but so too is the archaeologist who makes an interpretation. We must then also consider the implicit bias of the researchers as they are themselves embedded in a present-day plurality of context (Shanks and Tilley, 1987). In other words, by acknowledging the implicit bias of the researcher, we can arrive at the reflexive context. By recognizing the limitations of our own conceptual schemes, we might identify lacunae in our reasoning and re-examine the evidence from a new perspective. If, for instance, our interpretation of the archaeological record requires some understanding of gender roles in the past, as might be important in the interpretation of say burial goods, yet our own conceptual scheme reduces and portrays gender roles in binary male and female forms, we then inherently overlook the possibility that the past population might have included three or more genders or perhaps did not distinguish between genders at all. We therefore must allow the context under investigation to confront the context of the researcher such that a reflexive context is accounted for by the interpretation. Understanding the reflexive context is then key for interpreting the meaning of the archaeological record and is a particularly important component of practicing a contextual archaeology from our present-day vantage point (Shanks and Tilley, 1987).
From the Contextual to Contextual Interpretation Shifts in archaeological theory have introduced numerous ways of contextualizing the archaeological recorddi.e., in a cultural, chronological, environmental, ecological, functional, behavioral, systemic, symbolic/ideological, agentive, historical, and/or reflexive context (see Biehl, 1999). The question then becomes how the researcher is to reconcile all such possible variations of context and ultimately arrive at a holistic interpretation. As Hodder (1991) has stated, how one conceives context is, in a sense, predetermined by theory. That is to say, context and theory are interwoven such that what one believes is relevant to the process of contextualization is partly dependent on a theoretical framework. In order to practice a contextual archaeology, therefore, it is necessary to periodically suspend theory, embrace the plurality of context, and use the dialectic relationship between context and theorydi.e., move back and forth between the twoduntil all forms of contextual variation are adequately considered, or until all contextual similarities and differences are accounted for by the interpretation in question (Hodder, 1991). In other words, we must continue relating the parts (i.e., material culture) to the whole (i.e., the contextual) until the whole makes sense of all possible parts. This process of moving back and forth between material culture and context, context and theory, parts and whole, question and answer, has been termed the hermeneutic method (Hodder, 1991). One way to characterize how the hermeneutic method operates is to use the metaphor of a text (Hodder, 1991; Hodder and Hutson, 2003). When interpreting the meaning of a word in a text, it is quite often not sufficient to rely on a single absolute definition of the word. Indeed, the meaning of a worddi.e., a specific chain of lettersdcan change relative to the language being used and relative to the other words in the text (Hodder and Hutson, 2003). If we rely on the example provided by Hodder (1986) in Reading the Past and elaborate a bit further, we can examine the meaning of the word “pain” by using the hermeneutic method. Hodder (1986) notes that the word paindas is specifically formed using the letters P, A, I, and N from the Latin alphabetdcan mean different things in different languages. In English, for instance, pain refers to agony, whereas in French it means bread (Hodder and Hutson, 2003:176). Likewise, the word for pain in Bulgarian is bpmla and the word for bread is ym>b, emphasizing that not only can the same chain of letters mean completely different things in different cultural settings, but so too can a different chain of
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letters (from an entirely different alphabet) mean generally the same thing as a different chain of letters in another cultural setting. One can also consider that the word pain in the English language was once spelled “peine,” yet shared the same general meaning. Furthermore, if we continue with the meaning of the word pain in English as referring to agony, we might consider the ambiguity of the English phrase “my heart is in pain.” On the one hand, the author may be implying that they are having a heart attack and are in need of medical attention, and on the other hand they may be referring to the emotional pain of having lost a loved one. To distinguish between such variations in meaning of the same phrase or word requires some additional contextual information, such as checking the passages that came before and after the phrase to see if there is some clearer indication of whether the author intended physical vs. emotional pain. Perhaps the author is even referring to some form of pain that the reader has not yet considered due to their own personal biases. To interpret the meaning of a word in a text in such a way is to use the hermeneutic method by accounting for its contextual relationships and by moving back and forth between context and theory, the parts and the whole, until a satisfactory understanding of the word or phrase is ultimately achieved by the reader. In archaeological practice, one can proceed much in the same manner, only with the word or phrase being replaced by an instance of material culture and with the text replaced by the context(s) within which it is both literally and figuratively embedded. For example, a polished stone axe, taken as a specific instance of material culture in the archaeological record, can be interpreted using the hermeneutic method. Like a word in a text, the meaning of a polished stone axe can change in accordance with its context. Functionally speaking, a polished stone axe may at first be interpreted as an essential woodworking tool. One way to arrive at the interpretation of the axe as a woodworking tool is through functional use-wear analysis, whereby the markings on the axe are determined as having been produced from its physical interactions with wood. What then are we to make of a situation in which the axe has no obvious use-wear traces at all? Can we still confidently interpret the axe as a woodworking tool? As an intended woodworking tool? In all such cases? What, then, is the meaning of a polished stone axe? During the excavation of three Neolithic sites located in the Struma Valley, BulgariadIlindentsi, Balgarchevo, and Damyanitsadwe were confronted with just such a case (see Gre˛ bska-Kulow and Whitford, 2016; Grebska-Kulova et al., 2020). There, we uncovered numerous polished stone axes, many without obvious use-wear traces, deposited in specific archaeological contexts. At Ilindentsi such axes were placed either within or at the top of storage pits and found in pits dug below the foundation of a domestic oven. At Balgarchevo, they were found placed directly beneath large storage vessels and next to a grindstone installation adjoining the cooking facilities of a dwelling. At Damyanitsa, several polished stone axes were found inside a single liquid storage vessel located within a large storehouse containing fifty storage vessels altogether. To make sense of the polished stone axe under such circumstances we then needed to consider further contextual evidence. Using the hermeneutic method, we begin with the pre-understanding that polished stone axes serve the essential function of woodworking. When confronted by the lack of use-wear traces on many of the axes, however, we suspended our initial theory and began considering additional possible interpretations based on their respective contextual elements of variation. First, during the Neolithic of temperate Europe, it is well established that oak served as a primary resource in household construction and that forest clearings would have been necessary for the preparation and maintenance of agricultural fields and villages (Gre˛ bska-Kulow and Whitford, 2016). The polished stone axe, therefore, would by association have been considered essential to the act of agricultural production during the Neolithic of temperate Europedwithout the axe there would be no village or agricultural fields. Considering next that the polished stone axes in question were placed under storage vessels, inside storage vessels, in storage pits, and/or located near to cooking facilities and storehouses, which would not have allowed for the easy retrieval of the axe for its use as a woodworking tool, we arrive at the possibility that since the polished stone axe must have been ideologically associated with the act of agricultural production during the Neolithic of the Struma Valley that such axes could have been placed with permanent intent within such domestic agricultural contexts. It is then likely, as it accounts for all elements of variation, that the axes were placed in such contexts to symbolically stimulate the continued act of agricultural productiondi.e., to ritually ensure that the stores remained full and that the cooking facilities remained productive (Gre˛ bska-Kulow and Whitford, 2016; Grebska-Kulova et al., 2020). Additionally, such an interpretation requires taking note of the fact that at Balgarchevo the axes were systematically placed below numerous large storage vessels inside a domestic dwelling, at Ilindentsi they were found placed inside numerous storage pits and at the base of a domestic oven, whereas at Damyanitsa they were found inside a single storage vessel next to many other, otherwise empty, storage vessels in a large communal storehouse. Such contextual differences then account for different agentive practices and dispositions toward the act of storage and cooking at each respective site, all the while maintaining the coherent and overarching interpretation of the polished stone axe serving as a ritual symbol of agricultural production within the wider chrono-cultural context of the Neolithic Struma Valley. Furthermore, we account for historical differences in that the sites of Ilindentsi and Balgarchevo are dated to the Early Neolithic, whereas the site of Damyanitsa is dated to the Late Neolithic. As such, it is interesting to note that at Damyanitsa the practice of depositing polished stone axes in a storage context was significantly elaborated. At Damyanitsa, the seven polished stone axes were deposited alongside two stone adzes, one whetstone, one perforated fox tooth, and one bone tool, all covered with ochre, inside a single liquid storage vessel located alongside fifty other storage vessels in a probable communal (as opposed to domestic) storehouse situated away from the primary residential area (Grebska-Kulova et al., 2020). Therefore, though the practice of depositing axes in agricultural contexts began during the Early Neolithic, it continued well into the Late Neolithic, albeit with considerable elaboration. Such an elaboration of ritual practice runs in tandem with the intensification of agricultural production in the region, with the settlement at Damyanitsa serving as a large regional center of production. As such, we link the historical context of the polished stone axe serving as a symbol of agricultural
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production also to historical shifts in the practice of agricultural production in the region over time, from relatively small-scale and domestic during the Early Neolithic to large-scale and communal during the Late Neolithic. We also needed to confront our own implicit bias in order to arrive at such an interpretation. In the present-day context of the researchers, the sacred and the mundane are often thought of as separate categories of material culture. In other words, our bias suggests that some types of material culture should be classified as practical/mundane, whereas other different types should be classified as symbolic/sacred. We could not then at first-glance recognize the dual meaning of the polished stone axe, as both a practical and symbolic object, before overcoming our own implicit bias. Indeed, such an implicit bias was not easy to overcome. The excavations at Balgarchevo took place 20 years prior to those at Ilindentsi, yet it took being confronted by the similarity of polished stone axes deposited in agricultural storage contexts at both sites before it could be adequately recognized at either site alone. That is not to say that the researchers were unaware of its potential significance in isolation, but rather is meant to emphasize that the addition of information from other archaeological contexts made the interpretation all that much more coherent and secure. Likewise, had the interpretation not been made earlier with reference to an Early Neolithic context, it is unlikely that the historic significance of the same practice occurring during the Late Neolithic at Damyanitsa would have been recognized and/or interpreted quite the same way. In other words, only by moving back and forth between context and theory, by embracing a reflexive context, and by working to incorporate additional contextual information at every turn, could we arrive at the holistic interpretation of the polished stone axe as having both practical and symbolic meaning during the Neolithic of the Struma Valley. In short, such an interpretation could not have been accomplished without the use of the hermeneutic method.
Key Issues One of the key problems with the program of contextual archaeology is that it does not really stand out as distinct from traditional archaeology in general (see Binford, 1989; Kolpakov, 1993). Furthermore, the hermeneutic method allows for a plethora of interpretations depending on what each individual archaeologist conceives as relevant data, such that it has led to a certain degree of hyper-relativism (Biehl, 1999). The practice and disposition of the researcher then continues to determine, at the least, from which theoretical stance one first enters the hermeneutic method and ultimately the final direction and character of the interpretation. As such, very few studies over the years have outright claimed a contextual approach, despite their essentially using a contextual approach all the same, making it difficult to assess its specific usefulness and impact on the discipline of archaeology writ-large. Indeed, as previously stated, all archaeology is in some sense contextual as we go beyond merely studying material culture in isolation. Since the very onset of the discipline, there has been some preoccupation with defining context and with interpreting the contextual. The difference has been primarily with determining which aspect of the contextual is ultimately most relevant for the interpretation of the archaeological record. Surely how one defines relevance will depend on which theoretical stance one is most familiar and/or aligned with (Biehl, 1999; Shanks and Tilley, 1987). In other words, the search for relevance continues to lie in the domain of archaeological theory and with the development of coherent methodologies. Therefore, some have argued that it is best to avoid the particularistic aims of contextual archaeology as is achieved by suspending theory and using the hermeneutic method, in favor of remaining wedded to a single theory when making a specific interpretation about context (see Gremillion et al., 2014 for a relevant example). Subsequently, we might compare interpretations derived from different theories and methods regarding the same context, as to see which is most coherent and make adjustments where necessary, ultimately arriving at the same or at least a similar result as that of employing the hermeneutic method from the very beginning. In either case, the central premise of contextual archaeology, which is that it is at times necessary to suspend theory and make adjustments in our reasoning whenever the contextual information demands it, is critical toward ensuring that we continue to acknowledge the plurality of context and the multivocal potential of archaeological interpretation.
Summary and Future Directions To summarize, the concept of context is fundamentally tied to the principles of archaeological stratigraphy. As such, context can be defined as the combination of an object’s provenience and associations. Furthermore, contexts can vary in terms of their specificity, such that a general context might be inferred from a low-resolution provenience and weak degree of association and a highly specific context might be inferred from a high-resolution provenience and strong degree of association. Context is therefore multi-scalar and the relevant scale of analysis must be determined when practicing a contextual archaeology. Different scales of contextual analysis also then imply different dimensions of relevance and opportunities for further interpretation, such that general contexts can provide only quite general contextual interpretations and specific contexts, in turn, can provide highly specific contextual interpretations. During the culture-historical period, contextual interpretation was utilized to describe only the general cultural, chronological, and environmental contexts of material culture, often without concern for further interpretation. Then, with the advent of the new archaeology (i.e., processualism), the physical properties of material culture were emphasized to elaborate on the adaptive,
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ecological, functional, behavioral, and systemic contexts of material culture. Finally, with the post-processual turn, it was recognized that ideology/symbolism, agency, and history played an important role in mediating the meaning of material culture and that one must treat every single context not only as a spatiotemporally unique occurrence but also as a conceptually unique occurrence, drawing on both similarities and differences, in order to arrive at a holistic understanding of the archaeological record. Only by combining all possible forms of contextual variation can we arrive at a truly holistic understanding of the meaning of material culture. Finally, one must also consider the implicit bias of the researchers who make the interpretation as they are themselves embedded in a plurality of present-day contexts. To practice a contextual archaeology, therefore, requires the use of a reflexive hermeneutic method, which consists of moving back and forth between context and theory until one arrives at an understanding that makes the most sense out of all the available contextual information. That said, one key issue with the program of contextual archaeology is that it is not so dissimilar from archaeology in general, and determining what constitutes relevant contextual information is itself tied to theory and to the practices and dispositions of the researcher. Entertaining multiple theories at once is easier said than done and there is an argument to be made that it may perhaps be best to remain wedded to a single theory when making interpretations from the archaeological record, only to subsequently compare the interpretations made from multiple theories and decide which is most coherent given all available interpretations. Nonetheless, whether distinct from archaeology in general or not, the explicit emphasis of contextual archaeology on the plurality of context and the multivocal potential of interpretation has significantly contributed to the discipline, if not only to promote an aversion to dogmatism. Moving forward, one should continue to take stock of developments in the realm of archaeological method and theorydas they continue to be derived from the sciences and humanitiesdwhen practicing a contextual archaeology, such that new forms of contextual information continuously enter the process of interpretation.
See Also: Behavioral Archaeology; History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Post-Processual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Stratigraphic Diagrams.
References Barrett, John C., 2006. Archaeology as the investigation of the contexts of humanity. In: Papaconstantinou, Demetra (Ed.), Deconstructing Context: A Critical Approach to Archaeological Practice. Oxbow, Oxford, pp. 194–211. Biehl, Peter F., 1999. Analogy and context: a re-construction of the missing link. In: Owen, Linda R., Porr, Martin (Eds.), Ethno-Analogy and the Reconstruction of Prehistoric Artefact Use and Production, Urgeschichtliche Materialhefte, vol. 14. MoVince Verlag, Tubingen, pp. 171–184. Binford, Lewis R., 1962. Archaeology as anthropology. Am. Antiq. 28, 217–225. Binford, Lewis R., 1989. Debating Archaeology. Academic Press, Amsterdam. Binford, Lewis R., Binford, Sally R., 1966. A preliminary analysis of functional variability in the Mousterian of Levallois Facies. Am. Anthropol. 68, 238–295. Bordes, François, 1961. Mousterian cultures in France. Science 134, 803–810. Bordes, François, de Sonneville-Bordes, Denise, 1970. The significance of variability in Palaeolithic assemblages. World Archaeol. 2, 61–73. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. Esquisse D’une Théorie de la Pratique. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Butzer, Karl W., 1964. Environment and Archaeology. Aldine, Chicago. Clark, Grahame, 1952. Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis. Methuen. Cuvier, Georges, 1812. Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes: où l’on rétablit les caractères de plusieurs espèces d’animaux que les révolutions du globe paroissent avoir détruites. Deterville, Paris. Cuvier, Georges, 1835. Descriptions géologique des environs de Paris: atlas. E. d’Ocagne, Paris. Flannery, Kent V., 1968. Archaeological systems theory and early Mesoamerica. In: Meggars, Betty J. (Ed.), Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas. Anthropological Society, Washington, DC, pp. 67–87. Giddens, Anthony, 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. University of California Press, Berkeley. Grebska-Kulova, Malgorzata, Whitford, Brent, 2016. Objects of everyday life and their ritual dimension from prehistoric settlements in the Struma Valley. In: Spasova, Dimitriya (Ed.), Megalithic Monuments and Cult Practices: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium. Blagoevgrad, 12–15 October 2016. Neofit-Rilski University Press, Blagoevgrad, pp. 160–170. Grebska-Kulova, Malgorzata, Vajsov, Ivan, Whitford, Brent, 2020. Polished stone axes/adzes and storage vesselsdevidence of domestic ritual at the prehistoric settlement at Damyanitsa. In: Spasova, Dimitriya, Genov, Anton (Eds.), Megalithic Monuments and Cult Practices: Proceedings of the Third International Symposium. Blagoevgrad, 8–9 September 2020. Neofit-Rilski University Press, Blagoevgrad, pp. 231–245. Gremillion, Kristen J., Barton, Loukas, Piperno, Dolores R., 2014. Particularism and the retreat from theory in the archaeology of agricultural origins. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 111, 6171–6177. Harris, Edward C., 1979. Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy, first ed. Academic Press, New York. Hodder, Ian, 1985. Postprocessual archaeology. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theor. 8, 1–26. Hodder, Ian, 1986. Reading the Past, first ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hodder, Ian, 1991. Interpretive archaeology and its role. Am. Antiq. 56, 7–18. Hodder, Ian, Hutson, Scott, 2003. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, third ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kolpakov, Eugene, 1993. The end of theoretical archaeology? A glance from the east. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 26, 107–115. Leach, E., 1973. Concluding address. In: Renfrew, A. Colin (Ed.), The Explanation of Culture Change. Duckworth, London. Leroi-Gourhan, André, 1965. Préhistorie de l’art occidental. Mazenod, Paris. Lyell, Charles, 1830. Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. John Murray, London. Lyman, R. Lee, 2012. A historical sketch on the concepts of archaeological association, context, and provenience. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 19, 207–240.
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Museum of London Archaeology Service, 1994. In: Archaeological Site Manual, third ed. Museum of London, London. Renfrew, Colin, Bahn, Paul G., 2016. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice. Thames & Hudson, London. Schiffer, Michael B., 1976. Behavioral Archeology. Academic Press, New York. Shanks, Michael, Tilley, Christopher, 1987. Re-constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Smith, William, 1816. Strata Identified by Organized Fossils, Containing Prints on Coloured Paper of the Most Characteristic Specimens in Each Stratum. W. Arding, London. Steno, Nicolaus, Winter, John Garrett, 1916. The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno’s Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Process of Nature Within a Solid; an English Version With an Introduction and Explanatory Notes. Macmillan, New York. Steward, Julian H., 1955. Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Taylor, Walter W., 1948. A Study of Archaeology. American Anthropological Association, Arlington, Virginia. Trigger, Bruce G., 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, second ed. Cambridge University Press, New York. Webster, Gary S., 2008. Culture-history: a culture-historical approach. In: Bentley, R. Alexander, Maschner, Herbert D.G., Chippindale, Christopher (Eds.), Handbook of Archaeological Theories. AltaMira Press, Plymouth, pp. 11–28. White, Leslie A., 1943. Energy and the evolution of culture. Am. Anthropol. 45, 335–356. Worsaae, Jens Jacob Asmussen, 1849. The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark. John Henry Parker, London.
Digital Archaeology Kevin Garstki, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues 3D Visualization Data Archiving and Open Data Public Engagement and Collaboration Big Data and Automation Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Introduce recent digital tools used in archaeology. Outline the trends in the discipline regarding data archiving. Describe increasing attention to FAIR and CARE data principles in archaeology. Situate digital tools in wider conversations in archaeology about ethics and sustainability.
Abstract This entry introduces the wide field of digital archaeology that encompasses digital tools and their use in modern archaeology. Techniques such as 3D visualization are explained and situated in archaeological practice. Additionally, current trends in digital data archiving, open data practices, and big data approaches are discussed. This entry also situates these digital tools and approaches in wider theoretical changes to the discipline, focused on an ethical and inclusive archaeology.
Introduction All modern archaeological practice is imbricated in some form with digital technologies, and so all archaeology is digital archaeology. It is therefore difficult to define what constitutes digital archaeology in its entirety. It is more useful to consider digital archaeology as a way of engaging with the archaeological record through the use of digital technology. This can include computational archaeology, focused on computer-based analysis of archaeological data, and virtual archaeology, focused on computer-based simulations or reconstructions of archaeological remains. However, digital archaeology also encompasses all the information technology used in creating, analyzing, and storing archaeological data, as well as all types of digital media created through archaeological or heritage work. Because of the wide-ranging nature of digital archaeology, work with digital technologies has also spawned significant theoretical discussions about the nature of technology in archaeological practice and public engagement with the past. These discussions have moved beyond the community of digital practitioners and influenced archaeological thinking on a disciplinary level. This entry provides some brief explanation of common digital tools in archaeological work and situates the use of these tools in broad archaeological practice.
Overview Though it may seem to be a recent phenomenon to many, a “digital revolution” in archaeology has been in progress since the midtwentieth century (Lock, 2003: 10). Following the innovations in manual computing and archaeological analyses conducted with punch-cards, Jean-Claude Gardin and Peter Ihm were the first to use electronic processing for an archaeological application in 1958 or 1959 (Dallas, 2016). In the 1960s and 1970s, computers began to be used on a larger scale in archaeological computing, working together with the strong push toward quantitative methods in the field (Richards and Ryan, 1985). The reciprocal relationship between methods and structuring theoretical paradigm began during this period and has continued to the modern day. As new
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digital hardware and software have developed, archaeologists have cycled through periods of novel experimentation, critique, and widespread adoption or rejection. Through this process, the disciplinary adoption of a technology impacts the way archaeology is practiced and how knowledge is produced, and therefore fundamentally influences how the past is negotiated in the present. Excitingly, the last two decades have seen not just rapid growth in the technological potential of digital archaeology but also its influence on wider trends in archaeology. Technologies like Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) and computational photogrammetry, piggybacking off earlier developments in digital photography, led to a major focus on digital visualization in this period of digital archaeology. These techniques for documenting three-dimensional space accurately provided archaeologists with an influx of spatial data. To be clear, archaeologists have long created three-dimensional data of landscapes or sites through analog means such as topographic survey and mapping, but these digital data were at a much larger scale. Yet at the same time, the adoption of 3D data capture techniques has brought with it questions about authenticity, fidelity, and the loss of meaningful engagement with analog recording (Caraher, 2019; Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco et al., 2018; Morgan et al., 2021). The continued creation of 3D data coincided with an increased move toward born-digital field recording (Averett et al., 2016) and dedicated efforts toward digitization. This digital data production led to large amounts of digital data that archaeologists now must manage, curate, and archive. Few centralized repositories currently exist to maintain all of the data created through the archaeological process, nor are there data standards that ensure all necessary information is properly stored indefinitely. However, the last decade has seen a greater awareness of the issues of data storage and sustainability, leading to data repositories and publishers like the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) (https://core.tdar.org/) and Open Context (https://opencontext.org/). Furthermore, many have used these data storage resources to move toward an open archaeology, where data is shared openly and freely. Open-access data, coupled with long-term storage solutions have also led to innovations in data analysis that includes aggregating datasets from across repositories. Underlying all these developments in digital archaeology is the potential for upending traditional archaeological systems and challenging the ethics of modern archaeological practice. The affordances of digital technology allow creative avenues for community collaboration and public participation in archaeological practice. So, as much as digital archaeology encompasses the tools adopted by archaeology for new methodology, it also is instigating and supporting broader theoretical shifts in archaeology.
Key Issues 3D Visualization 3D visualization is now an integral part of archaeological practice in both fieldwork and artifact recording. In the field, both rangebased (e.g., laser scanners and structure-light scanners) and image-based systems (e.g., computational photogrammetry) are used consistently for documentation and to address broad research questions. On the site and landscape scale of analysis, Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS), often used interchangeably with Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR), have proved most impactful over the last 20 years. Most ALS scanners use Time of Flight technology to record the three-dimensional coordinates of a surface. The output from this equipment are 3D point clouds that, when processed, represent the topographic surface of a landscape (see Opitz and Cowley, 2013 for detailed overview). As the technology has become more and more available, large regions and even nations have full LiDAR coverage, some even making the data freely available for use. The benefits of these data for archaeological and topographical survey and remote sensing are significant; high resolution landscape data has led to a finer grained analysis of anthropogenic landscapes, and the density of point clouds means vegetation coverage can be filtered out to see the ground surface below (Fig. 1). In addition to the technological benefits the discipline has seen from these increased data, ALS-derived data have also contributed to a shift in conceptualizations of landscape. Through increased data resolution leading to significantly higher site identification, a shift continues to occur that reframes sites and archaeological features as continuous anthropogenic landscapes rather than discrete entities. To mitigate some of the cost associated with initial ALS data collection, as well as focus 3D data collection on the excavationscale of recording, computational photogrammetry is a widely used technique for documenting three-dimensional data in archaeological fieldwork. At its core, computational photogrammetry is simply the calculation of three-dimensional points from overlapping photographs. Photogrammetry is not a new technique for calculating 3D points through triangulation of 2D images, but the computer-aided technique that has become so common in archaeology is a more recent development. Now, a graphical user interface largely controls the photogrammetric analysis. Much of the commonly used software uses a technique for constructing the scene from photographs called Structure from Motion (SfM), which is why many also refer to computational photogrammetry as SfM. The technique widely used by archaeologists today should more accurately be called computational, digital, or automated photogrammetry, highlighting the computer’s role in the final product. This technique is utilized heavily for spatial documentation in archaeological fieldwork due to the low financial commitment, since all that is needed is a digital SLR camera and software (Fig. 2). Its applications extend from aerial photogrammetry, which utilizes photographs taken from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to close-range photogrammetry for excavations and historic architecture, to local participation in field recording (e.g., Bria and Vasquez, 2022; Sapirstein and Murray, 2017). Despite its ubiquity in archaeological recording, the most widely used output from computational photogrammetry continues to be the 2D images extrapolated from the 3D models. Plan view and section view orthorectified images can be produced from any 3D model that has been geo-rectified to a coordinate system during data collection. These orthophotos can be imported into a Geographic Information System (GIS) and mapped, negating the need for hand drawn maps in the field and their subsequent
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Fig. 1 Gradisce above Knezak, Slovenian Iron Age hillfort. Left: aerial photography. Center: visualization of processed airborne LiDAR data. Right: archaeological interpretation. Only the hillfort ramparts (black) were known before airborne LiDAR data was analyzed. Created by Edisa Lozic.
digitization. Yet perhaps the most exciting aspect of these 3D data moving forward will be to incorporate the full three dimensions into GIS applications (see Dell’Unto and Landeschi, 2022). Early experiments by Wilhelmson and Dell’Unto (2015) demonstrated the usefulness of this approach by linking varied bioarchaeological, 3D spatial, and archaeological data into a single geodatabase. Propriety desktop software such as ESRI ArcScene can visualize 3D data and integrate it with the data typically used in geodatabases. However, 3D data siloed on a single computer desktop are difficult to share and reuse. One avenue to incorporate these data into useable analyses that is also available to multiple users is to rely on web 3D GIS platforms. A few purpose-built web 3D GIS solutions are showing the potential of these platforms. One, Archaeo 3D, is a web-based 3D viewer and connected database that combines 3D models either created on site using SfM or virtual reconstructions with a PostgreSQL database that contains the site, feature, and object information (Jensen, 2018). To be able to extract the full analytical potential of 3D visualizations created in the field, more of these types of integrated 3D GIS platforms will have to be developed, and hopefully we will see this coming from software developers, which will allow these 3D data analysis tools to be accessible by the wider archaeological community. Many of the same technological developments in the last few decades that allowed archaeologists to integrate 3D recording into analysis have also made 3D reconstructions and Virtual Reality more accessible in the discipline. Reilly (1991) identified the benefits of creating and integrating 3D visualizations into archaeological dissemination early in the 1990s, and that trend has continued through the last three decades. Yet one of the true potentials for virtual reconstructions lay with their integration into continuing ethical engagements. The evocative and immersive experiences that virtual worlds bring to archaeological engagement can provide truly emotional connections to historical and archaeological storytelling, supporting social justice initiatives and ethical heritage work (see the Virtual Rosewood project: González-Tennant, 2013). Additionally, virtual worlds can be even more impactfully implemented if their creation comes through collaboration and guidance from stakeholder communities. A prime example of this is the Nunalleq Educational Resource, an interactive, multimedia software application that allows users to explore the story of the Yup’ik people living in western Alaska 500 years ago (Watterson and Hillerdal, 2020). This type of collaboration and co-production of archaeological knowledge is a bar that archaeologists should be aiming for, especially in the production of past virtual worlds.
Data Archiving and Open Data Digital data creation is increasing at an exponential rate. In archaeology these data come in the form of born-digital or digitized excavation documentation, digital photographs, GIS infrastructures, ALS-derived data, photogrammetric-derived data, and geophysical remote sensing data. However, regardless of the increasing quality and amount of data created, without sustainable ways to store these data, they may as well be written on paper, locked away in a filing cabinet. Currently, there are significant limitations for properly and sustainably archiving digital data in all their forms. Some countries have established digital archives for
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Fig. 2 Top left: two views of a 3D model of the sanctuary at Athienou-Malloura, Cyprus. Top right: 2D orthophoto created from the 3D model. Bottom: 2D sections made of the 3D model.
archaeological and cultural heritage data, such as the Data Archive and Networked Services (DANS) in the Netherlands or the DAI infrastructure in Germany, although most countries, including the United States, have no such centralized data archive. In fact, only a small fraction of data that is created through archaeological work is required to be archived by any institution in the US. The lack of governmental support for data archiving poses enormous challenges to long-term maintenance. Other institutions have stepped in to fill this gap in archiving support. In the UK, the Archaeological Data Service (ADS) curates and preserves digital archaeological data and provides open access to metadata, unpublished reports, and sometimes full datasets. Similarly, the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) is a US-based repository maintained by the Center for Digital Antiquity (https://live-digant.ws.asu. edu/). Many data archived through tDAR are freely accessible with login credentials and include levels of access and restrictions for culturally sensitive data. Another approach to data longevity is taken by Open Context, maintained by the Alexandria Archive Institute (https://alexandriaarchive.org/). Although Open Context does archive data through the University of California library system, it approaches data deposition and accessibility differently than the aforementioned archives. Because they are data publishers as much as an archive, Open Context curates and peer reviews data deposited with the service. Both repositories follow Creative Commons licenses that provide differing levels of open access to the archived data. In addition to data longevity, an important facet emphasized in these archaeological archives is a shared concept of openness. This ethos stands in contrast to a century old mentality of archaeological data ownershipdthe excavators own the data recovered from a site and disseminate it at their will. Increasingly, archaeological and heritage work has been guided by the principles of shared cultural heritage and the acknowledgment that the past is not owned by archaeologists. To structure this changing approach, archaeology is quickly adopting the FAIR data principles developed by an interdisciplinary group of scholars as a framework for creating, maintaining, and reusing data (Wilkinson et al., 2016). FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. In the move toward open access, this includes providing access to all the pieces that serve as the basis for, and output from, archaeological knowledge: data, methods, interpretation. This openness extends to a transparency about how archaeology is practiced and
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the epistemological processes in data interpretation. Furthermore, it represents a set of guidelines for making archaeological information accessible to all those who have a stake in its use, free of cost and copyright. Most of the FAIR principles have only been possible through the rise of the Internet, as evidenced by the data repositories and publishers mentioned above. Of course, archaeological data can only be Findable if it is in a form that can be accessed by anyone. To accomplish this requires structured data, or at least their metadata, that conform to widely used standards (Kansa and Kansa, 2022). Search features on web-platforms, archaeological or otherwise, require parallel parameters to consistently find like data sources. Through shared metadata schemata, discrete data are able to link within or across platforms (also known as interoperability) to create more powerful or wide-reaching analyses. These connections support the concept of Linked Open Data, whereby data from distinct repositories are interoperable through a shared set of parameters, such as the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model for cultural heritage data. Linked Open Data is a feature of the growing Semantic Web, which, more than just putting data onto the internet, is about making webs of data that a person or machine can explore (Berners-Lee, 2006). The goal of making data findable, accessible, and interoperable is that these principles allow archaeological information to be reused. The lack of data reuse remains a major problem in archaeological research and heritage management. Just as data are meaningless if they are sitting on a paper form locked away in a filing cabinet, they are just as meaningless if they are stored away in a digital repository never to be interacted with again. Reuse can take many forms: reanalysis, new analyses, interpretation, teaching, alternate narrative construction, for policymaking, for the support of local and Indigenous groups, and community engagement, to name just a few. And yet, the vast majority of archaeological and heritage data are not structured or archived in ways that allow easy reuse, or often any reuse at all. Archaeologists must contend with the differences in archaeological data recording throughout the world and across borders and changing excavation practices throughout time, all of which create uneven datasets that makes interoperability very difficult. As tempting as it is to transition full force to highly standard and structured data collection practices, archaeologists should be aware of wider epistemological concerns. While standards allow data to link across platforms to other like data, they also have the potential to mask variability in past human behavior; the information recorded in the metadata is, by its nature, reductive of the original context. Furthermore, a move toward full open data archiving is heavily intertwined with contemporary socio-political contexts and with different cultural understandings of how archaeology should be used in modern meaning-making. The benefits of open data have been discussed above, but it is vital that archaeological and cultural heritage data are approached on a context-by-context basis; archaeologists have traditionally been in the position of power in their relationships when studying the anthropological “other,” and these relationships need to be a focus so as not to reinforce unequal power dynamics. Considerable care needs to be paid to ensure that open archaeological data do not harm associated local and Indigenous communities in any way. For example, geospatial information is often fundamental to interpreting any archaeological dataset. However, these geospatial data can also be used improperly or for nefarious purposes; known locations of sites could provide opportunities for looting or destruction of cultural heritage. Many of the repositories discussed above contend with this issue by obscuring precise locations, such as locating a site to the county level instead of exact coordinates. This demonstrates the growing awareness of the potential harm that open data practices may cause Indigenous communities, who have historically been on the receiving end of colonial and traumatic treatment under the guise of scholarly archaeological work. The discipline has seen an openness to adopt many of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, which, like the FAIR Principles, seek to guide best practices for data creation and management. However, the CARE Principles specifically aim to address the traditional inequalities that structured use of information about Indigenous pasts (Carroll et al., 2020). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance state: these data should be used for the Collective Benefit of Indigenous peoples, that the Authority to Control these data lay with Indigenous groups, that those working with these data have a Responsibility to demonstrate their use for Indigenous benefit, and that Indigenous rights and wellbeing should be the primary concern and Ethic guiding use of these data. These principles emphasize the need for digital ecosystems to be constructed with the collective benefit of Indigenous peoples as the primary goal.
Public Engagement and Collaboration The adoption of open data trends in archaeology, with the emerging dedication to person-centered archaeological practice, have also manifested in the growing use of digital technologies for public engagement and community collaboration. Traditionally, museums and cultural heritage sites have acted as the primary means through which archaeologists and heritage specialists have communicated with non-professionals. They thus serve as natural places to incorporate new digital technologies into these public-professional mediations. Museums such as the British Museum and the Smithsonian are increasingly digitizing their collections and making them available online, often for free. These virtual collections typically include high resolution images or even immersive virtual spaces. Additionally, many institutions incorporate other visual media into their in-person exhibits, such as informative touch screens, virtual reality (VR) or immersive equipment, or applications on personal mobile devices like Augmented Reality (Economou, 2015). These technologies do more than make heritage narratives engaging to the public, they also provide exciting avenues to support museum visitors who have historically been excluded from museum pedagogy, such as blind or partially sighted (BPS) communities (Bavi and Gupta, 2022). Arguably the most impactful part of digital public archaeology in the last decade has occurred on the social web. The development of Web 2.0 technology has provided a space for archaeologists to publish their own content and interact directly with the public, without information being disseminated through the one-way street of traditional publication. The social web is structured in a way that people can reuse, add to, or meaningfully interact with information, such as on social networking or blogging sites
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(Perry and Beale, 2015). The archaeological community has used micro-blogging sites like Twitter to share ideas, publicize notable discoveries, and to connect archaeological networks (Richardson, 2015). At the same time as these platforms provide a framework for the participation of many different groups, they also act as arenas to share misinformation, for harassment of archaeologists, or for unethical research (Bonacchi, 2022; Richardson, 2018). In the best scenarios, these digital networks provide a place for the coproduction of knowledge and collaboration across communities, and archaeologists could continue to learn techniques to make the best use of the social web. Innovations in the web, as well as other digital technologies, have also led to collaborative production of archaeological research. Some projects have built on larger trends to facilitate productive work by opening labor to non-specialists, and by providing funding options directly from the public; these are also known as crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Beginning in 2014, the MicroPasts project demonstrated a sustainable model for cooperation in the creation of open archaeological and historical data (Bonacchi et al., 2015). Participants could contribute virtually to several projects, including tasks like YouTube video tagging, transcription and translation of texts, or editing images for computational photogrammetry. Individuals could also financially contribute to these projects. By expanding the type of resources (financial or labor) people are contributing to archaeological work will only further expand how invested the public is in cultural heritage.
Big Data and Automation Archaeology has followed recent trends in data science by beginning to adopt big data approaches to archaeological data. Contrary to the name, big data does not solely refer to the quantity of information created and used but also the way in which it is used. Traditionally, big data are defined by being high-volume, high-velocity, and high-variety, although these qualities are vaguely characterized. It can be argued that based on the scale of data archaeologists create compared to other fields in data analytics, we do not in fact utilize “big data” (Garstki, 2020: 59). However, if the focus is on applying big data analyses to archaeological datasets, there is obvious potential. Projects using large geospatial data or zooarchaeological data have demonstrated this potential, more so when data are linked across other open platforms. By using large amounts of data, other applications of big data like machine learning and A.I. automation are being explored with archaeological data. Machine learning algorithms use sample or training datasets to create mathematical models that make predictions about a new dataset. In this way, machine learning mirrors what archaeologists do in our interpretations; for example, based on our previous knowledge of a style of a house in a certain region, we can locate another house utilizing LiDAR visualizations. This type of landscape analysis has been a focus of recent machine learning applications, which utilize aerial imagery, satellite imagery, and ALS-derived datasets to automate the identification of archaeological features or sites (Davis, 2019). This type of automation has been extended to pottery classification and analysis, as well. For example, the ArchAide project developed a mobile app to automate pottery classification by comparing a photograph of a piece of pottery to a large pottery database (Anichini et al., 2020). Yet just as in other applications of big data analyses, these techniques must be approached carefully in archaeology. The use of big data approaches in archaeology has not been without its critiques. Mickel (2020) recently identified that despite the possibilities digital technologies bring for incorporating local knowledge into archaeological data production, this has seldom happened, and may not even be possible. Further, Gupta et al. (2020) excellently highlights that some archaeologists’ desire for large geospatial data in big data analyses ignores or fails to incorporate the rights of Indigenous communities. With some of these issues in mind, Huggett’s (2022) critical reflection on archaeological big data has led him to suggest a “slow data” approach. A slow data approach requires a close, humanistic connection to data, as opposed to one that simplifies and removes the proximity of data from the archaeological behavior they represent. The future of data use in archaeology will be a negotiation between approaches to big data and the critiques that such approaches bring to an ethical and human-centered archaeology.
Summary and Future Directions The impact that digital technologies have on the practice of archaeology will continue to intensify in the coming years. As equipment becomes less expensive, computing power increases, and software becomes more user friendly, the entire discipline will have to consider the wide influence digital methods have on how we reconstruct and negotiate the past in the modern world. The future of digital archaeology will be defined not only with the development of technology but more importantly with the applications for achieving ethical and equitable goals and providing means to reuse and interpret archaeological information in new ways. The goals of an ethical digital archaeology will not come without focused attention on traditional trends in the discipline or the false promises of the democratizing digital world (Colley, 2015; Dennis, 2020; Richardson, 2018). The use of new technology will not simply erase the inequalities that have existed in the discipline or in how the past is mobilized as a tool for subjugation in modern society. However, creative applications of digital tools, in concert with broad disciplinary shifts, can help make archaeology a more ethical discipline. Creativity should be a central theme for how digital technologies are utilized in a future archaeology. The archaeological record has the potential to elicit an emotional response from people, or as Perry (2019) has referred to it, enchantment. Creative mobilization of technology can provide archaeologists new ways not simply to record or analyze data, but to also engage the modern world. It may be useful to look at how gamification of archaeological content may engage people. Building off studies in User Experience (UX) and game design, digital platforms seem to be ideal places to allow people to participate in the archaeological or
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historical record rather than just viewing it. In fact, archaeogaming (Reinhard, 2016), the archaeology of and in video games, is a rapidly developing focus in digital archaeology. Participatory games, whether they are found in museums or web environments, can act as an enchanting engagement with the past, and be an entry point for increased interest in archaeology. In trying to predict how digital technologies may alter future archaeological practice, it is also useful to think about the full lives our digital products have had over the last 30 years of creation and use in archaeological research. Tringham (2022) discusses digital products that were the result of archaeological research in terms of their Life-Histories and Afterlives. In her characterization, a virtual reconstruction of an archaeological site may not be accessible forever, due to software updates or lack of file support. So, what happens after they “die”? This question gets to the heart of the growing desire for comprehensive digital archiving practices in archaeology and the need to think of archiving as a practice rather than a final resting place for data (see Rabinowitz, 2022). Through all our future digital work in archaeology, the questions of “what should be preserved, what can be used in the future, and how might these data be used” should be helping to structure our data management practices. Finally, the future of digital archaeology will be characterized by the acknowledgment that all archaeologists are digital archaeologists; some might use a particular technology more frequently, but all are impacted by its reach. As such, following Morgan (2022: 221), the hidden labor and contributions in a traditionally white male field, and the patrolling of who may be considered a “digital archaeologist” will hopefully be disrupted and these frameworks torn down. Digital technology is far from a democratizing tool of modern archaeology, but it does provide innovative avenues to practice archaeology and align the discipline with more ethical goals.
See Also: Archaeology and Cyberspace; Predictive Modeling in Archaeology; Survey.
References Anichini, Francesca, Banterle, Francesco, Garrigós, Jaume B., et al., 2020. Developing the ArchAIDE application: a digital workflow for identifying, organising and sharing archaeological pottery using automated image recognition. Internet Archaeol. 52. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.52.7. Averett, Erin, Gordon, Jody, Counts, Derek (Eds.), 2016. Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: The Potential of Digital Archaeology. Digital Press, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. Bavi, Ahlam, Gupta, Neha, 2022. Gamification of digital heritage as an approach to improving museum and art gallery engagement for blind and partially sighted visitors. Archaeologies 18 (3), 585–622. Berners-Lee, Tim, 2006. Linked Data. https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html (last accessed 12 July 2023). Bonacchi, Chiara, 2022. Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism Through Big Data. UCL Press, London. Bonacchi, Chiara, Pett, Daniel, Bevan, Andrew, Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi, 2015. Experiments in crowd-funding community archaeology. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 2 (3), 184–198. Bria, Rebecca E., Vasquez, Erick C., 2022. Digital Archaeology and Storytelling as a Toolkit for Community-Engaged Archaeology. In: Garstki, Kevin (Ed.), Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles, pp. 49–66. Caraher, William, 2019. Slow archaeology, punk archaeology, and the “archaeology of care”. Eur. J. Archaeol. 22 (3), 372–385. Carroll, Stephanie R., Garba, Ibrahim, Figueroa-Rodríguez, Oscar L., Holbrook, Jarita, Lovett, Raymond, Materechera, Simon, Parsons, Mark, et al., 2020. The CARE principles of indigenous data governance. Data Sci. J. 19 (1), 43. Colley, Sarah, 2015. Ethics and Digital Heritage. In: Ireland, Tracy, Schofield, John (Eds.), The Ethics of Cultural Heritage. Springer N. Y, New York, pp. 13–32. Dallas, Costis, 2016. Jean-Claude Gardin on archaeological data, representation and knowledge: implications for digital archaeology. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 23, 305–330. Davis, Dylan S., 2019. Object-based image analysis: a review of developments and future directions of automated feature detection in landscape archaeology. Archaeol. Prospect. 26, 155–163. Dell’Unto, Nicolò, Landeschi, Giacomo, 2022. Archaeological 3D GIS. Routledge, London. Dennis, L. Meghan, 2020. Digital archaeological ethics: successes and failures in disciplinary attention. J. Comput. Appl. Archaeol. 3 (1), 210–218. Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco, Paola, Galeazzi, Fabrizio, Vassalo, Valentina (Eds.), 2018. Authenticity and Cultural Heritage in the Age of 3D Digital Reproductions. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge. Economou, Maria, 2015. Heritage in the digital age. In: Logan, William, Craith, Máiréad Nic, Kockel, Ullrich (Eds.), A Companion to Heritage Studies. John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 215–228. Garstki, Kevin, 2020. Digital innovations in European archaeology. Elements in European Archaeology Series. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. González-Tennant, Edward, 2013. New heritage and dark tourism: a mixed methods approach to social justice in Rosewood, Florida. Herit. Soc. 6 (1), 62–88. Gupta, Neha, Blair, Sue, Nicholas, Ramona, 2020. What we see, what we don’t see: data governance, archaeological spatial databases and the rights of indigenous peoples in an age of big data. J. Field Archaeol. 45 (Suppl. 1), S39–S50. Huggett, Jeremy, 2022. Is less more? Slow data and datafication in archaeology. In: Garstki, Kevin (Ed.), Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles, pp. 97–110. Jensen, Peter, 2018. Semantically enhanced 3D: a Web-based platform for spatial integration of excavation documentation at alken enge, Denmark. J. Field Archaeol. 43 (Suppl. 1), S31–S44. Kansa, Eric C., Kansa, Sarah W., 2022. Promoting data quality and reuse in archaeology through collaborative identifier practices. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 119 (43), e2109313118. Lock, Gary, 2003. Using Computers in Archaeology: Towards Virtual Pasts. Routledge, London. Mickel, Allison, 2020. The proximity of communities to the expanse of big data. J. Field Archaeol. 45 (Suppl. 1), S51–S60. Morgan, Colleen, 2022. Current digital archaeology. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 51, 213–231. Morgan, Colleen, Petrie, Helen, Wright, Holly, Taylor, James S., 2021. Drawing and knowledge construction in archaeology: the Aide Mémoire Project. J. Field Archaeol. 46 (8), 614–628. Opitz, Rachel S., Cowley, David C. (Eds.), 2013. Interpreting Archaeological Topography: 3D Data, Visualisation and Observation. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Perry, Sara, 2019. The enchantment of the archaeological record. Eur. J. Archaeol. 22 (3), 354–371. Perry, Sara, Beale, Nicole, 2015. The social web and archaeology’s restructuring: impact, exploitation, disciplinary change. Open Archaeol. 1, 153–165.
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Rabinowitz, Adam, 2022. (Re)imagining the archaeological archive for the twenty-second century. In: Garstki, Kevin (Ed.), Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles, pp. 165–184. Reilly, Paul, 1991. Towards a virtual archaeology. In: Rahtz, Sebastian, Lockyear, Kris (Eds.), CAA90. Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology 1990. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford, pp. 132–139 (BAR International Series 565). Reinhard, Andrew, 2016. Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games. Berghahn Books, New York. Richards, Julian D., Ryan, Nick S., 1985. Data Processing in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Richardson, Lorna-Jane, 2015. Micro-blogging and online community. Internet Archaeol. 39. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.39.2. Richardson, Lorna-Jane, 2018. Ethical challenges in digital public archaeology. J. Comput. Appl. Archaeol. 1 (1), 64–73. Sapirstein, Philip, Murray, Sarah, 2017. Establishing best practices for photogrammetric recording during archaeological fieldwork. J. Field Archaeol. 42, 337–350. Tringham, Ruth, 2022. On the digital and analog afterlives of archaeological projects. In: Garstki, Kevin (Ed.), Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles, pp. 185–200. Watterson, Alice, Hillerdal, Charlotta, 2020. Nunalleq, stories from the village of our ancestors: co-designing a multi-vocal educational resource based on an archaeological excavation. Archaeologies 16 (2), 198–227. Wilhelmson, Helene, Dell’Unto, Nicolò, 2015. Virtual taphonomy: a new method integrating excavation and postprocessing in an archaeological context. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 157, 305–321. Wilkinson, Mark D., Dumontier, Michel, Aalbersberg, IJsbrand J., et al., 2016. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci. Data 3, 160018.
Further Reading Bonacchi, Chiara, 2022. Digital public archaeology. In: Noiret, Serge, Tebeau, Mark, Zaagsma, Gerben (Eds.), Handbook of Digital Public History. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin, Boston, pp. 77–86. Cook, Katherine, 2019. EmboDIYing disruption: queer, feminist and inclusive digital archaeologies. Eur. J. Archaeol. 22 (3), 398–414. Garstki, Kevin (Ed.), 2022. Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles. Watrall, Ethan, Goldstein, Lynne, 2022. Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice: Data, Ethics, and Professionalism. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Economic Archaeology Gary M. Feinman, Negaunee Integrative Research Center, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Production Subsistence Nonagricultural Production Exchange and Distribution Consumption, Access, and Systems of Stratification Summary and Future Directions References
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Economic archaeology has flourished as a key research focus for the discipline over the last 75 years. Archaeological investigations of past economies have focused on production, distribution, consumption, and stratification. Enhanced multiscalar perspectives on our economic past are revising long-held 19th-century conceptions of human history.
Glossary Accelerator Mass Spectrometric Techniques Mass spectrometry techniques in which ions are accelerated to extraordinarily high kinetic energies before mass analysis Domestication Changes in the physical properties of plant and animal populations through human selection Economic Archaeology Study of the relationships between past populations and their natural and cultural resources, encompassing production, distribution, consumption, and stratification Flotation Processing soil or feature fill using water to recover tiny artifacts, including plant remains and fish bones Household Archaeology An analytical perspective focused on domestic units, including production, consumption, ritual, gender-related, and other activities conducted in and immediately around residential contexts Market Exchange Economic transactions where the economic forces of supply and demand are visible and where prices or exchange equivalences exist Obsidian Translucent, gray to black or green hard volcanic glass that produces extremely sharp edges when fractured Reciprocity Exchange of goods between known participants by means of barter and face-to-face exchanges Redistribution A network of economic exchange that involved the centralized collection of goods from participating social units followed by the dispersal of those goods to those units Settlement Pattern Studies Archaeological studies involving examination of regions rather than individual sites Social Network Analysis An approach that investigates social relationships through the use of network and graph theoretical principles Socioeconomic Stratification Form of organization in which social groups vary markedly in terms of access to wealth and resources Specialized Production Production in which fabricated goods are transferred from the producer to a non-dependent or outside the domestic unit Star Carr One of the best-known early Mesolithic archaeological sites in England Subsistence The means of making a living, particularly the procurement of food
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Economic Archaeology Abstract Economic archaeology has emerged as a key research focus for the discipline during the last 75 years. Archaeological investigations have focused on production (subsistence), distribution, consumption, and stratification (inequality). New field strategies and technologies are providing expanded, multiscalar vantages on human economic behaviors and how they varied and changed over time. With more in-depth empirical grounding, archaeological perspectives now are helping revise long-held conceptions regarding humanity’s economic past.
Introduction Defined largely by its material record, archaeology has had a broad-brush economic focus since its infancy. As early as the 19th century, ancient artifacts recovered through field studies served as an empirical foundation from which synthesizers described and generalized long-term changes in human tool technologies (such as the shift from stone to bronze to iron) over time (Hawkes, 1954). Archaeologically recovered tools and implements also provided researchers with a basis to reconstruct certain aspects of past subsistence practices including hunting and the grinding of grains. For the most part, these early interpretations described basic production practices, including subsistence pursuits, for specific peoples at particular times in the past. These observations yielded basic knowledge on how food procurement shifted over long temporal episodes in many global regions, thereby providing a foundation for the definition of terms like the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) and the Neolithic (New Stone Age) that are still widely employed in the discipline of archaeology. Nevertheless, it was not until the last 70 years that an economic archaeology truly emerged with important conceptual and methodological breakthroughs. Broadly defined, economic archaeology is the study of the relationships between ancient populations and their natural and cultural resources, thereby encompassing production, distribution, consumption, and stratification. The mid-20th century writings of neo-evolutionary anthropologists such as White (1943) and Steward (1955) spurred much greater interest in questions concerning the nature and relative importance of the economic underpinnings of societal variation and change. Issues such as “was relatively equitable socioeconomic organization a necessary correlate of a hunting and gathering economy?” and “was redistribution a hallmark of hierarchical political formations, such as chiefdoms?” led to a renewed focus on past systems of exchange and production. At the same time, prompted by the works of Childe (1950), archaeologists endeavored to understand the causes, consequences, and shared/distinct characteristics in different global regions of the “agricultural” and “urban revolutions”, fostering a growing interest in the diachronic relationships between human populations and their available resources, changing farming strategies (including the scale and management of irrigation systems), and the kinds and degrees of control that political institutions had over the economy in different regions. By mid-century, the forging of a cross-cultural, comparative approach to key neo-evolutionary questions, such as the factors underpinning the origins of farming and sedentary life and the rise of the earliest urban centers, generated new archaeological research and major advances in the economic realm of production (especially in subsistence). It was only more recently that comparable attention was focused on the economy’s other principal facets, including distribution/exchange, consumption and access, as well as different modes of socioeconomic inequality or stratification. The remainder of this entry is organized in sections that highlight major research topics, approaches, findings, and advances in each of these realms that constitute the principal dimensions of economic life. Key empirical realizations and conceptual implications for the historical social sciences from more than a halfcentury of economic archaeology are advanced at the close of the entry.
Overview and Key Issues Production Early research in economic archaeology focused most directly on food procurement/production (subsistence activities), although the theoretical frames for these early studies (and so the questions being asked) tended to be more ecological than explicitly economic.
Subsistence During the mid-20th century, increasing attention was given to the collection of faunal and floral evidence relevant to the reconstruction of past diets and how people utilized available resources. In the excavations at Star Carr, the 9000–10,000-yearold Mesolithic site in northeastern Great Britain, Clark (1954) incorporated scientists from a number of disciplines into his research team. Some of these specialists analyzed pollen and animal remains to document how the settlement served as a camp site at the margins of a lake where the occupants largely hunted red deer and gathered a range of plant foods in a shifting landscape following the end of the Pleistocene. The findings from Star Carr illustrated how much could be learned by supplementing traditional artifact analysis with other classes of archaeological data. By the 1960s and 1970s, it became standard practice for archaeologists to recover macrobotanical remains from excavated contexts through dry-screening (or sieving) and flotation (the sorting and recovery of light plant remains from heavier sediment matrices through the use of fluid suspension). The collection of plant materials (and more recently the direct radiocarbon dating
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of these remains using accelerator mass spectrometric techniques) has laid the empirical foundation for the great progress that has been made in the study of plant domestication over the past four to five decades. For example, early multidisciplinary projects led by Braidwood (1960) in Southwest Asia and MacNeish (1964) and Flannery (1973; Piperno and Flannery 2001) in highland Mexico were able to distinguish when phenotypically wild grains were supplemented (and ultimately largely replaced) by domesticated varieties. These breakthroughs (and others that have followed from these pioneering efforts) have yielded evidence that different suites of plant foods were domesticated in Southwest Asia, eastern Asia, Europe, the Pacific, Africa, and South, Middle, and North America (Smith, 1998). At the same time, synthetic comparisons have revealed that the nature of the relationships and timing between plant agriculture and sedentary village life, animal domestication, and major technological innovations, such as the production of ceramic vessels, were far from uniform from one global region to another. The documentation of divergent processual pathways of change is significant as it not only provides evidence that the material underpinnings of each global region were in certain key respects different, but it serves to disaffirm the long-held rather romantic notion that the “literal and figurative seeds of civilization” diffused out in some simple, beacon-like manner from a small number of central locations or hearths. Instead, scholars have learned that local factors and indigenous resources played key roles in each region. Beginning in the mid-20th century, systematic archaeological settlement pattern studies in several regions of the world (Kowalewski, 2008) also were adding a new larger-scale perspective to the investigation of subsistence as well as the relationship between populations and available food resources through catchment analyses. These studies examined the distribution of communities on landscapes in relation to the surrounding plant and animal resources or agrarian potentials (based on crops, soils, and water). Such survey research has made it more feasible for archaeologists to evaluate and assess theoretical claims that serious stress on local subsistence resources prompted other key cultural transitions (including the beginnings of farming and the rise of state governments). Such assessments were really not possible before we had empirically derived regional distributions of past settlements for specific areas over time. Careful comparisons of settlement and resources at the regional scale allowed archaeologists the opportunity to disentangle the phenomenon of population growth (based on the size and number of settlements) from population pressure on potential food supplies (how population indicators and estimations compared to potentially available resources). Although no consensus has been reached and the causal links likely were not uniform in diverse times and places, neither starvation nor resource stress have stood up convincingly as prime motivating forces for either the advent of farming or the emergence of new political institutions. In recent decades, the examination of subsistence production has been enhanced by biophysical studies of human bone and teeth, which have provided more direct insights into what actually was consumed. The chemical analysis of human bone has proved to be valuable both to quantify relative meat intake within and between populations as well as to determine the comparative significance of local plants versus imported domesticates in the diets of specific past peoples. For example, the latter studies have been fruitful in documenting the consumption of exotic domesticated maize (originally from Mesoamerica) as a staple in eastern North America. Archaeologists have not only elaborated their investigatory repertoire for deciphering what foods people collected, produced, and consumed, but the new data generated by these numerous methodological innovations, including analyses of residues on ceramic vessel interiors as well as investigations of starch grains extracted from the crevices of grinding implements and other contexts, have enabled researchers to probe and answer questions about variation and change in subsistence production that basically were not even contemplated a century ago. Current investigations are able to evaluate how food procurement strategies compare at particular points in time to the estimated availabilities of different resources (allowing for the quantitative assessment of optimization models), while other multidisciplinary researches, involving settlement pattern surveys with botanical studies and other techniques, have shown how with major labor inputs some past agrarian landscapes (such as in parts of the Amazon and the lowland Maya Petén of Guatemala) were able to yield greater food bounties in the past than often are produced in these same areas today.
Nonagricultural Production The systematic investigation of nonagricultural production did not receive serious archaeological attention until the 1970s. The earliest studies endeavored to identify locations where pottery and chipped stone tool manufacture occurred in the past. Sets of archaeological correlates were devised from ethnographic and other sources to recognize these economic/craft activities at excavated sites (and with less confidence at a regional scale using surface findings). These correlates generally have been shown to have high degrees of cross-cultural utility and validity (Costin, 1991). These archaeological signatures rely not only on specific classes of artifacts (such as ceramic wasters or defects to identify pottery production) but also on relational data or the spatial coincidence of several kinds of evidence including the wasters, the remnants of ceramic firing features, the implements of manufacture, and high densities of pottery. Of late, archaeologists also have developed similar expectations and indicators to document empirically (with excavated data) the production of a range of other, less prevalent craft (and other manufactured) goods including bone tools, shell ornaments, metal objects, ground-stone implements, fiber/cloth, and alcohol. The formulation of broadly accepted criteria for the recognition of craftmanufacturing contexts has generated an empirical record from which archaeologists are able to examine long-held, but little tested, notions regarding how the nature and degree of labor specialization shifted as human polities became larger and more hierarchically organized. Based on their investigations, archaeologists have discovered that household or domestic group self-sufficiency is not as common among hunting/gathering and village farming peoples as many once believed. Domestic craft manufacture, likely often
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on a part-time basis, appears to have been a common occurrence even in relatively small-scale societies. Also unexpected has been the frequent finding that craft production was generally situated in domestic contexts even in large complex societies (e.g., Feinman, 1999). This pattern is particularly evident in the pre-Hispanic Americas where nondomestic workshops or factory-scale manufacture appears to have been relatively rare. Larger-scale nondomestic production contexts have been found with greater frequency in Eurasia, where the land-transport technologies (wheeled vehicles and a greater array of beasts of burden) were more efficient, but the preconceived notion that nonresidential workshops generally supplanted domestic craft manufacture in all or even most urban polities needs to be reconsidered. As has long been proposed, the nature and degrees of specialized labor do seem to expand with increases in the scale and complexity of political institutions, but the increments are not necessarily stepwise or uniform.
Exchange and Distribution
Food
Shell Ornaments
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Modes of economic transfer.
Reciprocal exchange
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Redistribution
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In archaeology, systematic and concerted efforts to theorize and reconstruct past patterns of exchange and distribution began during the second half of the 20th century. Research on this central aspect of past and present economies was prompted by the seminal writings of Polanyi (1944) and Sahlins (1972), who described basic modes of circulation (reciprocity, redistribution, and marketing), which were then closely linked to different organizational formations by Service (1962) and Fried (1967) among others (Fig. 1). At the same time, concern with defining the principal factors that prompted key societal evolutionary transitions led archaeologists to pose research questions that endeavored to assess the relative importance of local versus long-distance exchange (as well as other postulated “prime movers” such as warfare, demographic growth/pressure, and irrigation) in specific historical contexts. With the advent of these theoretical queries, archaeologists no longer found it sufficient or even adequate merely to categorize the external contacts between social groupings as either migration or diffusion, thereby focusing greater attention on the broad range of behaviors, many with economic implications, that could transmit various goods and information across space and between societies. In his highly influential works that structured decades of later conceptualization and research in archaeology, Polanyi and colleagues (Polanyi et al., 1957) conceptually outlined an association between the economic predominance of reciprocal exchanges (face-to-face transactions between known or symmetrically situated individuals) with small, egalitarian sociopolitical formations. At the same time, redistribution, a circulatory mode in which goods flowed into a central settlement or nodal power broker and then back out, was seen as almost a definitional aspect of chiefdoms and their economic underpinnings. Market exchange was thought to be important only in a select subset of later states and was largely associated with capitalism. Although these early views still have support, past modes of circulation and economic interaction have been shown through decades of archaeological investigation and analysis to be far more complex and variable than Polanyi’s scheme envisioned (Feinman and Nicholas, 2004; Smith, 2004). In particular, the importance and broad relevance of redistribution has been called into question in many global contexts (Earle, 1977), and, generally, archaeologists have found far less evidence of direct political controls over production and exchange than was thought 30–40 years ago (Feinman, 2017). To begin with, if much craft production was situated in domestic contexts, such manufacture would be difficult for political authorities to monitor or control directly. Nevertheless, there are other ways for governing officials to tap sources of production that they did not control directly through transfer mechanisms like taxes and tribute (e.g., Monson and Scheidel, 2015).
Market
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More specifically, bulk commodities, like grain, often are moved through different networks and mechanisms than were employed for rare, highly valued goods, such as metals, jade and gemstones, and marine shell. In certain regions of the world, a third class of items of intermediate worth has been defined, including obsidian (volcanic glass) and woven cloth. Items in this class were exchanged through channels that may not be coterminous with either the prestige good exchanges of high valuables or the paths traveled by basic staples. These complexities now make it difficult to characterize the breadth of ancient economies into a small number of discrete modes or to distinguish them from modern economic systems in some kind of categorical or rigid manner (Smith, 2004). For example, market exchange has been shown to have had a greater role in the circulation of goods in precapitalist contexts (including Mesoamerica, China, Greece, and Rome) than would have been supposed in Polanyi’s era (Feinman and Garraty, 2010; Garraty and Stark, 2010). A broad suite of indicators has been applied to identify market exchange, from the detection of marketplaces to expectations for the distribution of goods (Garraty and Stark, 2010; Hirth, 2020). At the same time, a key conceptual realization is that sustainable market exchange is reliant on conventions and rules, and so interpersonal cooperation underpins markets (Blanton, 2013). Archaeologists have devised and adopted a series of analytical means to assess the movement of goods and, hence, the channels and mechanisms through which exchange took place in specific settings. Traditionally, the form and stylistic aspects of specific artifacts have been used as visual clues to trace patterns of interaction. Yet artifact forms can be copied, or even appear similar by chance. As a result, it is not reliable to use physical resemblance alone to distinguish an imported piece in a given archaeological context from something made locally. Much more secure inferences regarding economic transfer can be drawn if it can be demonstrated that an artifact was procured or made in a locale other than where it was found. Characterization refers to a bevy of techniques of examination by which key properties of the constituent materials are identified, thereby allowing the source of that material to be determined. If characterization is to be effective, there must be certain attributes that distinguish the products of one source of whatever material from others. Generally, this cannot be achieved by visual means alone, and it is necessary to employ chemical, petrological, or physical means to distinguish the materials from different sources. Some of the first characterization research was carried out with obsidian (volcanic glass), which was valued in many past societies, since it can be knapped to create sharp, chipped-stone cutting edges. The main elements (including silica, oxygen, and calcium) of which obsidian is composed are largely the same the world over, but the rare additional elements are markedly different from one source to another. Since distinct obsidian quarries can be distinguished by the specific composition or signature of these rare trace elements, a number of different chemical techniques (including neutron activation, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, and X-ray fluorescence) have been employed over the years to identify the sources of this material. Given the widespread use of obsidian, including at sites far from the sources where the material was procured, such characterization studies have yielded important findings on exchange patterns for the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and across much of the Western Hemisphere (Feinman et al., 2022). Since the possible sources of clay and most kinds of stone other than obsidian are numerous and diverse, it is more challenging to identify similar compositional signatures to source them with a degree of resolution comparable to that reached for obsidian. Alternatively, petrological methods that examine stone or ceramic materials by taking a thin section of the target material and placing it under a light microscope can yield information on the rock and mineral structure of such materials. For certain stone materials (particularly building stone), such findings have successfully matched artifacts to their quarry or source. Ceramic artifacts, which frequently are composed of clay and mineral, sand, or rock inclusions, also have been profitably studied through these petrological methods. Yet because the fabric or composition of ceramics often is made from materials derived from more than one source (the clay mine and the sand or mineral source), the challenge of characterization is generally greater than it is for stone. Nevertheless, petrological techniques (especially when employed quantitatively) can provide a mineral signature for sets of pottery objects made with a specific recipe, and therefore such procedures help define the paths by which these vessels were moved. If the petrological characterization of the mineral composition is supplemented by chemical analyses of the clays, then often even greater resolution can be gained. Physical techniques, such as X-ray diffraction, that define the crystalline structure of minerals based on the angle at which X-rays are deflected have also been employed for the characterization of pottery as well as certain stone materials. Characterization studies (and other means of documenting the movement of goods from their source) permit archaeologists to define distributional patterns and hence some of the ways that commodities and valuables circulated. When regional and even larger-scale perspectives on the archaeological record are available, quantitative spatial techniques, including network analyses (Feinman et al., 2022), have been employed to define these distributional patterns. One of the key questions that still needs to be adequately tackled by archaeologists concerns the scale of many past economies and economic relations and how these interactions shifted over time. Prior to the advent of systematic settlement pattern studies in many regions of the world, archaeologists tended to examine exchange and economic interactions within small physiographic regions, presuming that important relations were almost entirely local in character, perhaps due to the limits on transportation technologies. Yet in parts of the ancient world, high volumes of certain commodities and precious goods were indeed transferred over long distances in significant enough quantities to have clear systemically important economic effects on the polities involved.
Consumption, Access, and Systems of Stratification Consumption is the third element of economic practice that includes production and distribution or circulation. In general, consumption practices have been less intensively investigated than the other aspects of economic behavior. To evaluate consumption, archaeologists require some sampling of houses or other kinds of comparable and meaningful archaeological units. Decades
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ago, scholars such as Martin (1943) in the American Southwest and Flannery (1976) in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, conducted excavations of large numbers of contemporaneous houses in single regions. Yet such sets of data ideal for the examination of consumption remain relatively rare in the discipline today. In addition, like many aspects of economic archaeology, the study of consumption practices depends on and requires an examination of relational patterns in the archaeological record, or how certain kinds of artifacts were distributed across specific features. Again, such a relational approach to the record has only begun to become “normal science”, a conceptual transition that became possible thanks to the rapidly expanding capabilities of computerized recording, data storage, and analysis over recent decades. Consumption practices are valuable for economically oriented archaeologists to examine and understand, as they provide a window into access patterns, or which items (within the range of goods available) do specific peoples or groups have the ability to procure and in what quantities. The outcome of such relational patterns for certain goods provides a key underpinning for the determination of socioeconomic stratification in the archaeological record (and so in the past). In other words, if a series of household units at a particular site are compared, it is important to assess whether all households had access to the same goods or whether select domestic units had more exclusive abilities to procure certain items, in particular those of high value. Marked disparities in access to portable wealth (usually objects that are highly crafted, exotic, or rare) as well as other goods provide an indicator for assessing the degree of socioeconomic stratification or inequality at a particular site or across a specific social grouping. Such empirical assessments are significant, as it is clear that stratification systems are highly variable across space and over time. Recognized variation in the manner of socioeconomic stratification also has been found not to be a simple consequence of (although related to) the level of sociopolitical complexity (e.g., Blanton et al., 1996). In some societal settings, where people lived (the elaboration of their residences) and how they were buried at death served as the main means by which some people or groups distinguished themselves from others, while in other places relative access to certain movable goods was a prime manifestation of socioeconomic stratification. The nature and degree of coincidence between these aspects of stratification also vary to different degrees from one time and place to others. Recent archaeological research has broadened the analytical lens on spatial and temporal variation in inequality. Neither the scale of human social formations nor the hierarchical complexity of political arrangements correlates precisely with the extent of economic inequity, although each does have a relationship to cross-cultural variation (Kohler and Smith, 2018). We also now know that the extent of economic inequality did not simply increase or decrease over time, but it is more closely tied to a broad set of factors, including variation in governance (Blanton et al., 2021; Feinman and Carballo, 2018). For example, the concentration of power and the monopolization of key resource streams tends to co-occur with higher degrees of inequality, while distributed power and broad, local systems of taxation and revenue creation tend to be associated with greater degrees of economic equity (Blanton and Fargher, 2016). More focus should be devoted to the links between politics and economics in the past, specifically how the institutions of governance were funded and how the means of fiscal financing varied over time (Blanton and Fargher, 2008; D’Altroy and Earle, 1985).
Summary and Future Directions Economic relations are one fundamental key for understanding the workings and transitions of past societies and for grappling with how and why those societies varied. Although archaeology as a discipline has many goals, addressing such big complicated issues about long-term societal variation and change is certainly at the forefront of much archaeological thought, and the broad range of field and analytic research that is synthesized here under the rubric of economic archaeology is essential (Hirth, 2020). Over the last 75 years or so, buoyed by a new corpus of techniques and ways to conceptualize the archaeological record, scholars have forged a more dynamic economic archaeology that has endeavored to determine not only what people ate and how they sustained their cities and acquired basic goods, but also how they financed key politico-economic institutions. The bases of shifts in these fundamental relations affected the alternative pathways of local and regional histories. Through the comparative examination of production, distribution, consumption, and stratification in different global regions, the discipline has made significant progress in defining the many diverse ways that past societies worked, were sustainable, and sometimes the underlying factors that provoked their decline and collapse (Middleton, 2012). Such information is relevant for detailing aspects of the past that rarely find their ways into textual records, which tend to focus on the powerful and history’s winners. They also enable us to recognize recurrent patterns of change and specific outcomes of past economic practices and institutional interactions. More ample perspectives on the past help us see the ways contemporary economic relations truly vary from the practices employed at different points in the human past. This is not trivial, as it is now allowing archaeologists to inform, correct, and modify the long-term notions and theories of economists and social philosophers about premodern economic relations that often were birthed in contexts of sketchy, empirical information about the past and preconceived biases concerning the supposed superiority of Europe and its people with more ample textual histories (Wolf, 1982). Despite the advances that have been made, economic archaeology remains at a still early, yet promising, juncture. Based on an emergent empirical record, we now can move beyond unsubstantiated Victorian-era notions of unilinear progress and categorical thinking about behavioral variation and change (Feinman and Neitzel, 2020), which have long-sustained stark, yet unsubstantiated, disciplinary and conceptual barriers between economies in the modern West and the Rest (Blanton and Fargher, 2008, 2016; Feinman, 2017) and economic practice in the preindustrial past and the present. Moving forward, the menu of research questions (both longstanding and new) waiting to be tackled is robust and multidisciplinary in implication and approaches. Yet for
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many regions of the world, we still lack the systematic regional settlement surveys, the intensive site-based studies with rigorous collection strategies, and the domestic excavation results and analyses that provide the starting point for many kinds of economic investigation. At the same time, too many faunal and floral as well as compositional analyses remain at a largely descriptive level, estranged from the economic archaeological questions that they are so necessary to elucidate. Finally, we must foster ways to work systematically and collaboratively on different scales of economic behavior from the macro- or world scale down to domestic transactions between co-residents. As efforts are implemented at these multiple scales and archaeologists learn to trust and marshal their dirt-derived findings, the discipline’s opportunities to develop more consensual answers to the big comparative issues regarding societal diversity, how it came to be, and how it changes over historical time will expand.
See Also: Animal Management; Archaeobotany: Plant Domestication; Cultural Ecology; Environmental Archaeology; Human-Landscape Interactions; Social Impacts on Landscapes.
References Blanton, Richard E., 2013. Cooperation and the moral economy of the marketplace. In: Hirth, Kenneth G., Pillsbury, Joanne (Eds.), Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C., pp. 23–48. Blanton, Richard, Fargher, Lane, 2008. Collective Action in the Formation of Premodern States. Springer, New York. Blanton, Richard E., Fargher, Lane F., 2016. How Humans Cooperate: Confronting the Challenges of Collective Action. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Blanton, Richard E., Fargher, Lane F., Feinman, Gary M., Kowalewski, Stephen A., 2021. The fiscal economy of good government: past and present. Curr. Anthropol. 62, 77–81. Blanton, Richard E., Feinman, Gary M., Kowalewski, Stephen A., Peregrine, Peter N., 1996. A dual-processual theory for the evolution of Mesoamerican civilization. Curr. Anthropol. 37, 1–14. Braidwood, Robert J., 1960. The agricultural revolution. Sci. Am. 203, 130–152. Childe, V. Gordon, 1950. The urban revolution. Town Plan. Rev. 21, 3–17. Clark, Grahame, 1954. Excavations at Star Carr. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Costin, Cathy L., 1991. Craft specialization: issues in defining, documenting, and explaining the organization of production. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 3, 1–56. D’Altroy, Terence N., Earle, Timothy K., 1985. Staple finance, wealth finance, and storage in the Inka political economy. Curr. Anthropol. 26, 187–197. Earle, Timothy K., 1977. A reappraisal of redistribution: complex Hawaiian chiefdoms. In: Earle, Timothy K., Ericson, Jonathon E. (Eds.), Exchange Systems in Prehistory. Academic Press, New York, pp. 213–229. Feinman, Gary M., 1999. Rethinking our assumptions: economic specialization at the household scale in ancient Ejutla, Oaxaca, Mexico. In: Skibo, James M., Feinman, Gary M. (Eds.), Pottery and People: A Dynamic Interaction. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, pp. 81–98. Feinman, Gary M., 2017. Reframing ancient economies: new models, new questions. In: Fernández-Götz, Manuel, Krausse, Dirk (Eds.), Eurasia at the Dawn of History: Urbanization and Social Change. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 139–149. Feinman, Gary M., Carballo, David M., 2018. Collaborative and competitive strategies in the variability and resiliency of large-scale societies. Econ. Anthropol. 5, 7–19. Feinman, Gary M., Garraty, Christopher P., 2010. Preindustrial markets and marketing: archaeological perspectives. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 39, 167–191. Feinman, Gary M., Neitzel, Jill E., 2020. Excising culture history from contemporary archaeology. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 60, 101230. Feinman, Gary M., Nicholas, Linda M. (Eds.), 2004. Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Feinman, Gary M., Nicholas, Linda M., Golitko, Mark, 2022. Macroscale shifts in obsidian procurement networks across prehispanic Mesoamerica. In: Feinman, Gary M., Riebe, Danielle J. (Eds.), Obsidian Across the Americas: Compositional Studies Conducted in the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum of Natural History, Archaeopress Pre-Columbian Archaeology, vol. 17. Archaeopress Publishing, Oxford, pp. 98–123. Flannery, Kent V., 1973. The origins of agriculture. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2, 271–310. Flannery, Kent V. (Ed.), 1976. The Early Mesoamerican Village. Academic Press, New York. Fried, Morton H., 1967. The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. Random House, New York. Garraty, Christopher P., Stark, Barbara L. (Eds.), 2010. Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Hawkes, Christopher, 1954. Archeological theory and method: some suggestions from the Old World. Am. Anthropol. 56, 155–168. Hirth, Kenneth G., 2020. The Organization of Ancient Economies: A Global Perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kohler, Timothy A., Smith, Michael E. (Eds.), 2018. Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Kowalewski, Stephen A., 2008. Regional settlement pattern studies. J. Archaeol. Res. 16, 225–285. MacNeish, Richard S., 1964. Ancient Mesoamerican civilization. Science 143, 531–537. Martin, Paul S., 1943. The SU Site Excavations at a Mogollon Village Western New Mexico: Second Season 1941. Anthropological Series, vol. 32. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 2. Middleton, Guy D., 2012. Nothing lasts forever: environmental discourse on the collapse of past societies. J. Archaeol. Res. 20, 257–307. Monson, Andrew, Scheidel, Walter (Eds.), 2015. Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Piperno, Dolores R., Flannery, Kent V., 2001. The earliest archaeological maize (Zea mays L.) from highland Mexico: new accelerator mass spectrometry dates and their implications. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 98, 2101–2103. Polanyi, Karl, 1944. The Great Transformation. Farrar and Rinehart, New York. Polanyi, Karl, Arensberg, Conrad M., Pearson, Harry W. (Eds.), 1957. Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Free Press and Falcon’s Wing Press, Glencoe. Sahlins, Marshall, 1972. Stone Age Economics. Aldine Atherton, Chicago. Service, Elman R., 1962. Primitive Social Organization. Random House, New York. Smith, Bruce D., 1998. The Emergence of Agriculture. Scientific American Library, New York. Smith, Michael E., 2004. The archaeology of ancient state economies. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 33, 73–102. Steward, Julian H., 1955. Theory of Culture Change. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. White, Leslie A., 1943. Energy and the evolution of culture. Am. Anthropol. 45, 335–356. Wolf, Eric R., 1982. Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Environmental Archaeology Felix Riede and Marcello Mannino, Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues Summary and Future Directions References Relevant Websites
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Environmental archaeology is the sub-field of archaeology concerned with human palaeoecology Traditionally a primarily methodological specialism, contemporary environmental archaeology is a broad field Applications now range from the laboratory to the field and increasingly include digital and computational methods The concerns of contemporary environmental change also raise ethical and political issues regarding environmental archaeological practice
Abstract Environmental archaeology is a sub-discipline within archaeology concerned with the ways in which past human communities interacted with, modified, and were impacted by their environments and changes thereof. The foundation of environmental archaeology is a methodological fellowship with neighboring disciplines such as zoology and geology; environmental archaeological interpretations are commonly based on the analysis of biological or geological samples from archaeological sites or landscapes. Recent methodological developments allowing the ever more extensive capture of ancient biomolecules but also increasing geochemical resolution are expanding the analytical horizons of environmental archaeology. At the same time, the notion of the Anthropocene and its associated discourse are moving environmental archaeology into a more theoretically nuanced and politically aware position.
Introduction Environmental archaeology is a sub-discipline within archaeology concerned with the ways in which past human communities interacted with, modified, and were impacted by their environments and changes thereof. Collaborations between archaeologists and environmental scientists go back to the birth of professional archaeology: The iconic investigations of the Danish shell-middens in the late 19th century, for instance, included zoologists and geologists (Gron and Rowley-Conwy, 2018). Traditionally, the foundation of environmental archaeology is a methodological fellowship with neighboring disciplines such as zoology and geology; environmental archaeological interpretations are commonly based on the analysis of biological or geological samples from archaeological sites or landscapes (e.g., Pollard, 1999). In the early days of environmental archaeology, such investigations were commonly conducted by disciplinary specialists in a model that be described as multidisciplinarydthe parallel application of specialist skills and knowledge around a common problem or object. During this stage of disciplinary development, environmental assessments such as osteological reports, pollen analyses or the like were most often published entirely separate from any analyses of the archaeological materials or as appendices, and usually as single-author efforts. A greater integration between the environmental sciences and archaeology emerged as part of what came to be known as “economic archaeology” in the UK (Higgs, 1972) and the ecology-inspired “New Archaeology” in the US (Binford, 1962). These approaches shared an intense interest in understanding past human behaviors in the context of their environment, including the biotic and abiotic resources pertinent to the societies at hand. At the same time, there was a trend toward larger and more collaborative projects with the result that many new approaches and methods were developeddsome of which spawned entire new sub-disciplines concerned, for instance, with the archaeologically motivated analysis of animal bones (zooarchaeology), plants (archaeobotany), human bones (osteoarchaeology) or soils, sediments, and strata (geoarchaeology). Today, environmental archaeology is widely considered as the interdisciplinary sub-discipline of archaeology that studies the interactions of peoples and environments in the past (Driver, 2001). According to O’Connor (2019), “[w]hat we tend to mean in the context of ‘environmental archaeology’ is those aspects of the past human environment that, although amended and
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modified by human agency, were not primarily constructed by people.” Yet, at a time of unprecedented human impacts on the Earth’s environments and climates, the definition of an in any way meaningful “natural” environment or, for that matter, of nature has become complicated (e.g., Ducarme and Couvet, 2020). The Oxford English Dictionary provides us with two definitions of the term “environment” that represent a good starting point, namely: The physical surroundings or conditions in which a person or other organism lives, develops, etc., and the natural world or physical surroundings in general, either as a whole or within a particular geographical area, esp. as affected by human activity. In fact, some scholars have questioned the usefulness of an “environmental archaeology” (e.g., Thomas, 2001; Albarella, 2018), given that “[p]eople and social systems form a major part of the ‘environment’ of any human population, so ‘environmental archaeology’ could subsume any archaeological evidence of social interactions or status ranking or buildings” (O’Connor, 2019). These definitions converge with trends within both biology and the climate sciences on the one hand and the humanities on the other (e.g., Emmett and Nye, 2017) that all define humans as indistinguishable from their environments. Environmental archaeology thus has a topical currency that transcends its originally largely methodological motivation; arguably all archaeology must be seen as a form of environmental archaeology.
Overview “Environmental archaeology” is an umbrella term to cover what, in its original form, included approaches aimed at reconstructing: (a) past landscapes and how these affected humans and (b) the subsistence strategies that people adopted to survive in the past. Investigations along these two trajectories necessitated the adoption of methods developed in the natural sciences, such as pollen analysis. The study of plant and animal finds respectively led to the establishment of archaeobotany (or paleoethnobotany) and zooarchaeology, while the study of pollen is part of palaeoecology, a sub-discipline that (especially in its off-site applications) is perceived as lying adjacent to archaeology (e.g., Dincauze, 2000; D’Andrea, 2019). Following the development of processual and behavioral archaeology in the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., Binford, 1964; Schiffer, 1972), it was realized that dealing with the inherent biases in the archaeological record required an understanding of site-formation processes, both in terms of natural and cultural agencies (Schiffer, 1987; Shahack-Gross, 2017). This was achieved through a combination of theoretical developments linked to the adoption of Middle Range Theory (i.e., theories aimed at reconstructing human behavior in the past by making use of ethnographically or experimentally acquired data on similar behaviors in the present; Binford, 1977, 1978) and through the establishment and consolidation of geoarchaeology, the sub-discipline that investigates archaeological sediments by applying approaches and methods from the earth sciences (e.g., Butzer, 1982; Goldberg and Macphail, 2005; Shahack-Gross, 2017). Some practitioners have discussed whether human osteoarchaeology (or what is often called physical anthropology) also falls within environmental archaeology, purporting that the study of human remains, and environmental archaeology belong together because (within archaeology) they are both regarded as “science” (e.g., Derevenski, 2001). Stronger arguments for a disciplinary connection can be made in the light of the fact that, when studied through traditional osteological methods and now in combination with biomolecular techniques (e.g., ancient DNA, isotope analyses, proteomics, carbohydrate residue analyses; see Brown and Brown, 2011), human remains can provide us with proxy data on past environments, for example through palaeodemography, palaeopathology and palaeodiet. These very methods- and finds-driven ways of thinking often lead to “environmental archaeology” being used as a shorthand for “natural science applications in archaeology.” This may reflect the way work has been divided in the commercial heritage management sector or how topics are organized in the context of university degrees. This distinction is less robustly justifiable in strictly disciplinary terms, however. Following this reasoning much of what is described as archaeological science could be subsumed within environmental archaeology or, as seems to be more frequently the case, vice versa (e.g., Brothwell and Pollard, 2001; Richards and Britton, 2019). What is currently perceived to be part of archaeological science rather than strictly environmental archaeology are all those approaches or methods that fall within archaeometry applied to ecofacts and biomolecular archaeology. However, these analytical methodologies can be more purposefully understood from a disciplinary perspective when applied within the context of the above-mentioned sub-disciplines, namely archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology and human osteoarchaeology. The combination of all these analytical science-based methods and techniques (e.g., ancient DNA and isotopic analyses, proteomics, radiocarbon dating), and their adoption in conjunction with standard identification and quantification work, is making it possible for environmental archaeology to reach ever greater levels of success (Reitz and Shackley, 2012; Murphy and Fuller, 2017). In fact, interdisciplinary approaches in environmental archaeology are allowing us to achieve increasingly complex reconstructions of past human-environment relationships and, occasionally, also to break free from the shackles of uniformitarianism. For instance, the application of carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses on pupae of the seaweed fly Thoracochaeta zosterae has shown that the present-day ecological requirements of this species are not a good indicator for its past distribution (Webb et al., 1998). More specifically, the fact that this species is now only found in association with decaying seaweed should not be taken as an indication that it can only live in such conditions. In fact, the isotope analyses demonstrate that in medieval times suitable conditions for the seaweed fly to thrive in were also present in urban latrines. Similar applications will become more common, once isotope analyses and other biomolecular methods are applied more regularly on archaeological specimens, enabling us not only to check
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some of our uniformitarian assumptions, but also aiding neoecologists in better understanding the ecological requirements of taxa and in establishing natural baselines. As novel ecosystems are swiftly becoming dominant due to climate change and human alteration of the Earth surface, a long-term mechanistic understanding of ecological relations and mechanisms beyond strictly uniformitarian assumptions is becoming critical not only for better understanding past but also future dynamics (Burke et al., 2018). The growing success of the bioarchaeological research that falls under the remit of environmental archaeology is also proven by the increasingly wide range of applications that are undertaken and their efficacy: (a) in improving the reconstruction of past environments, (b) in recording the impacts of past climate change on past human populations, (c) in elucidating the human capacity to adapt (or not) to changing environmental conditions and (d) in demonstrating anthropic impacts on past ecologies and taxa (Carleton and Collard, 2020). Moreover, environmental data from archaeological settings is increasingly seen as an invaluable resource, for instance, to understand future environmental and climatic changes (e.g., Desjardins and Jordan, 2019; Crabtree and Dunne, 2022) or to aid decisions linked to such developments (Rockman, 2012; Simpson et al., 2022). Even more broadly within the humanitiesdwhich have often placed humans and their culture somewhat outside of the reach of naturedthe deepening of evidently coupled environmental and social crises have pushed some academics to again collapse the nature/culture dichotomy (e.g., Chakrabarty, 2009; Bergthaller et al., 2014; Swanson, 2016; Ducarme and Couvet, 2020) and to rethink the human “in more than human terms” (Rose et al., 2012). Archaeology is not considered an integral part of this new arena of academic discourse that has emerged recently under the label of environmental humanities (Riede, 2019a). This could be because the aim of the environmental humanities is to critique old narratives and to take action to avert the present environmental crises. Environmental archaeology, in contrast, aims (a) to document past environments and human adaptations to them, (b) to better understand how the relationship between humans and nature has evolved through time and, more recently, (c) to use the understandings generated by such research processes to inform the public and policy makers of the possible impact of the environmental and climatic changes that lie ahead of us. It is in this sense that environmental archaeologists also need to consider operating under an ethical premise, given that archaeologists working on the effects of past environmental disasters have useful understandings and cautionary tales that they should bring to the public debate addressing some of the most challenging issues in human history (Riede et al., 2016). Here, environmental archaeology stands to take a transdisciplinary turn that not only involves interaction between different scientific specialisms but meaningful interactions also with stakeholders outside of academia. In fact, under the subtly different label of historical ecology, this turn has been well underway for some decades (cf. Isendahl and Stump, 2019). The role of archaeology in the debate on the Anthropocene goes beyond the mere definition of the chronological boundary of what is widely considered to be the first anthropogenic geological epoch. In fact, from a strictly regulatory viewpoint, the definition of an epoch has to do with the occurrence of phenomena globally that cause a change in the geological stratigraphic record traceable as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP). In this sense, defining the start of the Anthropocene requires the detection of a “human golden spike,” in other words of a moment in time when physical, chemical, and biological processes were affected to the point that the geological threshold from the Holocene to a different epoch was crossed (Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Waters and Turner, 2022). The difference with established geological epochs is not limited to the fact that the Anthropocene has been triggered by humans, possibly because of industrialization, the “great acceleration” or some other development in the past. Rather, the most significant difference is that the Anthropocene started recently or, by archaeological standards, practically in the present, making it difficult to assign its cause to a single specific factor. Possible triggers for this anthropogenic epoch appear to us as clearly distinct chronologically, despite being contemporaneous in terms of geological palimpsests. In other words, in the case of other geological epochs, the equivalent of “golden spike candidates” such as those invoked for the Anthropocene (e.g., impacts of fire, agricultural revolution, changes caused by pre-industrial farming, impacts of species introductions and removals, industrialization, “the great acceleration”) would not be chronologically distinguishable. The role of environmental archaeology in this epochal scientific controversy is thus firstly to contribute to our understanding of possible golden spike candidates that may have inaugurated the Anthropocene, especially when considering hypotheses backing an early start (Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Malhi, 2017). Secondly, and more relevant archaeologically, environmental archaeologists are in a unique position to investigate what developments in human-environment relationships came together in the making of the Anthropocene.
Key Issues The definition of environmental archaeology, or even its need as a discipline, have been debated without solution, firstly because the term environment itself is a source of disagreement. Current anthropological approaches, mirrored in some post-processual archaeological discourse, state that it is not possible to talk objectively of environment, because according to these views it is simply a social or cultural construct (Davies and M’Bogori, 2013). At the other extreme of the debate are views that are based on the notion that humans act within “natural environments” according to their own perceptions of them, but that, nevertheless, reconstructing past environments is a key aspect for understanding human behavior (Butzer, 1982). This pragmatic approach is not based on the solution of the conundrum on the dichotomy between environment and culture, although it does not require the adoption of a Cartesian notion of what is “natural” either. In fact, it is entirely compatible with the notion that environments and humans are part of ongoing processes of change and one way in which anthropic action or “social practice” shaped environments is expressed by the landscape. This understanding does not require either the theory-laden idea that culture is the extra-somatic means of adaptation for humans (Binford, 1962), stressing the usefulness of establishing the environmental histories relevant for archaeology.
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As there was, and still is, no end in sight for what in essence is a philosophical debate on the nature versus culture divide, archaeologists interested in the role that environments played in the human past have ended up working either under the assumption that culture is the means of adaptation to nature by humans (Binford, 1962) or in a theoretical vacuum. In the minds of their critics, these approaches have reinforced the veracity of the accusation that archaeological investigations with an environmental focus operate under the pretext that there is a “cultural archaeology” and an “environmental archaeology.” Partly for these reasons, and because studies of past environments and climates are often not backed by theory originating from the culturalhistorical and excavation-based traditions, environmental archaeology is often perceived as a very undertheorized segment of archaeological inquiry. Some scholars consider “environmental archaeology” an empty label exactly because it is not defined by high-level theory (e.g., Thomas, 2001; Albarella, 2018), but rather, at most, represents a set of techniques adopted as part of bioarchaeology (here taken to include archaeobotany, zooarchaeology and human osteoarchaeology), geoarchaeology and human palaeoecology. Thomas (2001) argued that human palaeoecology would be a better “disciplinary name,” as it implies that what we are currently labeling “environmental archaeology” requires grounding in ecological theory. According to this view, a similar disciplinary realignment is better for promoting the idea that understanding ecological relations from the past has important implications for present and future ecologies. Since the post-processual reformation of archaeology, expressly taking environmental perspectives to interpret the past has also resulted in accusations of environmental determinism, in other words in criticisms of the idea that prevailingly cultural phenomena can be narrowly explained by invoking environmental factors and events (Arponen et al., 2019). Although some of the more extreme aspects of processualism may have resulted in unwarranted deterministic perspectives, archaeological studies of past environments have always paid attention to contingency, process, agency and conditions, with causation only inferred from correlation and only on probabilistic grounds (Riede, 2019b). Nevertheless, the label “environmental archaeology” potentially reinforces some stereotypical divisions in archaeology, namely between culture and nature, as well as between humanities and science (Albarella, 2001, p. 11). It has thus been argued that, if the effect of similar polarizing positions and debates is merely to make the investigation of human-environment relationships in the past harder, then it may be worth dropping the use of umbrella terms such as “environmental archaeology” altogether, given that they cover branches of archaeology that are poorly defined theoretically (Albarella, 2018). Taking a more practical stance on the usefulness of the existence of a branch of archaeology focused on the environment, one should note that it has advanced the incorporation of bioarchaeological, geoarchaeological, biomolecular and archaeometric sub-disciplines into mainstream archaeology. An example of this is the increasing involvement of environmental archaeologists in commercial archaeology developer-funded projects. In the United Kingdom, for instance, archaeological projects conducted as a requirement of the planning process as required by the Planning Policy Statement 5 (Planning for the Historic Environment) necessitate the recovery, initial study and conservation of the whole range of “common types of environmental evidence” (i.e., vertebrate remains, human remains, macroscopic plant remains, wood and charcoal, pollen and spores, insects, mollusks, parasite eggs and cysts, phytoliths, starch granules, diatoms, foraminifera, ostracods and cladocerans, testate ameba and biomolecules), as well as the application of isotope analyses and geoarchaeological investigations (Campbell et al., 2011). One of the problems with the inclusion of environmental archaeology into commercial excavation projects is that this has usually been driven by inductive recording and data collection without enough thought given to more elaborate research strategies (Pearson, 2019); here, as elsewhere, there is scope for improvement. The guidelines on environmental archaeology proposed by Historic England (formerly English Heritage) suggest that questions such as the following can be addressed through the data from commercial excavations (Campbell et al., 2011): What was the environment of the area like at the time of occupation and how did it change over time? How did people procure and prepare food? What did they throw away and where? How were plants and animals used in rituals? This practical view of environmental archaeology also emerges in the description of the scope of the homonymous journal, the subtitle of which is The Journal of Human Palaeoecology. The journal embraces: “environmental specialisms within archaeology, such as archaeobotany, archaeozoology (both vertebrate and invertebrate), palynology, geoarchaeology, biological anthropology, as well as more synthetic and theoretical approaches to the past human environment.” Journals such as this provide a natural home for specialist practitioners, while many other archaeological journalsdalso those with substantial impact factors and broader scopedare open for environmental archaeological contributions (cf. Butzer, 2009). Apart from the lack of clear questions framing much of commercial archaeology, another issue linked to developer-financed excavations is that they involve limited postexcavation work. This is increasingly necessary to retrieve relevant data that can only be generated in laboratory settings, and to address complex research questions, given the continual expansion of archaeological and scientific analyses that can be undertaken on ecofacts. The ideal excavation should, thus, involve specialists as much as necessary during fieldwork and cover financially their work on the recovered materials in laboratory settings. This is how the integration of archaeological science has been managed in the excavations that Ian Hodder directed at the prehistoric site of Çatalhöyük (Matthews et al., 2000). The strategy adopted in what should be considered a template for modern archaeological fieldwork aims to integrate science with reflexive and post-processual methodologies by: (1) developing sensitive sampling strategies; (2) enabling reflexivity with available data to inform the excavators’ ongoing decisions and interpretations (“at the trowel’s edge”); (3) allowing specialists (who would usually be confined to laboratory settings) to have knowledge of the sites; (4) fostering inter-disciplinary discussions at every stage of the project. While financial and other practical barriers make a full implementation of such comprehensive interdisciplinarity difficult, it stands clear that the integration of environmental archaeological specialists, techniques and insights enriches archaeological interpretation at every stage.
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Summary and Future Directions Environmental archaeology has moved into the mainstream of the discipline. This is attested to by its progressive inclusion in university teaching curricula (see Coles, 1995) and by the consequent proliferation of textbooks on this branch of archaeology (e.g., O’Connor and Evans, 1999; Dincauze, 2000; Wilkinson and Stevens, 2003; Turney et al., 2005; Reitz and Shackley, 2012). Most of these books take an ecological approach to environmental archaeology, which to some extent supports the contention that it is just another name for human palaeoecology (Thomas, 2001). Some books have tried to bring the subject area more within mainstream theory, by taking social perspectives on environmental evidence (e.g., Evans, 2003) or by addressing head on the question of “how appropriate are the techniques and approaches of ‘natural’ sciences for examining human-environment relationships (Wilkinson and Stevens, 2003)? Both archaeobotany and zooarchaeology, for instance, now include much more than solely palaeoeconomic or subsistence-centered interests, contributing to our understanding of the social role of plants and animals for human groups in the past (Russell, 2012; Lodwick, 2019a). Most recently, major new introductory textbooks take this stance a step further still by framing global archaeology explicitly within the context of the Anthropocene (e.g., McCorriston and Field, 2020). Another positive outcome of these developments is that it has become increasingly clear that archaeology is a complex discipline that cannot be readily pigeonholed in the humanities, but that bridges major boundaries of knowledge connecting to the social and natural sciences. Proof of this is attested by the topics in the list of the most pressing scientific challenges that face archaeology (Kintigh et al., 2014). A whole subsection of challenges for understanding the human societies is devoted to humanenvironment interactions, which includes questions spanning from “How have human activities shaped Earth’s biological and physical systems, and when did humans become dominant drivers of these systems?” to “How do humans perceive and react to changes in climate and the natural environment over short- and long-terms?” What is even more compelling, however, is that most of the other challenges for archaeology need to take the environment into account. Here are a few examples in which this is explicit from the question itself: (a) What are the roles of social and environmental diversity and complexity in creating resilience and how do their impacts vary by social scale? (b) What are the relationships among environment, population dynamics, settlement structure, and human mobility? (c) How do humans occupy extreme environments, and what cultural and biological adaptations emerged as a result? (d) What are the biophysical, sociocultural, and environmental interactions out of which modern human behavior emerged? (e) How do spatial and material reconfigurations of landscapes and experiential fields affect societal development? (Kintigh et al., 2014, p. 880). Quarrels over disciplinary identity or institutional placementdbeyond the often-serious implications of funding limitationsddistract rather than assist in tackling these pressing issues. Although the practical, empirical, and often method-focused view of environmental archaeology is likely to remain part and parcel of how we view disciplinary divisions within archaeology, there are clear ambitions to make environmental archaeology sensu lato relevant in much wider debates about climate change, biodiversity loss and equitable futures (d’Alpoim Guedes et al., 2016; Armstrong et al., 2017; Boivin and Crowther, 2021; Burke et al., 2021; Lyon et al., 2022). Recently established journals such as Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology provide a platform for addressing the kinds of questions raised by Kintigh et al. (2014). The mission and scope of this journal, for instance, states that: Archaeology has already a long history and it went through many theoretical changes, but it has never been as interesting and relevant as it is today. Such relevance stems from the combination of sophisticated theoretical approaches with powerful analytical procedures borrowed from the natural sciences. Among the many fields that compose the contemporary practice of the discipline, the most exciting is environmental archaeology
In this context, the continuing investigation of human impacts on the environment, land degradation and its societal consequences must remain high on the future agenda of the discipline. In the context of the Anthropocene and the previous imbalance between prehistoric and historical archaeology in the intensity of environmental archaeological work such efforts may be especially pertinent in periods closer to the present (cf. de Souza and Costa, 2018). Like all of archaeology, environmental archaeology is a discipline in constant transformation. New methodological frontiers are opening, pushing for an ever-expanding scope and toolkit. In the laboratory, precision and parallel sampling techniques increasingly allow sample damage minimization while also improving analytical consistency and resolution. At the same time, digital and computational methods are also transforming some branches of environmental archaeology (e.g., Siart et al., 2018). Rich and voluminous remotely sensed data, for instance, is becoming readily available facilitating sophisticated in silico assessments of landscapes, as well as integrative synthetic analyses across archives. The latter includes ice-core data but also the constantly expanding repositories of diverse environmental data such as Neotoma or the European Pollen Database (EPD). This rapid digitization demands parallel developments in computational techniques as well as attention to data standards and reproducibility (e.g., Lodwick, 2019b) which will no doubt be to the benefit of the discipline as a whole. Further to methodological developments, environmental archaeologists are also well advised to continue their engagement with vital conceptual and broader societal developments. In biology, for instance, the notion of niche construction that includes aspects of inherited environments converges strongly with environmental archaeology (cf. Riede, 2012, 2019c). Not all practitioners are equally accepting of this approach, but it provides a ready vocabulary that facilitates mutual understanding across disciplinary boundariesdboth toward biology as well as toward the environmental humanities more broadly (cf. Boggs, 2016). The adoption of such theoretical models from ecology would at the same time complete environmental archaeology in a scientific sense as well as cement the fact that its practice isdnot least in the context of contemporary environmental changedinevitably political.
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See Also: Human-Landscape Interactions; Landscape Archaeology and Socio-Environmental Patterns; Paleoclimatology.
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Div. 24, 1–10. O’Connor, Terry P., 2019. Pinned down in the trenches? Revisiting environmental archaeology. Internet Archaeol. 53. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.53.5. O’Connor, Terry, Evans, John, 1999. Environmental Archaeology: Principles and Methods. Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK. Pearson, Elizabeth, 2019. Commercial Environmental Archaeology: are we back in the dark ages or is environmental archaeology a potential agent of change? Internet Archaeol. 53. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.53.4. Pollard, A. Mark, 1999. Geoarchaeology: An Introduction, vol. 165. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, pp. 7–14. Reitz, Elizabeth J., Shackley, Myra S., 2012. Environmental Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY.
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Richards, Michael, Britton, Kate (Eds.), 2019. Archaeological Science: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Riede, Felix, 2012. Theory for the A-theoretical: niche construction theory and its implications for environmental archaeology. In: Berge, Ragnhild, Jasinski, Marek E., Sognnes, Kalle (Eds.), N-TAG TEN. Proceedings of the 10th Nordic TAG Conference at Stiklestad, Norway 2009. Archaeopress (BAR International Series 2399), Oxford, pp. 87–98. Riede, Felix, 2019a. Deep pasts – deep futures. A palaeoenvironmental humanities perspective from the stone age to the human age. Curr. Swedish Archaeol. 26 (2018), 11–28. Riede, Felix, 2019b. Environmental determinism and archaeology. Red flag, red herring. Archaeol. Dialogues 26, 17–19. Riede, Felix, 2019c. Niche construction theory and human biocultural evolution. In: Prentiss, Anna Marie (Ed.), Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 337–358. Riede, Felix, Andersen, Per, Price, Neil, 2016. Does environmental archaeology need an ethical promise? World Archaeol. 48, 466–481. Rockman, Marcy, 2012. The necessary roles of archaeology in climate change mitigation and adaptation. In: Rockman, Marcy, Flatman, Joe (Eds.), Archaeology in Society. Springer, New York, pp. 193–215. Rose, Deborah Bird, van Dooren, Thom, Chrulew, Matthew, Cooke, Stuart, Kearnes, Matthew, O’Gorman, Emily, 2012. Thinking through the environment, unsettling the humanities. Environ. Humanit. 1, 1–5. Russell, Nerissa, 2012. Social Zooarchaeology. Humans and Animals in Prehistory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Schiffer, Michael B., 1972. Archaeological context and systemic context. Am. Antiq. 37, 156–165. Schiffer, Michael B., 1987. Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record, first ed. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM. Shahack-Gross, Ruth, 2017. Archaeological formation theory and geoarchaeology: state-of-the-art in 2016. J. Archaeol. Sci. 79, 36–43. Siart, Christoph, Forbriger, Markus, Bubenzer, Olaf (Eds.), 2018. Digital Geoarchaeology: New Techniques for Interdisciplinary Human-Environmental Research. Springer (Natural Science in Archaeology), Cham. Simpson, Nicholas P., Clarke, Joanne, et al., 2022. Decolonizing climate change–heritage research. Nat. Clim. Change 12, 210–213. Swanson, Heather Anne, 2016. Anthropocene as political geology: current debates over how to tell time. Sci. Cult. 25, 157–163. Thomas, Ken, 2001. Environmental archaeology is dead: long live bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology and human palaeoecology. In: Albarella, Umberto (Ed.), Environmental Archaeology: Meaning and Purpose. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 55–58. Turney, Chris, Canti, Matthew, Branch, Nick, Clark, Peter, 2005. Environmental Archaeology. Theoretical and Practical Approaches. Routledge, London. Waters, Colin N., Turner, Simon D., 2022. Defining the onset of the Anthropocene. Science 378 (6621), 706–708. Webb, Sarah C., Hedges, Robert E.M., Robinson, Mark, 1998. The seaweed fly Thoracochaeta zosterae (hal.) (Diptera: sphaerocidae) in inland archaeological contexts: d13C and d15N solves the puzzle. J. Archaeol. Sci. 25, 1253–1257. Wilkinson, Keith, Stevens, Chris, 2003. Environmental Archaeology: Approaches, Techniques & Applications. Tempus Publishing, Stroud.
Relevant Websites https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeology/about. https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show¼aimsScope&journalCode¼yenv20.
Ethnoarchaeology Margaret E. Beck, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is a reproduction of [Margaret E. Beck, ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY, Editor(s): Deborah M. Pearsall, Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Academic Press, 2008, Pages 1157–1167, ISBN 9780123739629, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012373962-9.00102-3], with revisions made by the Editor.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Development and Research Themes Applying Ethnoarchaeology Ethnoarchaeological Collections Example: The Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project Methods Results: Trash and Trash Accumulation Discussion Summary Further Reading
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Ethnoarchaeology is ethnographic fieldwork conducted explicitly for archaeologists. Ethnoarchaeology is middle-range research, establishing correlates between human behavior and material patterns. Ethnoarchaeology is necessary because some topics of archaeological interest, such as detailed waste disposal patterns in villages, are unlikely to be studied by other anthropologists. Areas of ethnoarchaeology’s greatest influence include artifact analyses, the study of hunter-gatherers, and interpretations of spatial patterning in sites.
Glossary Ethnoarchaeology The study of cultural material (such as pots, weapons, and tools), the understanding of how and why these materials were used, and interpretations of what they were used for Ethnography The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures Material culture The counterpart of verbal culture and learned behavior that refers to physical objects from the pastdtogether they constitute human activity Middle-range research Study of how people use objects and structures and the human behaviors associated with this use Uniformitarianism The theory that all geologic phenomena may be explained as the result of existing forces having operated uniformly from the origin of the earth to the present time
Abstract Ethnoarchaeology is ethnographic fieldwork designed to contribute to archaeological interpretation. Archaeologists study the material traces of past human behavior; ethnoarchaeologists study the material traces of ongoing human behavior, so that archaeologists can better infer past human behavior from material patterns. Direct behavioral observations, informant accounts and explanations, previous anthropological or sociological studies, and historical documents may all be available to the ethnoarchaeologist, allowing a more detailed and nuanced look at the relationships between human activities and artifacts. Ethnoarchaeological fieldwork is similar to other ethnographic research in some ways, but methods reflect (or should reflect) the emphasis on material culture and the need for data comparable to archaeological data. This article provides an overview of the development of ethnoarchaeology, its contributions to archaeological interpretation, and debates over its utility and successful application. Some of these points are illustrated through a case study from the Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project.
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Introduction Ethnoarchaeology is ethnographic field work designed to contribute to archaeological interpretation. It has also been called action archaeology, living archaeology, or archaeological ethnography. Archaeologists study the material traces of past human behavior; ethnoarchaeologists study the material traces of ongoing human behavior, so that archaeologists can better infer past human behavior from material patterns. Ethnoarchaeological studies may address questions at one or more levels, including the artifact (e.g., manufacture and use), the site (e.g., spatial distribution of features), and the process (e.g., exchange, seasonal mobility). Direct behavioral observations, informant accounts and explanations, previous anthropological or sociological studies, and historical documents may all be available to the ethnoarchaeologist, allowing a more detailed and nuanced look at the relationships between human activities and artifacts. Archaeologists often use data collected from living people to formulate hypotheses and interpret archaeological patterns. Ethnographic accounts and ethnographic museum collections are often incorporated into archaeological studies, but relevant information may come from many fields, including sociocultural anthropology, history, linguistics, sociology, geography, and economics. This other work used by archaeologists is distinguished from ethnoarchaeology by its research design. Data originally collected for nonarchaeological applications is usually too vague about the material culture or spatial distribution of activities. For example, ethnographers may provide some information on diet and food preparation but fail to describe the vessels and utensils used and the resulting material evidence of food preparation, such as wear on tools and the refuse produced. Archaeologists are then forced to guess what the material patterns should be from these activities. The term “ethnoarchaeology” is restricted here to fieldwork conducted explicitly for archaeologists, because only then will archaeological issues be adequately addressed and data collected in a way that relates to archaeological data. Ethnoarchaeology is one of several areas of study that improve archaeological inference, grouped by Lewis Binford into “middlerange research”. Middle-range research is essentially the study of cause and effect; archaeologists observe end products, such as artifacts, features, and spatial patterns, and infer the events or behaviors that created them. Links or correlates (as defined by Michael Schiffer) between dynamic events and activities and their static material traces can be formulated either by observing the ongoing behavior of others, as in ethnoarchaeology, or by mimicking the behavior in experiments under controlled conditions, as in experimental archaeology. Using these correlates requires the uniformitarian assumption that our observations can apply to other time periods because the processes we see in the present operated in a similar way in the past. The notion of uniformitarianism became widely accepted in geology in the first half of the 19th century and is now common in archaeology, although, the extent to which human behavior is consistent across time and space is still hotly debated. To complicate matters, the end product or archaeological record is created by multiple processes, and archaeologists often find remains that only indirectly reflect the particular human behavior they have chosen to study. Middle-range research, therefore, also includes the study of formation processes of the archaeological record, perhaps best known from the work of Michael Schiffer. Formation processes include both cultural processes, such as those studied by ethnoarchaeologists, and natural processes, such as sediment deposition and erosion. These processes can alter and rearrange material remains at any point during archaeological site formation. Some ethnoarchaeologists focus on particular behaviors of interest, such as house construction, stone tool manufacture, or food sharing, that occur early in the site formation process. Other ethnoarchaeologists address how materials enter the archaeological record through activities such as discard and house abandonment and how they are transformed by cultural processes such as trampling and construction, later in the site formation process. Research on formation processes is similar in some ways to taphonomy, the subdiscipline of palaeontology that addresses how organisms become part of the fossil record.
Overview and Key Issues Development and Research Themes Jesse Walter Fewkes first used the term “ethno-archaeologist” in 1900, referring to an archaeologist who applies his knowledge of a group’s current or recent culture to the study of its prehistory. This is similar to the “direct-historical approach” formally defined by Waldo Wedel in 1938 and depends on cultural continuity over time. This approach was used by a number of archaeologists in the United States during the late 19th century and early 20th century, including Arthur Parker in the Northeast, Wedel and William Duncan Strong in the Great Plains, Julian Steward in the Great Basin, and Fewkes and Frank Hamilton Cushing in the Southwest, and it still plays an important role in archaeological interpretation. It is not considered to be ethnoarchaeology by current scholars, who argue that ethnoarchaeology concerns more general links between human behavior and material patterning that are not dependent upon cultural continuity. The summary of ethnoarchaeology’s history largely follows that of Nicholas David and Carol Kramer, who in their 2001 book Ethnoarchaeology in Action divide the history of ethnoarchaeology into three periods: Initial, New Ethnoarchaeology, and Recent. They date the beginning of modern ethnoarchaeology to a 1956 paper by Maxine Kleindienst and Patty Jo Watson, titled “Action archaeology: the archaeological inventory of a living community”. Kleindienst and Watson argued that the archaeologist, “with his own theoretical orientation”, needed to conduct fieldwork to collect appropriate data for archaeological applications. The Initial period of ethnoarchaeology is mostly exploratory, descriptive, and focused on particular material culture classes. Modern Yucatecan Maya Pottery Making by Raymond Thompson, published in 1958, is a landmark study in this period because
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Thompson addresses how his descriptive work may be used by archaeologists. George Foster’s 1960 article “Life expectancy of utilitarian pottery in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacan, Mexico” is an early attempt in ethnoarchaeology to consider how artifacts are actually discarded and enter the archaeological record. The New Ethnoarchaeology developed from the New Archaeology or processual archaeology, an important theoretical shift in American archaeology following Lewis Binford’s article “Archaeology as anthropology” in 1962. The New Archaeology regarded culture as the external, nonbiological means of human adaptation to the environment. It also advocated an explicitly scientific approach to archaeological inquiry. This theoretical shift directed ethnoarchaeology toward studies of landscape and resource use, particularly by foragers, and toward work that considered how cultural remains entered the archaeological record. Important studies of hunting and gathering groups include work with the Ngatatjara Aborigines in Australia (Richard Gould), the !Kung San in southern Africa (John Yellen and others), the Nunamiut in Alaska (Lewis Binford), the Alyawara of central Australia (James O’Connell), and the Hadza in Tanzania (James O’Connell, Kristen Hawkes, and others). Studies of agricultural villagers include research by Patty Jo Watson and Carol Kramer in Iran and William Longacre in the Philippines. Publications appeared on the use of space, both within individual settlements and broader landscapes, and on-site formation processes. The Recent period is characterized by the growing influence of postprocessualism within archaeology and ethnoarchaeology. This perspective downplays function and adaptation and emphasizes the role of human choice and agency in culture. David and Kramer start this period in 1982 with the publication of Ian Hodder’s book Symbols in Action, which uses ethnoarchaeology to present a different view of material culture. Material patterns and objects are not just the end result of human behavior, Hodder argued; they also influence and shape that behavior. Artifacts are not passive evidence of culture but symbols in action. Hodder was inspired by scholars, such as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose practice theory has become increasingly important in archaeology. Postprocessualism does not replace processualism and related theoretical perspectives, however; this period also displays continuity in theory and in actual projects from the New Ethnoarchaeology period. French-speaking ethnoarchaeologists such as Valentine Roux also continued to work in the positivist tradition, adopting a theoretical position known as “logicism” that is based on archaeological writings by Jean-Claude Gardin and outlined by Alain Gallay. The fruits of long-term efforts in ethnoarchaeology became apparent in this period, through comparison and synthesis and the publication of findings from several large multiyear projects. Edited volumes such as Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology and From Bones to Behavior bring together studies from multiple authors and regions and evaluate the overall contributions of ethnoarchaeology to behavioral inferences from a particular artifact class. The Coxoh Ethnoarchaeology Project, led by Brian Hayden, conducted fieldwork in three communities in the Maya highlands between 1977 and 1979 and led to important publications on the production and use of flaked stone, ground stone, and ceramic artifacts as well as refuse disposal. The Mandara Archaeological Project directed by Nicholas David and Judy Sterner began in 1984, conducting research in Cameroon and Nigeria on ceramic manufacture, metallurgy, household compounds, and other topics. Longacre’s Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project has continued over 30 years and is discussed further below. To date, ethnoarchaeological projects have been conducted all over the world, in settings ranging from hunting–gathering camps to state-level societies. Topics include a wide variety of material remains and artifact classes, such as architecture, faunal bone, botanical remains, basketry, flaked stone, ceramics, glass, and metals. Activities and cultural processes have also been studied, such as the use of space within buildings, sites and settlements, and broader landscapes, site abandonment, and the development and transition of decoration and style. All of these studies are too varied and numerous to adequately summarize here. For more information, readers are referred to the “Further reading” section, especially the excellent overview by David and Kramer.
Applying Ethnoarchaeology As archaeology has evolved, so have ideas about the nature of archaeological inference and the appropriate use of ethnoarchaeology. Ethnoarchaeological data may be used as analogy, in which the archaeologist concludes that one thing (the prehistoric culture) is like another thing (the recent or modern culture) based on some observed similarities in material culture. The archaeologist may then associate the material culture with less tangible aspects of culture in the recent or modern group, and project those aspects onto the prehistoric group. In ethnoarchaeology as first defined by Fewkes and in the direct-historical approach, ethnographic analogies were often used uncritically; because of presumed cultural continuity, analogies between ancestral and descendant cultures were assumed to be valid without testing. Robert Ascher expanded use of these analogies in 1961 by arguing that analogies can be drawn between cultures that adapted to similar environments in similar ways. The New Archaeology emphasized testing hypotheses with archaeological data, and uncritical analogies were subsequently challenged. Ethnoarchaeology was often used instead as a source of testable hypotheses, as advocated by Patty Jo Watson. Robert Kelly’s The Foraging Spectrum illustrates this perspective. It combines ethnoarchaeological research with other hunter–gatherer studies and may not be ethnoarchaeology itself, but it was written primarily for archaeologists who need relevant anthropological theory to create testable archaeological models. (Kelly’s recent work studying mobility and site layout among the Mikea of Madagascar is more clearly ethnoarchaeology as it is defined here.) Hypotheses should not be generated solely from data from living people, however, as pointed out by ethnoarchaeologists such as Martin Wobst and Michael Stanislawski. The universe of possible explanations should not be restricted to what has been observed in recent human behavior; if it is, we will never see how the past may differ from the present.
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Ethnoarchaeology has also served to point out problems in interpretation, either with overlooked variables or unexplored alternatives. John Yellen has called this the “spoiler approach” and notes that although it emphasizes what archaeologists get wrong, it is an important part of developing and improving middle-range theory. Both Binford and Schiffer emphasize that in order to make inferences from the archaeological record, archaeologists need scientific law-like generalizations about the relationships between human behavior and material culture. Ethnoarchaeology is one major arena in which these generalizations or correlates are developed. Richard Gould and John Yellen have used “contrastive ethnoarchaeology” in this way, comparing household spacing between hunting–gathering groups in similar desert environments. In this case, the differences proved to be more informative than the similarities, and they concluded that the closer spacing in the Kalahari Desert was related to danger from large carnivores, which are absent in Australia’s Western Desert. Comparative studies also use data from multiple groups to find broader patterns, as in Dean Arnold’s Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process, Kelly’s The Foraging Spectrum, and Richard Blanton’s Houses and Households: A Comparative Study. Binford argues strongly for “the use of cross-cultural comparisons as a uniformitarian strategy for learning in anthropology” throughout his career and in his 2001 book Constructing Frames of Reference, written to address “productively using ethnographic data in the service of archaeological goals”. French-speaking archaeologists and ethnoarchaeologists in the logicist tradition agree that ethnoarchaeologists look for generalizations about behavior and material culture, although, as Alain Gallay points out, these are not useful if they become overly broad “platitudes on human behavior” or overly narrow “local cultural particularisms”. Gallay also argues that they cannot be applied appropriately if the mechanisms behind them are not understood. The scientific approach taken by the logicists includes use of evidence from other scientific fields, including some less often considered by North American ethnoarchaeologists such as experimental psychology. Valentine Roux and Danièla Corbetta’s research on craft specialization near New Delhi, India is one example of a logicist ethnoarchaeological study. Roux and Corbetta relate changes in ceramic shape to increasing productive specialization, explaining the relationship through the development of motor skills by potters as well as attributes of the raw materials. Not all archaeologists believe such generalizations have been or can be developed through ethnoarchaeology, or that they can be applied broadly enough to be meaningful or useful. Archaeologists such as Michelle Hegmon and Donald Grayson, referring to ceramic and faunal studies respectively, have suggested that cautionary tales or the spoiler approach dominate the field. Postprocessualists might deny that patterns of any real significance or interest could apply across cultures. Even committed ethnoarchaeologists find difficulties, often practical if not theoretical. For example, David and Kramer note that Roux and Corbetta’s results have not been applied to the interpretation of archaeological material, in part because Roux’s system for classifying vessels by level of specialization is very complex and can only be used for complete or reconstructible vessels. Other archaeologists and anthropologists argue that direct applications to archaeology are not the only useful contributions of ethnoarchaeology, if ethnoarchaeology is defined more broadly as ethnographic study with an archaeologist’s attention to material culture. Daniel Miller conducted ceramic ethnoarchaeology in India early in his career, and has since made enormous contributions to the field of modern material culture studies. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Material Culture, and his books include A Theory of Shopping and the edited four-volume set Consumption: Critical Concepts. Jeanne Arnold and Anthony Graesch are two of the archaeologists working with data from modern middle-class households in Los Angeles, collected at the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF), a Sloan Center on Working Families supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program on DualCareer Working Middle Class Families. They focus on domestic material culture, including architecture, home furnishings, and family possessions, and document the use of objects and space through systematic timed observations, photographs, and interviews. Currently, Arnold is investigating activity scheduling, object management, and identity formation, and Graesch’s focus is on how the constructed domestic environment reflects and relates to household activities. In spite of debates about its utility and appropriate role, ethnoarchaeology has had a significant impact on archaeological research, affecting the way questions are formulated, hypotheses are evaluated, and material patterns and interpretations are placed in a broader cultural context. The most visible impact may be on hunter-gatherer archaeology. James Skibo, in his review of American Antiquity articles from 1975 to 2004, found that ethnoarchaeological studies were cited 19 times per year on average and that most of these citations were for work with hunter-gatherers. Indeed, hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology has been frequently used to interpret archaeological data sets, such as regional survey data from the United States Great Lakes area in a 2005 issue of American Antiquity. Ethnoarchaeology often contributes to archaeology in the same way that other anthropological and social studies do, by enriching our understanding of culture and adaptation and human variation. Archaeologists who undertake ethnoarchaeology witness connections between artifacts and people and a whole lot more, and often return with a fundamentally different perspective on the study of human behavior, through archaeology or otherwise. These contributions are hard to quantify. There are other more tangible, if more prosaic, applications of ethnoarchaeological data. One area of influence is artifact analysis and interpretation. As pointed out by Donald Grayson and Laurence Bartram, Binford’s analysis of ethnoarchaeological fauna influenced many analyses of archaeological faunal collections. In spite of the apparent dominance of hunter-gatherer archaeology, ceramic ethnoarchaeology has also affected archaeological ceramic research. For example, the ethnoarchaeologist Dean Arnold once collaborated with two leading researchers in the chemical characterization of artifacts, Hector Neff and Ronald Bishop, to examine what ceramic sourcing really means in a social and behavioral context. Mark Varien and Barbara Mills used cross-cultural ethnoarchaeological data on ceramic use life to evaluate archaeological ceramic discard rates at one site in the United States Southwest. Miram Stark, who received her PhD from the University of Arizona, influenced many of her archaeological colleagues with her depiction of village-level ceramic specialization from the
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Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project (which is one reason why Kalinga and other ethnoarchaeological data are frequently considered in the reconstruction of ceramic exchange networks in central and southern Arizona). Spatial patterning has also received a lot of attention. Papers in the edited volume The Interpretation of Archaeological Spatial Patterning include both ethnoarchaeological studies and applications of ethnoarchaeological findings to particular archaeological sites. Susan Kent’s Analyzing Activity Areas is an important work that illustrates the utility of moving back and forth between ethnoarchaeological and archaeological perspectives. Kent planned to directly apply her ethnoarchaeological research presented in the first half to archaeological sites in the second half, but this application proved difficult given differences in the types of data collected. The attempt nonetheless generated many useful insights, including a ground-breaking discussion of cross-cultural differences in the use of space. Her later article “The archaeological visibility of storage: delineating storage from trash areas” is a strong application of her ethnoarchaeological work in Botswana to archaeological sites in the United States Southwest.
Ethnoarchaeological Collections So far there has been a discussion on the collection and use of data rather than objects. The physical objects, as examples of the material culture, are another important line of evidence. Ethnographic collections have been used by archaeologists to better understand nonindustrial material culture, and some have been directly compared to archaeological collections or analyzed using similar methods. Despite their utility, these are not the collections the archaeologists themselves would have made given the opportunity. This is, at least in part, because museums and wealthy individuals do not choose items that represent the bulk of the archaeological record. For example, collectors and the viewing public generally prefer painted vessels in good condition. Plain cooking vessels are underrepresented and heavily used vessels are rarely included, although fragments of such vessels dominate many archaeological collections. Ethnoarchaeologists may collect objects as well as data with the needs of archaeologists in mind. Such collections may allow for more detailed artifact analysis similar to that undertaken for archaeological objects, and permit reanalysis and use as training material by other researchers who could not visit the field site. Collections both enhance the original study and help other archaeologists to learn and benefit from ethnoarchaeological work. For example, Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project researchers collected both painted water jars and plain cooking vessels, now curated at the Arizona State Museum. These collections were an integral part of research by Skibo and Kobayashi on cooking vessel use. During his Nunamiut research, Binford collected faunal bone from both recently butchered animals and older Nunamiut sites. These materials are stored at the Museum of New Mexico and also at the University of Arizona, where Mary Stiner is directing additional analyses.
Example: The Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project Some of the issues raised above are revisited through one example from the Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project (KEP). This project is directed by William Longacre at the University of Arizona, who began studying contemporary potters in 1973. His choice of potters in Kalinga Province, the Philippines, was influenced heavily by a colleague, Edward Dozier, whose ethnographic fieldwork in the region indicated that ceramic vessels were still made and used within Kalinga households. Over the past 30 years, Longacre’s initial research focus on pottery decoration has expanded into broader investigations of household ceramic manufacture, use, and exchange. Longacre continued to collect data himself for decades and directed one large field season during the 1987–88 academic year. Many of his former students, including Michael Graves, James Skibo, and Miriam Stark, have also published their work with this project. The KEP is based in the Pasil Municipality along the Pasil River Valley in northern Luzon, the Philippines. The study area has two things in common with many other ethnoarchaeological field locations. First, most people in Pasil are farmers who grow almost all of their food and have limited access to cash. Second, the area is relatively inaccessible due to the local topography. The Pasil villages are located on mountain slopes (Fig. 1), and unpaved roads reach some but not all of them. Electricity is only available from gasoline-powered generators; it is used primarily for powering lights at night, and even then not consistently. Fewer commercial goods reach these communities because they are difficult to transport and also difficult to afford. Ceramic cooking vessels stay in use longer in these settings, perhaps in part because they are locally available and cheaper than the metal vessels that have replaced them in most of the world (Fig. 2). The example used here is drawn from the 2001 field season in Dalupa (Fig. 3), a community of 380 people in 71 households. As a prehistoric ceramic analyst, the author was especially interested in ceramics from middens, or trash dumps, because archaeologists recover large samples of ceramics from these contexts. Many more vessels are broken and discarded into middens than are left in other contexts, such as within houses during abandonment. During our fieldwork, we tracked the movement of discarded vessels into middens to link refuse deposits with their source areas, such as households or groups of households, and to see how well midden assemblages represented what was thrown away. Households are the focus of much anthropological and archaeological inquiry. Relying on observed ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological patterns, archaeologists have tried to associate attributes of household ceramic assemblages or social groups with household size and composition, wealth or status, social obligations, and diet, cuisine, and food preparation techniques. To draw these connections, however, they need to isolate the ceramics from different households or groups of households. Our goal was to see whether, using the right approaches, they could include midden ceramics in such studies.
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Fig. 1
View from Dalupa across the Pasil River Valley toward two nearby communities.
Fig. 2
Local potters in Dalupa apply resin to ceramic pots after firing to waterproof them.
Methods The choice of methods is crucial in an ethnoarchaeological study, particularly if the authors claim to find a broader pattern that applies to other situations. Archaeologists need to have confidence in the results before using them in archaeological interpretation, and should ask some pointed questions. How exactly did the ethnoarchaeologists document their patterns? How much variation
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Fig. 3 View down the central thoroughfare (cement sidewalk) of Dalupa. Because of Dalupa’s location on the side of a mountain, houses sit on residential terraces with stone walls like the one visible in the foreground.
might be expected from these patterns? Could any of the data sources be biased, and how and why? The best way to show the crosscultural applicability of a pattern is often to look at as many cases as possible, but authors can at least increase confidence in their particular case through careful data collection. David and Kramer provide an excellent overview of fieldwork methods and concerns unique to ethnoarchaeology. KEP fieldwork here is offered as one concrete example of ethnoarchaeological methods. Matthew Hill and Margaret E. Beck spent five months living in Dalupa and conducting fieldwork. They relied partially on interviews with Dalupa residents and partially on their independent observations of behavior and physical deposits, collecting data from household ceramic inventories, weekly questionnaires, and physical investigations of middens and artifacts. The interviews were conducted in English with the help of four local assistants, who translated as necessary. While use of English is widespread in the region, the dominant language is Kalinga. Interviews are a relatively quick way to get information on a variety of topics, and may be the only way to get some kinds of data. Some responses may be inaccurate or misleading, however, as informants may not remember events in sufficient detail or may adjust answers in attempts to please interviewers or avoid embarrassment. We attempted to reduce informant error by interviewing households once a week and collecting data over the entire field season, asking informants only to remember very recent events. We also reviewed questionnaire data for internal consistency and field-checked data whenever possible. Rosemary Firth describes and illustrates well the value of crosschecking interview data in Housekeeping Among Malay Peasants. We visited each house at the beginning of fieldwork to record all of the ceramic vessels owned by each family. Toward the end of the field season, we visited everyone again and re-inventoried their ceramic vessels. We compared the totals and then asked the family about any discrepancies, including vessels they may have broken or discarded. One of our local assistants visited every family once a week to ask about cooking vessel use, general household discard, and ceramic breakage and discard. First, people were asked what their family had cooked the previous day and which pots they used to cook in. They were also asked what they threw away the previous day, and where they put it. Finally, they were asked if they had broken or otherwise damaged any ceramic vessels during the week, and what they did with the vessels afterward. Their reports of damage from weekly interviews should have been consistent with the final ceramic inventories, and families were asked about any discrepancies during the final vessel inventories. We mapped the entire village, including any visible accumulations of trash. Each accumulation got an arbitrary number. Every week we reviewed the questionnaire data and matched the reported discard locations to our mapped trash piles, checking for new trash piles as needed. In this way we estimated how many households, and which households, threw trash into a particular midden. Once the middens were defined, we documented them in more detail. We mapped them in plan view (Fig. 4), cored them along a center line to determine depth, and recorded the items present on the surface in sample units. We also excavated test units in two active middens. We collected 3001 midden sherds, including surface sherds from 17 active middens and excavated sherds from two middens.
Results: Trash and Trash Accumulation Most trash within the Dalupa residential area is produced by household activities. Household trash generally consists of household items and waste from routine activities, such as meal preparation and personal hygiene. It is usually temporarily collected in
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Fig. 4 This midden below a terrace wall was photographed just before mapping (The line through the midden center is a measuring tape.) Note the spectators along the wall. Especially in the beginning of the field season, most of our activities gathered a crowd.
a container within the house, such as a large metal can, that is periodically carried outside and emptied. Ceramic vessels are thrown away close to where they were broken, in most (79%) cases within 10 m. Ceramic vessels broken within houses were treated like other household trash, although as relatively large objects, they might be thrown away immediately rather than placed in the trash can. One major difference in household trash between Dalupa and communities in the United States is that leftover food is almost never thrown away. It is instead shared with other people or given to domestic animals, and does not find its way into middens. Some inedible (to humans) by-products of food processing, such as pea pods, are thrown away. Discarded items do not accumulate randomly all over the village. The piles of trash often smell, attract insects and scavenging animals, and occupy space that could be used for other activities. Residents therefore come to some informal agreement about where trash may accumulate, and it becomes concentrated in certain locations as middens, known as aggil in the Kalinga language. In Dalupa and in other ethnoarchaeological settings, middens tend to appear in or along streams or washes, around the edges of house lots, and off the sides of hills or terraces. There were 32 active middens in Dalupa during our fieldwork, covering about 10% of the residential area. Dalupa households use between one and three middens for disposal of their daily household waste, although they tend to concentrate their refuse in one midden closest to their house. Some middens are used by a particular house and others are shared by multiple households. We grouped middens into three categories based on household contributions: household (used by only one household), local (used by two to five households), and communal (used by six or more households). Household and local midden users transported their refuse relatively short distances, averaging 6 and 11 m, respectively, because these middens were either within or adjacent to their house lots. The communal middens shared by many more families tended to be farther away from their houses, and communal midden users transported their trash nearly 35 m from their households on average. People apparently prefer to put a household mid-den close by, within their own house lot, when they have the space to do so. Household middens are found among the Maya households in the Coxoh Project area and in Philip Arnold’s sample of Mexican households in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, Veracruz. The average house lot size in the Veracruz sample is 282 m2. In Dalupa, where house lots average only 156 m2, residents are often forced to share middens with their neighbors. Middens in Dalupa are constantly disturbed even while they are forming. Younger children have not yet been fully socialized to avoid the trash, and often play in middens and collect materials from them. Domestic animals such as pigs, dogs, and chickens scavenge for food and also enter the middens to consume rice chaff, banana peels, and other discarded organic materials (Fig. 5). Because middens are often very close to living and working areas, they received significant foot traffic in some areas and might be shifted or disturbed by outside cleaning activities. For example, neighbors occasionally moved small middens away from their house if the smell or waste bothered them; larger middens near public spaces, such as the basketball court or elementary school, were pushed back or burned, or both, to clean up the area before intra- or intercommunity events (Fig. 6). The movement, cleaning, and trampling of middens reduces many items to plastic, metal, glass, fabric, and ceramic scraps. Faunal bone fragments only appear occasionally; in Dalupa as elsewhere, dogs destroy most of the bone produced by butchery and meat consumption.
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Fig. 5
Animals rummage through a Dalupa midden for food.
Fig. 6
The midden adjacent to the elementary school (the building to the right) is burned before the start of fall classes.
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We argue that the basic rules of trash disposal and midden placement might apply in other settings, allowing archaeologists to link middens to the living and working areas where trash was produced. It would be easier to connect household and local middens with their sources, because they receive trash from fewer households. Those households are immediately adjacent to the midden and can be identified. Household and local middens are visibly different from communal middens, at least in Dalupa, in their smaller size and placement around or between houses rather than around public activity areas. To apply our patterns, archaeologists would need to determine which structures in their site are habitation structures and which structures are contemporaneous. We also conclude that middens are good contexts for sampling household ceramic assemblages. Most (73%) discarded vessels went to middens, according to the weekly interviews, although some vessels were left outside the residential area or as isolated artifacts within the village. Both the weekly interviews and analysis of the midden ceramics suggest that the distribution of vessel types in middens is similar to the overall distribution of discarded vessel types.
Discussion In the absence of ethnoarchaeology, data on this topic may never have been collected. Other anthropologists do not seem to want such detailed information about trash and trash dumps, and the limited comparative data available were collected by other ethnoarchaeologists. We also reaped the benefits of a long-term ethnoarchaeological project, as our work was greatly improved by the
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availability of previous KEP vessel collections and data. For example, we were able to compare the frequency of vessel breakage and rates of ceramic use between the 1987–88 and the 2001 field seasons. Unfortunately, from the perspective of ceramic ethnoarchaeology, we found that ceramic use and ownership significantly declined over this 13-year period. Ethnoarchaeological fieldwork is similar to other ethnographic research in some ways, but methods reflect (or should reflect) the emphasis on material culture and the need for data comparable to archaeological data. Even so, there are often fundamental differences in the units of observation between ethnoarchaeology and archaeology, as noted by researchers who have worked in both settings, such as James Skibo and Philip Arnold. Moving back and forth between ethnoarchaeological and archaeological perspectives should enhance both kinds of research. We attempted to collect data as comparable to archaeological data as possible, having previously worked as archaeologists and attempted to apply ethnoarchaeological findings to our archaeological data. Only our archaeological audience can judge whether we were successful in our own data collection strategies. Our goal was to generalize about waste disposal in a village setting, and we suggest the observed patterns should apply in other villages (prehistoric or otherwise) similar to our ethnoarchaeological case. If they do, then midden deposits can be used to compare the material culture between households or groups of households. Archaeologists interested in household archaeology currently rely on material from house floors, which produce much smaller samples. We believe, as do other archaeologists influenced by the New Archaeology, that our generalizations would be refined and strengthened by additional cross-cultural comparisons.
Summary Archaeologists often want data from living groups that they can apply, more or less directly, toward their interpretations of the archaeological record. These are not easy to come by for several reasons. First, everyone really wants ethnoarchaeological data collected by archaeologists with similar theoretical perspectives and research interests to his or her own. This is obviously impossible; despite a considerable increase in ethnoarchaeological studies, they still make up a small portion of archaeological research, and opportunities to study nonindustrial technologies and lifeways are rapidly vanishing. Although ethnoarchaeologists attempt to serve the needs of archaeology, diversity within the discipline ensures that not all archaeologists will get what they want. Second, as noted earlier, both cultural and natural formation processes affect material patterning, and not all of these are documented in ethnoarchaeological studies. Archaeological inference depends upon numerous correlates or principles from multiple avenues of research, and ethnoarchaeology alone is unlikely to provide a scene that one could also observe in the archaeological record. As John Yellen observed, ethnoarchaeologists often describe the results of single events but archaeological assemblages result from multiple events. The archaeologists hoping for, in James Skibo’s words, “some tidy, tight, little correlate that can be applied to their massive pile of sherds now spilling onto the lab floor” will be disappointed by ethnoarchaeology, because ethnoarchaeological findings “must first be put into models that then can be applied to the archaeological record”.
See Also: Africa, South: Ethnoarchaeology; Archaeological Ethnographies.
Further Reading Beck, Margaret E., 2006. Midden ceramic assemblage formation: an ethnoarchaeological case study from Kalinga, the Philippines. Am. Antiq. 71, 27–51. Binford, Lewis R., 1978. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. Academic Press, New York. David, Nicholas, Kramer, Carol, 2001. Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hayden, Brian, Cannon, Aubrey, 1984. The Structure of Material Systems: Ethnoarchaeology in the Maya Highlands. SAA Papers 3. Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC. Kramer, Carol, 1979. Ethnoarchaeology: Implications of Ethnography for Archaeology. Columbia University Press, New York. Longacre, William A. (Ed.), 1991. Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Longacre, William A., Skibo, James M. (Eds.), 1994. Kalinga Ethnoarchaeology: Expanding Archaeological Method and Theory. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Yellen, John E., 1977. Archaeological Approaches to the Present: Models for Reconstructing the Past. Academic Press, New York.
Evolutionary/Neo-Darwinian Archaeology Anna Marie Prentiss, Department of Anthropology, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Theoretical Foundations for Evolution in Archaeology Diversity in Evolutionary Approaches to Archaeology Key Issues Cultural Microevolution Cultural Macroevolution Human Ecology Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgment References
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Darwinian evolutionary archaeology is a diverse field of study with emphases on microevolution, macroevolution, and human ecology. Darwinian evolutionary archaeology contributes insights into cultural change and ecological adaptation. Cultural evolutionary analysis can help us understand practical concerns related to the histories of human cultural traditions in light of environmental change.
Glossary Adaptation As a noun, adaptation refers to traits refined by evolutionary process (generally, natural or cultural selection) that provide economic and/or reproductive benefits to their users. As a verb, the term thus refers to the process of adaptive evolution under natural or cultural selection. Cultural selection The processes by which cultural decisions and behaviors affect the persistence of traits. The term is synonymous to artificial selection in some contexts. Drift Change in frequency of traits due to random chance. Ecological inheritance The outcome of niche construction in which a new ecological niche and its associated selection pressures are passed on to later generations. Exaptation Traits evolved as particular adaptations that evolve further as different adaptations. The standard example in paleobiology is feathers, which evolved initially for warmth evolving further to aid in flight. Macroevolution Evolutionary process typically studied on millennial and greater time scales focused on taxic variation including species and higher phylogenetic units. Microevolution Evolutionary process studied on inter-generational time scales focused in biology on genotypic and associated phenotypic variation. Natural selection The process under which variation in traits expressed across populations is sorted over time by their potential to provide economic and reproduction/replicative benefits. When this occurs, we recognize persistent traits as adaptations. Niche construction The process by which organisms alter their niches and thus change their associated selection pressures. This can lead to ecological inheritance. Ontogenic development Change in an organism across its lifetime. Items of material culture can be viewed in this framework providing insights into sources of variation that could become targets of adaptive evolutionary processes. Punctuated equilibrium A macroevolutionary process by which higher taxa, for example, species, evolve in geologically brief periods of time known as cladogenesis. Teleology Assumption of evolution for a particular purpose or outcome. The Darwinian evolutionary process is not considered teleological as it does not presume a long term goal.
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Evolutionary/Neo-Darwinian Archaeology Abstract Evolutionary/neo-Darwinian archaeology draws theoretical concepts from evolutionary anthropology, biology, and ecology in order to offer insights into cultural transmission processes, long term cultural evolution, and socio-ecological adaptations. Contemporary research integrates theoretical modeling with empirical studies of the archaeological record, emphasizing topics including technological evolution, subsistence variation, demographic history, and social change. Evolutionary models are increasingly valuable for enhancing our understanding of culture and environment relationships.
Introduction Evolutionary/neo-Darwinian archaeology was formalized during the 1980s, drawing theoretical inspiration from advances in evolutionary anthropology, biology, and ecology. The field developed in two distinct directions. One group, specifically identified as evolutionary archaeology, pursued an approach to the archaeological record with a major emphasis on applying the fundamental concepts of neo- or synthetic Darwinism to understanding change in human cultural traditions over time. Early writings emphasized those elements with empirically measurable qualities (Dunnell, 1980). Another group, eventually recognized as practitioners of human behavioral ecology, sought a microeconomic understanding of human behavior under the assumption that economic success would be rewarded with reproductive fitness, as expected under the neo-Darwinian model. Debates emerged between these groups during the 1990s (Boone and Smith, 1998). It was not long however, before these relationships were refined and both groups were recognized as contributors toward a common goal of understanding cultural evolution over time and across space. As noted in a recent synthesis, evolutionary/neo-Darwinian archaeology now encompasses a broad range of studies (Prentiss, 2019a). Scholars contribute toward understanding of cultural transmission and its effects on human behavior and the establishment of cultural lineages or, in effect, heritage. In turn, this research offers broad implications toward scholarly concerns with such topics as subsistence variability, technological evolution, demographic change, and social competition and cooperation. Advances in modeling and archaeological field and lab methods are leading to significant insights into culture and environment relationships. Here, I provide an overview of Darwinian evolutionary research focusing on microevolutionary, macroevolutionary, and ecological approaches to understanding culture change and behavior. I do not include cognitive archaeology as it is considered elsewhere in this volume.
Overview Evolutionary/neo-Darwinian archaeology draws its theoretical frameworks from multiple intellectual traditions. I review the theoretical trends that have most influenced evolutionary thinking in archaeology. I follow with an overview of major schools of evolutionary thought in archaeology.
Theoretical Foundations for Evolution in Archaeology Two fundamentally different approaches to evolutionary process developed during the mid-nineteenth century. Darwin (1859) developed his theory of evolution with influences from scholars as diverse as the geologist Lyell (1830–1833) and the demographer Malthus (1976). Darwin offered several critical arguments sometimes now identified as original Darwinism (Brooks, 2011): 1. Biological variation was transmitted across generations; 2. Variation was sorted by natural selection across generations such that certain traits were favored given economic and reproductive payoffs; 3. This process unfolded across vast spans of time, leading to a gradual pattern of change that would result in the emergence and extinction of different animal and plant species. During the early 20th century, Darwinian evolutionary theory was updated with new insights from Mendelian genetics thus establishing the Modern Synthesis, which centered evolution as a non-teleological, gene-centered process (Huxley, 1942). Expansions to synthetic Darwinism under what is generally recognized as the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis have been debated since the 1960s with emphases on scale of evolution (e.g., species selection), rates of evolution (punctuated equilibrium), niche construction, ontogenic development, plasticity, and influences of culture (Zeder, 2018). Simultaneous to the emergence and expansion of original Darwinism, Spencerian thought also developed a large group of adherents. Spencer (1857) argued that evolution was the progressive unfolding of perfection. This teleological model thus expected a single step-wise pathway toward some ultimate state wherein change was a byproduct of a conscious striving for a better life. Anthropologists of the late 19th and early-to-middle 20th century were influenced by Darwinian and Spencerian models to varying degrees. Historical particularists and archaeological culture historians assumed a model of culture change based upon the assumption that cultural content was transmitted between generations or diffused across geographic space. Despite the possibility of theoretical alignments, they largely avoided application of Darwinian theory to understand culture history as an evolutionary process. Exceptions include Scandinavian archaeologists of the late 19th century who suggested that artifact types could
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be seen as analogous to species as defined by paleontologists (Riede, 2010). The critique of historical particularism as atheoretical favored the emergence of neo-evolution in sociocultural anthropology, a framework founded largely on the Spencerian model of universal stages. White’s (1949) model asserted that culture changed by developing technologies able to harvest progressively greater amounts of energy. Transitions were thus still about conscious improvement. Processual archaeology emerged as an outgrowth of this mode of thinking with a focus on transitions as systemic solutions to emerging challenges, for example, farming as a solution to population packing (Binford, 1968). A truly Darwinian model of cultural evolution did not appear until 1965 when Campbell made the explicit argument that culture is an inheritance system that can be understood in a Darwinian framework where natural selection plays an important role. Campbell’s work opened up a wider discussion that led to more formal modeling of the cultural transmission processes under the guise of gene-culture coevolution theory, sociobiology, and dual inheritance theory (Prentiss, 2019a). Early outcomes of these efforts suggested that cultural transmission could be conceived as analogous to genetic transmission and subject to a range of unique selection proxies (identified by Boyd and Richerson 1985 as bias forces) along with effects of actual natural selection and drift. Meanwhile, ecologists had sought to engage with synthetic Darwinian theory with the goal of understanding animal behavior in an evolutionary context (Winterhalder and Smith, 1992). The new research agenda, evolutionary ecology, combined the mathematical logic of microeconomics with the assumptions of Darwinism to address a range of topics including foraging behavior, reproductive decision-making, and social strategies (see Prentiss, 2019b). By the late 1960s, entirely new fields of study had opened, including island biogeography, foraging theory, and reproductive ecology. Applications of these theoretical models to human behavior expanded in the 1970s (Winterhalder and Smith, 1981).
Diversity in Evolutionary Approaches to Archaeology Evolutionary archaeology emerged as an approach to archaeology based on the foundation of neo-Darwinism. Dunnell (1980) argued that processual archaeology was based more in Spencerian thought given that it was not based in population-thinking and had no place for natural selection. Evolutionary archaeology had at its foundation the assumption that cultural variation could be sorted by selection or drift to form evolutionary lineages over long time spans (Dunnell, 1980). For archaeologists this meant measurable variation in the form of artifact and feature traits drawn from the archaeological record. While recognizing cultural transmission provided a backdrop to assemblage variation, early practitioners of evolutionary archaeology assumed that it remained blind to the long-term effects of selection and thus was of limited importance. Fitness for cultural traits was defined as potential for replicative success. By the early 2000s, cultural transmission could no longer be ignored by evolutionary archaeologists as a critical force in cultural evolution. Research publications in evolutionary archaeology also shifted from largely theoretical to more frequently empirical, providing confirmation of many theoretical expectations (Jordan, 2015). Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) is the branch of Evolutionary Ecology focused on human behavior. HBE research proceeds by developing and testing formal models of human behavior, assuming that economic decision-making ultimately has reproductive impacts as expected under the synthetic Darwinian model. Behavior is assumed to derive from decisions informed and structured by cultural transmission, learning, and genetic inheritance (Richerson and Boyd, 1992). HBE models thus assume methodological individualism and rely upon optimality assumptions as working hypotheses. While HBE frameworks are designed to provide economic insight into human decision-making and associated behavior on landscapes, they are also used to explain adaptive change over time assuming that change is a byproduct of cumulative adaptive decision-making. Archaeologists seeking to test HBE models are challenged by an archaeological record with which it is impossible to test for the decisions made by singular individuals. They overcome this challenge by assessing the degree by which accumulated indicators conform to model predictions. Consequently, archaeologists have made abundant use of HBE to investigate a diverse range of topics including subsistence intensification (Morgan, 2015), technological decision-making (Herzog and Goodale, 2019), social relationships (Mattison et al., 2016), and demography (Puleston and Winterhalder, 2019). Discussions associated with aspects of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) are increasingly impacting evolutionary research in archaeology (Prentiss, 2021). These considerations have led to more explicit examination of macroevolutionary phenomena under a number of research themes. The scale of evolutionary process has been expanded beyond simple artifact based traits to a hierarchy of cultural entities including complex technologies (Jordan, 2015) and integrated socio-economic strategies (Coward et al., 2008). Rates of evolution are no longer assumed to be gradual but also punctuated by periods of rapid evolution. Recognition of macroevolutionary transitions in punctuated evolutionary sequences has opened up consideration of the impacts of niche construction (Laland and O’Brien, 2010), ecological inheritance (Zeder, 2018), and evolution of development (or Evo-Devo; Charbonneau, 2018). Advanced fitness landscape models have implicated new frameworks for thinking about cultural stability and change (Prentiss and Laue, 2019). Laue and Wright (2019), note that nearly neutral traits may be fixed for long periods and subject to change via drift or when intersecting with other such traits in rare high density information lattices.
Key Issues Evolutionary/neo-Darwinian archaeology is highly diverse and concerned with an array of methodological and empirical issues. Here I review several of the most significant contemporary discussions organized in three areas: cultural microevolution,
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macroevolution, and human ecology. Cultural microevolution is the study of cultural transmission processes acting on cultural traits within and between populations generally over short time spans (Walsh et al., 2019). Cultural macroevolution is concerned with the evolution of cultural traits over long time spans (Prentiss and Laue, 2019). Macroevolutionary research opens discussions of evolutionary rates, diversity, and transition processes for entities spanning technologies to wider socio-cultural phenomena. Human behavioral ecology is concerned with a comprehensive understanding of human behavior in an evolutionary context and, in essence, is the study of economic and reproductive payoffs of human decision-making (Prentiss, 2019b). Each study area has its own methodological challenges and debates.
Cultural Microevolution Cultural transmission theory has provided a host of microevolutionary models. We recognize patterns of descent in the form of vertical, horizontal, and oblique transmission systems (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981). We know that a variety of selection proxies or bias mechanisms (e.g., direct, frequency-dependent, and prestige-based) affect the nature of cultural lineages (Boyd and Richerson, 1985). Finally, we know that natural selection and drift also can impact cultural evolution on an intergenerational scale (Goodale, 2019). These models provide potentially powerful hypotheses about the cultural evolutionary process that can aid us in understanding cultural developments in the human past. Yet, it has proven extremely difficult to move from model predictions structured around individual decisions to archaeological contexts, which are the byproduct of population level phenomena (Crema et al., 2016). Current solutions to this dilemma (e.g., Crema et al., 2016) propose the use of an inferential procedure constructed in two parts. First, a generative model is constructed designed to approximate cultural and demographic foundations of an evolving cultural system. This model seeks to explain the evolution of specified cultural variants under the constraints of particular social learning (cultural transmission) models. Second, a mathematical approach known as approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is used to discern which models are more or less consistent with observed archaeological data. This approach has proven useful in ascertaining the relative likelihoods of alternative scenarios where equifinality in outcomes is common (Crema et al., 2016).
Cultural Macroevolution The archaeological record itself provides a fundamental challenge to evolutionary researchers. Scholars interested in cultural transmission have developed advanced models and testing procedures for assessing the probabilities of different systems of social learning. Clearly, such models have strong potential to provide new insights into ancient processes of cultural transmission. Despite these possibilities, there remains the argument that the archaeological record is generally inadequate for the study of cultural evolutionary phenomena at temporal scales below a millennium. Perreault (2019) argues that the archaeological record is challenging to interpret at scales of decades to centuries given mixing of materials from different occupations and through loss of many items due to standard formation processes. He suggests that when coupled with inadequate sampling procedures and theoretical frameworks calling for ethnographic scale cultural inferences, archaeologists suffer the distinct possibility of simply being wrong much of the time. Perreault therefore proposes that archaeologists develop “macroarchaeology” as a study of cultural evolutionary processes in which we might address pace and direction of change across large areas and long time spans thereby bringing archaeology better in line with the nature of its subject material for studies that could achieve much greater degrees of validity, as did paleobiology with its reliance on the fossil record. Perreault is not the first to propose a macroevolutionary approach to the archaeological record. Early writings in evolutionary archaeology recognized the macroevolutionary nature of the archaeological record (O’Brien and Lyman, 2000). These scholars stressed that microevolutionary processes still remained at the foundation of macroevolution. Other scholars, drawing influence from hierarchical thinking in paleobiology, suggested that culture might also evolve on more complex scales spanning technologies with multiple parts (Jordan, 2015) to the structure of political entities (Spencer, 2009). In recognition of the possibility of cultural evolution on multiple scales, Boyd et al. (1997) proposed that cultural evolution could act on ephemeral entities, assemblages of coherent units, hierarchically integrated systems, and cultural species. A limited number of empirical studies have addressed the question of multi-scalar cultural evolution. Spencer and Redmond (2001) used evolutionary trend analysis to conclude that the emergence of the Monte Alban state was a multilevel evolutionary process. The more common approach has been to use phylogenetic analysis to examine hypotheses proposing descent with modification on taxa operating at scales encompassing multiple integrated parts. Thus, Jordan (2015) studied the evolution of technologies in several regions of the globe, Coward et al. (2008) examined the expansion of Neolithic economies across Europe, and Prentiss et al. (2014a) tested hypotheses about the evolution of fisher-hunter-gatherer economic strategies in North America’s Pacific Northwest. These studies confirm that evolution on the scales of ephemeral entities, coherent units, and hierarchical systems is quite common. Evolution on the species scale is rare given the tendency for cultural units to include at least some degree of blending of other traditions (Prentiss, 2021). If cultural evolution acts on scales of complex entities then a logical next question concerns the nature of cultural transitions. Wright’s (1932) fitness landscape models have been attractive as theoretical frameworks for explaining rapid evolutionary change on higher hierarchical scales (Spencer, 2009). Recent fitness landscape modeling adds to these discussions suggesting a much greater role for neutral change in evolutionary transitions (Laue and Wright, 2019). Evolution of development (Evo-Devo) theory provides insights into transitions by focusing on the plasticity of some tool systems (e.g., lithic tools) and constraints on manufacturing and use that can provide the foundation for new technological lineages (Charbonneau, 2018). Evo-Devo theory permits us to gain
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insights into transitions as historical processes that may include both adaptive and exaptive elements (Prentiss, 2021). Niche construction and ecological inheritance are potentially important parts of this process, particularly as factors that canalize trends (Zeder, 2018). Yet, it remains a major challenge to actually test the predictions of such models. Our current strongest tool for examining macroevolutionary transitions comes from Bayesian phylogenetics, from which we can draw inferences on mosaic evolution, divergence times, and diversification rates (Gjesfjeld and Jordan, 2019). A fundamental issue for cultural macroevolution concerns the distinction between origins and radiation. Origins are the consequence of evolutionary transitions, and clearly, transitions may be complex and affected by the nature of prior transitions, trait plasticity, and inherited niches. Consequently, not all transitions occur for adaptive reasons and thus we may recognize both adaptations and exaptations. Radiations may occur out of functional and/or technological advantage but potentially also because selection is simply too weak to remove a variant (Laue and Wright, 2019). Paleolithic archaeologists grapple with issues of origin and radiation with regards to technological systems. Tennie et al. (2017) argue that stone tool making emerged as “latent solutions” to localized needs well before a coherent set of socially transmitted procedures evolved. Hiscock (2002) proposes that microlithic industry emerged in southeast Australia as the consequence of early exploration of backed flake tools by some that were differentiated from others who chose alternative technological pathways for accomplishing the same tasks. Bright et al. (2002) argue that ground milling stones evolved from experiments with unmodified stone slabs used for seed processing in the deserts of western North America. Altogether different models have been proposed for the persistence and radiation of stone technologies. Premo and Kuhn (2010) suggest that technological stability as associated with large cutting tools, or LCTs (hand axes), could emerge as a byproduct of it being maintained by small mobile groups with high extinction rates, thus severely reducing the chances of innovations persisting for significant time spans. Lycett et al. (2016) suggest that regional variation in LCT forms could develop via isolation as small groups colonized new regions. Laue (2018) proposes that LCTs might be understood as nearly neutral traits or those with negligible advantage or disadvantage that might simply become fixed in small groups with weak selection pressure. In contrast, Machin et al. (2007) see LCTs as efficient tools for butchering activities and thus favored by selection over long time spans.
Human Ecology Archaeology has had a long-standing interest in the relationships between population and cultural change. Boserup (1965) had an outsized influence on the writings of processual archaeologists interested in subsistence change (Binford, 1968). Indeed, as late as 2001, Binford continued to promote a model of population packing and associated demographic constraints as the driver of subsistence intensification and development of social complexity (especially inequality). Human behavioral ecology provides an established set of models concerning subsistence and related socio-demographic concerns (Morgan, 2015). Thus, HBE related models offer the potential for significant new insights into such topics as settlement histories and emergent inequality. Recent research confirms the relevance of demographic models influenced by Boserup and Malthus (Puleston and Winterhalder, 2019). Boserup (1965) saw population growth as an independent variable driving agricultural intensification. Broughton (1994) created a diet breadth model for the Sacramento River valley drawing from the same assumption, that as the population increased, human predators would need to acquire more lower trophic order animal resources with higher handling times while extending search costs for more distant higher trophic scale resources. Broughton’s model has been highly influential as a framework for modeling fisher-hunter-gatherer intensification (see Nagaoka, 2005). However, population driven intensification is insufficient for fully understanding human settlement histories. Malthusian theory suggests that population growth occurs only when there are low consumer demands on food resources as mediated by technology (Puleston and Winterhalder, 2019). Puleston et al.’s (2014) “Invisible cliff” model suggests that the rate and extent of population growth or copial period will be dependent upon founding population size, extent of habitat available, habitat yield, and fertility and mortality rates. Once subsistence limits relative to population have been reached, the model predicts a brief transition to a Malthusian period that may include higher mortality. Depending upon the degree of imbalance between population and resources, a new lower demographic ceiling may be established, though it could be accompanied by continued food stress and mortality, particularly among the very young and old. Alternatives to this scenario include technological enhancement per Boserup (1965) that raises food availability again, and for fisher-hunter-gatherers, resorting to residential mobility in order to access new resources (Winterhalder et al., 2015). Predictions of these models have been confirmed in a variety of contexts (e.g., Prentiss et al., 2014b). Many archaeologists are now pointing to the need for further research of this nature. The evolution of wealth-based social inequality has become a significant topic for HBE research. Cross-cultural ethnographic research supports the contention that wealth-based inequality evolved under conditions that included defensibility of critical economic resources and transmissibility of wealth across generations (Mattison et al., 2016). The question remains as to how specific groups shift from egalitarian approaches to resource acquisition and distribution to institutionalized wealth-based inequality. Boone (1992) argues that inequality can emerge from demographic ecological conditions associated with subsistence stress. In this scenario, we might imagine egalitarian households or larger communities coping with differential resource outcomes such that some might be considerably better off than others. Some may abandon their previous residences and seek shelter with others thus raising the possibility for inequality in access to wealth and other rights. Taking this a step further, wealthy groups might compete for these new low status persons as laborers by signaling their wealth and status via various conspicuous displays (Boone, 1998). Testing hypotheses about inequality with archaeological data requires a multi-model approach. Prentiss et al. (2014b) relied upon three HBE related models (Malthusian demographic cycles, diet breadth, and conflict/cooperation per Boone 1992) to
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develop an understanding of demographic, economic, and social change at the Bridge River housepit village in British Columbia. Here the community persisted through two complete Malthusian demographic cycles. The village was partially abandoned during the first Malthusian period, and those who remained undertook more frequent winter residential mobility to make up for weakness in village storage caches. By the onset of the second Malthusian period, a much higher population engaged in intra- and interhousehold competition for local and non-local resources and developed a pattern of wealth-based inequality that persisted across several generations.
Summary and Future Directions Evolutionary/neo-Darwinian archaeology has evolved a diverse collection of theoretical frameworks and research agendas. While challenging, cultural microevolutionary research continues to focus on the integration of theoretical modeling of cultural transmission processes leading to innovations in our abilities to recognize the operation of such systems in the ancient past. Cultural macroevolutionary research has advanced beyond its early emphasis on gradualist evolution of ephemeral traits to encompass a wide range of studies that include investigations of multi-scalar evolution, origins and radiations, and underlying causes of cultural diversity. Macroevolutionary thought is increasingly central to discussions of major transitions as for example, origins of domestication and food production. Macroevolutionary insights are aided by advances in analytical methodologies including phylogenetic and agent-based modeling. Evolutionary ecology, as applied to the study of human groups, now tackles the broadest array of problems including subsistence intensification, land tenure, demographic change, and social competition and cooperation. Substantial contributions are coming from multi-model scenarios, for example those drawn from demographic ecology, foraging theory, and socio-ecology, toward understanding of complex phenomena associated with socio-demographic aspects of settlement histories. Finally, evolutionary research in archaeology is recognized as providing essential insights into trajectories of human decision making as related to climate change. As noted by Rockman and Hritz (2020), the rigorous modeling of outcomes associated with cultural transmission in socio-ecological context places all strands of evolutionary archaeological research at the forefront of discussions concerned with our responses to environmental variability as associated to the current climate change crisis.
Acknowledgment I thank the editors for inviting this contribution and Matt Walsh for his thorough comments on the manuscript.
See Also: Cultural Ecology; Processual Archaeology.
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Experimental Archaeology J. Katerina Dvora´kova´, EXARC Journal, The Netherlands © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Definition Key Issues Experimental vs. Experiential Archaeology The Role of the Experimenter Who Does Experimental Archaeology Examples of Experimental Archaeology Iron Smelting Monoxylon Expeditions Iron Age Houses in Flames Overton and Wareham Down Earthworks Archaeological Reconstruction Related, But Not the Same Archaeotechnique, Ancient Technology, Primitive Technology Living History Life Experiments Archaeological Experiment Publication of Experiments Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading Relevant Websites
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Experimental archaeology aims to replicate and investigate past phenomena. Experimental archaeology is defined as a sub-field of archaeological research which employs experiments. Experimental archaeology generates and tests hypothesis for archaeological interpretation. Apart from its research aspect, experimental archaeology is also used in education. For experimental archaeology to be effective, its results have to be communicated and widely accessible.
Abstract Experimentation has been part of archaeology from its very beginnings and has developed alongside it, reflecting changes in archaeological thought in its approaches and methodology. The 1960s can be seen as the foundation of modern Experimental Archaeology as a sub-discipline of archaeology, which employs experiment to replicate past phenomena in order to test hypotheses, generate new hypotheses or enhance archaeological interpretation.
Introduction At its most basic, experimental archaeological research attempts to replicate and investigate past phenomena with the aim of testing hypotheses and thereby generate new research questions. Thus, experimental archaeology produces new data, which need to be fed back in to the larger world of archaeology and compared to the archaeological record.
It must be emphasized, that the number of people using the phrase experimental archaeology as well as the number of contexts it is used in, is rapidly expanding. When aiming to describe the field of experimental archaeology in all its aspects it is clear that a full overview is almost unobtainable. Paardekooper (2019).
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Beyond this basic definition, the practice of experimental archaeology spreads from the strictly academic through museum work into popular culture in the form of reenactments by professional and amateur groups. With such a wide and varied groups of users, it is obvious that the actual practice of experimental archaeology and the goals it aims to meet are equally diverse. As the quote by Paardekooper says, an all-encompassing exploration of the subject cannot be produced in this short entry. The aim therefore is to give a brief historical overview, touching on the more controversial aspects, followed by a look at the different ways in which the subject is both studied and presented to the wider public.
Overview Experimentation has been part of archaeology from its very beginnings and has developed alongside it, while also reflecting changes in archaeological thought in its approaches and methodology. The first known experiments were carried out in the 16th century, when Renaissance scientists laid the foundations of elementary archaeology. Michael Mercati stood out among these scientists, when he hypothesized that the stone, pottery and other artifacts discovered in the ground were made by early humans. The first experiment we know of for certain concerns the replication of a flint axe by the German clergyman Andreas Albert Rhode to support the hypothesis of its human origin. Aside from questions about the provenance of the objects, experiments in the early era were interested in the manufacturing and functionality of stone and later ceramic and metal artifacts, which included experimenting with the artifacts themselves. As the amount of objects found began to multiply, there came a time when a need for systematization was felt. In 1819 Christian Jürgensen Thomsen introduced his system of three Ages. Combined with other influences from developments in the natural sciences, this led to the establishment of archaeology as a separate discipline. While simple experimenting continued, the 19th century saw the creation of the first deliberately set out experiments. For example, the Swedish zoologist and archaeologist Sven Nilsson compared stone tools found in Scandinavia to ethnographic samples from around the world and tried to identify how they were used and hafted. As part of his work, he experimentally replicated the tools in order to complement ethnographical observations. In this work he was probably the first archaeologist to use ethnographic analogy. Augustus Lane-Fox (later general PittRivers) brought a different aspect to experimentation. Lane-Fox set up his experiments to answer particular questions. For example, he produced a set of tools from a pair of antlers like those that had been excavated, and tested their use by digging into a chalk face. This activity was meant to reproduce the possible actions used in cutting ditches or quarrying flint nodules from chalk. When removing chalk blocks, he observed that the tools made traces similar to those observed on archaeological sites. The first proper nautical experiment was a reconstruction of a trireme in France in 1861, though one of the most remarkable seafaring experiments in the 19th century was the reconstruction of a wooden boat found at Lover Gokstand (Norway) by Captain Magnus Andersen, which he then sailed across the Pacific Ocean to the United States. The ship made the journey in 27 days, proving its seaworthiness. By the end of the 19th century, archaeological experimentation had been firmly established in Europe north of the Alps and in the United States of America. The number of experiments steadily increased, although there was no new qualitative leap in experimentation until after the Second World War. Following the war, new approaches were adopted by archaeology, including analytical methods, new excavation techniques, new dating and surveying methods. Alongside these developments, archaeologists also undertook complex experimental research. For example, Axel Steensberg carried a series of experiments on ancient sickles, concentrating on their function, method of use and the relative merit of the use of flint, bronze and iron in their production. Steensberg’s student, Hans-Ole Hansen was the moving power behind and also the founder of the Lejre Research Center which combines education and experiment. This development was accompanied by the first attempts to formulate a theoretical framework for experiments in archaeology. In the 1960s a number of papers were independently published, which addressed questions on the definition, methodology and categorizing of experiments. Articles by Robert Asher (US) and Radomír Pleiner (Czechoslovakia) were published in 1961, followed in 1963 by the first of many articles by John Coles (UK). The year 1964 saw works by André Leroi-Gourhan (France) and Sergei A. Semenov (Soviet Union). We can therefore see this period as the foundation of modern Experimental Archaeology as a sub-discipline of archaeology. The theoretical background work culminated in the then definitive publicationdExperimental Archaeology by John Coles in 1979, which is in many ways still followed today. In the introduction, Coles provided a substantial summary of the history of experimental archaeology up to that date, though the summary seems to be mainly restricted to works available in the English language. Then, in single articles, he investigated the contribution of experiments in various fields of human endeavor, starting with long distance voyages (Discovery and Exploration), through production for everyday needs (articles on Subsistence and Settlement) to topics of art, music and monumental structures (Arts and Crafts, Life and Death). He stressed in his book how the experiments provide unique information and in dismissing their results academics neglect “one of the very mechanisms which can transfer hypothesis into legitimate inference” (Coles, 1979, 243).
Definition In the same way that Coles’ book was a culmination of efforts to establish experimental archaeology as a discipline, it is also a starting point for numerous discussions on the character and content of experimental archaeology. Over the years, there have been more than thirty definitions. Here, we will follow the definition produced by Mathieu (2002, 1): “A sub-field of archaeological research which employs a number of different methods, techniques, analyses, and approaches within the context of a controllable imitative
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experiment to replicate past phenomena (from objects to systems) in order to generate and test hypotheses to provide or enhance analogies for archaeological interpretation.” This definition emphasizes the context of the experiment, the fact that experimental research attempts to replicate past phenomena and finally, what the result of experimentation isdthe testing of hypotheses and thereby generating new research questions.
Key Issues Experimental vs. Experiential Archaeology So what does experimental archaeology contain? Peter Reynolds once wrote that the misunderstanding of what experimental archaeology is, was due to the confusion of three separate issues: experiment, experience and education. As such, he restricted the definition of experimental archaeology to experiment only “An experiment is by definition a method of establishing a reasoned conclusion, against an initial hypothesis, by trial or test” (Reynolds, 1999, 387). Peter Reynolds therefore rejects the experiential side of the experiment, but includes in his categories of experiments (construct experiment, process and function experiment, simulation and eventuality trial) also technological innovation experiment. He describes this category as “generally unrecognized and unappreciated as an experimental procedure”. Eventually the testing of new scientific equipment was dropped completely when experimental archaeologists embraced the interpretative concept of experimental archaeology. Restricting experimental archaeology to “pure” experiments would only dramatically limit the range of the activities available to study through experiment. Following Reynolds’ publication, the early 2000s saw a number of discussions on the topic of experimental vs. experiential archaeology, where practitioners struggled to clearly divide what they saw as an overlapping continuum, and this discussion eventually fizzled out. At the same time experimental archaeology began to be influenced by post-processual theories which emphasized the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations. This led to the use of more phenomenological approaches exploring how past people could have encountered and experienced material culture.
The Role of the Experimenter In the same way that archaeology straddles the space between the sciences and humanities, experimental archaeology straddles the space between scientific experiment and experience. Unlike in scientific experiment, the experimenters are an integral part of archaeological experiments. The experimenter designs the experiment and may already be entering into subjectivity, while actively preparing to enter into the process. The majority of experiments demands the use of replicas, the making of which could be an experiment all on its own. Or the experiment may demand a specific activity, which the experimenters or their co-operators will need to master beforehand. During an experiment, the experimenter is often the motivating power behind the process and will therefore influence it directly. There are generally two different approaches to the involvement of the experimenters. One is to try to exclude them as much as possible as part of the attempt to control as many of the variables as possible during the experiment. It is possible to tabulate the number of factors within the controlled conditions of a laboratory. Such experiments can provide us with an understanding of the scientific principles involved in a process, but there is an obvious difference to the way such processes would have been achieved in the past. The other approach is so called actualistic or contextual experiment, where the hypothesis is tested with authentic materials in a range of environmental conditions, reflecting more accurately the possible past scenarios. The variables in such an experiment are much more difficult to control. There then comes the question of how to assess the results and how much reliance can be placed upon them. Coles (1979, pp. 43–48) proposed eight fundamental rules to be used in the carrying out of experiments in order to allow for a degree of reliability in the observations and the acceptability of the results. 1. The materials used must be those originally available to the period/people. 2. The methods used need to be appropriate. 3. Modern methods are to be used to record and analyze the experiment in order to allow for an understanding of why and how things happen. 4. The scale of the work needs to be stated. 5. The experiment has to be repeatable. 6. Improvisation may be considered but must be documented. 7. The results have to be understood as supportive statements, not as proof. 8. The most important feature in assessing the experiment is an absolute honesty on how the experiment was carried out. It is possible to say that an experimenter’s previous experiences and skills fundamentally influence the nature and results of an experiment. Because of this, archaeologists often collaborate with craft specialists and those with knowledge of primitive skills. In doing so the level of experience of those participating in the experiment should be admitted as one of the integral variables and always stated when assessing the results of the experiment (see Coles’ rule #8). In the light of this, how much can an experiment tell us about past life? We always have to remember that the experimenter is a member of modern society and therefore their performance is not fully comparable to the people of the past. The time necessary
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for an activity, the physical performance necessary for the realization of a task, coupled with the experimenter’s dexterity in manipulating their tools is an important variable, but we do not know anything about the working times and physical performances of ancient people. Measured performance can provide therefore only an interval within a certain probability of the necessary time or physical performance, which can give us orientation values. There is the possibility that the experimenters themselves can become the focus of an investigation. Such possibility was addressed by Thaisa Martins in her MA dissertation. In an article based on her dissertation, Martins (2022) proposes two ideas how to explore the experimenter’s body: “(1) To understand the experimenter’s body as a group of body techniques that can be explored as extra-daily or daily body techniques. This idea allows to identify the specific movements that were needed to produce the experiment. Then, when conducting an archaeological experiment, we are also dealing with body techniques possibly performed in ancient times. We are calling these body techniques artifactual movement; (2) we propose to approach theories and methodologies of the Dance field, from a transdisciplinary perspective, to analyse body movement. Working with Rudolf Laban’s Choreology and Helenita Sá Earp’s Fundamentals of Dance Theory to develop archaeological analyses.”
Who Does Experimental Archaeology Experimental archaeology is a versatile tool that connects museums, universities, societies and freelancers. Paardekooper (2019).
According to Paardekooper (2019), there are over 100 universities offering education in experimental archaeology in Europe alone. This sometimes includes immersive workshops, in other cases study specializations in experimental archaeology, up to PhD level, are offered. Most universities use experimental archaeology as a didactic tool. While only a small number of students would fully focus on experimental archaeology, many more learn about and become experienced in experimental methods. For example, Exeter University (UK) offers an MA and MSc in experimental archaeology, where students explore through practical engagement experimental archaeology’s potential as a powerful research method, an effective educational tool and an excellent medium for public outreach. The University of York (also UK) offers MA and MSc in Material Culture and Experimental Archaeology. The course interweaves practical and theoretical approaches to material culture, employing ethnoarchaeological and experimental archaeological approaches. The University College Dublin’s School of Archaeology (IE) established the UCD Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Ancient Technologies at the edge of their campus, to become a location for a wide range of experimental projects, thus combining archaeological teaching with practical research. UCD offers GradDip and MSc in Experimental Archaeology & Material Culture. Other organizations dedicated to experimental archaeology are various societies, either national or student university based ones. The national societies are usually umbrellas for their members, they help to facilitate and showcase the work of their members. For example, the “European association for the advancement of archaeology by experiment” (EXAR, Germany) was founded in 2002 having evolved from “the working group for experimental archaeology”, established at the conference accompanying the exhibition “Experimental Archaeology in Germany” in Oldenburg in 1990. The lectures from their annual conferences are published in the journal Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa. There are also museums with some experimental archaeology, which include a research component; this specifically applies to open-air museums where experimental archaeology can play an important role. Archaeological open-air museums’ main task is to present an image of the past, as the interpreters see it, to their visitors. In their work, they connect three aspects of interpretation of archaeological datadeducation, presentation and experiment. Archaeological open-air museums are great sites for monitoring experiments, offering a solid base for long term experiments. There are now about 400 archaeological open-air museums across the world. The oldest were constructed at the end of the 19th century and portrayed a romantic image of the past. A still existing example of this type can be found at Unteruhldingen, on the German side of Lake Constance. The first “prehistoric” houses were built here in 1922. In 1925, work started in Virginia on reconstructing “Colonial Williamsburg”. The place is a living history museum themed on the 18th century. Here, they interpret the origins of the idea of America. In Poland, following wetland excavations at Biskupin, the first reconstructions of an Iron Age settlement were made in 1936. The project attracted a lot of attention and acquired the character of a national monument. With its long history, Biskupin has been able to maintain a knowledge of building wooden constructions. Since the 1980s, Biskupin has been the venue for one of the largest archaeological festivals in the world. Unfortunately, patriotic elements were often an important motive for these reconstructions. This can lead to a misuse of archaeology as seen in Germany, where during the Nazi regime archaeology and experimental archaeology were put to use to provide professional popularization and massive ideological exploitation in attempts to justify the Third Reich’s view of the world. The modern era of archaeological open-air museums can be thought to have been introduced when Sangnalandet Lejre was conceived by Hans-Ole Hansen. From the very beginning, the center combined the characteristics of a theme park with a museum’s scientific background. The well-balanced convergence between presentation, education, and research as practiced by Lejre has been an inspiration to dozens of others. In 1972, Peter Reynolds set up an archaeological field laboratory, with aid from the Council of British Archaeology (CBA), entitled “the Butser Ancient Farm Research Project”. Butser was originally developed as a working Iron Age farm. The work at Butser continues to produce experimental and experiential knowledge regarding farming and building techniques and processes. Some
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of this work, especially that which may leave taphonomic traces that are applicable to archaeological questions, have been used in wider research. Many museums co-operate with universities, allowing students to gain hands-on experience and keeping a connection to academic research at the same time. Museums also often co-operate with individual freelance researchers. One example of this type of interaction is the cooperation between MAMUZ Schloss Asparn/Zaya and the University of Vienna (AT), which in 2022 celebrated 40 years. It allows the students to learn basic prehistoric working techniques and how to implement an archaeological experiment. For the museum, it is an opportunity to stay in close contact with researchers, participate in current research and subsequently embed research results into its educational work. Another example of close interrelation between a university and a museum comes from the Czech Republic. The Association “Centre of Experimental Archaeology” gained land at Vsestary near Hradec Králové in 1997 and started building a center dedicated to the study of archaeological structures from Eastern Bohemia. The members of the association took part in the founding of the Department of Archaeology at the newly established Philosophical Faculty of the University Hradec Králové (UHK). The cooperation between UHK and the Region of Hradec Králové allowed the original center to be, between the years of 2009–2012, rebuilt into the Prehistoric Archaeopark Vsestary with both traditional and open-air museum segments. The close relation between the Department of Archaeology and the Archaeopark has allowed for the pursuit of long-term experimental projects.
Examples of Experimental Archaeology Iron Smelting While archaeological excavations have uncovered hundreds of features identified as iron-smelting sites, the knowledge of how these would have worked has nearly disappeared. Early experimenters usually undertook only one or two attempts to recreate the process. The situation changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a systematic investigation into iron production. Examples that especially stand out were the sets of tests at Eindhoven in the Netherlands and at Lejre in Denmark. In North America there was a rising interest in bloomery iron, starting in the late 1990s within the artisan blacksmith community. This was largely due to the work of Lee Sauder and Skip Williams, based at Sauder’s studio workshop Rockbridge Bloomery located in Lexington, Virginia. A significant event was Michael McCarthy’s Early Iron Symposium in 2004, which was the first full scale gathering of those interested in small scale bloomeries in North America. In Canada, Darrell Markewitz runs Wareham Forge and on his Website over 20 years of experimental work are presented. Markewitz suggested a method for the standardized reporting of experimental iron smelting, as a reaction to the fact that there was no standardized set of expected measurements of this complex procedure with its many variables. He suggested five main steps to describe the process: describing the intentions and limitations, construction and smelting materials, the furnace, the methods and, finally, presenting the results. Recording the basic set up of a furnace and the steps utilized during the operating sequence allows for repeatability (Markewitz, 2021).
Monoxylon Expeditions While some claim that experimental voyages in authentically reconstructed vessels do not add to the knowledge of early seafaring and that the knowledge could be gained more easily from charts, Radomír Tichý (2019) insists that “field study” reveals more than any map study or even a mathematical model can. The Monoxylon Expeditions aimed to investigate the possibilities of maritime travel in the Mediterranean Sea during the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic, when crossing the sea must have played an important role in the spread of agriculture. The expeditions concentrated specifically on the possibilities of using a dugout vessel. The first expedition in 1995 traveled from the island of Samos to Attika and utilized a boat of a hypothetical shape. The second expedition utilized a boat built on the basis of a Neolithic boat found in Lake Bracciano (IT), though the model they used was about 1 m shorter. During a month at sea, the crew of the Monoxylon II paddled a distance of over 780 km along the north coast of the Western Mediterranean. The third expedition in 2019 used the same boat though with adjustments based on the observations from the previous voyage. Returning to the Eastern Mediterranean, it traveled from Attica across the chain of islands to the isle of Melos, which was a significant source of obsidian, and from there to the islands of Santorini and Crete. The expeditions observed the behavior of the vessel in different conditions, highlighting the importance of the direction of wind and the height and direction of waves during navigation rather than the influence of sea currents. The speeds reached during the navigation exceeded previous estimates and allowed for speculations on the topic of crew vs. cargo size. At the time of writing, a fourth expedition is under preparation, as it was finally possible to obtain a tree large enough to attempt to fully recreate the Early Neolithic boat find from the lake Bracciano (IT).
Iron Age Houses in Flames In 1967 House 1 at the Lejre Experimental Centre’s Iron Age village was in a poor state, due to lack of maintenance, and it was decided to use it in an experimental fire. The primary aim of the experiment was to allow for a better understanding of the remains of burnt Iron Age houses. Prior to being set on fire, the house was fitted with internal contents based on archaeological finds. The wooden construction was marked to allow for the recording of its collapse. The house was surveyed and equipped with thermocouples to record the temperatures of the fire. The fire was recorded on film and documented by photographs. Within 15 min of the beginning of the experiment, the roof collapsed; it then took over three and half hours for the house to turn into a smoking heap, while the initial fierce flames, which destroyed most of the structure, lasted only 30 min.
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First investigation of the site happened two weeks after the fire, with several 1 m2 areas in the SW part of the house used to assess the initial situation. The remains were then covered over with a thin layer of soil. The next excavations took place between 1992 and 1993. The results of the excavations were then compared to the original plan and inventory. In general, the majority of the results corresponded well with the original situation, though there were also some incorrect interpretations. The correct results confirmed stratigraphic analyses, while the misinterpretations showed that observations made by excavators are only one of many possible scenarios. This experimental house fire provided a possible scenario for the disintegration of an Iron Age house by fire and the observations could be used as a reference point in the archaeological interpretation of burnt house sites (Rasmussen, 2007).
Overton and Wareham Down Earthworks The experimental earthwork project was founded with the aim of following long term changes of archaeological features. Two linear earthworks with a bank and box section ditch were constructed in 1960 and 1963, respectively, and were to be excavated in sections after 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 68 and 128 years. The whole project was designed carefully. On the surface assigned for the construction of the bank shards of flower pots representing the traces of earlier settlement were thrown. Under the body of the bank layers of charcoal and Lycopodia spores were placed, to allow for the observation of the possible inter mixing of the layers. The layers of the bank were themselves divided by layers of grit and polythene pipes were placed to show lateral movements. A number of samples of various materials were spread into the various layers. The project was designed to follow not only the erosion of the earthworks, but also to compare the different rates of preservation in the differing environment, as Overtown Down is in a limestone area and Wareham in an area of acid podzolic soils. The first 32 years of the project in Overton Down have shown that radical changes happened mostly in the first 4 years and the shape of the ditch stabilized after about 10 years. The situation at Wareham was different, the erosion was more pronounced and the ditch was still eroding after 31 years. These differences were due to differences in plant cover. While at Overton Down much of the surface of both the bank and the ditch were stabilized by plant growth, in Wareham the top of the bank and ditch were not covered. There were no big differences in the preserved materials. While the organic samples kept better in Overton Down, they were decayed and it was obvious they would not have been preserved within an archaeological situation. Pottery was preserved well in both cases. While the development of new methodologies may make some features of this project now seem problematic, it is still a remarkable long-term experiment (Bell et al., 1996).
Archaeological Reconstruction Archaeological reconstruction is a very special case. While the construct itself is not an experiment but an archaeological 3-D interpretation, both the process of its making and later use can become a set of experiments, though they can also serve a number of other purposes. For example, life-size models of houses in archaeological open-air museums serve as educational tools and allow for a visualization of the past environment. Most of the prehistoric building reconstructions are derived from excavated ground plans, though in some cases there might be floors or even lower parts of the walls preserved. This means that with the exception of lucky finds of construction elements or finds of models and other prehistoric depictions, we are missing information on the surface structures, which includes such details as the height of the wall, window and door details or roof construction. Along with the lack of material remains, we are also missing all the intangible informationdwhat would the occupants’ expectations concerning everyday needs be, such as internal light levels or temperature? Reconstructed buildings should be designed to a specific ground plan, using the most appropriate information available. Different experiments can then be built into the actual construction phase. These can relate to the testing of tools, materials and construction elements. Beside the prior set of questions, the process generates a series of new questions, some of which would need on the spot decisions. The resulting building is only one of the possible interpretations of the source situation. Copying earlier reconstructions without asking new questions is not an experiment. Experiments around the finished house can become an interpretative frame of reference for the identification of activity patterns. The resulting construction can also be used in habitation experiments such as studying the indoor climate of the reconstructed houses including air quality. The Klima-X experiments in Lejre recorded the indoor climate in the reconstructed longhouses. While the houses were relatively cold, it was the strong drafts which caused the most discomfort. The recording showed that the idea that the clay floors and walls would retain warmth after being heated up was incorrect. The other surprising conclusion was that heat from animals makes very little impact on the temperature in the living quarters. The testing of the reconstructions can show how the various structural details do or do not function and its results can inspire new investigations of the archaeological findings concerning such features as partition walls or insulation.
Related, But Not the Same Archaeotechnique, Ancient Technology, Primitive Technology In order to understand the function of ancient tools or how they were made, it is necessary to learn, at least to a certain point, ancient techniques. Mastering a technique can be very useful to an experimental archaeologist in setting up experiments, though there is difference between using technology and carrying out an experiment. The technological approach concentrates on materials and processes and does not necessarily deepen our knowledge about past cultures. Ancient/Primitive technology evolved independently
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in Northern America and Europe and is widely utilized. One of the people, whose name is connected to the establishment of Primitive Technology in the United States is Errett Callahan. Callahan taught himself flint knapping in the 1950s and made a point of sharing his skills and knowledge with others. His most important projects are the Pamunkey Project, the Cahokia Pit House Project, and his Danish daggers project. The Society of Primitive Technology (http://www.primitive.org) was established at the end of the 1980s, bringing together people serious about ancient crafts. In Europe, an important impetus to the study and promotion of primitive technology was provided by Tomas Johansson from Sweden, who established the Society for Prehistoric Technology in 1980 and was one of the founders of a European network of archaeological open-air museums, EXARC. Archaeotechnicians are highly skilled craftspeople with a good knowledge of archaeological resources. They often carry out demonstrations for the public in which they show and explain how past techniques were executed and their historical context. Many of them also carry out archaeological experiments.
Living History Living History represents various activities involving re-enactment of historical events and the recreation of past realities. Reenactors bring to life various period events with craft demonstrations and live displays and also create educational programs for children. The main aim of Living History is, apart from the enjoyment of role-playing, to engage with a modern public and provide a connection between textbooks and reality. The past is a source and an inspiration for Living History activities. There are many societies and associations of re-enactors specializing in specific historic eras. Most of re-enactors are “hobbyists” who dedicate their weekends and holidays to their interest, many of them spend much time researching their period and have deep knowledge of it. As it is often difficult for the general public to judge on the authenticity of their performance, re-enactors and their hosts carry a great responsibility.
Life Experiments Life Experiments concern groups of modern people living in past conditions for a certain length of time. They might do this for themselves but Life Experiments do make for interesting TV shows, like Living in the Past, the 1978 BBC documentary. This program followed a group of fifteen volunteers, including three children, for a year. The volunteers were drawn from relatively diverse backgroundsdthere was a doctor and his nurse/wife, a builder, a farmer, a schoolteacher and a part-time hairdresser. They attempted to recreate an Iron Age settlement, equipped with only the tools and materials available in that period and having to learn from scratch most of the essential skillsdblacksmithing, tanning, basket making, earthenware pottery, weaving, crop cultivation and livestock farming. Other well-known examples are “SteinzetdDas Experiment” from 2007 by ARD/ZDF, where seven adults and six children lived in a recreation of a stone age settlement or Seven in the Past which concentrated on the Middle Ages. These events make for riveting drama but they are more informative about present day society and can be viewed as more of a social experiment where the participants gather personal experiences, than a true representation of the past. However, they can generate questions and inspire experimental projects.
Archaeological Experiment As we saw above, experimental archaeology follows the same trends as archaeology as a whole. Experimental Archaeology was strengthened with the advent of Processual Archaeology, while it got criticized by Postprocessual Archaeology. This critique led to a greater acceptance of experience in archaeological experiment while not changing the fundamental methodology. The influence of Processual Archaeology also meant a rise of experimental research into function, technology and processes. This is also where the Reynolds’ five categories of experiments come from (Reynolds, 1999). The first category, the construct experiment he defined as the exploration, at a 1:1 scale, of a third dimension. The probability of the “construct” being true to the original artifact depends on the quality of the source data. So, there would be difference between a wooden object preserved in a water logged environment and a house, which we know of only from a ground plan. For the latter Reynolds coined the term “construct” as he deemed that with so many unknowns, it is impossible to talk about reconstruction. This category corresponds with the “Functional Replicas” category of Mathieu (2002). Replicas are often produced as a first step toward further experimentation. The second of Reynolds’ categories, Process and Function, aims to study how things were achieved and corresponds to Mathieu’s category of Behavioral Replication. The most common is functional replication, testing hypotheses on function and the use of particular objects. This type of replications requires replicas produced within the previous category. The third of Reynolds’ categories is simulation experiment and partially corresponds to Mathieu’s Process Replication, specifically to its subcategory Formation Process Replication. Its aim is to understand the archaeologization process, to understand the elements of archaeological evidence by projection from the excavated to the original state and monitoring its decay. Such experiments require a long term approach. Another type of Process Replications is Technological Process Replication. Here we can perhaps talk about “chaîne opératoire”, a concept introduced by French archaeologists, which is defined as a technological approach seeking to reconstruct a sequence of an artifact production, starting with raw material, through its use and maintenance, to its disposal. The last subcategory in the Mathieu’s system is Simulation Studies, which concerns computer modeling. Reynolds’ system contains one more categorydAn Eventuality Trial, which he describes as a combination of his three previous categories. The experiments could study exploitation of landscape, specifically agricultural processes. For such a complex experiment to achieve statistical validity, it needs to be run repeatedly over several years. For experiments to adhere to modern standards, they need to have clear goals and be solution oriented. They must also be planned and executed with the correct manual skill. Finally, they must be recorded and repeatable. While assessing the results, it
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is necessary to remember that unless there is a wealth of accompanying archaeological evidence, experimental studies could validate a whole plethora of possible hypotheses.
Publication of Experiments Experimental archaeology produces new data which needs to be fed back into the larger world of archaeology and compared to the archaeological record. In order to successfully share the results of experimentations, they have to be published in such a way that the results can be accessed by other researchers and the wider audience. One of the many issues behind a lack of successful publication could be that researchers lack experience with publishing experiments: This can take the form of either non-academics lacking experience in writing peer-reviewed articles, or academic-based archaeologists who lack experience with the practical side of experiments. This can lead to articles with too much information being left out, whether deliberately or not. When being published, an archaeological experiment needs to be clear, understandable and replicable by others. It has to be stated clearly why the experiment was done. The paper should discuss similar experiments, the problems scholars faced and their results, which shows that the experimenter is building on similar work that has been done previously. There should also be a clear overview of the experiment and the results should be published in an easily readable form, usually with clear tables and graphs. Summarizing the results and assessing them in the light of the original objectives serves not only the reader but also the experimenters themselves. A lack of publishing can also lead to the unnecessary “reinventing of the wheel”. Even if material is published, this does not mean it is either accessible or easy to find. Much of the works appear only in gray literature. That was the reason why EXARC took the initiative to collate information in the Experimental Archaeology Collection, a place for sharing and preserving data and the results of experimental archaeology. The collection contains over 12,000 titles and is part of the Digital Archaeological Record (https://core. tdar.org/collection/60199/exarc-experimental-archaeology-collection).
Summary and Future Directions Verifiability and repeatability are important parts of the experimental process. At the same time, experimenters need to keep in mind the advances made in the past. Past research needs to be acknowledged and studied in order to generate new questions and identify blank spaces in archaeological research. The fields of possible application open to experimental archaeology are extensive, especially in regard to basic reconstructions of the life in the past. Experimental research is essential to help us to become better at understanding the past populations, but for that experiments need to be based on well-defined research questions. To summarize: “Experimental archaeology per se does not lead to tangible results. Its aim is to find out more about life in the past, about people behind artifacts. It can become a module in a wider strategy of archaeological research, education and communication. It is interdisciplinary and also links archaeology with public” (Paardekooper, 2019).
See Also: Ceramics: Stylistic and Functional Analysis; Primate Archaeology; Textiles; Traceology.
References Bell, Martin, Fowler, Peter, Hillson, Simon (Eds.), 1996. The Experimental Earthwork Project, 1960–1992. CBA Research Report 100. Council for British Archaeology, York. Coles, John, 1979. Experimental Archaeology. Academic Press, London. Markewitz, Darrell, 2021. Standardized reporting of experimental iron smeltingda modest(?) proposal. EXARC J. 2021 (1), https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10559. Martins, Thaisa, 2022. The experimenter’s body: movement as an artifact. EXARC J. 2022 (3), https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10653. Mathieu, James (Ed.), 2002. Experimental Archaeology. Replicating Past Objects, Behaviors, and Processes. BAR International Series, vol. 1035. BAR, Oxford. Paardekooper, Roeland, 2019. Experimental archaeology: who does it, what is the use? EXARC J. 2019 (1), https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10402. Rasmussen, Marianne (Ed.), 2007. Iron Age Houses in Flames, Testing House Reconstructions in Lejre. Studies in Technology and Culture, vol. 3. Lejre Historical-Archaeological Experimental Centre. Reynolds, Peter, 1999. The nature of experiment in archaeology. In: Jerem, Erzsébet, Poroszlai, Ildikó (Eds.), Archaeology of the Bronze and Iron Age. Proceedings of the International Archaeological Conference Százhalombatta, 3-7 October 1996. Archaeolingua, Budapest, pp. 387–395. Tichý, Radomír, 2019. Archaeology of the wind. Zivá Archeologie 2019 (21), 3–12.
Further Reading Busuttil, Christopher, 2008. Experimental archaeology. Malta Archaeol. Rev. 2008–2009 (9), 60–66. Coles, John, 1979. Experimental Archaeology. Academic Press, London. Flores, Jodi Reeves, 2012. Experimental Archaeology: An Ethnography of Its Perceived Value and Impact in Archaeological Research. Exeter University, Exeter. Kelteborn, Peter, 2005. Principles of experimental research in archaeology. EuroREA 2005 (2), 120–122. Outram, Allan, 2008. Introduction to experimental archaeology. World Archaeol. 40 (1), 1–6. Outram, Allan, Mathieau, James, Schmidt, Martin, 2005. How to publish experimental archaeology. EuroREA 2005 (2), 107–112. O’Sullivan, Aidan, Powers, Mark, Murphy, John, Inwood, Niall, Gilhooly, Bernard, Kelly, Niamh, Malone, Wayne, Mulrooney, John, Corrigan, Cian, L’Estrange, Maeve, Burke, Antoinette, Kazuro, Maria, McDermott, Conor, Warren, Graeme, O’Neill, Brendan, Heffernan, Mark, Sweeney, Mairead, 2014. Experimental archaeology: making; understanding; story-telling. In: Kelly, Bernice, Roycroft, Niall, Stanley, Michael (Eds.), Fragments of Lives Past: Archaeological Objects From Irish Road Schemes, Archaeology and the National Roads Authority Monograph Series, vol. 11, pp. 115–126.
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Schenck, Tine, 2015. Accessing Intangible Technologies Through Experimental Archaeology. A Methodological Analysis. Exeter University, Exeter. Sellet, Frederic, 1993. Chaîne opératoire: the concept and its applications. Lithic Technol. 18 (1–2), 106–112. Tichý, Radomír, 2005. Presentation of archaeology and archaeological experiment. EuroREA 2005 (2), 113–119.
Relevant Websites Archeopark praveku Vsestary https://archeoparkvsestary.cz/. Butser Ancient Farm Archive 1973–2007 http://www.butser.org.uk. Colonial Williamsburg http://www.history.org. EXAR http://www.exar.org/. EXARC http://www.exarc.eu. EXARC Experimental Archaeology Collection https://core.tdar.org/collection/60199/exarc-experimental-archaeology-collection. Experimental Iron Production at the Rockbridge Bloomery http://iron.wlu.edu/. Experimental Iron Smelting Wareham Forge http://www.warehamforge.ca/ENCAMPMENT/smelting.html. MAMUZ https://www.mamuz.at/en/exhibitions/schloss-asparn-zaya/archaelogical-open-air-site. Muzeum archeologiczne w Biskupinie http://www.biskupin.pl. Pfahlbauten Unteruhldingen http://www.pfahl.bauten.de. Sagnlandet Lejre http://www.lejre-center.dk. The Monoxylon Expeditions http://www.monoxylon.com/monoxylon-iii-en/. University College Dublin https://www.ucd.ie/. University of Exeter http://www.ex.ac.uk. University of York https://www.york.ac.uk/.
Feminist Archaeology Jana Esther Friesa, Bisserka Gaydarskab, Paz Ramı´rez Valientec, and Katharina Rebay-Salisburyd, a Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Oldenburg, Germany; b Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom; c Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom; and d Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Topics and Goals History and Fundamental Theories of Feminist Archaeology Key Issues and Important Directions The Multiple Approaches of Feminist Archaeology Difference Feminism Matriarchy and Mother Goddesses Marxist Feminism Post-structural Feminism Neo-liberal Feminism Intersectional Feminism Trans-inclusive Feminism Data Feminism Matricentric Feminism Feminism and Archaeological Practice: The Past and the Present Career Opportunities Bullying and Harassment Self-Understanding and Self-Presentation Feminist Outreach, or the Experts and the Public Museums Gender Roles and Representation in the Popular Media The Distant Past in Other Academic Subjects A Sample of National Feminisms USA Scandinavia United Kingdom Germany Spain Feminist Archaeologies and Related Approaches Queer Archaeology Archaeology of the Body Household Archaeology Feminist Archaeology and the Study of Masculinity Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Feminist archaeology sees itself as part of the struggle for gender equality. It has diverse, sometimes even contradictory theoretical foundations and distinctly different emphases and approaches in different countries. In addition to the past, it makes the institutions of archaeology the object of research. It aims not only to work within academia, but also to change the general public’s conceptions of the distant past as they are part of today’s gender discourse.
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Feminist Archaeology Abstract This paper presents both the theoretical approaches to archaeology that focus on the past and the more practical approaches that focus on archaeology’s own institutions and its external impact. It makes clear that feminist archaeology is diverse and disparate and goes far beyond women’s concerns. Instead, it challenges the theoretical foundations and unconscious presuppositions of archaeology and claims to change the discipline as a whole as well as popular assumptions about the past.
Introduction Feminist archaeology, like feminism in general, aims at gender equality and gender justice, and it is as diverse, confusing, and sometimes contradictory as the latter. Feminist archaeology targets very different areas of the past as well as the present. It has changed in the course of its history, is understood differently in different countries and sub-disciplines, and it overlaps with countless other topics and approachesdnotably gender archaeology. Therefore, giving a stringent overview of feminist archaeology without over-simplifying is almost impossible. So, we have opted for an approach that is more like a collection. In addition to overarching theoretical and historical commonalities, we present a bouquet of theoretical orientations and the multiple feminist archaeologies in different countries. This will be complemented by an overview of how feminist archaeology has turned archaeological institutions into subjects of research and challenged them to change. As probably the most ambitious objective of feminist archaeology, we describe the ideal to change the general public’s ideas of gender in the distant past.
Overview Topics and Goals Feminist archaeology basically aims at two directions. On the one hand, it questions the methods, theories and results of its subject under the viewpoint of gender. On the other hand, it addresses gender aspects of the present in archaeological institutions, but also anywhere archaeology plays a role today. The changes it seeks to achieve range from the basic theories of archaeology to the representation of past genders in popular culture. The concrete methods are as much its subject as the selection of research topics, the division of tasks in archaeological institutions, linguistic representation, the mediation of archaeology to the general public, and equal opportunities. Within academia, feminist archaeology works to liberate the study of the past from male bias, dissolve unconscious stereotypes, and develop better methodologies (Lozano Rubio, 2011). The goal is to create greater awareness of the diversity of gender systems of the past by raising awareness of biases to give proper consideration to all genders and to overcome the dominance of a few topics with male connotations in research (Skogstrand, 2011). Archaeologists and archaeological institutions are themselves subjects of research within feminist archaeology (Conkey, 2003). One goal here is to better understand how personal, social, and political developments contribute to bias. Most importantly, it aims to address gender imbalances in terms of equal opportunity and perceptions of accomplishment. Recently, the fight against sexual harassment has also become an issue (Coltofean-Arizancu et al., 2023). In the area of outreach, feminist archaeology strives for a balanced, diverse representation of the past (Prados Torreira and López Ruiz, 2017). It also aims at a clearer presentation of previously neglected subject areas, so as to challenge role stereotypes, and to raise awareness of the mutability of gender systems. The same applies to the representation of the past in the media, in the entertainment industry and other sciences. Here, feminist archaeology aims to break down outdated, clichéd representations of gender in order to arrive at more realistic, diverse representations. Finally, it aims to influence popular, often unconscious, presuppositions about gender in the past that are reflected in numerous discourses surrounding gender politics.
History and Fundamental Theories of Feminist Archaeology Feminist approaches entered academic archaeology comparatively late (Sørensen, 2000). It was not until the late 1980s that they were taken up to any relevant extent in some countries. In others, they still do not play a significant role even today. Female archaeologists from Scandinavia, the USA and Great Britain were the first to work on these topics since the 1970s. The actors, theoretical foundations, and strategies in establishing feminist approaches have always been diverse. The theory of feminist archaeology has also undergone considerable development. Among the oldest approaches is women’s studies. It is based on the insight that research in patriarchal societies clearly disadvantages women researchers (Nelson, 1997). In addition, women are neglected as research subjects. Women’s contributions to the social, technical, or religious achievements of their society are regularly marginalized. This imbalance makes it necessary to put women and subjects understood as feminine at the center of research. Their importance deserves re-evaluation and a female side is to be added to the image of prehistory.
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Case studies in gender archaeology often carry the unspoken assumption that, after eliminating the androcentric bias, unbiased insights into the gender structures of the past can be gained. Sporadically, however, feminist archaeology has welcomed deliberately female-preferential scholarly work (Lozano Rubio, 2011). Since the 1990s, women’s studies within feminist archaeology have largely been replaced by gender studies (Matic, this volume). In the early days of this branch of research, the focus was on analyzing the theoretical premises about gender in archaeology (Pyburn, 2004). The almost always unspoken and presumably mostly unconscious paradigm is that there are naturally and immutably only two genders. Accordingly, women and men in all cultures have always had the same basic characteristics, have always assumed the same tasks, and have always experienced the same, lifelong gender identity. Moreover, this duality has always been expressed materially in similar ways. Gender archaeology counters this with the differentiation between sex and gender. Here, sex is understood exclusively as the physical part of gender. Gender stands for all non-immediate physical aspects ranging from tasks to self-perception. These aspects are not derived from corporeal physicality but are understood as social constructs (Brumfiel, 2006). Some case studies in gender archaeology discuss the possibility of more than two genders (Gilchrist, 1999). Overwhelmingly, however, a more binary view of gender is used. Beginning around 2000, the existence of two biological sexes was also questioned within feminist archaeology. This goes back to the research of Butler (2004). She understands the dichotomy of the sexes as a social construct that is part of power relations. According to her theories, sex and gender are continually (re)constructed and shaped through everyday actions, speech acts and contacts with others. Prompted by Butler’s theory, there has been some discussion as to whether gender is a valid category of inquiry at all (Sofaer, 2006). The demand to think beyond the binary model of gender has mostly prevailed, even if this has still relatively rarely been translated into concrete case studies. Nevertheless, the possibility that other social categories were more important than gender in burials is now often considered. Making one’s institutions the object of study has not yet found its way into mainstream archaeology. The division of labor and equal opportunities were addressed comparatively early in archaeology, since the 1970s (Conkey, 2003). Where feminist archaeology makes its own discipline the object of research, it has been less theory-driven than in the study of the past. Equal opportunities are promoted through the presentation of female professional biographies (Diaz-Andreu and Sørensen, 1998), statistical studies on job appointments (Fries, 2021) or mutual support. Regarding communication, be it within the subject or externally, there are often borrowings from other sciences, such as pedagogy, communication theory, linguistics or art theory, without there being a separate discussion of feminist archaeology’s theoretical foundations.
Key Issues and Important Directions The Multiple Approaches of Feminist Archaeology Difference Feminism A fundamentally important distinction within feminist theory is that between difference feminism and equality feminism. The former assumes that there are fundamental, biologically determined differences between genders. It criticizes the devaluation of skills and values found especially in women, patriarchal domination over women, and lack of equal opportunity. Within archaeology, some of the research on individual women and groups of women can be categorized here. Research on topics understood as traditionally feminine (Brumfiel, 1991) or on issues surrounding the female body (Beausang, 2005), also rests in part on difference feminist foundations. In particular, research on prehistoric matriarchies is often based on a difference feminist approach. Advocates of equality feminism criticize difference feminist studies for emphasizing only the female side of the traditional gender image. Outdated stereotypes would be merely turned into positive here (Gilchrist, 1999). In contrast, they emphasize the diversity and historicity of gender and the ways it intertwined with other social categories.
Matriarchy and Mother Goddesses The romantic idea of a peaceful, happy deep past in which women ruled and were worshiped as goddesses is still part of the public perception, particularly of the Stone Age. Probably rooted in early evolutionary thought about the origins of the family (Bachofen, 1861; Morgan, 1877), the idea of matriarchy in Europe before the invasion of patriarchal Indo-European language speakers from the eastern steppes in the third millennium BC has been promoted by the famous Lithuanian archaeologist Maria Gimbutas (Gimbutas, 1974, 1979). The discovery of a strong male bias in these migration events through archaeogenetic research (Haak et al., 2015) has led to a revival of these ideas. The abundance of female figurines, and their numerical dominance over male and gender-neutral figurines in many times and places across the globe (Insoll, 2017), were also easy to link to matriarchy. They are often seen as symbols of fertility and fecundity, as well as female goddesses; their appearance in many different cultural contexts, however, makes it futile to find an explanation that satisfyingly explains them all. Matriarchy studies have developed independently out of these insights, largely unnoticed by academic archaeology (e.g., Göttner-Abendroth, 2012), and often becoming central to groups and initiatives that embrace New Age esoterism, witchcraft, ecofeminism or environmentalism (Meskell, 1995). These ideas continue to thrive despite targeted scholarly criticism (Eller, 2001; Röder et al., 2001).
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Marxist Feminism Marxist feminism emerged as a corrective to traditional Marxism, which had ignored the issue of gender, by adding gender to the staple Marxist category of class. Thus, the basic premise of domination and oppression is expanded to double oppression of women by socio-economic class and by men. The explicit link between capitalism and domination over labor has been criticized as too narrow and unable to deal with gender inequality in pre-and post-capitalist societies (Seneviratne, 2018). Moreover, the failed regimes of the late 20th c. Eastern Europe confirm the perception of Marxism as utopian. Currently, an argument can be made that Marxist feminism has been overtaken by intersectional feminism. However, since a substantial part of practicing archaeologist’s lives and works in capitalist societies, there is relevance to the Marxist feminist insistence that such a system should not be viewed through the lenses of market forces and profits, but that inequality and power can only be addressed by structural changes (Seneviratne, 2018). The major focus of Marxist feminism on labor can be very beneficial for studies of the past if stripped of its ideological roots, allowing an exploration of the issue of exploitation which has often been taken for granted. This will enable insightful studies about division and/or overlap of labor between various gender categories in the past (e.g., Costin, 2013).
Post-structural Feminism Feminist post-structuralist theorizing focuses particularly on the specific social and historical processes whereby individuals become gendered subjects. From the 1990s the works of Butler (2004) have questioned the definition of “sex” as a biological given and instead posited that sex and gender are socially constructed categories. Butler has widely influenced the study of gender in archaeology with alternative ways of viewing sex and gender that have moved beyond essentialist and universal identity constructs to more nuanced configurations (e.g., Alberti, 2005). This influence on archaeological literature has led to a search for intersex, hermaphrodites, third genders, gender fluid individuals, gender ambiguity and plurality, following anthropological examples from Native Americans, Melanesians or Indians. Studies using this approach intertwine with Queer archaeologies, questioning the universal assumption of present-day binary genders on gender roles in the past, and the reliability of sex attribution.
Neo-liberal Feminism If we need to describe neo-liberalism and neo-liberal feminism in a few words, they would be “the rise of rampant individualism” for the former and the “conversion of (Western) middle-class women into human capital” (Rottenberg, 2016) for the latter. Juggling a high-achieving career with reproduction and childcare forms a major part of the neo-liberal feminism discourse, which promotes a work-family balance as opposed to the choice between work and staying at home. If taken uncritically, neo-liberal tropes and discussions can have serious implications in archaeology. Thus, the post-processual interest in the individual could turn into Thatcherite dogma, such as “there is no such thing as society.” Or a skillful female potter engaged in daily maintenance activities can turn into a prehistoric neo-liberal feminist. Finally, taking the 20th century choice to stay at home out of its feminist context feeds into patriarchal structures of power, thus validating the normativity of such social systems and projecting modern stereotypes onto the past.
Intersectional Feminism Intersectional feminism emerged from Black feminism and Critical race theory to address the racial inequality of women (Crenshaw, 1989)dan aspect that was overlooked by first- and second-wave feminism. The concept of intersectionality considers other forms of oppression intertwined with gender, including race, class, ethnicity and sexuality. The combination of intersected social identities may add layers of domination, discrimination, oppression, privilege, and violence. Furthermore, intersectionality may shed light on understanding and challenging hegemonic power structures and relations. In archaeology, an intersectional perspective needs to integrate aspects of gender with age, class and ethnicity. Gender can no longer be separated from other social identities that defined the complexity of past societies. The introduction of intersectionality in gender archaeology has occurred within the last decade, including analyses using Black Feminist (Sterling, 2015), Indigenous (Lightfoot, 2006), and post-colonial archaeologies.
Trans-inclusive Feminism Trans-inclusive feminism emerged with the trans-gender theorizing associated with third-wave feminism, which considers trans women as women and, therefore, a group that feminism needs to represent. It aims to protect the rights of trans people while simultaneously pursuing women’s and trans’ equality and safety. This perspective endorses the right of trans people to choose an individualized gender identity and expression (Jenkins, 2016; Koyama, 2003). Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERF) have criticized this by rejecting the concept of trans gender identity and not recognizing transgender rights, considering that trans women are not women because they were born biologically male. In archaeology, this perspective engages with queer theorizations of the past, which have started to question heteronormativity and gender essentialism as modern constructs.
Data Feminism In comparison to other feminist approaches, data feminism is relatively recent and has been brought to the fore by two female data scientists (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020). They utilize a very wide range of evidence to convincingly demonstrate that who collects (commissions the collection) of what kind of data for what purposes is deeply embedded in present power structures, usually patriarchal and/or involving the domination of majority groups over marginalized individuals/communities. They also criticize the old
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but still archaeologically pertinent issues of objectivity and neutrality of data by revealing that such awe is yet another myth propagandized by white, cis, heterosexual males. The overall message is that (big) data could and should be used for multiple purposes (research questions) but with awareness of its messiness, pluralistic nature and situatednessdall stemming from a feminist approach. In archaeology, this is particularly valid for data concerning human recordsdlike past and present archaeologists or aDNA samples, but also radiocarbon dates or settlement data. Examples of the harmful distancing of big data from context, as eloquently argued by D’Ignazio and Klein, include misleading demographic reconstructions on the basis of the number of radiocarbon dates and partial and biased life stories from the past (e.g., overlooking personal mobility and prioritizing newsworthy mass migrations (Haak et al., 2015).
Matricentric Feminism Motherhood is both the “relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that potentialdand all womendshall remain under male control” (Rich, 1997 (1976)). As such, motherhood is often understood as at odds with feminism. Matricentric feminism argues that the category of “mother” is distinct from the category of “woman,” and that many of the problems mothers facedsocial, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and so forthdare specific to women’s role and identity as mothers (O’Reilly, 2016). Mothers need a feminism of their owndone that positions mothers’ concerns as the starting point for a theory and politics of empowerment. Within academic feminism, mothers have been marginalized. Within archaeology, motherhood has often been taken as normal and inevitable in the past and has rarely been a topic of scholarly investigation. This has recently changed, with publications specifically focusing on the culture of motherhood (e.g., Cooper and Phelan, 2017; Romero and López, 2018) and finding new scientific approaches to mothering practices in the past (e.g., Dunne et al., 2019).
Feminism and Archaeological Practice: The Past and the Present Career Opportunities A Europe-wide survey in 2014 has shown an increase of the number of women archaeologists to reach just over 50% of the total workforce (Atchinson et al., 2014). The situation is similar in the USA (Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2019). Does this translate into equal treatment of women? Returning to the earlier point we have made that which data are collected is a matter of power, it is not surprising that surveys and studies about working conditions, career prospects, discrimination, harassment and pay-gaps, among others, are very few and far between, problematizing a coherent long-term regional, let alone global, picture. However, issues raised in 1993 and capturing the situation in the last decades of the last century in Australia and North America overlap with issues raised in studies in the 2010s showing persistent and recurrent inequalities across time and space. Notwithstanding the progress that has been made in accommodating women’s aspirations with appropriate career structures, advances have been patchy, underlining that the “chilly climate” toward women in academia identified by A. Wylie in the 1990s (Wylie, 1993) still persists. The situation is similar in museums, commercial units, heritage organizations and other archaeological settings where women are part of the workforce but are not proportionally represented in leading positions, more often have part-time or temporary positions and, crucially, still suffer from a gender pay-gap. Success stories, as in the example of Norway (Lazar et al., 2014), should not delude us into thinking that the glass ceiling has been shattered. In many parts of the world, patriarchal structures are very much alive (for an East European example see Palincas¸, 2010). Statistics for disabled people and people from minority and marginalized groups are even fewer in number (see Intersectional Feminism section). In 2013, only 2% of UK archaeologists were disabled and 99.2% were white. As late as 2015, documented structural discrimination in the UK was shown by the inability of ethnically diverse graduate cohorts to convert into an equally diverse workforce. In two critical areas of the archaeological profession, women are lagging behind. The first is the number and success of grant applications, where female applicants receive either smaller grants or less prestigious ones (e.g., the European Research Council Advanced Grants are predominantly held by men, Fig. 1). The second is the production of knowledge about the past, as measured by publications in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. While the European Journal of Archaeology is slowly overcoming its long-term bias in favor of male authors, a study of publishing practices in archaeology in the USA, including four high-impact journals and two non-refereed publications, has revealed that the main contributions are made by male archaeologists who make up less than 10% of all North American archaeologists (Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2019).
Bullying and Harassment Harassment in archaeology can take many formsdfrom micro-aggression and banter (Andrews et al., 2020) to full-blown sexual assault and rape (Heath-Stout, 2019). It could be based on gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality or any other aspect of identity. It is deeply embedded in all aspects of archaeological practice but only recently has its exposure become more common (e.g., ColtofeanArizancu et al., 2023). The rarity with which harassment practices have been called out has led to their normalization that feeds back into not recognizing such practices as offensive and thus not reporting them. Harassment can lead to low self-esteem, depression, changing research fields or even leaving archaeology altogether (Heath-Stout, 2019). Existing codes of conduct seem to have had little effect in stopping unwanted behaviors and in recent years influential professional organizations like the SAA (2015) and
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European Research Council grants awarded to men and women.
the EAA (2020) have issued formal statements to take a stance against harassment practices. However, a Europe-wide survey conducted in 2021 shows that harassment, assault, bullying and intimidation remain deeply entrenched in our discipline and we still have a long way to go to uproot them (Coltofean-Arizancu et al., 2023).
Self-Understanding and Self-Presentation Archaeologists’ professional self-perceptions and self-presentations also include significant gender aspects. Archaeologists often complain that they are portrayed unrealistically by the media, and that the general public does not have a realistic image of their work (Kaeser, 2010). However, archaeologists also often paint a picture of themselves that only partially matches reality and overemphasizes certain aspects. Very clearly in the foreground, both in general ideas and in what archaeologists themselves publish, is fieldwork. Physical exertion, climatic hardships, the necessary tenacity, and sensational discoveries are often emphasized. These qualities have traditionally been attributed primarily to men, making archaeology a mostly male profession in the popular image. This external representation is also related to professional self-perception (Fries, 2019). For many archaeologists, excavation seems to be the core of their profession. Since the image of archaeology and excavation is a distinctly male one, it is conceivable that female archaeologists identify less with their profession than male archaeologists. This is exacerbated when they are excluded from certain activities in fieldwork, which has long been the case and still occurs today.
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Feminist Outreach, or the Experts and the Public Museums Museum displays, reconstructions and illustrations are powerful in conveying messages about gender relations, whether intentionally or not. In most cases, they reveal more about the time in which they were produced than about the past they aim to illustrate (Röder, 2004). Since women’s roles and possibilities have probably never changed as rapidly as during the late 19th and early 20th century, we can observe significant changes in how women were portrayed in museums. Analyses have concluded that women and children were traditionally under-represented, often shown in domestic or care roles, whereas men are displayed as active creators and warriors (e.g., Röder, 2004; Schulte-Dornberg, 2005). In recent years, some museum displays have been re-designed to integrate current research into gender relations (Reschreiter and Kowarik, 2019) and to question traditional gender roles (e.g., Fig. 2). Thus, we now see an increase of young men cradling children, as well as women as shield maidens. While in some contexts, such as the famous Birka Viking warrior woman (Price et al., 2019), this is certainly correct, an over-emphasis on exceptional women risks delivering a different kind of distorted vision of the past.
Gender Roles and Representation in the Popular Media The considerable reach of media such as movies, video games or books makes it crucial to assess the messages that the audience receives concerning gender in the past. Images in educational and children’s books and movies tend to represent gender roles that associate women with nurturing their offspring and domestic activities and men with more active, creative and technological roles. For instance, representations of Paleolithic art, stone tool making, metalworking and the production of fire more frequently showed male action (Galanidou, 2007). Women are depicted sewing, producing textiles and ceramics, or being associated with children and the household. In archaeological video games, there is a trend to emphasize the physical strength of male protagonists. The inclusion of female characters who question traditional gender roles is still viewed with skepticism. An example is the polemic inclusion of female generals in Total War: Rome II (2018), which was accused of being “historically inaccurate.” Male leader characters clearly outnumber females in these games (Sycamore, 2017). The focus of most video games on warfare and combat is problematic because it tends to endorse traditional gender stereotypes of the past.
The Distant Past in Other Academic Subjects In addition to archaeology and fictional works, other sciences also make statements about the distant past and its gender relations. From political science to psychology to nutritional science, past eras, especially the Paleolithic, are used to explain behaviors and social structures observed today, for example in stressful situations or when shopping. This is often not done in cooperation with archaeological experts, but simply through the everyday theories of the respective scientists. These assumptions about the past, however, are not so very different from those of the general public. The application of this common-sense knowledge to facts observed today marks a minor advance in understanding. The reflection of gendered aspects of the past on the present enters the realm of feminist archaeology. For example, contemporary color preferences are explained by psychology in terms of a presumed gendered division of labor in the Paleolithic, without
Fig. 2 Museum display from the Museo Arqueológico Regional de Madrid as an example for a balanced (by age and gender) presentation of humans from the far past. After Prados Torreira and López Ruiz (2017).
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reference to current archaeology understanding (Grisard, 2019). However, as yet this side of feminist archaeology remains poorly developed.
A Sample of National Feminisms USA It is from the American feminist context that the word gender, as opposed to sex, arose in the 1960s, to emphasize social attributes as much as biological characteristics. Gender archaeology, as all American archaeology, is part of the anthropological discourse. The first discussions on gender inequality were rooted in ethnology (e.g., Zimbalist Rosaldo et al., 1974), with archaeologists soon following suit to criticize both the fact that women in prehistory were often non-existent or given passive roles, and also biases in archaeological practice. The work of Margaret W. Conkey, Joan Gero and Janet D. Spector (Conkey and Spector, 1984; Gero and Conkey, 1991; Spector, 1993) centered on the Americas, whereas Ruth Tringham’s work in the Balkans (Tringham, 1991) also influenced European archaeologists.
Scandinavia Scandinavian archaeologists were among the first in Europe to embrace feminist ideas, starting in the early 1970s (Dommasnes, 2021). They were in opposition to an archaeology that was strongly object-oriented and scarcely theory-driven. Generally preceding comparable approaches in the English-speaking world, theories of women’s and gender studies and corresponding case studies were published there. The workshop “Were they all men? An examination of sex roles in prehistoric society” held in 1979 (Bertelsen et al., 1987) led to the foundation of the “Kvinner i Arkeologi i Norge” (Women in Archaeology in Norway) association, which published its own journal from 1985 to 2005 (Dommasnes and Montón-Subías, 2012). K.A.N. played a crucial role in the establishment of women’s studies, gender studies and feminist discussions, which today form a central part of Scandinavian archaeology. These developments benefited from ideas from processual archaeology and its deconstruction (Nelson, 1997).
United Kingdom The first feminist perspectives in UK archaeology began in the 1980s with discussions in Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conferences (1982, 1985, 1987) and the Cambridge Feminist Archaeology Workshops (1987/88). The first published papers dedicated to women, gender, and feminist theories (Arnold et al., 1988) argued for the development of a feminist archaeology. For instance, Sørensen (1988) aimed at developing methodologies for the study of women and of gender relations in the past, researching the work of women in archaeology, increasing women’s visibility in museums and publications, and revisiting the role of women in history. Two of the authors who continued working with gender wrote two influential textbooksdGender and Archaeology by Gilchrist (1999) and Gender Archaeology by Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (2000)dwhich specifically focused on European case studies and heralded a new acceptance of gender archaeology in teaching and research.
Germany In Germany, the first feminist initiatives for gender archaeology occurred from the end of the 1980s (Moraw, 2021). These initiatives, started mainly by female students, confronted a traditional archaeology dominated by an almost theory-free cultural historical perspective, and demanded better methods, more gender-conscious theories and equal opportunities. The Netzwerk archäologisch arbeitender Frauen (Network of Women in Archaeology), founded in 1991, was an essential part of these early discussions. Gender archaeology is now considered an established specialty within archaeology. In social archaeology, the category of gender is regularly taken into account, usually in combination with other social aspects. Feminist archaeology, on the other hand, is less well accepted. However, there are differences between the various sub-disciplines of archaeology. A recurrent feature of German archaeology concerns the gendered practices in the mortuary domain. However, the theoretical foundations of these studies can often be less complex and too positivistic, with a central tenet being the distinction between sex, as indicated by the skeleton, and gender, mostly based upon grave goods. The existence of more than two genders and those post-structuralist approaches are occasionally discussed but have so far hardly influenced wider perspectives. Nonetheless, attention has been drawn to the biases inherent in visual representations of the past and in the field of professional equality.
Spain In Spain, a feminist perspective that criticized the androcentric bias in the studies of the past started later than in other leading countries (e.g., Sanahuja and Picazo, 1989). The first feminist archaeologists were influenced by Marxist theory and focused on sexual roles and relations. However, English-speaking contributions later influenced feminist theorization in Spanish archaeology. In the early 2000s, the feminist approach was established with multiple conferences, seminars and museum exhibitions dedicated to women and gender in archaeology. The main contributions of Spanish archaeologists focus on two areas of research: maintenance activities and the socio-historical construction of gendered personhood and identity. The maintenance activities approach originated in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, led by a group of scholars influenced by feminist Marxism. Maintenance activities include caregiving, cooking and food processing, textile production, hygiene and public health, children’s socialization, and the creation and organization of residential space (Montón-Subías and Sánchez-Romero, 2008). These practices were considered neglected by mainstream archaeology because
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of their association with women in the past and present. The second approach examined the differences between relational and individualized identity from its historical origins (Hernando, 2012). Using ethno-archaeological, archaeological and historical studies, Hernando (2012) suggested a change in the Metal Ages from the relational identities initially shared by men and women to a gendered difference between male individualized identities and female relational identities. She considers this differentiation, which still exists today as the basis for the genesis of the patriarchy.
Feminist Archaeologies and Related Approaches Queer Archaeology Queer theories originated in the 1980s and 90s with the debates on gender, sex, and sexuality. Queer archaeology questions heteronormative assumptions within archaeological interpretations about the past (Cobb, 2005). The focus of queer archaeology in past narratives tends to be gender and sexuality, questioning that present-day normative sexualities or genders should not be assumed for the past. However, queer archaeologies go beyond sexuality and gender, challenging all aspects of established normative practice and scientific discourse (Dowson, 2000). This approach has been applied to archaeological studies on social identity, intersectionality, kinship and family structure, or bodily performance.
Archaeology of the Body Gender is closely connected to archaeological research on the body. A body-centered theoretical approach has two aspects: the body as an artifact and the body as the scene of display (Joyce, 2005). In the latter sense, the analysis and interpretation of anthropomorphic images are especially pertinent from an engendered and feminist perspective. Rautman and Talalay (2000) have observed that “cultural ideas of maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity, are played out in these media.” This approach has led to studies on archaeologies of sex, gender and identity embodied in costume, bodily ornamentation and modification, gesture and posture in figurines, burials and other media (e.g., Rebay-Salisbury, 2016).
Household Archaeology The study of the household has also been the focus of gender archaeology, considering that women carried out activities that are particularly visible in the domestic sphere (Lawrence, 2006). However, this assumption is sometimes biased by a modern consideration of past gender roles, with women relegated to the domestic and men to the public sphere. Examples of feminist studies of households include analyses of the gendered use of space (e.g., Tringham, 2001), material culture associated with women, subsistence and craft production within the household. This perspective partially overlaps with the maintenance activities approach, considering that many caring activities take place within the social space of the household but also outside of it.
Feminist Archaeology and the Study of Masculinity Masculinist approaches influenced by feminist scholarship in the field of archaeology are limited. The most important contribution of masculinist approaches in archaeology has been to point out the existence of multiple masculinities and the claim that the masculine subject needs to be an object of research (Skogstrand, 2011). Masculinist perspectives argue that gender archaeology should encompass both women and men understood as multi-faceted rather than essentialist categories. The understanding of ways that gender structured past societies and shaped people’s identities requires the investigation of both men and women in those societies, their status, class, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Summary and Future Directions Rather than being an exhaustive account of a distinctive approach, this chapter provides a flavor of the multi-faceted character of feminist archaeology. At times, the overlap with issues discussed in “gender archaeology” is not only obvious but inevitable. However, these are two distinct fields in archaeology. Over the years, feminist archaeology has shaken off its exclusive focus on women in the past and on-going battles for the rights of women archaeologists, although these remain its core tenets. The various strands of feminism, and thus their application in archaeology, need not be seen as contradictory but complementary in broader attempts to address the epistemological and ontological grounds of the discipline, as well as all aspects of working practices in archaeology. Feminist archaeology remains far from acceptance in many parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Standpoint theory and intersectionalism, among other key notions in feminist archaeology, need to be incorporated more widely in our approaches, thus leading to more diverse and nuanced narratives of the past world. In an increasingly hostile, intolerant and socially segregated present, feminist archaeology can help fight the normalization of such practices by deconstructing uncritical social interpretations of the past that are simply replicating modern power structures.
See Also: Gender and Heritage; Gender and Queer Archaeology; Identity and Power; Post-Processual Archaeology.
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Further Reading Atchinson, Kenneth, Rocks-Macqueen, Dough, 2013. Archaeology Labour Market Intelligence: Profiling the Profession 2007/08, Landward Research. Retrieved 17 December 2021, from. www.landward.eu/Archaeology%20Labour%20Market%20Intelligence%20Profiling%20the%20Profession%202012-13.pdf. Butler, Judith, 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. Routledge, New York. Champion, Erik, 2017. Single white looter: Have whip, will travel. In: Mol, Angus A., Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Csilla E., Boom, Krijn H.J., Politopoulos, Aris (Eds.), The Interactive Past: Archaeology, Heritage, and Video Games. Sidestone Press, Leiden, pp. 107–122. Clancy, Kahtryn B.H., Nelson, Robin G., Rutherford, Julienne N., Hinde, Katie, 2014. Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees report harassment and assault. PLoS One 9 (7), e102172. Cobb, Hannah, 2015. A diverse profession? Challenging inequalities and diversifying involvement in British archaeology. In: Everill, Paul, Irving, Pamela (Eds.), Rescue Archaeology: Foundations for the Future. Herefordshire: RESCUE – The British Archaeological Trust, p. 266. Colomer, Laia, Gili, S., González Marcén, Paloma, et al., 1993. Género y Arqueología: las mujeres en la prehistoria. Arqcrística 6, 5–7. du Cros, Hilary, Smith, Laurajane (Eds.), 1993. Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique. Occasional Papers in Prehistory 23. Australian National University, Canberra. Ghisleni, Lara, Jordan, Alexis M., Fioccoprile, Emlily, 2016. Introduction to “Binary Binds”: Deconstructing sex and gender dichotomies in archaeological practice. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 23 (3), 765–787. González Marcén, Paloma, Montón-Subías, Sandra, Picazo, Marina, 2008. Towards an archaeology of maintenance activities. In: Montón-Subías, Sandra, SánchezRomero, Margarita (Eds.), Engendering Social Dynamics: The Archaeology of Maintenance Activities, British Archaeological Reports International Series 1862. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 3–8. Jalbert, Catherine L., 2019. Archaeology in Canada: An Analysis of Demographics and Working Conditions in the Discipline. PhD Thesis. Department of Archaeology, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Knapp, A. Bernard, 1998. Who’s come a long way, baby? Masculinist approaches to a gendered archaeology. Archaeol. Dialogues 5 (02), 91–106. Koch, Georg, 2017. “It has always been like that...”: How televised prehistory explains what is natural. In: Fries, Jana Esther, Gutsmiedl-Schümann, Doris, Zalea Matias, Jo, Rambuscheck, Ulrike (Eds.), Images of the Past. Gender and Its Representations, Frauen - Forschung - Archäologie 13. Waxmann, Münster, pp. 65–84. Montón-Subías, Sandra, Moral de Eusebio, Enrique, 2020. Gender, feminist and queer archaeologies. A Spanish perspective. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, pp. 4471–4479.
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Moser, Stephanie, 2009. Archaeological representation: The consumption and creation of the past. In: Cunliffe, Barry, Gosden, Chris, Joyce, Rosemary A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 1048–1077. Sénécheau, Miriam, 2005. Motive mit Tradition. Lebensbilder und Geschlechterrollen in gegenwärtigen Schulbüchern. In: Fries, Jana Esther, Rambuscheck, Ulrike, SchulteDornberg, Gisela (Eds.), Science Oder Fiction? Geschlechterrollen in Archäologischen Lebensbildern, Frauen - Forschung - Archäologie 7. Waxmann, Münster, pp. 123–162. Sofaer, Joanna, Sørensen, Marie Louise Stig, 2013. Death and gender. In: Tarlow, Sarah, Nilsson Stutz, Liv (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 527–542. Starbuck, David R., 1994. The identification of gender at northern military sites of the Late Eighteenth Century. In: Scott, Elizabeth (Ed.), Those of Little Note: Gender, Race and Class in Historical Archaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, pp. 115–128. Wicker, Nancy L., 2010. Situating Scandinavian Migration Period Brateates: From typology and iconography to gender, agency, and visual culture. In: Dommasnes, Liv Helga, Hjørungdal, Tove, Montón-Subías, Sandra, Sánchez Romero, Margarita, Wicker, Nancy L. (Eds.), Situating Gender in European Archaeologies, Archaeolingua Series Minor 29. Archaeolingua, Budapest, pp. 67–81.
Field Archaeology A˚sa Berggren, Lund University, Lund, Sweden © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Short History of Fieldwork and Some Social Aspects Methods of Fieldwork and the Archaeological Process Surveying Areas of Interest Assessing a Site Excavating a Site Summary and Future Directions Future Directions, Challenges and Emerging Trends Conclusions References Relevant Websites
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The social history of archaeological fieldwork shows a separation between intellectual interpretation and manual excavation. The professionalization of the archaeological sector has in some respects led to increased equality and power to the fieldworkers, however not in all aspects, e.g. regarding gender and global differences. The conditions of the archaeological process differ between research, training and commercial projects. The archaeological process generally consists of three phases involving fieldwork: survey, assessment, excavation. Archaeological fieldwork faces several challenges and possibilities in the near future, e.g. increasing demands on societal relevance and inclusive practices, increasing and accelerating technical and digital development, and increasing adaption to market principles.
Abstract Field archaeology entails everything archaeologists do outside of the office; however, when scrutinizing the concept of the field in field archaeology, it is a rather complex issue. A short history of archaeological fieldwork shows that social factors influenced knowledge production in the field and still do today. An account of the archaeological process, concerning both commercial and research projects, illuminates what archaeologists do in the field during the various phases. Challenges and possibilities ahead affect how fieldwork will be carried out in the future. Among those are increasing demands on societal relevance and inclusive practices, increasing and accelerating technical and digital development and increasing adaption to market principles.
Introduction The machine excavator roars as the bucket swings back toward me after leaving a big heap of soil next to the trench. We are in a field where last year’s stubble is covering the ground, and I am standing in front of the big machine. The operator of the excavator seeks eye contact to receive my signal of where to place the bucket for the next stroke of removal of soil and how deep it should be. The remaining topsoil is removed and some colorations in the subsoil are revealed for me to interpret i.e. decide whether they are remains of human activity or the result of natural processes in the ground. We are in the field, performing archaeological fieldwork. Working in a fully cultivated landscape, removing topsoil with a machine excavator to discover remnants of earlier activity, such as filled pits in the subsoil visible as darker areas, is a common task to be performed during archaeological fieldwork (Fig. 1). I, as a field archaeologist, have done it countless times. And yet, many archaeologists will not recognize this as one of the tasks they perform routinely. Perhaps they have never had to do this particular job. Archaeological fieldwork entails many different kinds of tasks, and can be many different things to different archaeologists, depending on the type of archaeology being executed – during a research project, a training excavation or in commercial archaeology funded by the developer – and in what kind of natural environment the fieldwork is taking
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place – a fully cultivated landscape as in the example above, in a dense forest, on a rocky mountain, in an urban area or on a seabed under water. Another factor decisive of the kind of fieldwork being performed is where in the archaeological process the fieldwork is taking place. If it is in a phase during which ancient remains are unknown in an area and the archaeologist’s task is to find out whether there are any present, the fieldwork will be exploratory and cover large areas, while the fieldwork involving known remains on a certain site will constitute a stationary excavation. In addition, various professional and national traditions also contribute to how fieldwork is carried out. Archaeological fieldwork thus varies according to a wide range of factors. The term field archaeology implies the part of archaeology that is performed in the field, i.e. archaeological fieldwork, which in turn includes a vast variation of practical tasks. However, the understanding of field archaeology is not only instrumental. It also needs to be approached on a more theoretical level, as the definition of the concept can be rather imprecise and needs to be contextualized to be understood. To define field archaeology is to illuminate and disentangle the “field” in archaeology. At first glance this may seem a redundant enterprise, as most have a rather clear – popular – image of archaeologists in the field, locating or excavating ancient remains, often but not always, in faraway places. It would seem rather uncomplicated and self-evident what the field is in these cases: somewhere outdoors, away from any office space, often in the countryside. In fact, as Gavin Lucas (2001a) points out in his expose of various historical and contemporary approaches to archaeological fieldwork, the “field” in field archaeology was established in opposition to “home” during the 19th century, the home being the academy, library or study of the archaeologist, while the “field” was where the data was collected. Lucas points to the fact that this separation of home and field has been long-lived in archaeology and is still the base of concepts as “post-excavation,” signifying analyses and report work after the excavation (Lucas, 2001a:12). This separation implies that data collection and excavation is physically separated from interpretation, which in turn has affected the social position of archaeological field workers (Berggren and Hodder, 2003). However, this separation between fieldwork and interpretation has been widely questioned during the last few decades (Hodder, 1997; Lucas, 2001a) and it is now more or less acknowledged that interpretation and subjective sampling informed by earlier knowledge take place during all phases of the archaeological process, from planning a project to archiving documentation and artifacts after an excavation. Moreover, the increasing use of digital methods and applications has brought a new perspective on what constitutes the field in archaeology, as a screen may well serve as a place of discovery where data is collected (Edgeworth, 2014). In addition, one may ask whether “field archaeology” is not the same as any kind of “archaeology,” as all archaeology is based on some sort of empirical foundation, a field, in a wide sense. However, in this entry I will focus on the specificities of field archaeology taking place in the field. The above account tells us that the seemingly straightforward issue of defining field archaeology can be complex and worth an in-depth discussion. Moreover, the definition of the concept of field archaeology can vary within the archaeological community. For some the field and fieldwork signifies solely the non-destructive, systematic search for unknown sites of ancient remains (e.g. Drewett, 2011:3; Encyclopædia Britannica – Archaeology-Fieldwork). This may entail for example field walking, searching for finds or visible structures, indicating ancient remains above or under the ground. The aim of this kind of survey is to discover and document new sites without excavating and removing them, for example to understand the use of a landscape during a certain period or to investigate the presence of archaeological sites in the area of a potential development. However, this definition of field archaeology is not very common. Most archaeologists use the concept of field archaeology meaning all work done in the field, out of the office, including both surveys and excavation. In the following the concept field archaeology is used in this more inclusive fashion. Furthermore, the field is where archaeological theory and method are combined and bridged in the practice taking place there. It changes and develops in tune with other changes. Archaeological fieldwork is thus affected by theoretical, material, methodological, economic and political changes in the archaeological field as well as in society as a whole.
Overview and Key Issues Short History of Fieldwork and Some Social Aspects The past has a role in the present, and people have handled this role in different ways during the course of history. Archaeological fieldwork is one of the most direct and physical ways to handle the past in the present. There are very early accounts of signs that humanity for a long time has been aware of and used the cultural remains of earlier peoples in an “archaeological” way, e.g. in the Middle East (Schnapp, 1996:13). Our Western history of archaeology may be traced back to both an elite pastime and a building and enhancing of national states during the last few centuries. The field and fieldwork did play a role in these endeavors, e.g. the surveying and documentation of monuments in the countryside of Sweden in the 1600s (Jensen, 2002). However, in the beginning of archaeology as an academic discipline in the 19th century, fieldwork was not greatly emphasized. Rather it was the collections of artifacts that were in focus and the typology of these artifacts were at the center of research. Even as more systematic fieldwork was beginning to take place, e.g. conducted by the British General Pitt Rivers, the focus was on the artifacts. This was a result of culture being regarded as a universal phenomenon during this time. As the main objective of fieldwork was to enhance and to answer questions about a collection, the same classification system could be used regardless of where the artifacts came from. Fieldwork became more important when culture started to be regarded as particularistic in the early 20th century, and various culture groups were identified with their own material cultures. As a result, the particularity of each site became relevant, and thus the fieldwork that took place there (Lucas, 2001a:4ff). Since then fieldwork has had an important role in shaping the disciplinary identity of archaeology (Moser, 2007).
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The view of the archaeologist in front of a machine excavator in a trench. Scania 2014. Photo: Åsa Berggren.
When discussing archaeological fieldwork of the late 19th and early 20th century, it should be noted that it bears little resemblance to what we today consider best practice in field archaeology. As a result of the focus on collections, and the colonial setting of many of the archaeological “campaigns,” many of the men – because it was always men – conducting excavations were not always present at the sites. The work was carried out by local workmen, all according to ways typical of that time. Fieldwork methods were developed accordingly. Pitt Rivers has been called the first “scientific archaeologist.” He used careful recording methods during large scale excavations but did not participate in the excavations himself. He supervised and checked on the excavators and had a superintendent on site to control the work when he was not there (Lucas, 2001a:22). Another Brit, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, working in India during the early 20th century developed a ‘box method’ with a grid of sections and baulks that provided control of layers and finds. The system, drawing on Wheeler’s military background, allowed the unskilled to be controlled by the skilled colonial master and can be regarded as a method to discipline the Indian workers as well as the archaeology (Chadha, 2002). There is an interesting social factor here that has been impacting archaeological fieldwork from the very beginning; the separation of the individuals that initiated the work and interpreted/categorized the artifacts and those engaged in the actual fieldwork. The division between what can be labeled intellectual work and manual fieldwork can thus be traced back to the 19th century. There are of course many factors impacting the organization of archaeological work and the development of archaeological field methods, but one of them is the social position of the fieldworkers (Berggren and Hodder, 2003). The often colonial context and the military background of some of the prominent figures involved in the development of early archaeological fieldwork were instrumental to the social organization of archaeological labor. Similarly, during the first half of the 20th century in both Europe and the United States, unskilled workmen commonly carried out the excavations, while the archaeologist documented and studied the material. This organization of work was also typical of the early so called salvage archaeology taking place both in Europe and in the United States during the depression and the war and post-war years during the 1930s–1950s, making use of labor-relief programs for the unemployed (Rahtz, 1974; Fagette, 1996). During this time fieldwork was called for only when ancient remains were discovered by chance during other jobs involving digging in the ground. More systematic execution of archaeological fieldwork was emerging as salvage archaeology no longer sufficed, as the post war building booms, especially in Europe, took place. This led to a process of professionalization of field archaeology and in many countries a legislation with a “polluter pays”-principle, i.e. the builder or developer pays for the archaeological investigation. For example, in Sweden the law was changed to include this principle in 1942 (Lag, 1942:350). A job market opened up as excavations became a part of land development and professional archaeologists could support themselves by excavating (Fig. 2). This process increased from the 1960s into the 1980s. The enormous expansion of field archaeology during this period was intimately tied to changes in legislation stating the necessity to excavate occurring remains before development. Through this expansive period of field archaeology, the social position of the field workers did not improve at the same rate. In fact, many of the workers on archaeological rescue excavations were not professional archaeologists. Many of them
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were amateurs, volunteers and unskilled local workers. The process of a fully professional job market for field archaeologists was slow and gradual (Rahtz, 1974). Interestingly, it is possible to trace the gradual professionalization and changes in the societal attitude toward this field of archaeology through the terminology used. Initially called salvage archaeology, it evokes the image of field workers salvaging damaged remains, a picture also suggested by the concept rescue archaeology. These terms are still in use today, but as the sector was professionalized, the terms contract archaeology and developer-funded archaeology have become more common, as well as commercial archaeology. These point to the business side of the organization of the sector rather than saying anything about the remains. In the US, the term Cultural Resource Management (CRM) is used, pointing to the broader sector in which this archaeology is active. Similarly, as the sector became professionalized, there was a need to separate the commercial archaeology from non-commercial archaeology, normally called research archaeology. The social position of the fieldworkers in archaeology is closely connected to the economic foundations of this job market. With increasing costs of contract archaeology in many countries, there was a movement toward privatization with lesser state control. This took place at different times, e.g. during the 1970s in the United States (Hester et al., 1997), in the 1980s in Great Britain (Hunter and Ralston, 1993) and during the 1990s in other part of Europe e.g. in Sweden where this process of privatization has been gradual and still only mimics a free market (Regeringen, proposition 1996/97:99). In this developing archaeological market, companies competed among various ways with price, where the lowest price won the job, leading to a sector with low wages and unsecure, short-term jobs, even for trained archaeologists. This situation still has repercussions on today’s job market. The separation between interpretation and archaeological fieldwork can be followed through the development of this job market. As rescue archaeology increased in volume around the 1950s–1970s, costs and post-excavation budgets were minimized in turn. Field archaeologists active in rescue archaeology were to be mainly engaged in the collection of data, with minimal analysis and publication and the full interpretation of the same data was to be carried out, if at all, by scholars at the universities, on other budgets (Berggren and Hodder, 2003). Interpretation was of course taking place during fieldwork, as it always has. The increasing number of fieldworkers gained experience and expertise, and their knowledge informed their work. However, this process of interpretation was seldom documented (Berggren, 2002). This situation has been acknowledged, and attempts have been made to rectify this imbalance. The theoretical acknowledgment that interpretation takes place from the very start of an archaeological process, from the very planning of where, what and how to excavate as prior knowledge informs and impacts decisions, has led to attempts to systematize and document this interpretative process, e.g. in what has been called a reflexive archaeology (Hodder, 1997, 2000). In some cases, this awareness has led to a shift of the systems, e.g. in Sweden where it was decided in a governmental proposition from 1994 that developer funded archaeology should be part of a research process (Regeringens proposition, 1993/94:177), i.e. it was acknowledged that interpretation and knowledge creation takes place in the field in contract archaeology. This is a way to enhance the position and power of the field worker in archaeology and acknowledge the intellectual part of field work. Yet, this concerns mainly national archaeological sectors in parts of the world, mainly in northern Europe and the US. In other parts of the world, e.g. in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, national archaeological sectors coexist with projects led and staffed by foreign researchers, often with local workers as unskilled help. Studies of recent such projects have shown the extent to which local workers on excavations possess expertise regarding both excavation methods and interpretation of features and finds. However, this knowledge is not acknowledged in the archaeological projects, and is even downplayed by the workers themselves in order to fit in to the hierarchies and what is expected of them (Mickel, 2021). Even projects explicitly attempting to bridge the gap
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Contract archaeology during the building boom in the 1970s, Malmö, Sweden. Kristineberg 1977. Photo: Malmö Museum.
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between the research group and the local community through an inclusive approach have been described as enclaves, with little day to day interaction with the surrounding community (Davidovic, 2010:160; Mickel, 2021). The inequalities can perhaps be regarded as a remnant or an echo of colonial times. This ties into the issue of how archaeology of the global North and the global South are valued. Studies of North and South American trained archaeologists, working on the same projects in South America show that the South American archaeologists’ training and fieldwork are not valued as highly as the North American archaeologists’ ones. For example, to North American archaeologists working in the Andes their own ways of doing archaeology have implicitly become the norm by which other archaeologies are valued, and thus thought to be incorrect if found to be different (Leighton, 2014). Field archaeology has thus in part been formed as a professional field by certain social factors such as colonial hierarchies and poor working conditions, resulting in an apparent disconnect between the physical fieldwork and the intellectual interpretation process. Another factor that has impacted this field, and especially how fieldwork is regarded, is gender. From the formation of archaeology as an academic field during the 19th century, archaeology was a male activity, in line with norms and power structures in society as a whole at that time. In a study of the history of Classical Archaeology in Sweden, i.e. archaeology by Swedish scholars studying the Mediterranean area, it is shown that female archaeologists were discriminated against in a fully male social arena. The women did contribute, also during fieldwork, but were left out of publications and access to academic positions. The self-representation among male 19th century archaeologists can be summarized as three stereotypes that were very closely tied to the view of successful leadership of fieldwork. They were the adventurer, the entrepreneur and the professional scholar, a self-imagery based on bourgeois masculinity and colonial practices, combined with capitalist and industrial values of the time (Berg, 2016, 2020). Fieldwork became imbued with these masculine ideals, and women were prevented from taking part. As fieldwork was a crucial step toward a career in archaeology at this time, women were also shut out of archaeology in general (Lucas, 2001a:7). Later on, many women became archaeologists and had access to the emerging archaeological job market during the post war era – mostly as the educational systems became more equal and university training in archaeology became open to all – but the macho ideals still prevailed and still do today. Lucas puts it: “the field remains heavily inscribed as a masculine space” (2001a:8). This has been shown by the works of e.g. Joan Gero, who has in her pioneering work shown that archaeological practices are gendered and that fieldwork is coded with masculine values (Gero, 1996). These values, connected to fieldwork, have in turn shaped the identity of archaeology as a discipline, and being successfully socialized into the discipline means to embrace those values (Moser, 2007). These values have made archaeology a less friendly space for women or anyone who does not fit into the mold, but also a place for those who want to take advantage of the resulting hierarches, even today. This became apparent during the 2017 #metoo movement, when women around the world testified to discrimination and sexual harassment in numerous professions, organized in appeals as hashtags. In Sweden the archaeology call was named #utgrävningpågår – #excavationinprogress and the testimonies, from both academic and contract archaeology, were numerous, illuminating the structural dimension of the problem. Directly relevant to field archaeology is the typical short-term contracts in developer funded archaeology, keeping women from reporting the harassment, in fear of not being hired the next season. The result was a sort of awakening in the sector, leading to many contract archaeology organizations in Sweden reviewing their policies against discrimination and harassment (Aldén Rudd, 2019). However, structural problems are not easily overcome by policies and documents, but by a true shift of norms that bring real change. Several organizations have tried to achieve this change through campaigns, e.g. the RESPECT campaign in Great Britain combining information and surveys regarding sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination in the archaeological workplace, where fieldwork is especially targeted (RESPECT British Archaeological Jobs & Resources). After this short review of how social factors historically and today, have shaped and are shaping archaeological fieldwork, it stands clear that fieldwork is entangled in societal structures way beyond archaeology (e.g. colonialism, misogyny etc.). These structures are somehow enhanced by the fact that fieldwork takes place “somewhere else,” somewhere where normal conditions do not seem to apply, and it is easy to “get away with” abnormal behavior. This is of course not acceptable, and work toward change is ongoing in many countries, e.g. Sweden (Berg and Bergerbrant, 2020). As can be seen in the historical overview above, theoretical trends concerning how knowledge has been regarded are also a factor that has impacted archaeological fieldwork. We have seen how the physical fieldwork was separated by the intellectual interpretation process, often carried out by different categories of people. This was possible because fieldwork was seen simply as the recovery of objects from the ground. The objects were there to be unearthed by anyone, as long as someone knowledgeable kept control. Underlying this view is the assumption that the recovered data led to objective knowledge. This knowledge was the base for culture historic interpretations. As archaeology later was influenced by processual thoughts, fieldwork was also impacted as sampling and field surveys were carried out to collect statistically representative data (Lucas, 2001a). However, as theoretical trends have brought a realization that archaeological excavation and fieldwork rather is an interpretative exercise, it has been pointed out that it is paradoxical that fieldwork in commercial archaeology does not seem to be much affected. Instead, field workers have become more or less voiceless and sometimes are seen as mere technicians. Interpretation and synthesizing are done away from the field, by someone else, and field workers are made invisible in this phase of the work (Lucas, 2001a:12f; Berggren and Hodder, 2003; Chadwick, 2003). However, some of the recent technical developments in digital methods, both regarding documentation and interpretation, may carry some of the solutions to these problematic issues (see more below). As awareness of the importance of social aspects impacting fieldwork, an ethnography of archaeological fieldwork has developed (Edgeworth, 2006). This field has been important in illuminating many aspects of archaeological knowledge production in the field. However, what does it mean that the bulk of archaeological ethnography has been carried out on research excavations, often doubling as student training excavations, and very little on commercial excavations? As an example, the book Ethnographies of archaeological practice (ed. Edgeworth, 2006) can be mentioned. A vast majority of the case studies published in this book are based
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on research or training excavations. Commercial excavations are only mentioned in a few cases. This is not problematic in itself; however, if the conclusions are presented as valid for the whole field, it may be misleading. The conditions vary and are not always comparable. In fact, teaching field archaeology requires certain conditions that are not easily combined with the aims of both contract and research projects, i.e. answering certain questions within a timeframe. Student training should have student learning as a main goal. However, student training can be successfully combined with commercial or research excavations, as long as the students are not treated as cheap labor and their involvement in the excavation is treated separately from the main goals of the project.
Methods of Fieldwork and the Archaeological Process After the historical overview above, it is now time to turn to the practicalities, the actual fieldwork. As field archaeology is defined as what archaeologists do in the field, accounts of what field archaeology entails often consist of descriptions and explanations of the various tasks performed in the field. Comprehensive works such as Geoff Carver’s chapter Archaeological Fieldwork (2010) and Peter Drewett’s book Field Archaeology – An Introduction (1999[2011]) are examples of meticulous accounts of all steps archaeological fieldwork may involve. Moreover, more recent works detail the use of digital documentation methods in the field, e.g. 3D GIS and how it becomes embedded in the constant decision and interpretation processes during fieldwork (Dell’Unto and Landeschi, 2022). Here only a short account is possible. Fieldwork is the common denominator of all archaeology, regardless of geographic area or time period, be it with commercial, research or training focus. Fieldwork is thus at the core of all archaeology, but archaeology is of course more than fieldwork. Typically, an archaeological project consists of four stages: planning, fieldwork, reporting/publishing and archiving. The stages and how they are carried out may vary depending on what is to be investigated, but also on national legislation and traditions. Moreover, there is also a significant difference between commercial archaeology and research projects, the latter often combined with student training. This means that the conditions for fieldwork differ, leading to quite different situations for the field archaeologists. The conditions in commercial archaeology are often subject to market principles, which has resulted in increasing time pressure and strict prioritization during fieldwork – the costliest part of a commercial project, as it typically involves the most man hours of the phases of a project. Contrary, in a research project, even though most often on a strict budget and time schedule, the time pressure is different and the pressure to prioritize what to excavate and what to leave unexcavated is often not even applicable. Moreover, during a training excavation for students, with an educational goal, time pressure to excavate a certain percentage of the area is or should not be appropriate. In this case, the progress of excavation should not be in focus but the learning progress of the students.
Surveying Areas of Interest Regardless of these differences, fieldwork often consists of and can be divided into several phases and tasks. A first phase of fieldwork can be to locate archaeologically interesting sites. The aim may be to create a comprehensive overview of a geographical area and the remains from different periods within this area, as a basis for research or future decision processes for development etc. This phase of fieldwork rarely starts in the field. Without a thorough review of what is already known of the area, a field survey will become more difficult and less productive. That is why it is important to review national and regional databases or registers of remains and finds, old maps and documents in archives, previous excavation reports, photographic images, e.g. aerial photography from past decades, and present documentation such as satellite images and LIDAR data (that show the topography of the ground in great detail) (Fig. 3). Through these images, patterns not easily visible on ground level can be illuminated, e.g. large-scale systems of banks or ditches or so-called crop marks, i.e. differences in vegetation caused by underground structures close to the surface. The collection of all this information can be done by the archaeologists themselves, but often specialists are engaged, e.g. cultural geographers to interpret old maps, an undertaking that often demands special training. All the information forms a base of knowledge that archaeologists bring with them to the field when a field survey is conducted, in addition to previous experience and knowledge of the particular landscape. The information is often gathered in a GIS (Geographical Information System) project to produce plans and maps that will be brought into the field. The survey can thus be focused on the more likely areas, where there are indications of remains or places where remains may be expected, based on knowledge of previous patterns of settlements, burial grounds etc. The survey often takes the form of field walking, which is exactly what it sounds like. The archaeologist walks over the area, taking a closer look where there are indications on the maps, to decide whether it could be of archaeological interest, and also checks all the places that would be suitable for settlements etc. The archaeologist looks for remains that are still visible above ground, e.g. stones that are partial remains of a prehistoric burial or an early historic building etc. The archaeologist also seeks indications of remains that are not visible above ground, but could be found under the topsoil, e.g. in an agricultural landscape. An indication of previous activity that can be found under the soil could be scatters of finds brought to the surface of the ground through cultivation, such as worked flint or sherds of pottery, burnt stones from fireplaces etc., representing various time periods and types of activity. That is why it is important to choose the right time of year to conduct the survey, for the ground to be accessible, without growing crops on fields. During field walking, it is also important to include the areas not indicated as likely for archaeological interest. This may seem counterproductive, as previous knowledge is a solid base to build a successful field survey on. However, we are not likely to find new patterns if we only look for the known ones. The aim of all archaeology is to push knowledge further and learn new things about our past. That is why, during a field walk, the archaeologist also covers the ground between the more likely places. Walking on parallel transects according to a grid in an area
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Example of LIDAR data as the background of an assessment area in Scania, Sweden. Illustration: Berggren (2021).
is one way of achieving this. However, this is suitable in a fully cultivated landscape, while in a woodland, walking will have to be adjusted to trees and bushes, as well as the topography. A survey may also include trial trenches, e.g. the topsoil may be removed by a machine excavator. Exposed features of archaeological interest are only documented as no excavation is conducted during this phase. A field survey normally results in a report with maps describing the observations and interpretations of the archaeologist. The sites noted as settlements, activity areas etc. get registered as such in the national register. Depending on whether the survey was done as part of a research project or part of a contract for development of the area, the report then functions as the basis for various further actions. Was it part of a research project, the information may be sufficient for a landscape analysis, or a site may be chosen for further investigation to reach a more detailed understanding of the former use of the area. Was it part of a commercial project leading to development of the area, the process of finding out more information of the potential archaeological sites will continue. A field survey is not supposed to be destructive and should not cause any damage to the remains. The finds noted on the ground surface are normally only documented but not collected, as they are part of an area that will be registered as an archaeological site and thus protected, and the same applies to features noted under topsoil. That is why, in cases of research projects, a permission to conduct a survey from authorities is not always necessary, however it is from landowners. In case of a contract archaeology project, the survey is commissioned by the authorities, as part of handling an application from a developer.
Assessing a Site To assess the archaeological status of the sites found during a survey often entails trial excavation. As this involves destruction of the remains, permission from authorities is necessary through a process that varies between different countries. In a typical contract archaeology process, the aim of an assessment is to verify the interpretations from the survey, and hopefully define and date the sites, to use as a basis for the next and final step, the final excavation. Depending on the kind of site, the assessment can be executed by different means. In an agricultural landscape, additional trial trenches by machine excavator may be needed to delimit the site (Fig. 4), as well as excavation of a few selected features, to reach an interpretation of function and date. On large, layered sites, e.g. urban sites or tell sites, the assessment may consist of trial soundings, e.g. half meter squares excavated through the layers to collect finds and get a view of the section through the layers. This is often done according to a sample strategy, e.g. by placing the squares
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Trial trench in the countryside outside Malmö, Sweden. 2013. Photo: Åsa Berggren.
according to a grid or evenly at a certain distance. However, an assessment does not necessarily need to consist of excavation. Nondestructive methods may also be used during this phase of the process. Examples are geophysical techniques that, just like the photographic imagery mentioned above, are remote sensing methods, and will not affect the remains. There are several methods available, suitable for different conditions and different kinds of remains, e.g. electrical resistivity surveying, thermal sensing, magnetometry, magnetic susceptibility surveying and ground-penetrating radar (Gater and Gaffney, 2003; McKinnon and Hayley, 2017). With these techniques variations underground are measured and can be plotted on plans to be interpreted, e.g. a pattern of material of higher resistivity than the surroundings may be interpreted as a buried base of a stone wall, and an area of high magnetism may be indicative of a removed fire place or hearth. GPR has become more widely used during the last decade or so. It functions as a sonar underground and can measure differences of material underground at different depths. This data can be plotted in a 3D GIS project which results in a three dimensional image of what can be found underground. Surveying with all these geophysical techniques requires an accessible and even area where the machines can be moved around, preferably according to a grid. These techniques are a great help when it is not possible to remove any soil during an assessment. However, they do not reveal all remains buried under ground, and sometimes patterns are caused by natural variations in the ground, which means that they are only a part of the toolbox and actual excavation will always be needed to confirm the interpretations based on geophysical surveys. The assessment phase will typically result in a report with the interpretations of the sites, which in contract archaeology will make up the basis for the further decisions of the authorities regarding the archaeological process and development of the area. When the assessment has resulted in a confirmation of the presence of remains protected by law, a full-scale excavation will most likely take place.
Excavating a Site In contract archaeology the area that was first surveyed is in the last phase narrowed down to places that have been confirmed as archaeological sites that are of relevance. These sites are thus chosen for excavation, while other remains are not selected. How do we know what to prioritize? How do we know what is relevant? How can we feel confident that something does or does not need to be investigated? Well, there is no certainty, as there is always an element of unpredictability in field archaeology. However, if the first steps of the investigation process, the survey and the assessment, are done with sufficient resources and care, it is possible to make sound and relevant decisions on what sites to investigate in the last stage. However, the prioritization does not stop at choosing which sites to excavate, further prioritization is necessary as the research design of the investigation is formulated. It is crucial in all field archaeology to have a solid plan of how to conduct the excavation, based on what we would like to know, i.e. carefully chosen research questions. A key issue is to ask questions that can be answered through excavation. If the questions can be answered with information that is already available, excavation is not necessary. The aim is new information and new knowledge. With the acknowledgment that archaeological fieldwork is an interpretative enterprise, it follows that the remains are not just unearthed and present themselves from the ground. Instead, the research questions based on prior knowledge and understanding of gaps that need to be filled, will guide the choice of excavation and documentation methods, analyses of soil and finds etc. In this
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process a prioritization of what to excavate carefully and what to perhaps just document in plan is made. Pressure to cut time and thus costs, in the field phase of contract archaeology has led to prioritizations to excavate as low as 30% of the uncovered features in open area excavations. This requires explicit aims and experience to know what features to excavate to get the most information to answer the questions. However, the unpredictability of archaeological fieldwork also requires the archaeologists to be flexible and open to new and not recognized phenomena. A certain amount of flexibility and openness should thus be built into the research plan, to have a possibility to push our knowledge further into directions not anticipated from the start of the project. The above account is concerned with a developer-led archaeology process. There are significant differences between this process and a research project, even though interpretation and research are unquestionable ingredients in contract archaeology, making the difference less distinct. However, one crucial difference is the conditions of the initiation of the projects. In research, the project may start with a research question or interest in a known site, and the research design is formulated accordingly, while the aim of a contract archaeology project is to investigate the potential archaeological remains in a designated area or place. This means that the objects and the research questions are not pre-formulated in the latter case, but the archaeologists create their research according to what is found during the early phases of the archaeological process. In some ways this approach may enhance the chances of finding unexpected and unrecognized remains and push the results in new directions, toward new knowledge, in case the authorities allow untrodden paths of research. To develop research questions and refine field methods and sampling, it is important to include various specialists early in the process, already while writing the research design, to include the latest types of analysis and questions. This could be a specialist on a certain type of find or a certain type of analysis. It is also crucial to integrate the specialists in fieldwork, to have their expert knowledge influence the work done in the field. Depending on the kind of remains and the research design, the excavation and documentation methods are chosen, as well as sampling and find collection strategies. A characteristic of field archaeology is the fact that there is only one attempt; however well documented the remains become, there is no longer a possibility to try again once they are excavated. This is regardless of the approach or attitude toward archaeological excavation and documentation. For a long time, archaeological excavation was regarded as destruction of the remains, but with a view on excavation (and archiving) as a materializing process, excavation and documentation can be regarded as displacement of the archaeological record rather than destruction (Lucas, 2001b). Nevertheless, materializing the excavated remains as part of the archaeological record can only be done once. This is still the case no matter how the remains are documented. Digital 3D documentation of the process of excavation has sometimes been understood as a possibility to put the remains back together and to excavate them again. However, the decisions made during excavation cannot be undone, even though, with the help of careful documentation, e.g. 3D models, it is possible to review the basis of these decisions and understand the prerequisites of the resulting interpretations – and even make reinterpretations. Documentation is crucial. If we do not document what we excavate, we are no more than grave robbers or saboteurs. The documentation and finds are what survive an excavation, to continue their lives in archives and collections, open to recontextualization and reinterpretation. There are several approaches to archaeological field documentation but the basic idea of creating a record of a layer or feature is to graphically document in plan, i.e. horizontally (Fig. 5) and in section, i.e. vertically. The record can depict a single layer or cut or be a multi-layer plan or section. Increasingly, 3D documentation is also used, multiplying the possible perspectives, from the earlier plan and section perspectives. The graphic documentation can be achieved by pen and paper on millimeter paper, by digital planning using measurements by total station or GPS fed into GIS programs, or by photography resulting in 2D photos or 3D models. These methods have different qualities and are suitable in different situations and for different remains (Morgan and Wright, 2018; Berggren and Gutehall, 2018). The graphic record is only a part of the documentation. It can be
Fig. 5
Documentation of postholes and pits with a GPS in Scania, Sweden. 2021. Photo: Åsa Berggren.
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combined with a stratigraphic record, or a diagram, in cases where the stratigraphy is complex, e.g. in urban excavations, with many layers and complex formation processes. This is of course documented in the section drawings, but an interpretation of the sequence of events can be documented in a matrix, e.g. a Harris matrix detailing this interpretation (Harris, 1989). Another part of the documentation is more descriptive, often involving a context sheet or feature sheet, which is filled in by the excavator, preferably while the excavation is ongoing. This information typically consists of a descriptive part with measurements, descriptions of soil and finds, and a more interpretative part, with the excavator’s ideas of the function of what has been excavated. The sheet can be a paper to fill in with pen in the trench, and the information to be transferred to a database at a later stage. Lately it has become more common to digitize this process and enter the information on a tablet computer. The data can be entered onto a digital context sheet and be transferred to the database at a later stage, or the data can be entered on the tablet computer directly into the database via a Wi-Fi connection, omitting one step of the process. The pros and cons of digital versus manual documentation methods and procedures have been discussed. It has been argued that digital methods are more efficient and more accurate than other methods (e.g. Roosevelt et al., 2015). The digital acquisition may be quicker, but a solely instrumental view of the archaeological field documentation process may disregard many factors impacting the results. In fact, the discussion concerning digital methods in archaeology has been criticized as technically focused and driven by technological development rather than archaeological needs and inquiries (Perry and Taylor, 2018). Furthermore, digital data is not objective as it is created in a social situation (Huvila and Huggett, 2018), which means they should be subject to critical engagement and reflexive approach like any other method used in field archaeology. This is crucial as digital methods do impact the interpretation process. Having access to scale-less 3D documentation as well as previous digital data in the field adds layers of information and impacts the way a field worker can engage with the remains but can also create a distance or a wedge between the archaeologist and the object under investigation, as the act of documentation is easily removed from the field (Taylor et al., 2018; Berggren and Gutehall, 2018). Moreover, as digital screens also act as points of archaeological discovery (Edgeworth, 2014), the concept of the archaeological field and where archaeological field work is performed may have to be expanded. However, the act of documentation is preferably fulfilled parallel with excavation. Both activities are processes, intertwined, impacting one another, changing direction, going back and forth, as the work of the archaeologist is progressing. This may be called a hermeneutic process, and include a reflexive process, as the archaeologist is using previous knowledge, adding to it, changing it, as the excavation process is ongoing. To emphasize that interpretation is part of the excavation, the term “interpretation at the trowels edge” has been used (Hodder, 1997). However, this should not be understood as if the interpretative process starts there. As can be understood from above, it starts already during the planning stage, when the site is chosen, when methods and strategies are decided etc. The excavation process consists of a combined intellectual and bodily process that involves interpretation and knowledge creation. The bodily process is of course the practical excavation, a manual task performed physically by the archaeologist, in touch with the material, working it with tools functioning as extensions of their bodies. Matt Edgeworth has described this process as a series of two-way transactions, that he calls “acts of discovery.” Emerging archaeological patterns are interpreted according to existing knowledge, at the same time as the material evidence is reshaping that knowledge. This means that the bodily experience of excavation involves both physical and cognitive skills (Edgeworth, 2006). The actual excavation is executed with various methods and tools according to the character of the remains in question. In open area excavations, normally in cultivated landscapes, the top soil is removed with a machine excavator, revealing features that have previously been dug into the ground, e.g. pits, wells, postholes, now filled with soil that differs from the ground surrounding them. These features are normally not stratigraphically connected, but are excavated separately. The excavation normally starts with the archaeologist “cleaning” a surface, which means scraping the area to remove loose and dry soil, to get an idea of shifts in the color and character of the soil. This is how a feature (e.g. a pit, a posthole, a well, a burial or a hearth) is defined. The tools used to excavate the features vary according to the remains and the aim of the excavation. A machine excavator may be used to excavate deep pits; however, shovels and trowels are more commonly used. Thin layers and delicate finds such as skeletons may demand smaller tools. Often features are half-sectioned, i.e. half the filling is excavated, leaving a section through it, for a view of the feature and the filling in profile (Fig. 6). As the filling may be layered, the layers can be excavated separately, to differentiate finds and samples. Thick layers, with no obvious stratigraphy may be divided into smaller, arbitrary spits, e.g. 10 cm thick, to still achieve a separation between different parts of the sequence of deposits in the layer. Layers like this may be found in open area excavations, e.g. in deep features, such as wells, or large activity areas resulting in so called cultural layers. In urban areas the stratigraphy is often complex, with many layers on top of each other, some disturbed by later activity, e.g. digging pits, later covered again, and so on. As mentioned above, to document this kind of remain, a matrix of symbols may be used, documenting a logic sequence of events. Similarly, to excavate such a sequence, it is important to excavate layer by layer, from the younger/upper to the older/lower part of the sequence. This is called a “single context” excavation method. Using this method, the entire layer, or context, is excavated. Contrary, excavating by sectioning features, only half is excavated. However, if the feature is considered interesting enough, the second half may be excavated after the section is documented. Finds are collected from the various layers, used for dating the sequence and understanding the function of the feature. Samples of the soil are taken, to be analyzed for the same reasons. In most projects there is a find strategy and an analyses strategy to follow, set up to use the information gained to answer the research questions. This may entail treating various finds and samples during excavation according to certain guidelines, in order to avoid contamination that will affect the results. Preferably, finds are cleaned and registered in a database already during fieldwork, however, time pressure may make this difficult. Soil samples are treated according to which analysis is planned. Flotation to separate charred material, such as seeds and grains, can also be done during
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Fig. 6 Excavation with a trowel, which is one of the most common tools used by field archaeologists. A stone packing is half sectioned, Scania 2017. Photo: Sydsvensk Arkeologi.
field work, in order to get them analyzed and dated by radiocarbon analysis as soon as possible. To start these procedures during fieldwork is valuable for the interpretation process. The sooner the results can feed back into the ongoing excavation, the more influence the results can have on decisions on how to proceed with the investigation. To have an overview of the latest excavation results is crucial. This brings the relevance of the organization of an excavation to the front. Who has the overview of the excavation? Who makes the decisions? The historical social conditions of fieldwork have been mentioned above. The conditions have changed, but the prevalent structures remain. In contract archaeology many fieldworkers are employed on short-term contracts, e.g. for a season or a project. They conduct the excavation and much of the documentation, interpreting the remains, with their experience, skill and expertise. However, the last word belongs to supervisors, excavation leaders, project managers, who are in control of the socalled post-excavation phase, when “final” interpretations are made and reports are written. The fieldworkers are seldom a part of this process. They are the providers of information and data, to the next level in the hierarchy in the project, be it in contract archaeology or a research project. That being said, this is mainly relevant in large projects with a lot of staff, including seasonal staff. Smaller projects can be staffed with a small group of permanently employed archaeologists, involved in all phases. However, the problem identified earlier with the voiceless fieldworkers still remains.
Summary and Future Directions Future Directions, Challenges and Emerging Trends Archaeology faces many changes and challenges ahead. Some are specific to contract archaeology; some are common to all kinds of archaeology. Here we will look closer at three trends that possibly point to some future developments in archaeology. They are: increasing demands on societal relevance and inclusive practices, increasing and accelerating technical and digital development and lastly, increasing adaption to market principles. These demands also impact how archaeology is implemented in the field. The demands on archaeology to be relevant in society are not new. Since the professionalization of archaeology, archaeological projects have been expected to disseminate the results in the greater society. However, during the last few decades the demands on especially contract archaeology to be more inclusive have increased, influenced by what is called community archaeology and with it a critical approach to how archaeology interacts with society. This movement has also led to the formulation of a set of principles that can be used for guidance to be inclusive in the digitization of the heritage sector, using the FAIR principles, Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability (e.g. Hermon and Niccolucci, 2021), slowly getting accepted and implemented, also in field archaeology. Contract archaeology is paid for by developers, private and public, and research projects are often funded by research councils and other public and private funding bodies, and all require that the archaeology they fund should be relevant. Relevant according to current research trends, but also according to current demands in society. These demands are in part theoretical, in part economical and political. As an example, the Swedish situation can be mentioned. In the regulations of the Swedish National Heritage Board it is stated that contract archaeology “should create knowledge relevant to the authorities, the research community and the general public” (Kulturrådets författningssamling, 2017, my translation). However, what is considered relevant is not outlined, but left to the archaeology sector to define. In practice, it is defined by contract archaeologists writing tenders in combination with the officials working at local County Administrative Boards deciding who wins the bids. Furthermore, influenced by the public
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archaeology movement, the Swedish government and authorities have stated that contract archaeology dissemination should “emphasize people’s participation in an inclusive society and be designed to be accessible and possible to interpret regardless of background and other prerequisites” (standard wording, tender specification of requirements, County Administrative Board, my translation). Increased participation is thought to increase influence on how cultural heritage is regarded, which in turn will increase democracy. Likewise, a participation of various interest groups may illuminate previous one-sidedness in the interpretation of the cultural heritage, and in the end lead to a more just and fair view of the past. How this should be achieved, is left to the practitioners to interpret and define. The public programs designed to meet these requirements of relevance and inclusion also have an effect on fieldwork and how it is carried out. Research questions may be directed toward issues of climate change and societal sustainability, as a way to make archaeological results part of current discussions in society. In the field, this has had a rather limited impact so far. It influences what is being investigated as well as sampling procedures, with the aim to acquire as much environmental data as possible. To achieve this, samples may have to be taken outside of the area of investigation, which will require permissions from authorities/landowners. Yet, so far the demands on archaeology to present solutions for a troubled planet have not led to political manipulation of how archaeology is conducted in the field. There is no doubt much to learn from the past and what archaeology can bring to the debate is the long-term perspective often missing from the discussion. However, the hope that our societies will learn from the past through archaeology how to deal with climate change and cultural challenges sometimes seems overestimated. Greater impact on fieldwork so far is caused by the demands for inclusion. So far, these have often been understood as demands for a broadening of the groups that take part in public programs such as tours of excavations for various reasons. Outreach can be targeted to groups that are not normally reached by archaeological public programs such as newly arrived refugees (Berggren, 2018) and groups to which excavations are not normally made accessible such as people with disabilities (Engström, 2021). Community archaeology is gaining ground and is increasingly, but slowly, being seen as part of general archaeology, not just as a fringe phenomenon. Local communities and other interest groups are increasingly getting involved in local archaeology. However, here is a potential line of conflict, where the archaeologist’s expert role may collide with the agendas of other groups. Even fear of imbalance between these interests may cause alarm, as seen in the “cultural heritage debate” in Sweden regarding the influence of interest groups and minority groups on the heritage sector (museums and archaeology). By the critics the sector was portrayed as dominated by norm criticism and identity politics leading to an inaccurate and politicized view of the past (Handelsmann-Nilesen, 2018), while advocates instead emphasize democratic values. To be inclusive is thus an act of balance, not only between being an expert in the field and being open to other perspectives, but also keeping the balance between various political demands in an increasingly polarized political climate. During fieldwork, this means also balancing the task of excavation and the task of dissemination. As more focus is directed toward the public, especially in large projects, one person or a group can be appointed to manage the public programs, not to take time from the excavation of the field archaeologists. Such programs often include popular visits to the excavation, sometimes drawing big crowds. During the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2022), when the public was not allowed to come to the excavations due to restrictions, the possibility to manage the public programs on a digital basis online was developed and elaborated. These digital possibilities will probably continue to be used, at least as partly digital public programs, even after the restrictions are lifted as it is a convenient way to reach groups that cannot come to the excavation in person. Another trend, that started decades ago, is the increasing digitization of archaeological documentation, analysis and archiving. This has been called the “digital turn” in archaeology and its impact and implications have been much debated, as seen above. In fieldwork its greatest impact has been the transformation of documentation, while the actual digging has not changed much as a result of digital methods, even though the agency of digital (and non-digital) tools has been discussed (e.g. Huggett, 2021). The changes due to digitization of archaeological documentation have been profound and the acceleration of changes will probably continue into the future. As mentioned above, this quick development has been criticized as driven by technological progress, and not by archaeological needs and requirements. There is a risk the technical methods of documentation will control and form the record, instead of archaeological issues and questions. As the technical development seems to escalate, it is crucial that we as archaeologists ask what we want from this development. Documentation in the field has been digitized step by step and the trend is pointing toward a “born digital” record, meaning all steps of the documentation are digital. The various formats of data are handled in the field and used in different digital applications. However, the long-term implications of this fragmentation into various formats demand regional/national solutions for archiving that are not always in place, and are a cause for national engagement (e.g. Löwenborg et al., 2021). The assumption that digital data are objective is refuted by most as it is acknowledged that digital data are not neutral. In fact, this assumption is believed to lead to less critical engagement with the material. However, there are other issues that can lead to less critical engagement. As mentioned above, one effect of digital field documentation is said to be effectiveness. But, as some stages of documentation are omitted, others are added. For example, as field data are fed into GIS-projects and databases directly, the automatic control function of converting data from paper to digital data while they are being entered has disappeared, and the control stage has to be added. So the question is how much time really is saved by digital methods. Also, as increased efficacy is expected, less time for fieldwork may be planned, which will place more time pressure on fieldworkers to achieve an acceptable level of archaeological results. This pressure is not expected to decrease. This may have a negative impact on how fieldwork is executed and also on the process of interpretation. To address this, calls for workflows which allow a more reflexive interpretation process, or a ‘slow archaeology,’ have been heard (e.g. Caraher, 2016; Perry and Taylor, 2018:15). However, for economic and other reasons,
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opportunities for “slow” reflection and thought processes will not be realized without being systematized and carefully planned and integrated into existing workflows. Similarly, the quick development of scientific analyses will most probably continue, bringing new sampling techniques and the possibility of focus on new materials that have so far not been seen as important. This underlines the importance of integrating specialists even further in the process of formulating research designs as well as implementing them during fieldwork and analysis. The increased adaption to a commercialized market is a trend that concerns the development of contract archaeology. In various paces in different countries, the commercial archaeology sector has become increasingly like any consultant business, competing for jobs, executing project after project, with little chance of synthesizing knowledge. Job market conditions have improved with increasing professionalization and increased compliance to legislation regarding the working environment, especially during fieldwork. There is also a growing awareness concerning issues of harassment and bullying at the workplace. However, many of the improvements apply to archaeologists with permanent positions, while many field archaeologists are still on short-term contracts and with little chance of getting a permanent position.
Conclusions Field archaeology is everything archaeologists do outside of their office. Since the early days of archaeology fieldwork, there has been a separation between intellectual interpretation and excavation as the manual work was done by unskilled workers without archaeological training. This separation has been persistent throughout the development of the archaeological field and its professionalization, caused both by traditions and theoretical trends regarding the role of excavation in archaeological knowledge production. Several factors have influenced this development, such as global inequalities, gender inequalities and cost cutting in an increasing adaption to market principles. The conditions of fieldwork differ depending on whether the archaeological excavation is conducted as a research, training or commercial project. However, the general archaeological fieldwork typically consists of three phases involving: survey, assessment, excavation. There are several methods used for excavation and documentation. During a survey, the aim is to locate archaeological remains, which is done without destruction of the remains. However, an assessment may entail trial excavation, to determine the age and characteristics as well as geographical limits of an archaeological site. A full-scale excavation often means the removal of the remains, and what is left will be the finds and documentation. It is important to choose excavation and documentation methods according to what kind of remains are investigated and what questions are outlined in the research design. This is also relevant for the choice of finds and sampling strategy, which make it crucial to involve various specialists early in the process, preferably already when writing the research design. Moreover, it can be fruitful to evaluate the documentation as the excavation is ongoing, as the results could influence how it progresses. A certain amount of flexibility is thus needed in the research design. Archaeological fieldwork faces several challenges and possibilities in the near future, e.g. increasing demands on societal relevance and inclusive practices, increasing and accelerating technical and digital development and increasing adaption to market principles. Standing in a field with a machine excavator roaring in front of you, while you are trying to decide whether the colorations in the ground are indeed archaeological remains or not, there may be little time or opportunity to dwell on the future development of various strands of archaeology. However, considering the challenges and possibilities ahead, it may be worth getting the different archaeologies together by bridging the gap between professional and research communities, to face the future as a more united sector. Even though several conditions separate the different archaeologies, there are more that unite us. There is plenty of common ground for future discussions and endeavors, as the one thing that unites us is that fact that we all perform fieldwork.
See Also: Airborne and Space-Borne Prospection; Geophysical Prospection; History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Mortuary Excavation and Recording Approaches; Stratigraphic Diagrams; Survey.
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Chadha, Ashish, 2002. Visions of discipline: Sir Mortimer Wheeler and the archaeological method in India (1944–1948). J. Soc. Archaeol. 2, 378–401. Chadwick, Adrian, 2003. Post-processualism, professionalisation and archaeological methodologies. Towards reflective and radical practice. Archaeol. Dialogues 10, 97–117. Davidovic, Antonia, 2010. Practices of Archaeological Knowledge Production at Çatalhöyük. Çatalhöyük 2010 Archive report. Çatalhöyük Research Project, p. 159. Dell’Unto, Nicolo, Landeschi, Giacomo, 2022. Archaeological 3D GIS. Routledge, London. Drewett, Peter, 2011. Field Archaeology: An Introduction, second ed. Routledge, London. Edgeworth, Matt, 2006. Multiple origins, development and potential of ethnographies of archaeology. In: Edgeworth, Matt (Ed.), Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice. Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations. Alta Mira Press, Oxford, pp. 1–19. Edgeworth, Matt, 2014. From spade-work to screen-work: new forms of archaeological discovery in digital space. In: Carusi, Annamaria, Hoel, Aud Sissel, Webmoor, Timothy, Woolgar, Steve (Eds.), Visualization in the Age of Computerization. Routledge, New York, pp. 40–58. Engström, Elin (Ed.), 2021. FuTArks verktygslåda för en tillgängligare uppdragsarkeologi. Stiftelsen Kulturmiljövård, Västerås. Fagette, Paul, 1996. Digging for Dollars: American Archaeology and the New Deal. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Gater, John, Gaffney, Chris, 2003. Revealing the Buried Past: Geophysics for Archaeologists. Tempus Publishing, North Pomfret. Gero, Joan, 1996. Archaeological practice and gendered encounters with field data. In: Wright, Rita (Ed.), Gender and Archaeology. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp. 251–280. Handelsmann-Nilesen, Mika, 2018. Museerna i skottgluggen. En undersökning av kulturarvsdebatten i dagspress 2016–2017. The Unstraight Museum, Stockholm. Harris, Edward, 1989. 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Destruction and the Rhetoric of excavation. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 34, 35–46. McKinnon, Duncan, Hayley, Bryan (Eds.), 2017. Archaeological Remote Sensing in North America; Innovative Techniques for Anthropological Applications. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Mickel, Allison, 2021. Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor. University press of Colorado, Louisville. Morgan, Colleen, Wright, Holly, 2018. Pencils and pixels: drawing and digital Media in archaeological field recording. J. Field Archaeol. 43, 136–151. Moser, Stephanie, 2007. On disciplinary culture: archaeology as fieldwork and its gendered associations. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 14, 235–263. Perry, Sara, Taylor, James S., 2018. Theorising the digital: a call to action for the archaeological community. In: Matsumoto, Mieko, Uleberg, Espen (Eds.), Oceans of Data: Proceedings of the 44th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 11–22. Rahtz, Philip, 1974. Rescue digging: past and present. In: Rahtz, Philip (Ed.), Rescue Archaeology. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, pp. 53–72. Roosevelt, Chris H., Cobb, Peter, Moss, Emanuel, Olson, Brandon R., Ünlüsoy, Sinan, 2015. Excavation is destruction digitization: Advances in archaeological practice. J. Field Archaeol. 40, 325–346. Rudd, Petra Aldén, 2019. #utgrävningpågår. Curr. Swed. Archaeol. 26, 267–268. Schnapp, Alain, 1996. The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology. British Museum Press, London. Taylor, James, Issavi, Justine, Berggren, Åsa, Lukas, Dominik, Mazzucato, Camilla, Tung, Burcu, Dell’Unto, Nicolo, 2018. ‘The Rise of the Machine’: the impact of digital tablet recording in the field at Çatalhöyük. Internet Archaeology 47.
Relevant Websites Encyclopædia Britannica – Word: Archaeology-Fieldwork, https://www.britannica.com/science/archaeology/Fieldwork accessed 28 May, 2022. Lag (1942:350) om fornminnen (Law concerning ancient remains) https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/lag-1942350omfornminnen_sfs-1942-350 Regeringens proposition 1993/94:177 Utbildning och forskning, kvalitet och konkurrenskraft (Education and Reserach, Quality and Competitiveness). https://data.riksdagen.se/fil/ 955B5E39-F3DF-4CEC-8C2E-F7C1C3E13D7A Regeringen, proposition 1996/97:99 Uppdragsarkeologi mm. (Developer funded archaeology etc.) https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/proposition/ uppdragsarkeologi_GK0399/html RESPECT British Archaeological Jobs & Resources http://www.bajrfed.co.uk/bajrpress/respect-campaign/.
Forensic Archaeology Ambika Flavel, Margaret Cox, and Daniel Franklin, Center for Forensic Anthropology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview: Traditional vs. Forensic vs. Humanitarian Archaeology Traditional Archaeology Forensic Archaeology Humanitarian Archaeology Primary Distinctions Between Traditional, Humanitarian, and Forensic Archaeology Key Issues Education and Training Forensic Archaeology: Theory and Method Forensic Search Techniques Evidence Recovery Interpretation of Site Formation Processes Forensic Archaeology: Applications Domestic, National and International Policing Mass Fatalities Non-judicial Forensic Archaeology Case Study: Srebrenica Genocide Summary and Future Directions References
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Key Points
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Forensic archaeology is the application of traditional field-based archaeological practices in a legal context The applications of forensic archaeology are many and varied, and include domestic, national and international policing, mass fatalities and non-judicial (e.g., repatriation) matters The primary goal of forensic archaeology is the reconstruction and interpretation of events that occurred at a crime scene at the time of deposition The forensic archaeologist provides specific expertise in forensic search techniques, evidence recovery and the interpretation of site formation processes Practitioners trained in traditional methods should not perform forensic casework without specialized training and adherence to professional codes of conduct
Abstract Forensic archaeology is defined as the application of traditional archaeological theory and method to legal investigations. Specialists in this discipline assist in locating, documenting, and recovering human remains and/or material evidence; this is required in the context of single or mass death scenarios, whether natural, accidental, or deliberate. Standard scientific approaches within the framework of crime scene protocols and rules facilitate the archaeological recovery of forensic evidence that can be used to reconstruct criminal activity, thus also requiring expert testimony in court. The objective here is to consider the current state of forensic archaeology as a distinct discipline, including a critical evaluation of professional practice.
Introduction The foundations of the discipline of Forensic Archaeology were laid in 1943 when anatomists and pathologists exhumed bodies for the International Katyn Commission. Excavation of buried human remains was performed by archaeologists for many years and it made sense, therefore, for this expertise to be applied in criminal investigations when buried, or partially buried, remains were encountered. However, early human rights investigations employed pathologists to exhume bodies, which introduced the risk of
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incomplete recovery and loss of contextual information and understanding. The application of archaeological methods and approaches to the search for, and investigation of, sites that are of potential relevance to law enforcement agencies began in the United States in the 1980s under the auspices of forensic anthropology (Blau and Ubelaker, 2016). Reflecting the archaeological and crime scene context, archaeological (scientific approaches to search, excavation and recovery) and anthropological (excavation and analysis of human remains) methods were applied to what were very often surface or shallow buried deposits, usually seeking to find clandestine burials or evidence of body disposals. A significant shift of momentum and emphasis occurred in the late 1980s to early 90s when practitioners in the United Kingdom started to use archaeological methods to assist law enforcement agencies with forensic investigations. Archaeological contexts were by comparison often deep and complex. This shift largely coincided with the establishment of the main foundations of forensic archaeological theory and practice in the United States, pertinent to which was the publication of the first two practical manuals on the subject by Morse et al. (1983) and Skinner and Lazenby (1983) (see also Cabo and Dirkmaat (2015) for a detailed synthesis of the history of Forensic Archaeology in the United States). This shift led more widely to a separation of archaeological and anthropological specializations and applications, and facilitated a much-needed maturation in the development and application of appropriate archaeological techniques to the location, recording and excavation of deep and complex burials specific to a crime scene context. In the United States and countries such as Australia, disposing of victims’ bodies often takes advantage of vast open and rarely visited spaces and wildernesses, populated by scavengers and carrion feeders. For example, of 137 unsolved homicides in Australia (up to November 2019), the victim’s body is still missing in 21 of those cases (McKinley and Ferguson, 2021). In contrast, the United Kingdom and many European countries are, to a far greater extent, heavily urbanized and the disposal of bodies often requires burial and concealment in areas frequently visited by people, and in some cases, within buildings and gardens. Recognizing the need for an appropriate educational provision in the application of archaeology and anthropology to crime scene investigations, the first Master of Science program in forensic archaeology was developed and delivered in the United Kingdom in 1996. The development of that program defined the breadth and nature of the subject as it seemed to be at that time. Such content has over the years adapted to reflect the further maturation of the discipline within a world of rapidly developing scientific techniques, many of which have relevance to crime scene investigation and resolution, as well as a broader contextual range of applications specifically considering humanitarian contexts. Herein we discuss aspects of traditional archaeology compared to its humanitarian and forensic counterparts, and thereafter the core educational and training requirements relative to their application in a forensic investigation. The various approaches available to the archaeologist, including basic theory, method and application are considered and illustrated using a practical case study. Included throughout is some critical evaluation of professional practice and consideration of the future development of the discipline. The primary focus of the entry, however, is to provide exposure to the applications, and professional practice, of forensic archaeology in the modern context.
Overview: Traditional vs. Forensic vs. Humanitarian Archaeology As with most forensic sciences, forensic archaeology traces its origins, and indeed shares many methodological approaches, with a “parent discipline”, which in this instance is traditional field-based archaeology. This is not dissimilar to the relationship between forensic and physical anthropology. Accordingly, the professional practice of forensic archaeology follows much of the same methodological foundations as its parent discipline, albeit with some specific distinctions relative to its application in matters of judicial and humanitarian relevance. To that end, it is not appropriate to assume that a traditional archaeologist can simply perform casework in the capacity of their forensic and humanitarian counterparts without appropriate training, expertise and competency. It is also important to note the mental health impact of dealing with circumstances of death, with those people who are not adequately prepared, or bereft of access to appropriate support networks, being traumatized by their experiences; see also Franklin (2019). Appropriate training, expertise and competency are thus central tenets guiding the ethical professional practice of any forensic science, mandated to minimize potentially compromising a forensic investigation and rendering any associated evidence(s) inadmissible. The following considers the primary distinctions between traditional, forensic, and humanitarian archaeology, thereafter, continuing to a specific focus on the latter relative to education and training, theory and method, and applications.
Traditional Archaeology Traditional archaeology is defined as the study of the past through the systematic recovery and scientific analysis of material culture and associated environmental evidence. It is thus both a field and scientific discipline dedicated to understanding events that transpired in the past, similar to many of the forensic sciences (archaeology included) that involve investigations of criminal activities, although with a considerably shorter temporal purview. Further, traditional archaeology also provides an insight into past environments, both anthropogenic and naturally occurring. Each geographical region has its own area of focus, but in the Australian context, the three major sub-fields of archaeology are indigenous, historical and maritime, each of which invokes common, and sub-field specific, skills. In the UK, archaeological practice can be described in terms of field-based, scientific and/or environmental. These can be further divided into period- or context-based applications, such as terrestrial, wetland or maritime. Typical applications of traditional archaeology are many and varied, but primarily include identifying, investigating and recording archaeological sites, and cultural heritage management, both of which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Such
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work may be performed as an independent consultant, as part of educational or research institutes, government agencies (e.g., museums, heritage organizations), land councils, or commercial conglomerates. The expertise of the archaeologist is grounded in fundamental skills in project management, searching for and identifying sites, surveying, excavation, laboratory analysis, documentation, photography, geographic information systems (GIS), technical writing, and liaising with stakeholders (among others).
Forensic Archaeology Forensic archaeology is by definition the application of traditional archaeological theory and method to matters of legal relevance, thus embodying the relationship between archaeology and criminal investigation. The primary goal is the reconstruction and interpretation of events that occurred at a crime scene at the time of deposition, including documenting post-depositional modifications. Thus, the forensic archaeologist draws on traditional theory and method to achieve the latter, but this must be supplemented by appropriate training in crime scene and legal protocols relevant to the specific jurisdiction in which they are working. In essence, the forensic requirements and constraints define the framework within which the traditional methods are applied. This framework includes an understanding of chain of custody, crime scene management, and police procedures and structures, working with other forensic and policing personnel, expert evidence, and court testimony. The latter clearly highlights why training in traditional archaeology does not automatically qualify or prepare you to work as a forensic archaeologist.
Humanitarian Archaeology The space between traditional and forensic archaeology is a continuum of the degree of application of forensic and crime scene protocols (and standard operating procedures). What can be termed humanitarian archaeology (which includes unrecovered war casualties) sits between the two, sometimes closer to one than the other depending on its aims and objectives. While forensic archaeology was at first mainly applied to investigations by domestic law-enforcement agencies, such applications quickly proved themselves to be invaluable to other types of organizations, particularly those concerned with the implementation and enforcement of international humanitarian and criminal law (e.g., the United Nations (UN) investigating atrocity crimes at the Balkans in the 1990s). While the essence of forensic archaeology might be the location and excavation of human remains for judicial authorities, its application also serves the needs of humanitarian and other non-judicial organizations seeking to locate human remains whose whereabouts were either deliberately concealed or simply lost in time. Very often, the need for strictly applied crime scene protocols to what are in essence archaeological landscape surveys and excavations necessitates a conflation of archaeological with crime scene principles and methods. This pluralism is designed to ensure optimum recovery of all evidence whether human remains, artifacts or eco-facts in a manner that ensures continuity and chain of custody, and mitigates evidence contamination. The increasing use of DNA to establish the identity of individuals, whether victims or those dying in warfare (the fallen) or in natural disasters, has increased the imperative for these controls in both legal, humanitarian and historical contexts.
Primary Distinctions Between Traditional, Humanitarian, and Forensic Archaeology There is clear and obvious overlap in the practice of traditional and forensic archaeology that directly relates to the former being the “parent” discipline of the latter. Some of the requirements of forensic work (e.g., search, recovery and analysis) of human burials are not dissimilar between the two disciplines, especially in a bioarchaeological context. Connor and Scott clearly defined that relationship in their 2001 publication, stating “The archaeological concepts of sites and artifacts have analogs in the forensic world. The site is the crime scene; the artifacts are the evidence. In both worlds, the determination of site, or crime scene, boundaries depend on the spatial distribution of the remaining artifacts or evidence” (Scott and Connor, 2001 p. 4). Some 20þ years on that concept is still relevant today. As such, it is important to highlight the primary distinctions between the skills, knowledge, and application of forensic archaeology in the modern context relative to its traditional counterpart. This is especially important in serving to caution practitioners trained in traditional methods against performing forensic casework without due consideration of the specialized training and professional code of conduct that supports such endeavors. The professional practice of forensic archaeology represents the interface between the aims and requirements of archaeology and criminal investigation. Accordingly, this requires an understanding of, and training in, the legal importance of proper collection and documentation techniques of forensic evidence in the relevant jurisdiction; essentially an understanding of working directly with law enforcement and other investigative authorities. Such work has specific procedural requirements for accessing crime scenes, contamination management, evidence handling, and confidentiality. For example, the chain of custody is one, if not the, most critical element of evidence documentation, as it defines contextual security. It involves the sequential documentation (e.g., written and photographic) that links any evidence recovered to the scene from which it originates, and the subsequent movement of that evidence (e.g., for scientific testing). This is intended to provide some degree of assurance of evidence integrity such that it is representative of what it was when first collected. Allied to this are protocols designed to the prevention of contamination of evidence (of all types) by the archaeologist and cross-contamination between recovered evidences. Appropriate documentation is inherently intertwined with the possibility that the work and any associated reporting performed by the forensic archaeologist may become subject to judicial scrutiny and require clarification in associated proceedings. The skills required to prepare a court report and serve as an expert witness are not a routine part of training in traditional archaeology, but rather more commonly associated with
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education in the forensic sciences and in university programs specifically teaching forensic archaeology (or anthropology). This, however, does not preclude the fact that there will be instances where matters of relevance to the traditional archaeologist are challenged in the legal system (e.g., cultural heritage), albeit they will be comparatively less frequent. The request for archaeological assistance in a forensic context will more often than not involve human remains and thus the practitioner must have pertinent skills relative to medico-legal death investigation. This necessitates training in human anatomy to facilitate recognition, and the appropriate handling and management of osseous and dental remains recovered at a scene. There are also frequently instances, however, where soft tissues (including connective and keratinous tissues) are still present; these require appropriate and often distinct operational management, especially relevant to health and safety (e.g., biohazards). Recognition of taphonomic alteration of human remains is important (e.g., cremated material) as is identifying fetal, infant and juvenile material and remains that are of non-human, or even non-osseous, origin (Dupras et al., 2012). It is important to note, however, that the forensic anthropologist attending the scene should assume responsibility for confirming the latter. All these competencies are encompassed in professional codes of conduct and standard operating procedures specific to working with human remains. Another readily apparent difference between traditional and forensic archaeology is that the former is largely research based and question driven, serving to decipher broad patterns of past human behavior (Scott and Connor, 2001). In contrast, forensic evidence serves to facilitate the reconstruction of specific event(s) relative to judicial enquiry. The focus of a forensic investigation is thus narrower and will frequently involve questions relating to identity the cause or manner of death; such factors are rarely relevant in an archaeological context (Cox and Hunter, 2005). It would also be more common than not for the traditional archaeologist to have more time available to plan their research and associated field work; there may, however, be exceptions when a site of significant cultural or heritage significance is under imminent and unexpected threat. In the context of criminal activity where a clandestine grave comes to the attention of investigators, there are almost always considerable time constraints affecting the documentation and recovery of associated evidence; the crime scene may be at risk of contamination and any delays in processing evidence can compromise subsequent avenues of forensic investigation. Routine criminal forensic work thus inherently requires greater flexibility in approach and methods with little forward planning time. The primary distinction between the fields of traditional and forensic archaeology is the involvement of a higher judicial system in the latter; a forensic archaeologist is collecting or assessing evidence for a criminal investigation, whereas humanitarian or traditional archaeologists may find themselves collecting information for civil disputes (such as land ownership), repatriation, truth and reconciliation endeavors, or the recovery of hitherto unrecovered war casualties. In the majority of cases not only is a forensic excavation focused on a recent event (usually within a decade or two), it is often a single event in time. This contrasts vastly with traditional archaeology, whereby stratigraphically complex and unrelated events over time are uncovered, particularly in European contexts, the exception being singular events such as shipwrecks or excavation of catastrophe sites such as volcanic eruptions, mudslides, and plagues. Each judicial authority will have its own organizational structure with a clearly defined chain of command and responsibilities, and it is imperative that the forensic archaeologist is cognizant of this and the ramifications of such on their work. It is essential that their place within this hierarchy and process is understood from the outset and adhered to throughout. As a member of a multidiscipline team, each expert will have clearly defined roles and responsibilities that must be accommodated and respected. If in doubt, the most appropriate practice is to ask a superior; the ramifications of failing to correctly follow protocol can be catastrophic on an investigation and any such transgressions risk bringing the discipline and its practitioners into disrepute. The key distinctions between the application of traditional, humanitarian and forensic archaeology are summarized in Table 1; the core competencies of a forensic archaeologist that are distinct to the traditional archaeologist are outlined in Table 2.
Key Issues Education and Training As the discipline has matured over the last 25 years and its use in law enforcement has proliferated, so has the need to ensure standards, proficiency and recognized qualifications and affiliations. Broader regulatory frameworks, protocols and standard operating procedures are now commonplace, and the discipline is well established within formal higher education, as attested by structured career paths and accreditation procedures that reflect professional practice and legal imperatives. The latter has, however, not always been the case. As the subject progressed from its infancy into its juvenile phase in the late 1990s, rapid growth and development was necessitated by involvement in such important events as the investigation of the Balkans’ conflict by the UN. At that stage, however, the lack of standards and protocols evident in the early investigations in the Balkans drove an imperative for their development (Cox et al., 2008). It is encouraging to note that in recent years, as expertise and capacity are developing around the world, efforts have been made to form closer links between practitioners in different geographical areas; for example, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the United Kingdom and Europe (MacKinnon and Harrison, 2016).
Forensic Archaeology: Theory and Method Broadly speaking, forensic archaeology is a discipline that has evolved to cater for the requirements of the various medicolegal systems around the world as well as over-riding international authorities (e.g., the UN and ICC). Within these frameworks practitioners endeavor to apply relevant advancements in technology to maximize recovery and documentation of information. Not all
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Key distinctions between traditional, humanitarian and forensic archaeology. Traditional archaeology
Humanitarian and forensic archaeology
Physical remains
Artifacts: interpretation has little legal consequence
Human remains Jurisdiction Temporal period
Ancestors Local, national, international government agencies Prehistoric through modern
Sub-fields
Indigenous, pre-historical, historical, maritime, terrestrial wetland, environmental Extensive research is usually undertaken before excavation
Evidence: interpretation has legal consequence therefore bound by admissibility parameters Can be living relatives Medicolegal system, national or international court system Usually, a recent event but unrecovered war casualties may be older Criminal, homicide, genocide, unrecovered war casualties, mass disaster victim recovery Forensic: Limited case information is provided to the practitioner Humanitarian: More information can be made available As for traditional but including such issues as unexploded ordnance, booby trapping of sites, chemical and biological hazards, post-traumatic stress Skeletonized or fleshed. Can include burnt bodies, cremations, desiccated remains Forensic: Cause and manner of death and crime scene investigation Humanitarian: Location, recovery, identification and repatriation/truth and reconciliation. Appropriate funerary rites including reburial Genocide, (mass) murder, crimes against humanity, murder, manslaughter, unrecovered war casualties, mass fatality victims
Background information Health & safety Preservation Purpose/mandate
Scenarios
Essential and broad brush; focus is usually on mechanical issues and those associated with digging at depth and the management of spoil Skeletonized, mummified desiccated, cremated, saponified tissues Research or rescue
Attrition sites, multi-period/phased, natural disasters; epidemics; accidents; warfare, execution
Table 2
Core skills and knowledge associated with the forensic application of archaeological theory and method in a criminal context. Core competency
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
Competency as a field archaeologist. Current registration/accreditation as a forensic practitioner and/or membership of a professional society Broad understanding of policing structures and legal framework (e.g., scene organization, chain of custody and evidence handling, court systems) Flexibility in approach and methods relative to rapid and varied deployment with little preparatory time *Ground search (e.g., environmental indicators, transects, geophysical) and surveying/mapping (e.g., compass, theodolite, total station, GIS) methods *Excavation techniques, including screening, recognition, recording, collection, and transportation of skeletal remains Awareness of sensitivities associated with working with human remains *Basic recognition of human and non-human skeletal anatomy *Collection and preservation of associated forensic evidence (e.g., DNA, botanical, entomological) *Site formation analysis and recording (e.g., digital photography, laser scanning) Legal report writing and presentation of expert evidence in a court of law
Note: *Denotes competency associated with bioarchaeological applications of traditional archaeological theory and method.
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jurisdictions have the resources to utilize these technologies and instead fall back on tried and tested equipment to apply the appropriate methodologies to an investigation. These methodologies fundamentally target search and recovery of evidence in such a way as to be able to reconstruct past events for the court in a manner defined by rules of admissibility and that can be comprehended by a judge (and jury). In this section, aspects of forensic search techniques, evidence recovery, and interpretation of site formation processes are considered.
Forensic Search Techniques With the exception of accidental findings, locating clandestine burials (whether of a human body or other physical evidence) is not a simple matter and can be most successful when accompanied by witness testimony. As with traditional archaeology, desk-based searches using remote sensing help narrow the area of interest and reduce the amount of ground search time required. Satellite and aerial imagery has successfully located a number of clandestine burials, such as mass graves in Bosnia (Froehlich and Taiatu, 2020), Poland, and France (Ossowski et al., 2018). In addition, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to search large and/or inhospitable areas is becoming more viable (Murray et al., 2018). Surface evidence and disturbance are important indicators of the location of subsurface evidence. Topographical searches targeting changes in vegetation are highly variable and dependent on the time since burial, seasonal change, and the specific local flora. Systematic fingertip searches for items of clothing (i.e., shoes), munitions (i.e., shell cases), or human bone can all be indicative of nearby graves and can narrow the focus of the search to a specific area of interest (AOI). Non-invasive geophysical surveys of the AOI can either eliminate areas unsuitable for burial (i.e., shallow bedrock) or further delineate the search parameters (Ruffell and McKinley, 2005; Blau et al., 2018). However, in the traditional archaeological context these searches are often looking for substantial extant structures or foundations rather than intangibles, such as ground disturbances or evidence of burning that can quickly become obliterated in many environments (Berezowski et al., 2021). Finally, confirmation is achieved though test excavation and location of buried evidence (Ruffell, 2005).
Evidence Recovery Material evidence collected for courts and tribunals are bound by rules of admissibility, which differ according to jurisdiction. The forensic archaeologist must therefore be cognizant of these rules and adapt evidence recovery methodologies to suit. As an example, the rules of evidence for United Nations Tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) are relatively general, simply stating that “No evidence shall be admissible if obtained by methods which cast substantial doubt on its reliability or if its admission is antithetical to, and would seriously damage, the integrity of the proceedings.” [Rule 95] (United Nations, 2015). When there is a potential for multiple jurisdictions to become involved, or when those rules are unclear or have not been clearly outlined, the higher standards should always be adopted. This higher benchmark is largely considered to follow the Daubert Standard established in 1993 by the United States Supreme Court. These rules require a judge to evaluate not only the expert, but also the validity of the methodology employed (Bartelink et al., 2016). It is therefore imperative in forensic archaeology to record the contextual information of the human remains (or otherwise) recovered from a grave and maintain a watertight chain of custody; the very methodology of the excavation can become subject to critical review. Evidence recovery must therefore be a transparent process backed by logical and justifiable decisions based on tried and tested peer-reviewed methods, appropriate for the specific set of conditions encountered. What defines evidence will differ according to each case, but it may primarily comprise a body or parts thereof, clothing, and personal effects worn by the deceased. Evidence may also include objects relating to the identity of the decedent (such as identification documents), their manner of death (including munitions, weapons, ligatures and blindfolds) and manner of burial or concealment (such as tool marks and ecofacts); see Schmitt (2002). Expert evidence is tendered to the court in the form of a written report comprising the methods employed in locating and recovering the evidence, the broader context in which the evidence was recovered (the site), a description of the feature from which the evidence was recovered (i.e., the grave) including size, and mechanism of its construction (hand or machine dug). Accurate documentation of the process, the evidence prior to collection, and after processing, facilitates ensuring that the expert report is accepted. Photographs, video recordings and 3D reconstructions assist the expert to present the information included in the report, in a manner that can be assimilated by the court, without having to oversimplify the evidence and/or patronize the jurists. With these parameters in mind, the actual recovery of evidence should be both professional and respectful. It is important to maintain the integrity of the evidence, that is, avoid damaging or altering the nature of the evidence. This may require intervention, such as consolidation of fragile elements, or refrigeration of materials (i.e., soft tissues or photographs) prone to decay once removed from a stable buried environment. Prior to any removal, it is imperative that the evidence be documented both visually and geographically, allowing its original condition to be observed and its position relative to the crime scene to be recreated threedimensionally.
Interpretation of Site Formation Processes The forensic archaeologist is often required to search for and recover buried human remains, however decedents are not always buried, and even if they are, the burial environment is not always static. Where the body was found and how it (or other evidence) came to be there can be straightforward, or the result of a highly complex series of events requiring interpretation (see schematic shown in Fig. 1). The simplest method of disposal and deposition is leaving a body where it fell; this will result in the body being found at a surface site (subject to the impacts of weathering and scavenging). When a person is killed within a pre-dug hole, the
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Execution event
Body moved? Yes
No
Body stored? Yes
Body buried? No
Temporary site
Yes
No
Execution grave
Surface site
Primary grave Grave robbed? Yes
Looted 1° grave
Fig. 1
No
Intact 1° grave
Secondary grave
Site formation process variations result in different grave types.
deposition is known as a grave execution site. Bodies that are transported from the place of execution to a grave are said to be buried in a primary grave; temporary deposition sites can be formed when bodies are placed somewhere between the execution site and the permanent place of burial (such as the primary grave). A secondary grave is created when bodies are moved from a primary gravesite and redeposited in a second grave, the former becoming a looted (or robbed) grave (Jessee and Skinner, 2005; Cox et al., 2008). Three dimensional representations of the crime scene (whether surface or subterranean) can assist in site interpretation and dissemination of information. The location of munitions, artifacts, ecofacts, and the spatial distribution of human remains (or disarticulated body parts) is also integral for the interpretation of site formation processes.
Forensic Archaeology: Applications There is a relatively broad spectrum of casework applications in which the specific skill set of a forensic archaeologist could be deployed. The main areas of engagement include police cases, mass fatalities and the investigation of violations of human rights (genocide, crimes against humanity and mass murder). The latter applications are considered in further detail below, but it is important to acknowledge that there are many other potential legal applications that are beyond the scope of the present entry to review, including but not limited to: undertaking controlled exhumations in a known cemetery (e.g., for DNA sampling); locating missing graves in a known cemetery; cultural heritage (e.g., disturbance/destruction of archaeological sites); illegal trading of archaeological artifacts cf. (Groen et al., 2015).
Domestic, National and International Policing Employing forensic archaeologists has been seen as having great potential in domestic casework (Blau, 2004; Ashby, 2013; Alfsdotter, 2021), but they are only routinely employed in the United Kingdom (Davenport and Harrison, 2011) and Switzerland (Indra and Lösch, 2021). In other jurisdictions the line between forensic archaeology and anthropology is more blurred (cf., Pilloud et al., 2022). The American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFSdwww.aafs.org) considers archaeology part of their Anthropology Section, although no standards relevant to exhumation or excavation currently exist (Groen et al., 2015). Latin American jurisdictions, such as Argentina (Crossland, 2009), Guatemala (Barker et al., 2016), and Chile (Garrido-Varas and Intriago-Leiva, 2012) have forensic teams that perform exhumations under a national framework of truth and reconciliation for past violations of human rights. Specialists in archaeology and anthropology are employed to collect and analyze skeletal
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remains respectively, although many have skills in both areas. In these contexts, humanitarian investigations primarily aim to identify “the missing” through judicial proceedings often initiated by family members. In cases of human rights violations of one sovereignty against another, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established to hold those responsible accountable for their actions. To date 30 cases have come before the ICC and 17 investigations are ongoing in Europe, Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and Asia. Jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression is provided to the ICC under the Rome Statute (effective 2002), to which 123 countries are States Parties. Prior to this, two ad hoc tribunals (ICTY/ICTR) were established to investigate acts of genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, respectively. Working within the auspice of these tribunals allowed forensic archaeology to achieve significant recognition. Exhumation reports detailing the location and recovery of mass graves (see below) were submitted to the Hague as expert evidence.
Mass Fatalities It has been noted in the literature that the application of forensic archaeological expertise in mass fatality incidents is the “least uniform and least practiced”, a likely consequence of overwhelming pressures, which in some cases results in the fast and undocumented mass burial of the dead. The latter would expectedly be more prevalent in underdeveloped jurisdictions lacking appropriate infrastructure to facilitate appropriate forensic management, and thus generally having to rely on international assistance (e.g., Southeast Asian tsunami). Many of those limitations have seen increased pressure on appropriate mass fatality management and planning, which should include archaeological assistance where appropriate (see Blau, 2005). A poignant example of the potential contributions of a forensic archaeologist in a disaster or crime scene context involving mass fatalities was the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York on September 11, 2001. The immediate forensic response did not involve the deployment of archaeological expertise, and initial site processing resulted in substantial commingling of human and non-human remains (Gould, 2002; Mundorff, 2008; Warnasch, 2016). In 2006, unexpected discoveries of WTC debris and human remains led to a large-scale investigation of the site for any undiscovered victims. Led by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), systematic assessment and archaeological excavations over a 7-year period ultimately resulted in the recovery of 21,905 remains and the identification of 1647 of the 2753 victims (Adams et al., 2022). That work demonstrated the critical skills offered by a forensic archaeologist, which in the context of the WTC recovery, includes systematic scene processing involving the recognition, documentation and recovery of fragmented human remains, contributing to the increased likelihood of achieving the positive identification of decedents.
Non-judicial Forensic Archaeology While forensic archaeology is primarily perceived to be the application of archaeological methods and principles within crime scene frameworks and imperatives, running in parallel to this is another version and application of forensic archaeology. Humanitarian recovery of the dead and the recovery of war dead are examples, and in such cases, the overarching procedures and methods are usually archaeological, with crime scene controls and protocols influencing and shaping such approaches. These are essential where one of the aims of such initiatives is the identification of the dead to the name by which they were known during life (usually but not always their genetic identity). Specifically, those crime scene aspects in play are those that ensure the following: a lack of contamination of evidence; continuity of evidence; and chain of custody. The specific aims and objectives of a project will determine the overall approach required, which will be a balance of the application of archaeological principles and practice within the constraints and requirements essential to ensure those three crime scene elements. Whether forensic archaeology is undertaken for domestic police forces, international legal organizations such as the UN via International Criminal Tribunals, humanitarian (e.g., International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), The Hague) or other organizations (e.g., Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), UK; Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), Oahu and Nebraska) its specific characteristics are a fusion of archaeological and crime scene principles and procedures, weighted in accordance with the overall context, and aims and objectives, of the initiators. Excavation of buried human remains has been performed by archaeologists for many years and it made sense, therefore, for this expertise to be applied in criminal investigations when buried, or partially buried remains are encountered. However, as mentioned above, early human rights investigations employed pathologists to exhume bodies, which might have resulted in less than optimal recovery of all body parts and the loss of potentially important contextual information. The practice and practitioners of forensic archaeology are often employed in the recovery and repatriation of human remains in a variety of contexts, including civil disputes, war, natural disasters, and accidental mass fatalities. While in many instances the application of forensic archaeology can be to recover uncomplicated cases of single burials, it can be applied to much larger initiatives, including assisting the investigations of international criminal tribunals. These more than most demonstrate how the most complex of cases can be better understood by the application of forensic archaeology to their investigation; this is highlighted by the case study that follows below.
Case Study: Srebrenica Genocide The former Yugoslavia was a federal republic from 1945–1992 comprising six republics (Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia) organized by the Communist Party after World War II. The ethnic composition of the Federation included Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Croats (Catholics), Bosnians (Muslims) and ethnic Albanians (Muslims). Tensions between the ethnic and religious groups culminated in the early 1990s following the death of Tito (Josip Broz) whose
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regime largely suppressed such unrest. Although Bosnia and Herzegovina gained independence in 1992, Bosnian Serbs voted to stay with Serbia, resulting in the formation of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska. The armed conflict between the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska is known as the Bosnian war (1992–1995). In an attempt to minimize civilian casualties, the United Nations declared Sarajevo and Srebrenica as safe areas and deployed a protective force to deliver humanitarian aid. The War continued to escalate in intensity and on July 6th, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces attacked Srebrenica. Some 20,000 women, children, and elderly fled to the Dutch base of Potocari 7 km to the north. On July 11th General Ratko Mladic claimed Srebrenica for the Bosnian Serbs, non-Serb civilians were rounded up and the women and children were separated from the men who were taken to nearby sites where they were subsequently executed. The remaining Muslim refugees headed for the city of Tuzla, a journey of nearly 100 km known as the “Death March.” Of the 15,000 unarmed men who began the journey as few as 3500 men made it to Tuzla. The United Nations established a court (1993–2017) to address the atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia. More than 160 people were charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The first indictments were issued for Radovan Karadzic (president of Republika Srpska), Ratko Mladic (leader of the Army of Republika Srpska), and Radislav Krstic (Commander of the Drina Corps) for crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of war. Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia (1989–1997), was also indicted by the tribunal for crimes committed in the Autonomous Province of Kosovo (1999), Croatia (2001) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (2001). In 1996 the Office of the Prosecutor initiated the exhumation of suspected mass grave sites within Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mandate was to collect physical evidence from the graves, determine the time of death, and identify victims where possible. Many graves were located through aerial photography, and areas of significant disturbance occurring in mid-July 1995 were flagged as possible mass graves. One such area was a site in Glogova, a village in the Municipality of Bratunac, which in 1992 had been subjected to ethnic cleansing. In the area south of the Bratunac to Kravica road, among a group of abandoned houses separated by a track, was a group of mass graves (see Fig. 2). The area to the south of the track was designated Glogova 1 (GL01) and five large purpose-dug graves were identified. Due to meticulous excavation methodologies, three separate events were recognized as having occurred, initially bodies were brought from a site of execution and buried in Graves H and F within Area A, and Grave K in Area B. Photographs, taken on July 17th, 1995, showed an extensive area of disturbed soil that was not present on a photograph dated July 5th, 1995 (see Fig. 3). At some time between July 17th and 27th, a second group of bodies were brought to the site and buried in Graves E and L in Area A. The final episode of disturbance occurred between July 27th and October 30th, 1995, not long before Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were indicted by the ICTY. During this final event, bodies were removed from Glogova 1 and reburied in secondary graves at Zeleni Jadar (JZ06), approximately 20 km south of Srebrenica. Pollen evidence initially linked the primary to secondary graves. The primary graves in Area B were untouched by any site disturbance, while those in Area A were either marginally disturbed (Grave H) or had been substantially “robbed” (Grave F) to hide evidence of the executions. The wheel ruts that formed between graves H and F during the grave robbing event contained body parts that fell into the depressions during the haphazard operation. All the primary graves were dug by an excavating machine with a three-toothed bucket. The one exception was Grave H that was excavated by a front loader. The tool marks of the mechanical digger were often clearly visible in the clay at the bottom and sides of the graves. The robbing event utilized both a three- and a four-toothed bucket.
Fig. 2
Site plan of the mass graves at Glogova 1 showing distribution of bodies exhumed for the ICTY in 2000. Courtesy of Wright (2001).
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Fig. 3 Aerial photographs used to locate the primary graves at Glogova: July 5th, 1995 before any disturbance, July 17th, 1995 first instance of ground disturbance, July 27th, 1995 second instance of ground disturbance, October 30, 1995 third instance of ground disturbance. ICTY Court Records IT-98–33.
A total of 191 bodies and 288 body parts were exhumed from Glogova 1. The pathology report concluded that individuals were male and aged between 12 and 75 years. The majority were between 30 and 55 years old, but 11 individuals were under the age of 17; in two of those pre-pubescent cases, skeletal sex could not be ascertained. The secondary site of Zeleni Jadar (JZ06) contained an additional 101 bodies and 355 body parts. At this site all individuals for which sex could be ascertained were identified as male; the ages ranged between 8 and 69 years. Most of the individuals in the GL01 graves presented evidence of perimortem injury, predominantly bullet and blast trauma. On average there were 2.4 bullet injuries per individual; 48% affecting the trunk and 18% the head. In almost 40% of the cases, bullet injuries were to the back of the body, but generally in a random pattern. Blast injury was present in 37% of bodies and clothing showed evidence of burning. No cause of death could be ascertained in 16 cases although many presented with blunt force trauma and shrapnel injuries. Witnesses to the executions at the Kravica Warehouse described VRS soldiers cramming the building with detainees and then firing through the windows with various automatic weapons, and throwing in hand grenades, on the afternoon of July 13th, 1995. The detainees were alleged to have been men attempting to reach Tuzla to escape VRS held-territory, part of the “Death March” column. According to witness accounts, a large excavating machine was used to collect the bodies and place them in trucks that drove away. The machine was also used to widen the warehouse door to facilitate the collection of bodies, and in doing so, demolished part of the structure. The warehouse subsequently underwent forensic investigation: “Numerous suspected impact areas were noted along the exposed sections of the wall; next to and contiguous with these impact areas were suspected blood spatter and tissue deposits” (US NCIS, 1998 p. 4). Investigators identified human DNA from hair and tissue samples and TNT from the explosive residue. All graves at Glogova 1 (except Grave L) contained evidence that could be linked to the execution site; this included painted concrete, the frame from the demolished building entrance, and fragments of blue tiles from the internal wall of the Kravica warehouse. The secondary graves at Zeleni Jadar also contained fragments of concrete and plaster originating from within the warehouse.
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The Kravica warehouse was therefore identified as the execution site for the individuals interred at Glogova and Zeleni Jadar. ICTY investigators collated information from witnesses, exhumations, crime scene analysis, and numerous other sources to support the case for the prosecution. In all, the ICTY convicted 16 people for atrocities relating to the attack on Srebrenica in July 1995. Radislav Krstic, Radovan Karadzic, and Ratko Mladic were found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war. The International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) is an intergovernmental organization established in 1996 and tasked with all aspects of missing persons, including exhumation and identification, with a primarily humanitarian focus. The ICMP work has had a positive influence on rule of law, perpetrator accountability, and strengthening of the rights of the Missing. The organization was founded to account for the ca. 40,000 people unaccounted for after the conflict in the Former Yugoslavia. Since then, its mandate expanded to include accounting for the missing due to the 2004 Tsunami in Asia, 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States, and conflicts in Iraq, Chile, Colombia, and Libya. The ICMP has exhumed thousands of graves, including one at Zaleni Jadar (ZJ02) in 2007, which was only partially excavated by ICTY in 1998. A total of five bodies and 43 body parts were removed from that grave; the exhumation team reported that although the site was a secondary mass grave, they believe that it may have been once again robbed with the bodies being deposited in an unidentified tertiary grave. Although the excavations were not commissioned by the ICTY, the ICMP report was used as evidence in its trial against Zdravko Tolimir, who was indicted in 2005, and convicted in 2012 of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war. In this case study evidence collected by the forensic archaeology team was used by ICTY investigators to build a case against individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of war. Physical evidence was used to link the execution site to primary and secondary grave sites, link primary and secondary graves to each other, interpret the burial and robbing events, identify the machinery used to perform the tasks, and corroborate witness testimonies. Even when sites were not directly commissioned by the ICTY, physical evidence collected by the ICMP could be, and was, used in a court of law. The same ICMP teams who exhume graves from internal conflicts help exhume people missing in mass disasters, the skill set being compatible.
Summary and Future Directions It is clear in the modern context that forensic archaeology is a broad but recognizable specialty stemming from its traditional parent discipline. While sharing some commonality in the fundamental methods that underpin their respective applications, deployment in a forensic context introduces a complex array of procedural and methodological requirements not normally encountered in the traditional milieu. As part of a broader team of policing agencies and scientists working within the context of medico-legal death investigations, the forensic archaeologist can contribute in practically every aspect of the case, from reconciling witness statements, scene location and identification, and processing. As discussed here, and reinforced with practical examples, the benefits of incorporating the skill set of the forensic archaeologist are many and varied, but primarily relate to achieving greater accuracy in evidence collection when processing scenes involving single and/or multiple fatalities. The flow-on benefits carry significant societal benefit, notwithstanding contributing evidence facilitating the identification of victims, which is a basic human right afforded to a decedent under international humanitarian law, and which provides some degree of closure to surviving family and friends. Since the dawn of the new millennium, the maturation and evolution of forensic archaeology has continued apace, as has the geographical range to which such approaches are applied and from where practitioners hail. The days of teams of largely white westerners parachuting into post-conflict zones or areas inflicted by natural or human-made disasters, often in the developing world, are thankfully declining and initiatives designed to build capacity in areas previously devoid of such have proliferated (e.g., for Iraq in 2005–2006,1 and beyond). Such initiatives that empower post-conflict regions are to be encouraged and facilitated when possible. Shifts of emphasis in the west include the move toward forensic archaeology being considered by some as part of a broader forensic ecological and generally multidisciplinary approach to crime scenes (MacKinnon and Harrison, 2016). Whether one accepts that conflation of expertise or not, what must be considered is, that in most cases, it is the responsibility of the archaeologist to secure the samples required by many of the ecologists and other experts, whether palynologists, entomologists, anthropologists, pathologists, or others.
See Also: Cemeteries and Necropoleis; Human Remains: Challenges and Future Directions; Mortuary Excavation and Recording Approaches.
References Adams, Bradley, Warnke-Sommer, Julia, Odien, Jennifer, Soler, Angela, 2022. Victim identification and body completeness based on last known location at the World Trade Center. Forensic Sci. Int. 340, 1–8. 1 The Inforce Foundation delivered two programs of training for Iraq (funded by the UK Foreign Office) to ensure that they had the capacity to locate, excavate and analyze mass graves under crime scene controls. The second program trained 12 of those to become trainers, thus helping to establish self-determination of investigations going forward.
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Alfsdotter, Clara, 2021. Forensic archaeology and forensic anthropology within Swedish law enforcement: current state and suggestions for future developments. Forensic Sci. Int.: Reports 3 (4), 1–15. Ashby, Edward, 2013. Forensic archaeology in New Zealand: review and future directions. Aust. J. Forensic Sci. 45 (1), 25–35. Barker, Caroline, Flavel, Ambika, Rivera Fernández, Claudia, 2016. Forensic investigations in Guatemala: the continuing search for truth, justice, and the missing two decades after the peace Accords. In: Blau, Soren, Ubelaker, Douglas H. (Eds.), Handbook of Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology, second ed. Routledge, New York, pp. 545–562. Bartelink, Eric J., Milligan, Colleen F., Sturdy Colls, Caroline, 2016. The role of forensic archaeology in missing persons investigations. In: Morewitz, Stephen J., Colls, Caroline Sturdy (Eds.), Handbook of Missing Persons. Springer, Cham, pp. 271–294. Berezowski, Victoria, Mallett, Xanthé, Ellis, Justin, Moffat, Ian, 2021. Using ground penetrating radar and resistivity methods to locate unmarked graves: a review. Rem. Sens. 13(15), 2880. Blau, Soren, 2004. Forensic archaeology in Australia: current situations, future possibilities. Aust. Archaeol. 58 (1), 11–14. Blau, Soren, 2005. One chance only: advocating the use of archaeology in search, location and recovery at disaster scenes. Aust. J. Emerg. Manag. 20 (1), 19–24. Blau, Soren, Sterenberg, John, Weeden, Patrick, Urzedo, Fernando, Wright, Richard, Watson, Chris, 2018. Exploring non-invasive approaches to assist in the detection of clandestine human burials: developing a way forward. Forensic Sci. Res. 3 (4), 304–326. Blau, Soren, Ubelaker, Douglas H., 2016. Forensic anthropology and archaeology: moving forward. In: Blau, Soren, Ubelaker, Douglas H. (Eds.), Handbook of Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology, second ed. Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 1–9. Cabo, Luis L., Dirkmaat, Dennis C., 2015. Forensic archaeology in the United States. In: Groen, W.J. Mike, Márquez-Grant, Nicholas, Janaway, Robert C. (Eds.), Forensic Archaeology: A Global Perspective. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, pp. 255–270. Cox, Margaret, Flavel, Ambika, Hanson, Ian, Laver, Joanna, Wessling, Roland, 2008. Scientific Investigation of Mass Graves: Towards Protocols and Standard Operating Procedures. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cox, Margaret, Hunter, John, 2005. Forensic Archaeology: Advances in Theory and Practice. Routledge. Crossland, Zoë, 2009. Buried lives. Archaeol. Dialogues 7 (2), 146–159. Davenport, Anna, Harrison, Karl, 2011. Swinging the blue lamp: the forensic archaeology of contemporary child and animal burial in the UK. Mortality 16 (2), 176–190. Dupras, Tosha L., Schultz, John J., Wheeler, Sandra M., Williams, Lana J., 2012. Introduction to forensic archaeology. In: Dupras, Tosha L., Schultz, John J., Wheeler, Sandra M., Williams, Lana J. (Eds.), Forensic Recovery of Human Remains: Archaeological Approaches, second ed. CRC Press, Boca Raton, pp. 1–19. Franklin, Daniel, 2019. Mental resilience in dealing with traumatic events. Aust. J. Forensic Sci. 51 (4), 369–370. Froehlich, Annette, Taiatu, Claudiu Mihai, 2020. Space in Support of Human Rights. Cham, Springer International Publishing. Garrido-Varas, Claudia, Intriago-Leiva, Marisol, 2012. Managing commingled remains from mass graves: considerations, implications and recommendations from a human rights case in Chile. Forensic Sci. Int. 219 (1–3), e19–e24. Gould, Richard A., 2002. WTC archaeology: what we saw, what we learned, and what we did about it. SAA Archaeol. Rec. 2 (5), 11–17. Groen, W. J. Mike, Marquez-Grant, Nicholas, Janaway, Robert C., 2015. Forensic Archaeology: A Global Perspective. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester. Indra, Lara, Lösch, Sandra, 2021. Forensic anthropology casework from Switzerland (Bern): taphonomic implications for the future. Forensic Sci. Int.: Reports 4, 100222. Jessee, Erin, Skinner, Mark, 2005. A typology of mass grave and mass grave-related sites. Forensic Sci. Int. 152 (1), 55–59. MacKinnon, Gaille, Harrison, Karl, 2016. Forensic anthropology and archaeology in the United Kingdom: are we nearly there yet? In: Blau, Soren, Ubelaker, Douglas H. (Eds.), Handbook of Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology, second ed. Taylor & Francis Group, London, pp. 13–26. McKinley, Amber, Ferguson, Claire, 2021. The role of detection avoidance behaviour in solving Australian homicides. Salus J. 9 (2), 57–66. Morse, Dan, Duncan, Jack, Stoutamire, James, 1983. Handbook of Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology. Rose Printing Company, Tallahassee. Mundorff, Amy Z., 2008. Anthropologist-directed triage: three distinct mass fatality events involving fragmentation of human remains. In: Adams, Bradley J., Byrd, John E. (Eds.), Recovery, Analysis, and Identification of Commingled Human Remains. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ, pp. 123–144. Murray, Bryce, Anderson, Derek T., Wescott, Daniel J., Moorhead, Robert, Anderson, Melissa F., 2018. Survey and insights into unmanned aerial-vehicle-based detection and documentation of clandestine graves and human remains. Hum. Biol. 90 (1), 45–61. Ossowski, Andrzej, Bykowska-Witowska, Milena, Brzezinski, Piotr, 2018. Application of analysis of aerial photographs in search of burial sites of victims of war and totalitarian crimes. Issues Forensic Sci. 299 (1), 77–90. Pilloud, Marin A., Passalacqua, Nicholas V., Philbin, Casey S., 2022. Caseloads in forensic anthropology. Am. J. Biol. Anthropol. 177 (3), 556–565. Ruffell, Alastair, 2005. Burial location using cheap and reliable quantitative probe measurements. Forensic Sci. Int. 151 (2–3), 207–211. Ruffell, Alastair, McKinley, Jennifer, 2005. Forensic geoscience: applications of geology, geomorphology and geophysics to criminal investigations. Earth Sci. Rev. 69 (3–4), 235–247. Schmitt, Stefan, 2002. Mass graves and the collection of forensic evidence: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. In: Haglund, William D., Sorg, Marcella H. (Eds.), Advances in Forensic Taphonomy: Method Theory and Archaeological Perspectives. CRC Press, Boca Raton, pp. 277–292. Scott, Douglas D., Connor, Melissa, 2001. The role and future of archaeology in forensic science. Hist. Archaeol. 35 (1), 101–104. Skinner, Mark, Lazenby, Richard A., 1983. Found! Human Remains: A Field Manual for the Recovery of the Recent Human Skeleton. Archaeology Press, Burnaby. United Nations, 2015. IT/32/Rev.50: Rules of Procedure and Evidence. International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991. The Hague, The Netherlands. US NCIS, 1998. Forensic Investigation: Kravica Warehouse. ICTY Court Records, IT-05-88/2(Exhibit P01828). Warnasch, Scott C., 2016. Forensic archaeological recovery of a large-scale mass disaster scene: lessons learned from two complex recovery operations at the World Trade Center site. J. Forensic Sci. 61 (3), 584–593. Wright, R., 2001. Report on Excavations and Exhumations at the Glogova 1 Mass Grave in 2000. ICTY Court Records IT-05-88 (Exhibit P00873): X0064480-X0064521.
Funerary Archaeology Christopher J. Knu¨sela and Eline M.J. Schotsmansa,b, a PACEA, De la Préhistoire à l’Actuel: Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie, University of Bordeaux, Pessac, France; and b Centre for Archaeological Science, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview The Development of Funerary Archaeology Preliminary Phase: Chronological Ordering First Phase: Normative Burial Second Phase: Processualism Third Phase: Post-processualism and Interpretive Archaeologies Fourth Phase: The Empirical Approach, Synthesis and Comparative Practice Multi-stage Mortuary Practices and Social Meaning Key Issues in Funerary Archaeology Standard Terminology Soft Tissue, Equifinality and Method Validation Continued Debates Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading Relevant Websites
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Definition of funerary archaeology Historical perspective of the development of funerary archaeology Groundwork for a synthesis between funerary archaeology and human bioarchaeology (archaeothanatology) Key definitions of concepts in funerary archaeology Future research orientation for the study of the dead and their context for understanding the living society and longer-term trends in social archaeology
Abstract Funerary archaeology focuses on the social aspects of death by studying archaeological mortuary contexts, still often divided between those who start the interrogative process from the human remains and those who concentrate on the burial type and grave goods/inclusions. This treatment reviews the development of the subdiscipline of funerary archaeology while providing a context for the synthesis of the subject with archaeothanatology and its emphasis on the taphonomy of human remains and associated materials, as well as with human bioarchaeology, the study of human remains, to address grander themes in social archaeology.
Introduction Funerary archaeology, sometimes equated synonymously with the Americanist mortuary behavior, focuses on the social aspects of death by studying funerary contexts: archaeological contexts where the dead are deposited as a result of the performance of funerary rites. Mortuary behavior is broader, including human remains found in an archaeological layer or feature, the origin of which may not include evidence for the performance of funerary rites. Thus, all treatments of the deceased (including, among others, postmortem dissection, cremation, clandestine and penal killing, use of human remains for decorative or utilitarian purposes, and abandonment, dismemberment, and exposure of bodies without inhumation) qualify as mortuary treatment, but only those that reflect manipulation of the corpse as a result of obsequies performed for the dead by the living define funerary behavior (Boulestin, 2012; Knüsel et al., 2022). The division between mortuary and funerary contexts can be difficult to define and, at times, cannot be resolved definitively – and certainly not before the remains themselves have been analyzed. Evidence of intentional funerary behavior must
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be clearly demonstrated to qualify as those having received funerary treatment. This is done by comparison with funerary practices at the same site and other contemporary sites to establish similar archaeological patterns. As a case in point, cannibalism resulting in fragmented and cutmarked remains, and defleshing, indicated by cutmark incisions directed at removing flesh, can be found in both circumstances depending on those involved: community members in funerary cannibalism/defleshing, or predatory outsiders in the denigratory and perhaps degustatory mortuary form. The taking of heads is also ambiguous and can be performed as part of either funerary or mortuary behavior depending on the context in which remains are found, as in a venerated ancestor or sanctified individual, a condemned and decapitated or dismembered criminal, or as an abject and threatening display of a vanquished enemy. These examples highlight the importance of contextual information to distinguish intention for closely related behaviors. Graves of the dead are one of the most common archaeological features encountered and their construction arguably represents the most planned and heavily ritualized archaeological context. It is a general observation, however, that even for periods with abundant historical records, there is relatively little detail about the physical manifestations of funerary ceremonies that would facilitate their use to perceive the intentions and meanings behind the occurrence, spatial distribution and the internal patterning within graves encountered as a result of archaeological investigation. Prehistory is, by definition, silent on these matters due to the absence of written records. Images in parietal art, abstract and representational depictions in perishable materials, such as wood and skins, which occasionally preserve, but also in extant artifacts in bone, stone, ceramic and metal of any date require the same type of contextual analysis as funerary remains to discern intent and meaning. This is also true for ethnographic accounts that describe beliefs and practices surrounding death but do not address the physical manifestations of such practices. Written sources are thus inherently limited in the extent, detail and veracity of information they convey and are biased by the acuity and sociopolitical and intellectual perspective of the observer. The most basic aspects, such as items of personal adornment, graveside ritual, body preparation and those contributing to it, position and disposition of the body, specific location of the interment within a burial ground, and burial markers and maintenance of burial areas are rarely recorded in any detaildin protohistoric societies where descriptions are provided by non-indigenous observers, as much as in many historical societies. Symbolic meanings, although implicit, remain difficult to substantiate. In graves, a feature specifically created to accommodate the dead, the dead are the central focus, and the treatment accorded to the remains of the dead reflects the intentions and tolerances of an unknown number of participants of equally unknown identities. Divergent disciplinary developments in funerary archaeology have divided the subject between those who start the interrogative process from the analysis of human remains and others who concentrate on archaeological features defined on the basis of grave types, the grave goods found within them, and distribution and spacing of both burials and burial grounds. Both approaches address chronological and spatial distributions, and there is often also consideration of the social, cultural, ritual and spiritual (i.e. cosmology, beliefs) dimensions of death. This division persists to the present-day and can be found throughout the past as disciplines developed in a variety of institutional and intellectual settings. Synthetic and inter-disciplinary research – such as archaeothanatology and (human) bioarchaeology – form disciplinary bridges between biological anthropology and archaeology (see below) and consider both the study of the remains of the dead and their funerary context – together – because their separation makes it difficult to draw comparisons implicit in higher level inferences about social change in the past. Funerary rites incorporating ideas and concepts about death and the dead are carried out by survivors repeatedly and in anticipation of future deaths, including their own. A society’s enduring principles, social relationships, worldview, and changes in these through time, influence funerary expression and material correlates. Funerary remains thus reflect much about the living and the wider community and society of which they form a part, but they vary depending on social circumstances surrounding individual deaths. Owing to these established connections, funerary archaeological remains figure prominently in the study of social structure, comprised of named social positions within societies, such as mother/father, elder, leader, lineage founder, lineage head, artisan, hunter, priest(ess), healer, for example, and social organization based on the social relations among the living governed by group memberships, kin relationships, sex and gender, age, and socio-political distinctions, among others. Because funerals for the dead mark a major transition between life and death, they attest to funerary rites of passage, as described by folklorist Arnold van Gennep (1981) [1960]. Van Gennep drew attention to the importance of rites of passage to the stability of society and the integration of its members during times of social tension, including birth, marriage, and death, with the last being most elaborate. The elaboration of this final rite of passage makes it more likely to be visible archaeologically, while other such transitions are much less visible and more difficult to interpret due to great variations in their expression among human groups. The final rites may include symbolic acts and objects, some employing ephemeral materials, marking these and other social transitions because they accompany every change of status or social position at various stages in the life course.
Overview The Development of Funerary Archaeology Funerary archaeology has passed from a preliminary phase in the 18th and 19th centuries when antiquarians began to actively explore prehistoric graves of past people through four subsequent major developmental phases after the subject became a mainstream concern of archaeological enquiry. Owing to divisions of the subject based on period and geography as well as differing disciplinary structures within organizations that defined and contributed to the subject, these phases are not entirely distinct, nor are they defined completely chronologically. The following sketches are intended to provide broad-brush insight into the developmental trends of the subject. The ideas developed in these phases persisted in varying ways in later developments – to the present day – and thus cannot be said to have entirely replaced earlier ones.
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Early on, antiquarians employed what was later described as the “direct historical approach” to funerary contexts, which included interpretations drawn from analogies with contemporary or historical societies, both their own and those encountered through ethological and folklore studies of people, including rural folk communities and non-European groups. They often invoked a desire for access to an after-death existence as the chief reason behind the occurrence of the largely inhumed human remains encountered in the archaeological record. They viewed burials as reflecting early religious beliefs, while the specific practices were not the focus of investigation, a feature that is in stark contrast with the most recent approaches that focus on funerary practices that are now understood to combine profane and transcendent aspects.
Preliminary Phase: Chronological Ordering Funerary contexts played a central role in the development of archaeology. In the opening sentence of his article on Jens J. A. Worsaae’s seminal work on “grave lots” (burial goods) for archaeological dating, Rowe (1962) defined “Worsaae’s Law” as ". the principle that the objects accompanying a burial are in most cases things which were in use at the same time. This principle forms the basis of all use of grave associations for dating purposes in archaeology .” (Worsaae, 1843, cited in Rowe, 1962: 129). This succinct statement nicely encapsulates the early analytical use of artifacts found in graves for the purposes of archaeological relative dating. This form of relative dating of grave goods permitted the basic chronological ordering that contributed to the formation of Christian J. Thomsen’s Three-Age system, which equated chronological ordering in time based on the raw materials used to fashion implements, notably the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age in ascending order. As a consequence, these changes in the use of raw materials could be viewed as a form of developmental sophistication equated with progress through time. Although the development from stone to bronze to iron characterizes many regions of the world, some never developed the metal parts. There is no overall progress or increased social sophistication that can be unequivocally associated with the use of this sequence, but the Three Age System is conceptually important because of the chronological ordering based on classifying objects according to their raw material constituents.
First Phase: Normative Burial The objective of much research in this phase was to identify groupings with shared attributes based on relative dating (developed in the preliminary phase, above) and notions of “cultural” affiliation based on the types of sites and objects deposited together in burials and their stylistic attributes, as developed by Gustaf Kossinna and later employed by Vere Gordon Childe in his 1929 book, The Danube in Prehistory, who decoupled people from particular material culture. These objects were, in turn, associated with peoples thought to indicate an ethnic group (resulting from ethnogenesis) that could be defined and distinguished based on a standard pattern of funerary treatment, such as position of the body, mostly flexed or supine inhumations, or cremations, and the type of container or lack thereof. In short, in this phase researchers posited that objects and funerary treatments could be identified with the location of peoples or culture areas in the pre-literate past, some attested by proto-historic chroniclers to have inhabited a particular region or place. Burial treatments that did not follow these predominant features were identified as those of intrusive people/migrant groups. Shared traits were attributed to cultural diffusion (exchange) among groups or displacement as a result of invasion.
Second Phase: Processualism This phase is associated with the advent of the New Archaeology, which advocated consideration and explanation of the processes behind long-term socio-cultural change, hence also called Processual Archaeology. In a classic paper published in 1971, Lewis R. Binford decried the “surprising lack of literature in which attempts are made to deal with burials as a distinct class of variable phenomena .. Rarely . have there been attempts to explain variable burial data as observed at a given location, between locations, or as documented in the general literature” (p. 6). This work ushered in a paradigm shift from viewing burial as the number of different funerary treatments employed by a particular “people” in the past to one attempting to explain the social factors contributing to variations in expressions of mortuary behavior. These, Binford posited, varied with the number of social relations deceased individuals had established with the living in their lifetimes and that were recognized at death. The social persona (later referred to as the “social identity”) of the deceased represented a composite of the statuses occupied by the individual up until the time of death – in other words, a composite social identity comprised of sex, age-at-death, social position, sub-group affiliation, cause (more recently, also including the manner or circumstances) of death and location of death. Binford and contemporary researchers endeavored to demonstrate a connection between the complexity of funerary rituals and the organizational complexity of societies. More complex societies are those that integrate a greater number of people in socioeconomic and ritual activities and thus might also be expected to evince a greater degree of social variation in burial. The ultimate intention, then, was the reconstruction of social organization and individual social distinctions, such as social rank, and their variations, which were demonstrated statistically to be linked to subsistence practices and the advent of more complexly socially integrated societies, social stratification, and the advent of social inequality. A means of measurement of this variation came from analyses of individual burials that differed in their positioning, placement, demarcation, grave types, and inclusions of objects, all of which might be summed up in their degree of monumentalization or memorialization, generally termed “elaboration,” qualities that are reducible, for comparative purposes, to “energy expenditure” as developed by Tainter (1978). This phase drew heavily on Binford’s “Middle Range Theory,” a hypothetico-deductive approach (as employed in the natural and physical sciences) to link abstractions (such as defleshing, for example) with patterning of physical remains uncovered in the archaeological record to define and identify past behaviors. Application of this type of theory, a hallmark of processual archaeology,
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highlights the need to link material remains and their patterning to abstract concepts. It permits researchers to identify similarities and differences in behavior over great distances and time-spans that are linked to more overarching factors, such as subsistence (i.e. economic) practices, environment, social organization and complexity in order to address grander narratives of social change in the past, such as the advent and development of social inequality, the impact of farming on social organization, and the role of violence in social change, among others. It is a reductionist normative approach to burial variation in order to create datasets facilitating broad comparisons with subsistence data, as recorded in the Human Resources Area Files (HRAF) (a database of information of world socio-cultural practices among peoples) and divided into groups based on subsistence practices: hunter-gatherers, shifting agriculturalists, settled agriculturalists, and pastoralists and eventually extended by other researchers to include socially stratified societies, such as chiefdoms and states. On a social scale, these socio-economic divisions are based on the number of individuals integrated in past societies, namely bands (tens of individuals), tribes (100–1000 individuals with clan-based sodalities), chiefdoms (thousands of individuals with systems of rank recognized from social proximity to the chief based on descent), states (tens of thousands to millions of individuals with bureaucracies and ascribed social status from birth, as found in aristocracies), each evolutionary step requiring more complex social organization to maintain social integration (Service, 1962). It is the number and social composition of those recognizing status responsibilities to the deceased that is transmitted via the funerary record. One of the hallmarks of this approach to the funerary record is the subsequent division of graves into horizontal (kin-based) and vertical social differentiation (individuals and groups with unequal power relations) based on statuses determined by age and sex, descent group affiliation, membership in sodalities (task-linked associations, including clans), and personal achievement. These social distinctions are symbolized by the manner in which a body is prepared and other ritual prior to burial and by the inclusion of totemic items (often organic) within burials (O’Shea, 1981). The biocultural approach, based on a synthesis of biological and social (political and economic) aspects that contribute to the make-up of human populations (Goodman, 1998), developed in tandem, but as a separate phenomenon, in biological anthropology. It, too, advocated a shift from research based on ethnogenesis to one focused on adaptability and the effects of social inequality on human health and well-being through paleopathological and auxological (growth and development) studies based on skeletal indicators of physiological stress. Examples of physiological stress include reduced stature and skeletal disproportion due to growth anomalies, the presence of enamel hypoplastic defects in teeth from growth disruption, susceptibility to disease such as specific types of density-dependent infectious disease, especially tuberculosis and leprosy, and trauma due to accidents sustained as a consequence of subsistence tasks and inter-personal aggression.
Third Phase: Post-processualism and Interpretive Archaeologies In reaction to approaches that saw the funerary realm as a reflection of the social organization of the living society, post-processual archaeology emphasized the symbolic aspects of funerary treatments. Proponents argued that the funerary realm is not a direct reflection of the once living society and may, conversely, provide an ideal or even distorted reflection of it and its constituent groups. This disciplinary dichotomy ushered in what became known as the processual versus post-processual debate of the 1970s and 1980s that persists to the present day, with often hybrid forms borrowing from both paradigms. The post-processual movement challenged the presumed scientific objectivity of the hypothetico-deductive approach of processual archaeology and emphasized a more subjective approach to archaeological interpretation. In 1995, in a test of these two opposing perspectives using information from ethnographic societies, Christopher Carr (1995) compared the social organizational and belief-related aspects of 46 funerary practices in 31 non-state societies from Africa, the circum-Mediterranean, Asia, Insular Pacific and North and South America from the HRAF and concluded that “it would appear that further development and strengthening of Middle-Range Theory in mortuary archaeology requires a broadening of perspective to include both social organization and philosophical-religious beliefs as determinants of mortuary practices” (p. 121). As a consequence, many recent approaches to the funerary record have tended to address the symbolic aspects of burial, often using the social identity of the deceased in a synthetic approach to social difference based on age-at-death, sex, health status or attainment of full genetic potential for growth as reflected in adult the concentrate on defining the social identity of the deceased, a concept closely akin to the social persona, though more subjectively rather than objectively defined. Interpretive archaeologies, more recent descendants of post-processual archaeology, focus on the actions and thoughts of individuals in the past. Not only the remains of the dead are considered to inform about the life of individuals and their society, the social identity of the living should also be taken into account. As Parker Pearson (1999: 3) notes, funerary archaeology concerns “the archaeological study of the funerary practices that the living perform for the dead. It is not so much about the dead as about the living who buried them.”
Fourth Phase: The Empirical Approach, Synthesis and Comparative Practice Interpretive archaeologies stress the uniqueness of each society, and the need to study the full context of each in all its diversity, hence laying the foundation of the fourth phase: a step-by-step empirical analysis of human remains in their broader depositional context that contributes to interpretation of the funerary record. Funerary preparations and deposition of corpses are not necessarily the end of a process, but a milestone in a sequence of variable length and multiple steps. These sentiments re-focus attention on identifying the actions of people in the past. Owing to the difficulty of addressing beliefs directly from physical remains and their patterning – and especially abstract ones without obvious material correlates – researchers have directed attention to mortuary behavior and funerary practices as a result of funerary actions or deeds (“gestes funéraires” in French). This shift in focus is best
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represented by the development of archaeothanatology in France. While emerging at the same time as the processual and postprocessual paradigms in archaeology and equally representing a shift in thinking, archaeothanatology developed within biological anthropology as a means to bridge the gap between field recovery, traditionally seen as part of archaeology, and physical anthropology, a laboratory-based pursuit. The origins of the archaeothanatological approach can be traced back to a publication by André Leroi-Gourhan et al. (1962) on the Neolithic collective burial at Mounouards (Mesnils-sur-Ogre, Marne, France) and was further formalized by Henri Duday in the 1970s and 1980s and later published in English translation (Duday, 2006, 2009). The main goal of archaeothanatology is to reconstruct the structure and organization of past societies from the analysis of the treatment, handling and management of the deceased. Initially known as “field anthropology” (“anthropologie de terrain” in French), archaeothanatological analysis commences – ideally – in the field with detailed observations and recording of the human remains and their burial arrangement, organization and architecture. In other words, it does not consider the human remains alone but also associated items, their arrangement, the depositional context and the entire funerary area in its broadest sense. The archaeothanatological approach can be summarized in three phases: (1) field observations, (2) reconstructing the disposition of the remains at the time of their final deposition, and the way the assemblage was constituted, (3) interpretations of mortuary behaviors and social information more generally (Boulestin, 2022). Internationally, archaeothanatology is often perceived as a method, a “different,” empirical type of mortuary analysis that integrates detailed archaeological field observation and biological anthropology as a means to bridge the divide between archaeology and anthropology (Knüsel and Schotsmans, 2022). The archaeothanatological approach hinges on the consideration of taphonomy. One cannot reconstruct the original appearance of a burial if the effects of depositional processes are not considered. With its focus on the corpse of the deceased and its taphonomic decomposition, the concept of “funerary taphonomy” emerged (Knüsel and Robb, 2016). To summarize, archaeothanatology, sometimes referred to as archaeo-anthropology, is the science of the study of death in all its manifestations: biological, cultural, and social. It is a synthetic study of both biological and sociocultural aspects of death in past societies and seeks to investigate the relationship between the dead and the living and with death. The intent of the approach is to span the gap between archaeology and biological anthropology, field (excavation) and laboratory (post-excavation) analysis.
Multi-stage Mortuary Practices and Social Meaning Because archaeothanatology aims to investigate all dimensions of death and the dead, it shares much of its research orientation with human bioarchaeology, a branch of bioarchaeology applied specifically to human remains, as envisioned by Jane Buikstra in 1977 (see also Larsen, 1997; Buikstra, 2006). However, while bioarchaeology tends to focus on the dead as a means to study the once living population, archaeothanatology addresses this aspect as well as, more directly, the archaeological context of the dead to reveal patterns in the remains of the deceased and accompanying material relating to the performance of funerary actions or deeds. As a result of a greater appreciation for variation among burials excavated in the same region and period - and within a single site – the enduring result of this phase of development is that burial is no longer seen as a single event, but often as a multi-stage phenomenon of variable duration. Earlier work defined practices based on ethnographic analogy, as when Hertz (1907) [1960] defined secondary burial as a threestage processing of the deceased, the first of which involved burial of the deceased within a few days after death. During the second phase, relatives of the deceased removed the remains of the dead on the occasion of a celebratory feast that occurred afterward for a variable period of time, followed by the reburial of dried bones of the once corpse among the remains of agnatic kin. This final reinterment confirmed the arrival of the deceased’s soul in the land of the ancestors and restored social relations among the living. This insight was later updated by Metcalf (1981) to include variation based on the circumstances surrounding death that may alter the relationship between the social status of the living as represented in funerary rites, for example, based on age-at-death, with older adults receiving such treatments and younger children less likely to do so. It is informative to note that this phase of research had already been anticipated previously, if not systematically acted upon and incorporated into practice. Researchers such as Lynne Goldstein (1981: 59) early on in the development of funerary archaeology championed “multi-dimensional” funerary recording and analysis of the relationships between human remains, burial and site contexts. She included treatment of the body by recording the state of articulation, the number of individuals, and anatomical modifications; preparation of the disposal facility (grave), grave type, orientation of the facility and the body within it, and location with respect to habitations and sites; burial content within the grave, encompassing the arrangement of the remains with respect to the grave, its furniture, and grave inclusions; and, importantly, the population profile, including determinations of age-at-death and sex, disease states, circumstances of death, and genetic relationships. Also, in the 1980s, Chapman (1987: 198) defined “mortuary practices” as the “total range of cultural practices relating to an individual, from the moment of death until sometimes weeks, months of years afterwards.” Chapman noted that the archaeologist shares with the (bio)anthropologist a desire to understand the relationship between mortuary practices and the wider socio-cultural system of which they form a part but is also, in addition, concerned with assessing the extent to which such practices are preserved in the archaeological record (taphonomic analysis). He argued for the use of cross-cultural comparisons and studies developed through inter-disciplinary links with physical (biological) anthropology and forensic science, in the latter instance as a form of middle-range theory linking observed variation with processes, natural or human behavioral, observed in the world today. His goal was to reconstruct social organization from the archaeological record of mortuary practices. This objective is the same for the archaeology of death/archaeothanatology-that is, to derive information on the structure and organization of early societies from the analysis of mortuary practices based on models taken from social anthropology and ethnohistory (Boulestin, 2022: 47).
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Scholars continue to emphasize the closer integration of archaeology and biological anthropology to the benefit of better and more holistic analyses of funerary remains and, toward the end of this phase, this integration spurred new developments in funerary archaeology as a joint effort of both biological anthropology and funerary/mortuary archaeology. Essentially, while archaeologists were calling for studies relating to the funerary context and social organization, biological anthropologists continued to concentrate on skeletal variation based on laboratory measurements and analyses. This meant little common working and few joint efforts, with separate means to address what are, in fact, very complementary research questions. Today, the discipline rests on the brink of breaking down disciplinary divisions to integrate human bioarchaeology with archaeothanatology/the archaeology of death to produce a more synthetic and holistic approach to funerary archaeology and biological and social aspects of past populations. A holistic approach helps researchers to anticipate the patterning within graves and better recover remains to address the variation observed in the funerary record, without assuming that what they observe is a direct reflection of the beliefs and funerary rites of past people. While treatments (actions) and practices (repeated actions at a site level) are better appreciated, rites linked to beliefs, which are embedded in the ceremonies and principles governing the structure of mortuary practices, remain the most difficult to reconstruct.
Key Issues in Funerary Archaeology Standard Terminology In 1968, based on work largely undertaken in the Western United States, Sprague lamented the lack of a meaningful and applicable explanatory system and precise nomenclature necessary to facilitate comparative studies of burial traits. By the same token in 1975, in France, Ambroise and Perlès decried the lack of a precise and appropriate vocabulary to describe the placement and organization of skeletal remains in a burial, while highlighting the effect of poor definitions, not least leading to artistic rather than empiricallyguided representations of funerary remains in museum displays. Some 20 years later, this time in a review of Western Asian Natufian (Epi-paleolithic, circa 15,000–11,500 BC) contexts, Byrd and Monahan (1995: 257–260) summed up the same problem, prosaically stating that “Archaeology frequently suffers from the lack of a standardized, consistent body of terminology.” Some 30 years after his earlier paper, in his 2005 book, Sprague provided more detailed insights into the myriad terms employed to describe various aspects of the grave and its contents, yet fell short on critical appraisal of their use, did not account for the full range of funerary treatments, introduced some confusion due to overlapping definitions and, in general, was not sensitive to and thus did not fully integrate human remains and their descriptive nomenclature in the vocabulary (see Knüsel, 2014; Boulestin, 2022 for critiques). Most recently, Knüsel et al. (2022) have made a renewed effort to provide standard terms, the product of various conference sessions over more than a decade. The persisting separation of archaeology and biological anthropology, even with the advent of archaeothanatology and human bioarchaeology, continues to hinder the adoption of standard terminology. Funerary studies are especially adversely affected by an incomplete understanding of the specific meaning and use of anatomical terms. Anatomical nomenclature comes with an already existing and accepted set of terms to describe the orientation and position of the skeleton, skeletal elements, and parts of elements. Those terms employed to describe physical movements of the living body, such as flexion and extension (forearm, neck) and leg (tibia and fibula), medial and lateral rotation (upper and lower limbs), pronation and supination (forearm), protraction and retraction (scapula and mandible), plantarflexion and dorsiflexion, inversion and eversion (foot) are also standardized and each segment of the body/skeleton can thus be described by the same standard anatomical terms employed to describe movement and posture/position in the living (cf. CalaisGermain, 1993). This standard terminology is completely transferable to the mortuary context and can also be employed to indicate the position of accompanying objects as well, which help to describe and, at the same time, define this context. Many disciplines have faced the same situation and various long-lasting standards have been adopted to aid communication – from the Linnaean Hierarchy in evolutionary biology to the periodic table in chemistry. Two standard works for anatomical nomenclature are the result of such endeavors: one of long descent from the 19th century, the “Nomina Anatomica” (1989) produced by the I.A.N.C. (International Anatomical Nomenclature Committee), which provides standard lists of anatomical descriptive terms in Latin, and its successor, the “Terminologia Anatomica: International anatomical terminology,” the first edition published in 1998, and the second edition in 2011, produced by the FIPAT (Federative International Programme on Anatomical Terminologies). The “Terminologia Anatomica” provides lists of the Latin terms translated into English, and there is a Spanish version. The “Nomina Anatomica,” on the other hand, has been translated into a number of languages, including French and English. These sources provide the basis for shared and consistent use of anatomical terms that form the foundation of funerary archaeology. As the only funerary remains bearing a descriptive standard at present, it is the human remains that can provide a means to describe the location and distribution of other grave contents within the grave. If used appropriately and consistently, even in the absence of photographs and drawings, the position of associated objects can be understood by reference to the remains which initially motivated their deposition, permitting faithful comparisons between features, time periods and locations as well as providing insights into the functions of objects, as adornments of the body or inclusions in the grave. Another problem with existing terminology in funerary archaeology is that some words encompass interpretation rather than observation (Boulestin and Duday, 2006: 166). For example, classifying primary and secondary depositions based on the maintenance of articulations leads to potential misapprehension. A fully articulated skeleton may not always be an indication of a primary deposition. If a corpse had been mummified and subsequently buried as part of a secondary funerary practice (Fig. 1), it is
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Fig. 1 A human donor, naturally mummified at the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research, and subsequently buried. If this individual were to be excavated in thousand years’ time, when soft tissues had disappeared, archaeologists would wrongly classify it as a primary deposition, based on the skeleton being fully articulated. The tight flexion of the lower limbs results from its mummification and binding, but the same position may be the result of soil pressure. Further experimental work continues to attempt to distinguish this equifinal patterning. Photograph: E. Schotsmans.
technically a secondary deposition. Thousands of years later, when soft tissue has disappeared, archaeologists will be tempted to classify it as a primary deposition based on the skeleton being fully articulated.
Soft Tissue, Equifinality and Method Validation While archaeothanatology aims to bridge the gap between conventional archaeology and anthropology, a connection with soft tissue studies (forensic anthropology, forensic or medico-legal science, forensic pathology) is still absent. During archaeothanatological analysis, taphonomy plays an important role. The depositional environment and peri- and post-mortem processes, which affect preservation and degradation, can be assessed in order to discriminate human behavior from natural processes. However, the influence of decomposition stages on the final disposition of the skeletal remains is under-appreciated. Schotsmans et al. (2022) describe examples of “rigor mortis” (post-mortem stiffening) of the neck and fingers, which fixes body parts in positions that might be misinterpreted as a funerary practice. Similarly, post-mortem corpse movement caused by putrefactive gases and subsequent bloating might make it difficult to reconstruct the exact original position of a body by observing the skeleton (Schotsmans et al., 2022). Tight flexion of the lower limbs (Fig. 1), a known funerary practice, can result from both desiccation (sometimes referred to as mummification), binding or might be due to pressure exerted by the soil. Several causes can lead to the same end-result, known as equifinality. The replication of patterns is thus even more fundamental to define funerary practices in order to distinguish these from taphonomic causes that mimic intentional funerary actions. An apt criticism of the reconstruction of funerary practices is that they rely on unvalidated taphonomic hypotheses of skeletal disarticulation and movement (Mickleburgh et al., 2022; Schotsmans et al., 2022). Reconstructions of these have tended to depend on reasoned arguments that account for repeated patterns encountered in a series of graves, but without the backing of actualistic studies to demonstrate the processes underlying these repeated observations. They thus remain solely descriptive and reliant upon repeated observations that are in many cases consistent but ultimately do not resolve equifinal patterning. In parallel, analysis of bacterial bioerosion of internal bone microstructures can be useful for estimating the range of taphonomic trajectories represented in a mortuary assemblage, but experimental work is required to define precisely if and how specific funerary treatments may affect bacterial bioerosion (Booth et al., 2022; Schotsmans et al., 2022). Modern cemetery exhumation and forensic experimentation can bridge the gap between soft tissue and bone to validate methods that distinguish human intervention from the effects of natural processes of decomposition.
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Continued Debates Debate continues to surround the origins of funerary behavior in humans and other hominins and the extent of their uniqueness among other species, leading to the identification of the earliest forms of funerary practices in the Paleolithic: inhumation as well as other practices, including exposure of the dead, defleshing, and funerary cannibalism. The social meaning of inhumation from the Upper Paleolithic poses another question: only a minority of socially and/or biologically distinctive, “special” people, appear to have been inhumed (cf. Formicola, 2007; Trinkaus, 2018). The identification of cremation/evidence of burning and the antiquity of these practices and their meaning and social selection for these rites through time and across geographic space, as well as their changing social meaning is an enduring research question for earlier prehistory as well as for later periods. It is also clear that further synthesis between (human) bioarchaeology and mortuary/funerary archaeology is required to better explore human remains and their burial context. To better interrogate and interpret burial patterns and reconstruct the social organization and funerary rites of once living societies, this research endeavor marshals archaeological science and social theory, including that drawn from ethnology and sociocultural anthropology. It requires continuous bridging of disciplinary separations to address broad over-arching social questions, including engendered roles in past societies, social structural questions relating to the development of social personae/social identities, such as ritualists and leaders, and enlarging on the roles of men, women, and children in these processes, and in the creation of unequal social relations leading to institutionalized inequality. Providing a deep and variable history of these concepts and their development promises to open new avenues to observe how these features influence modern societies today and could do so in the future. Most importantly, research must move from the dominant descriptive phase to address questions of social importance, marking a return to questions of social structure and organization, and social change through time. For example, what do symbols and the objects bearing them mean for the specific dead they accompany? To answer such questions will involve the creation of cross-cutting social identities, combining evidence from the human remains with those of the funerary context, to produce a bioarchaeological synthesis that can then be applied to studies of health, gender, kinship relations, the importance and place of children and of the mother-infant dyad, the changing and variable role of sex and aging in the past to reveal what it meant to be a woman, a man, or child. Another important area of research comprises how ancient DNA studies can best be integrated on a grand scale to look at the peopling of the landscape and of the planet, but also on a smaller scale to reveal site-based social dynamics and motivations for these movements and connections to events in the past, such as the emergence of horse pastoralists in the Eurasian Bronze Age (cf. Haak et al., 2015; Furholt, 2018), the origin of the warrior ethos, slavery, social control and punishment, and the role of social violence in these developments before and with the advent of socially stratified societies and polities in the past.
Summary and Future Directions Funerary archaeology can provide a unique glimpse into the rites, beliefs, and cosmology of past peoples. Patterning among burials affords appraisal of the changing social organization of past human societies. Despite its intentional nature and the wealth of social information the burial and its site contain, it remains perhaps the most difficult archaeological context to interpret due to the complexity and variability of human funerary behavior and the effects of taphonomic change on the grave and its contents. It seems almost impossible to think that funerary archaeology developed in the absence of the study of human remains. Yet, such is the case and, even today on many occasions, human remains, burial associations and the depositional context are not treated at the same time, by the same researchers, or for example in the same conference session or published volume. From early on, funerary archaeology focused on grave goods, grave type, and location of burials with far less attention paid to the remains of the deceased and funerary practices in the past. Grand questions such as the origins and development of social inequality based on social status dominated research endeavors, but before the full panoply of burial recording and terminology were conceived, making the basis on which interpretations developed less detailed, holistic, and compelling. Detailed recording, analysis and study of the remains of the body within its depositional context, is fundamental for identifying taphonomic changes of the corpse and of the skeletal remains and accompanying material, funerary manipulation, and intentional burial. The once dominant and still influential notion of “cultures” built upon perceived similarities in archaeological remains tended to identify a general way the dead were treated and, in the process, creating uniformity, while more recent studies have noted variation and diversity. Perhaps one of the most fundamental realizations is that funerary treatments are more variable than the grave structures that contain the dead. For example, a mound/tumulus might contain cremations and/or inhumations as primary or secondary depositions, and possibly both, thus in variable states of completeness after being moved from elsewhere and re-deposited, within containers (e.g. box, coffin, urn, jar, textile bag) or without them. A similar grave feature, then, disguises greater variation in the mortuary treatments than initially conceptualized. Rather than seeing this as a set-back in interpretation, this increased detail can be seen as an opportunity to revise understandings, reflect on the methods used to arrive at them, and the social processes that contributed to their constituents. Funerary archaeology has been adversely affected by disciplinary separations stemming from academic divisions that tend to separate arts, humanities and social sciences from the sciences, and thus anthropology, both social and biological, from archaeology. To undertake funerary studies well and compellingly requires crossing these divisions and a synthesis of subject domains as well as participation of researchers and research expertise drawn from across these boundaries. This type of synthetic study cannot be ascertained solely by excavating skeletons and looking only at the end-result of these processes. It is also necessary to study
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decomposition from the start until the end of the process, and actualistic experimental studies play a major role in understanding burial patterning (Mickleburgh et al., 2022; Schotsmans et al., 2022). Interdisciplinary analyses adopt an intersectional approach (cf. Buikstra et al., 2022) based on cross-analysis of the biological characteristics, the bio-profile, of the deceased with funerary contexts, treatments and burial patterning. For example, the use of ancient DNA (aDNA), isotopic analysis for diet and geographic origin, and bioarchaeological analyses in the context of funerary practices provides new means to interrogate the early equation of funerary practices with social aspects of past groups (cf. Alt et al., 2013; Deguilloux et al., 2014; Gleize et al., 2016; Beau et al., 2017). Some of these have begun to demonstrate specific kin-based groupings (Deguilloux et al., 2014; Beau et al., 2017; Yaka et al., 2021; Skov et al., 2022), showing that although some kin were buried in the same location (Alt et al., 2013), others were not. Some studies show non-kin-related origins for individuals buried in proximity (Chyle nski et al., 2019), with a reduction in co-burial of kin through time (Yaka et al., 2021). Interdisciplinary studies can also be applied to reveal social and demographic effects of high mortality events, such as plague (Castex et al., 2014), and violence (Haak et al., 2008; Meyer et al., 2009, 2014; Schroeder et al., 2019), both of which produce mass graves. Genome-wide analysis of aDNA provides a means to investigate the question of population movements in the past directly, but most studies to date have thus far been performed on a population level and the link to the demographic aspects from the skeleton and health have yet to be fully integrated. Notwithstanding recent successes of aDNA profiling, the study of the skeleton and its depositional environment remain fundamental for interpretation, and some studies fall short on the contextual aspects of human remains in mortuary and funerary contexts. Site-specific studies in the context of social identity, accompanying objects, and variation in funerary practices of local populations to investigate the demographic, socio-cultural, and socio-political climate of social change is thus left unaddressed. Thus, the mechanisms of transmission and social change in individual communities/groups will continue to form a focus for future research. As a complement to population-level studies, osteobiographies of single deceased individuals aid to showcase the interactions among accompanying goods, grave construction and biological characteristics to define the social identity of the deceased, often associated with social changes in the archaeological record. A highlight of these approaches tends to be detailed articulation with the archaeological context, in combination with ancient biomolecules, isotopic analyses for provenance (geographic origin) and diet and, less commonly, DNA (cf. Knüsel, 2002; Knüsel et al., 2010; Stodder and Palkovich, 2012; Melton et al., 2013; Hosek and Robb, 2019), as well as for some periods, historiographical framing with text-based information (archives and published sources). These can then provide models to be applied to larger samples which form the population back-drop to highlight similarities and unique differences of single individuals to provide more detailed social identities. They mark an effort to place individuals in an otherwise largely faceless past.
See Also: Cemeteries and Necropoleis; Human Remains: Challenges and Future Directions; Mortuary Excavation and Recording Approaches.
References Alt, Kurt W., Benz, Marion, Müller, Wolfgang, Berner, Margit E., Schultz, Michael, Schmidt-Schultz, Tyede, H., Knipper, Corina, Gebel, Hans-Georg K., Nissen, Hans J., Vach, Werner, 2013. Earliest evidence for social endogamy in the 9,000-year-old-population of Basta, Jordan. PLoS One 8 (6), e65649. Ambroise, Daniel, Perlès, Catherine, 1975. Note sur l’analyse archéologique des squelettes humains. Rev. Archéol. Cent. Fr. 14 (1–2), 49–61. Beau, Alice, Rivollat, Maïté, Réveillas, Hélène, Pemonge, Marie-Hélène, Mendisco, Fanny, Thomas, Yohann, Lefranc, Philippe, Deguilloux, Marie-France, 2017. Multi-scale ancient DNA analyses confirm the western origin of Michelsberg farmers and document probable practices of human sacrifice. PLoS One 12 (7), e0179742. Binford, Lewis R., 1971. Mortuary practices: their study and their potential. Mem. Soc. Am. Archaeol. 25, 6–29. Booth, Thomas J., Brönniman, David, Madgwick, Richard, Portmann, Cornelia, 2022. The taphonomic and archaeothanatological potentials of diagenetic alterations of archaeological bone. In: Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 580–599. Boulestin, Bruno, 2012. Champ de la discipline: concepts et mise en oeuvre. In: Bonnabel, Lola (Ed.), Archéologie de la mort en France. La Découverte, Paris, pp. 24–39. Boulestin, Bruno, 2022. A tale of two worlds: terminologies in archaeothanatology. In: Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 42–54. Boulestin, Bruno, Duday, Henri, 2006. Ethnology and archaeology of death: from the illusion of references to the use of a terminology. Archaeol. Polona 44, 149–169. Buikstra, Jane E., 1977. Biocultural dimensions of archaeological study: a regional perspective. In: Blakely, Robert L. (Ed.), Biocultural Adaptation in Prehistoric America. The University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA, pp. 67–84. Buikstra, Jane E., 2006. A historical introduction. In: Buikstra, Jane E., Beck, Lane Anderson (Eds.), Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains. Academic Press, Amsterdam, pp. 7–25. Buikstra, Jane E., DeWitte, Sharon N., Agarwal, Sabrina C., Baker, Brenda J., et al., 2022. 21st-century bioarchaeology: taking stock and moving forward. Yearbook Biol. Anthropol. 178 (1), 54–114. Byrd, Brian F., Monahan, Christopher M., 1995. Death, ritual, and Natufian social structure. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 14, 251–287. Calais-Germain, Blandine, 1993. Anatomy of Movement. Eastland Press, Seattle, WA. Carr, Christopher, 1995. Mortuary practices: their social, philosophical-religious, circumstantial and physical determinants. J. Archaeol. Method Theor 2 (2), 105–200. Castex, Dominique, Kacki, Sacha, Réveillas, Héléne, Souquet-Leroy, Isabelle, Sachau-Carcel, Géraldine, Blaizot, Frédérique, Blanchard, Philippe, Duday, Henri, 2014. Revealing archaeological features linked to mortality increases. Anthropol. Int. J. Sci. Man II (3), 299–318. Chapman, Robert, 1987. Mortuary practices: society, theory building and archaeology. In: Boddington, Andrew, Garland, Neil A., Janaway, Robert C. (Eds.), Death, Decay and Reconstruction. Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 198–213. Childe, Vere Gordon, 1929. The Danube in Prehistory. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Chylenski, Maciej, Ehler, Edvard, Somel, Mehmet, Yaka, Reyhan, Krzewinska, Maja, Dabert, Mirosława, Juras, Anna, Marciniak, Arkadiusz, 2019. Ancient mitochondrial genomes reveal the absence of maternal kinship in the burials of Çatalhöyük people and their genetic affinities. Genes 10 (3), 207.
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Deguilloux, Marie-France, Pemonge, Marie-Hélène, Mendisco, Fanny, Thibon, Diane, Cartron, Isabelle, Castex, Dominique, 2014. Ancient DNA and kinship analysis of human remains deposited in Merovingian necropolis sarcophagi (Jau-Dignac-et-Loirac, France, 7th–8th century AD). J. Archaeol. Sci. 41, 399–405. Duday, H., 2006. Archaeothanatology or the archaeology of death. Translated by Knüsel, C. J. In: Gowland, Rebecca L., Knüsel, Christopher J. (Eds.), Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 30–56. Duday, Henri, 2009. Archaeology of the Dead: Lectures in Archaeothanatology. Translated by Cipriani, A. M. and Pearce, J. Oxbow Books, Oxford. FIPAT (Federative International Programme on Anatomical Terminologies), 2011. Terminologia Anatomica. International Anatomical Terminology, second ed. Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart. Formicola, Vincenzo, 2007. From the Sunghir children to the Romito dwarf: aspects of the Upper Paleolithic funerary landscape. Curr. Anthropol. 48 (3), 446–453. Furholt, Martin, 2018. Massive migrations? The impact of recent aDNA studies on our view of third millennium Europe. Eur. J. Archaeol. 21 (2), 159–191. Gleize, Yves, Mendisco, Fanny, Pemonge, Marie-Hélène, Hubert, Christophe, Groppi, Alexis, Houix, Bertrand, Deguilloux, Marie-France, Breuil, Jean-Yves, 2016. Early Medieval Muslim graves in France: first archaeological, anthropological and palaeogenomic evidence. PLoS One 11 (2), e0148583. Goldstein, Lynne, 1981. One-dimensional archaeology and multi-dimensional people: spatial organisation and mortuary analysis. In: Chapman, Robert, Kinnes, Ian, Randsborg, Klaus (Eds.), The Archaeology of Death. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 53–69. Goodman, Alan H., 1998. The biological consequences of inequality in antiquity. In: Goodman, Alan H., Leatherman, Thomas L. (Eds.), Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: PoliticalEconomic Perspectives on Human Biology. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, pp. 147–170. Haak, Wolfgang, Brandt, Guido, de Jong, Hylke N., Meyer, Christian, Ganslmeier, Robert, Heyd, Volker, Hawkesworth, Chris, Pike, Alistair W.G., Meller, Harald, Alt, Kurt W., 2008. Ancient DNA, strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105 (47), 18226– 18231. Haak, Wolfgang, Lazaridis, Iosif, Patterson, Nick, Rohland, Nadin, et al., 2015. Massive migration from the Steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. Nature 552, 207–211. Hertz, Robert, 1960. A study on the collective representation of death. In: Death and the Right Hand. Translated by Needham, R. and Needham, C. Free Press, New York. Hosek, Lauren, Robb, John, 2019. Osteobiography: a platform for bioarchaeological research. Bioarchaeol. Int. 3 (1), 1–15. Knüsel, Christopher J., 2002. More Circe than Cassandra: the princess of Vix in ritualised social context. Eur. J. Archaeol. 5 (3), 275–308. Knüsel, Christopher J., 2014. Crouching in fear: terms of engagement for funerary remains. J. Soc. Archaeol. 14 (1), 26–58. Knüsel, Christopher J., Robb, John E., 2016. Funerary taphonomy: an overview of goals and methods. In: Knüsel, Christopher J., Robb, John E. (Eds.), Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Special Issue on Funerary Taphonomy, vol. 10, pp. 655–673. Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J., 2022. Introduction: archaeothanatology, funerary archaeology and bioarchaeology: perspectives on the long view of death and the dead. In: Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 1–20. Knüsel, Christopher J., Batt, Catherine M., Cook, Gordon, Montgomery, Janet M., Müldner, Gundula, Ogden, Alan R., Palmer, Carol, Stern, Benjamin, Todd, John, Wilson, Andrew S., 2010. The identity of the St. Bees Lady, Cumbria: an osteobiographical approach. Mediev. Archaeol. 54, 275–317. Knüsel, Christopher J., Gerdau-Radonic, Karina, Schotsmans, Eline M.J., 2022a. Lexicon of terms used in archaeothanatology: a work still in the process of becoming. In: Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 653–686. Larsen, Clark Spencer, 1997. Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Human Behavior from the Human Skeleton. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Leroi-Gourhan, André, Bailloud, Gérard, Brézillon, Michel, 1962. L’hypogée II des Mournouards (Mesnil-sur-Oger, Marne). Gall. Prehist. 1, 23–133. Melton, Nigel D., Montgomery, Janet, Knüsel, Christopher J. (Eds.), 2013. Gristhorpe Man, a Life and Death in the Bronze Age. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Metcalf, Peter, 1981. Meaning and materialism: the ritual economy of death. Man 16, 563–578. Meyer, Christian, Brandt, Guido, Haak, Wolfgang, Ganslmeier, Robert A., Meller, Harald, Alt, Kurt W., 2009. The Eulau Eulogy: bioarchaeological interpretation of lethal violence in corded ware multiple burials from Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 28 (4), 412–423. Meyer, Christian, Lohr, Christian, Kürbis, Olaf, Dresely, Veit, Haak, Wolfgang, Adler, Christina J., Gronenborn, Detlef, Alt, Kurt W., 2014. Mass graves of the LBK: patterns and peculiarities. In: Whittle, Alasdair, Bickle, Penny (Eds.), Early Farmers: The View from Archaeology and Science. Proceedings of the British Academy, Oxford, pp. 307–325. Mickleburgh, Hayley L., Wescott, Daniel J., Gluschitz, Sarah, Klinkenberg, M.Victor, 2022. Exploring the use of actualistic forensic taphonomy in the study of (forensic) archaeological human burials: an actualistic experimental research programme at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University (FACTS), San Marcos, Texas. In: Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 542–662. Nomina Anatomica, 1989, sixth ed. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh. O’Shea, John M., 1981. Social Configurations and the archaeological study of mortuary practices: a case study. In: Chapman, Robert, Kinnes, Ian, Randsborg, Klaus (Eds.), The Archaeology of Death. Cambridge University Press, London, pp. 39–52. Parker-Pearson, Michael, 1999. The Archaeology of Death and Burial. Sutton Publishing, Gloucester. Rowe, John H., 1962. Worsaae’s Law and the use of grave lots for archaeological dating. Am. Antiq. 28 (2), 129–137. Schotsmans, Eline M.J., Georges-Zimmermann, Patrice, Ueland, Maiken, Dent, Boyd B., 2022. From flesh to bone: building bridges between taphonomy, archaeothanatology and forensic science for a better understanding of mortuary practices. In: Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 501–541. Schroeder, Hannes, Margaryan, Ashot, Szmyt, Marzena, Theulot, Bertrand, et al., 2019. Unraveling ancestry, kinship, and violence in a Late Neolithic mass grave. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116 (22), 10705–10710. Service, Elman L., 1962. Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. Random House, New York. Skov, Laurits, Peyrègne, Stéphane, Popli, Divyaratan, Iasi Leonardo, N.M., et al., 2022. Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals. Nature 610, 519–525. Sprague, Roderick, 1968. A suggested terminology and classification for burial description. Am. Antiq. 33 (4), 479–485. Sprague, Roderick, 2005. Burial Terminology: A Guide for Researchers. Altamira Press, Lanham, MD. Stodder, Ann L.W., Palkovich, Ann M. (Eds.), 2012. The Bioarchaeology of Individuals. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Tainter, Joseph A., 1978. Mortuary practices and the study of prehistoric social systems. In: Schiffer, Michael B. (Ed.), Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 1. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 105–141. Trinkaus, Erik, 2018. An abundance of developmental anomalies and abnormalities in Pleistocene people. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (47), 11941–11946. van Gennep, Arnold, 1960, 1909. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Vizedom, M. and Caffee, M. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Yaka, Reyhan, Mapelli, Igor, Kaptan, Damla, Dogu, Ayça, et al., 2021. Variable kinship patterns in Neolithic Anatolia revealed by ancient genomes. Curr. Biol. 31, 1–14.
Further Reading Agarwal, Sabrina C., Glencross, Bonnie (Eds.), 2011. Social Bioarchaeology. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. Beck, Lane Anderson (Ed.), 1995. Regional Approaches to Mortuary Analysis. Plenum Press, New York. Bloch, Maurice, Parry, Jonathan (Eds.), 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gordon, Bruce, Marshall, Peter (Eds.), 2000. The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gowland, Rebecca, Knüsel, Christopher J. (Eds.), 2006. Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains. Oxbow Books, Oxford.
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Hertz, Robert, 1907. Contribution à une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort. L’Année Sociologique 10, 48–137. Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J. (Eds.), 2022. The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology. Routledge, Abingdon. Laqueur, Thomas W., 2015. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Metcalf, Peter, Huntingdom, Richard, 1991. Celebrations of Death – The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. O’Shea, John M., 1984. Mortuary Variability: An Archaeological Investigation. Academic Press, Orlando. Parker-Pearson, Michael, 1999. The Archaeology of Death and Burial. Sutton Publishing, Stroud. Schmitt, Aurore, Déderix, Sylviane, Crevecoeur, Isabelle (Eds.), 2018. Gathered in Death. Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives on Collective Burial and Social Organisation. Presses universitaires de Louvain, Louvain. Schotsmans, Eline M.J., Márquez-Grant, Nicholas, Forbes, Shari L. (Eds.), 2017. Taphonomy of Human Remains: Forensic Analysis of the Dead and the Depositional Environment. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, New York. Shanks, Michael, Hodder, Ian, 1995. Processual, postprocessual and interpretive archaeologies. In: Hodder, Ian, Shanks, Michael, Alexandri, Alexandra, Buchli, Victor, Carman, John J., Last, Jonathan, Lucas, Gavin (Eds.), Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past. Routledge, London, pp. 3–29. Tarlow, Sarah, Nilsson Stutz, Liv (Eds.), 2013. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Valentin, Frédérique, Rivoal, Isabelle, Thevenet, Corinne, Sellier, Pascal (Eds.), 2014. La chaîne opératoire funéraire: éthnologie et archéologie de la mort. De Broccard, Paris. van Gennep, Arnold, 1981, 1909. Les rites de passage: étude systématique. A. and J. Picard, Paris.
Relevant Websites Human Resources Area Files (HRAF): https://hraf.yale.edu/cross-cultural-research/. (Last visited 18 November 2022). Glossary Knüsel, Christopher J., Gerdau-Radonic, Karina, Schotsmans, Eline M.J., 2022. Lexicon of terms used in archaeothanatology: a work still in the process of becoming. In: Knüsel, Christopher J., Schotsmans, Eline M.J. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeothanatology. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 653–686.
Gender and Queer Archaeology Uros Matic, Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues History of Gender Archaeology Sex and Gender Gender and Mortuary Archaeology Gender and Settlement Archaeology Gender and Representations Gender and Museums Summary and Future Directions References Relevant Websites
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Key Points
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Short definition and outline of gender archaeology. Short overview of the development of gender archaeology. Sex and gender are discussed as two distinct categories by gender archaeologists, although this distinction has been questioned by queer theorists. Gender and mortuary archaeology deals with studies of gender through the funerary archaeological record. Gender and settlement archaeology deals with the greatest challenge for gender archaeology, recognizing gender behind the archaeological record of settlements. The most common focus of gender archaeologists is representations of the human body in the past. Gender and museums deals with the issue of stereotypes on gender in museum exhibitions and how these should be tackled critically.
Glossary Gender The cultural interpretation of sexual differences that results in the categorization of individuals, artifacts, spaces and bodies (Gilchrist, 1999: xv). Gender system “A set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner, no matter how bizarre some of the conventions may be” (Rubin, 1975: 165). Sex In our modern society, classification by means of observable biological differences between men, women and intersex individuals, based on the appearance of genitalia, chromosomes and hormones (Gilchrist, 1999: xviii). In other cultures, other bodily differences and functions gain more importance. Sexuality The way people experience and express themselves sexually. Someone’s sexual orientation is their pattern of sexual interest and practice.
Abstract Gender archaeology is a subfield of archaeology dealing with various aspects of gender in past societies. Although all archaeologies deal with gender to a different degree, gender archaeology insists on theoretical and methodological transparency, often relying on feminism and queer theory. Gender archaeologists deal with conceptualizations of gender in past societies, ideologies, roles and relations. They insist on historical contingency and refuse biological determinism.
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Introduction Gender archaeology is usually understood as a subfield of the general field of archaeology. It explores gender in past societies based on material remains. However, although this definition broadly summarizes the goal of gender archaeology, it has to be pointed out that all archaeologies are in a way practicing gender archaeology whenever they make claims or assumptions on past gender. For example, whenever the material remains of certain activities (e.g., flint knapping, hunting, foraging, pottery production, cooking, etc.) are interpreted as activities of men or women, or both, we are dealing with gender (see Gero and Conkey, 1991). This is because, either based on evidence or assumptions, we ultimately claim that there was a clear gender division of labor in past societies or not. As already pointed out by Conkey and Spector (1984: 2), although often lacking serious theoretical and methodological background on the subject of gender, archaeological literature is not silent on this topic. However, there is a big difference in assuming that in all past societies “men hunted and women gathered” or that all warriors were men (for these and other common archaeological stereotypes see Coltofean-Arizancu et al., 2021), and demonstrating with evidence that in a particular past society most men in a particular age category hunted large game more than most women did (Hays-Gilpin and Whitley, 1998: 5). Thus, gender archaeology concerns with more than simply finding men and women in the past. It deals with understanding how gender works in all of its dimensions, such as ideology, roles, and relations (Conkey and Spector, 1984: 15; Conkey and Gero, 1991: 14). Nowadays, archaeologists differentiate between sex and gender. The former is understood as a biological difference in chromosomes, hormones, and genitals which can, but does not necessarily have to, also be distinguishable on the skeleton (Sofaer, 2006; Geller, 2017). The latter (gender) is understood as the socio-cultural interpretation of bodily differences (Conkey and Gero, 1991: 8; Gilchrist, 1999: xv) which past societies could have observed based solely on outer appearance, since “people do not see each other as genes but as bodies in the world” (Sofaer, 2006: 92). Therefore, one could ask if a complex concept such as gender can be investigated archaeologically. However, equally complex concepts such as population pressure, resource stress, socio-technic subsystems, et cetera, cause much less skepticism in archaeology (Conkey and Gero, 1991: 6–7). Since we can be sure that people were around in the past, and that no one ever excavated a “socio-technic subsystem,” we can be optimistic in the claim that gender can be studied. The following sections discuss how this can be done.
Overview and Key Issues History of Gender Archaeology The first feminist and gender studies in archaeology appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. Women archaeologists in Norway organized a conference titled “Were they all men” (1979). In 1985 the organization Kvinner i Arkeologi i Norge (“Women in Archaeology in Norway”) was formed with its corresponding journal. At the same time, in the early 1980s, feminist critical voices emerged in the USA (Gilchrist, 1999: 4–7). Soon after, literature appeared written by women archaeologists inspired by feminism. These pioneer gender archaeologists criticized the following: 1. Androcentrism, observable in the focus on past men and the androcentric language privileging men. Conclusions were mostly derived via formal analogies from androcentric ethnography or the unexamined, un-reflected, and culture specific assumptions of the male researcher. Often man and human are used interchangeably, when in fact the authors refer to men (Conkey and Spector, 1984: 3–10). 2. Biological determinism, observable in the often assumed “biology is destiny” premise, which is itself relying on statistical averages and questionable assumptions (Conkey and Gero, 1991: 8; Gilchrist, 1999: 12). 3. The absence of women (Fig. 1) from archaeological interpretations of the past (Nelson and Rosen-Ayalon, 2002: 4) and histories of archaeology (Díaz-Andreu and Sørensen, 1998). Conkey and Spector analyzed what they called a “particular gender mythology” which substantiated a range of beliefs about the meaning of masculine and feminine which are actually culture-specific rather than universal (Conkey and Spector, 1984: 1). It was argued from very early on that gender biases are not rectified by adding new data or case studies focusing on women rather than men. What was needed was a feminist critique of traditional research practices together with the critique of categories such as women and women’s experiences (Conkey and Gero, 1991: 5) paired with new working methods (Díaz-Andreu, 2005: 41). A number of mythical archaeological figures have been under criticism, among them “man the hunter,” projectile points as male and ceramics as female (Conkey and Spector, 1984: 7). After this initial 1970s–1980s phase, often contextualized as Second Wave feminism, in the 1990s gender archaeologists started dealing with gender identities beyond the binary gender system, sexuality, and the intersectionality of identity, all themes related to the Third Wave feminism. The early 2000s continued on this trail, new organizations were formed (see below), but old problems re-emerged (Gilchrist, 1999; Sørensen, 2000). Androcentrism, biological determinism, and the absence of women from archaeological interpretations are still present in archaeology, in some communities more than in others (Coltofean-Arizancu et al., 2021). Nowadays gender archaeology incorporates a plurality of approaches, some based on intersectionality (Meskell, 1999) and embodiment theory (Meskell and Joyce, 2003), others developed out of feminist scholarship but focusing on masculinity and its social constructions (Knapp, 1998). There is a light tension between those scholars who argue in favor of returning to more explicitly feminist agendas (Engelstad, 2007) and those who do not necessarily opt for them.
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Fig. 1 Illustration of an androcentric past for “Stereotype 20: There is no longer a need for dedicated gender archaeology”. After Coltofean-Arizancu et al. (2021: 48).
Sex and Gender Human sex designation relies on chromosomes, hormones, and sexual dimorphism. Chromosomal sex refers to the most typical presence of a XX chromosome combination for females and a XY chromosome combination for males. There are also intersex variations such as XXY, XYY, and XXYY with estimations of their prevalence ranging between 0.018% and 2% of live births (Geller, 2017: 45). Sex hormones play a major role in how the human morphology develops during and after puberty. In processes of sex development, differences between the chromosomal sex and its morphological expressions can occur. Sexual dimorphism can be observed in average bone lengths and body heights for men and women, even though short men and tall women in relation to the average exist in any population. When archaeology is concerned, most osteologists focus on specific traits in the skull and pelvis and score them on a five-part scale (see below). In our society we encounter individuals whose biological sex matches their gender (cis) and those whose biological sex does not match their gender (trans). Furthermore, femininity and masculinity are culturally relative social expressions and are not reserved to female or male bodies (Matic, 2022). Queer people challenge binarism in many ways (Jensen, 2009), and the heteropatriarchal binary sex-gender system (Foucault, 1978; Laqueur, 1990). Gender archaeology deals among else with this system’s history but also with other sex/gender systems. Compliance to gender norms is closely regulated through physical and symbolic violence (Matic and Jensen, 2017). We often witness homophobic outbursts of physical violence toward the LGBTQþ community or those individuals who are considered to be too feminine or too masculine for their sex/gender. Such acts of violence serve the purpose of showing which forms of gender behavior or identity are normative and which are not, and what are the consequences of transgression from these norms. This is how binarism as a norm is maintained. One subfield of archaeology known as queer archaeology especially deals with past and present norms of sex, gender, and sexuality, their transgressions and regulations (Dowson, 2000; Jensen, 2008, 2009; Matic, 2012). Thus, in the early 2000s, gender archaeologists increasingly started dealing with sexuality as a separate category of identity not necessarily coming out of gender differences. Much in the tradition of Foucault (1978), archaeologists started thinking about genealogy of sexuality in different societies, its connection to power and ideology (Schmidt and Voss, 2000). Modern perceptions of sexuality emerged in the 19th century. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are considered as distinct sexual natures only from approximately 1870 onward (Foucault, 1978; Gilchrist, 1999: 56). In contrast to our modern human sex designations, rich historical and ethnographic data inform us on societies which understood bodily differences in various ways and attributed them to gender norms accordingly. For example, for ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and experts on medicine, such as Greek physician Galen (ca. 129–216 AD), male and female reproductive organs were isomorphic. This means that the female genitals were considered to be an inverted version of the male genitals. According to Aristotle (ca. 322 BC), men produce sperm because of their overabundance of heat that cooks food and transforms it into sperm. Women have menstruation because their bodies are cold. The lack of heat prevents them from cooking sperm which leads to menstruation. This understanding of bodily difference led to various normative expectations from men and women. The
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culturally specific understanding of sexual difference based on heat also influenced beauty ideals, since, for example, a short penis with long foreskin was considered to be more attractive (Fig. 2) than a long penis or one with a short foreskin (Fig. 3). It was believed that sperm cools off by the time it leaves the body of a man with a longer penis (Algrain, 2022: 157–158). According to T. Laqueur, the isomorphic view of genitals in antiquity formed the so-called “one sex model” (Fig. 4), which was in use until the 17th century, after which it was replaced with our modern binary sex model (Laqueur, 1990). Ethnographic records of non-European societies provide other examples for a different understanding of sexual difference. Among the Hua of Papua New Guinea, individuals are classified as male or female, but their bodily fluids are believed to change over the lifetime, shifting the balance between masculinity and femininity (Gilchrist, 1999: 57). Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea men and women are believed to possess the same sex organs at birth. However, in order to develop gendered essences, they need to go through certain procedures. For a boy to achieve manhood (or warrior status, jerungdu), he must shed the female essence (blood) and gain the male essence (semen). This balance is acquired ritually through two actsdnose-bleeding and fellatio with tribal elders (Herdt, 1981, 2019). Among the Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel area in coastal southern California nonprocreative sexual activity was crucial for the identification of the ’aqi gender, linked to the undertaking of occupation. The ’aqi encompassed biological males who adopted some aspects of women’s clothing and work, but also post-menopausal women. The Chumash entrusted undertaking to individuals who were no longer (or never had been) capable of giving birth so that they and their offspring could not be symbolically polluted by the corpses they deal with (Hollimon, 2000: 181–182). Thus, in defining bodily differences, the Chumash did not focus so much on sexual but rather on reproductive dimorphism. In India, the hijra (Fig. 5) followers of the mother goddess are a mixed group of those born as visibly intersex, sexually impotent men who undergo castration and rarely non-menstruating women. Although appearing as women, they flout the conventions of Indian femininity (Nanda, 1999). Different ideas on sexual difference led to different ideas on social roles. Feminist philosopher J. Butler argued that the socio-constructivist model of pre-social sex and cultural gender positions sex outside of discourse and culture. She questions the accessibility of pre-discursive sex, since bodies are always already gendered from their entry into a society (Butler, 1990, 1993). We have seen this in the case of Greeks, Romans, Hua and Sambia of Papua New Guinea, hijras in India, and the Chumash in California, but one can also think of our proclamatory statements such as “it’s a boy” followed by attribution of baby blue blankets and later on toy cars and male action figure toys instead of pink blankets and Barbie dolls. Therefore, if having a certain sex means expressing it in a certain normative way, then sex is always already gender. Butler does not argue that sex and bodies are fictions, but that certain bodily features are chosen as central to sex. For example, if impregnation is a central difference between the male and the female, then this ignores the fact that not all women can be
Fig. 2 Two athletes competing in the pankration. Panathenaic amphora from Capua, made in Athens in 332–331 BC. One athlete has his penis visible and depicted according to ancient Greek beauty ideals. British Museum, London, Accession number GR 1873.8–20.370 (Cat. Vases B 610) (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pankration_panathenaic_amphora_BM_VaseB610.jpg).
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Fig. 3 Greek column krater. Side B shows two satyrs with erected phalli, National Archaeological Museum, Madrid, Accession number 1999/99/65 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crtera_tica_de_columnas_(M.A.N._1999-99-65)_01.jpg).
Fig. 4 The neck of the uterus (vagina) turned inside out, illustration from De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem of Dutch anatomist Andreas Vesalius from 1543, Book V, Fig. 26. After Sanders and O’Malley (1950, 171).
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A group of hijra in Bangladesh, February 7, 2010 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_group_of_Hijra_in_Bangladesh.jpg).
impregnated and not all men can impregnate for various reasons, one of them being old age (Butler, 1990, 1993). Just like the category of man and woman is defined through reproduction and intersex individuals are operated to fit into one of the two sexes, so do trans men and women transition by changing their bodies through the use of hormonal therapy and sex change medical procedures. Butler argued that it is heteronormativity that requires a binary sex/gender system in order to establish itself as natural (Butler, 1990, 1993). However, in past societies, sex was not as changeable as today. Although there have been different ways to understand sex in the past, they do not undermine the relevance of osteological ideas of sex for archaeology (Sofaer, 2006: 94–96) as sometimes assumed. This is important to stress in the context of the often misunderstood ideas of J. Butler. As we have seen, she did not conceptualize sex as “a volatile social construct” (Bolger, 2013: 6) as many archaeologists, including those dealing with gender, seem to think. When Butler and those who agree with her, including some archaeologists, argue that sex is constructed, they do not mean that it is not real. Rather, they highlight the arbitrariness of matter’s selection to constitute sex (Geller, 2017: 5). The question is how did our modern heteropatriarchal binary sex/gender system become so widespread? How come other ways of understanding bodily differences became a historical or ethnographic record? The answer lies in colonialism and the consequent enforcement of Western heteropatriarchy on different indigenous societies all over the world (for a summary of evidence from textual sources see Peakman, 2019; for archaeology see already Conkey and Spector, 1984: 19–20; and later Voss and Casella, 2012). “Coloniality of gender” describes the organization of gender in modern colonial gender systems (sexual dimorphism, patriarchy, and normative heterosexuality) and is concerned with how it crossed with race in colonial encounters, not so much replacing pre-colonial gender systems but producing new ones (Lugones, 2008). Montón-Subías (2018) studied the changes in gender and maintenance activities introduced by Jesuit missions in Guam (Mariana Islands). She argued that the Jesuits introduced new attitudes toward the body and nudity, maintenance activities, and gender relations. Archaeologically accessed materialities were crucial for these changes. Consequently, through colonialism, some gender identities ceased to exist. The Sambia system of sexual regulation was challenged and transformed by pacification, colonization, Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Christianity, and primary schooling in the Sambia Valley over a period of a few decades, 1974–2010 (Herdt, 2019). One further example are the amrads in Qajar Iran (1789– 1925), beardless young men with moustache line on their upper lip, who had sexual intercourse with adult men, expectedly being their passive partners. With the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), a modern heteronormative gender system inspired by the one of western Europe came in place of the old one. There was no place for amrads and many others in it (Papoli-Yazdi and Dezhamkhooy, 2021). The Spanish colonization in the Chumash region introduced Catholic burial programs which usurped the traditional responsibilities of the ’aqi and consequently disintegrated the guild (Hollimon, 2000: 191). Others, such as hijra in India, continue to exist under the same name but are now considered to occupy a position outside the social norms and desired behavior for men, leading a precarious life in a novel modern heteropatriarchal society in India (Jensen, 2008).
Gender and Mortuary Archaeology The mortuary archaeological record, or the remains of burials and cemeteries of past societies, is often the starting point of various gender research. Archaeologists have in the past (but some continue doing this to the present) attributed gender to buried individuals based on their own assumptions on which objects buried with the individuals were used or associated to which gender in a particular society (Conkey and Gero, 1991: 11; Díaz-Andreu, 2005: 38; Sofaer, 2006: 90, 101–102). In summary, the same
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stereotypical assumptions on gendered objects were made for different past societies, such as that weapons indicate that the buried individuals are men and that sewing needles, spindle whorls, or cosmetic utensils like mirrors or tweezers indicate that the buried individuals are women. However, just because certain activities are more or less gendered in one society does not mean that they are more or less gendered, and in the same way, in another society. For example, our modern heteronormative society expects men not to wear makeup because it is associated with women, femininity, or those men who do not comply with gender norms. However, in ancient Egypt wearing makeup was not gendered. Both men and women used makeup because it was simultaneously a cosmetic and a medical substance for treating various eye conditions (Capel and Markoe, 1996: 79). Therefore, finding cosmetic containers in ancient Egyptian burials does not necessarily indicate if the buried individual was a man or a woman (Fig. 6). Treherne (1995) demonstrated that a warrior’s beauty and identity in Bronze Age Europe, as represented in burials, did not rely only on the deposition of weaponry but also on association with cosmetic utensils. According to Treherne, the use of weapons, consumption of alcohol, and grooming were practices which constituted the identity of a Bronze Age European warrior. The valuable contribution of Treherne opened many important questions concerning the acquisition of such identity and its stability over time, such as due to aging or injury (Gilchrist, 1999: 66). Are all men buried with weaponry necessarily warriors? Were men who do not show markers of occupational stress related to the use of weaponry, in fact, men who were not warriors at all? Or were they men who simply died too early for such markers to form? Archaeologists closely dealing with gender insist that material culture buried in a grave should not be a priori gendered. Instead, there are several hotly debated theoretical and methodological strategies to tackle this problem (Gilchrist, 1999; Díaz-Andreu, 2005). The first is to attribute biological sex to the buried individual based on the following: 1. Genital sex if the soft tissue is preserved (Sofaer, 2006: 90), such as bodies buried in specific conditions such as dry desert conditions or permafrost, or mummified bodies artificially preserved through the use of different substances. 2. Morphological features of the skeleton with 97% accuracy, for example, the skull or pelvis-reflecting functional differences between the male and female body concerning childbirth. However, sex determination of immature skeletons remains complex and less reliable (Sofaer, 2006: 91). 3. DNA preserved in human bones; it does not play a limited role in archaeology anymore as argued almost two decades ago (Sofaer, 2006: 91). 4. The identification of sex-specific peptides in dental enamel, with accuracy also for immature skeletons (Rebay-Salisbury et al., 2020). The methods summarized above provide us only with the following very specific information: 1. If the individual had a penis or a vagina, or if they had ambiguous genitalia. 2. If the individual shows more masculine or feminine features within the studied population. Thus, osteoarchaeologists or physical anthropologists often classify the skeletal remains (pelvic bones and crania) as typical male, probable male, sex unknown, probable female and typical female. Some populations display a higher degree of dimorphism than others (Sofaer, 2006: 92). 3. If the individual had chromosomes typical for a male (XY), a female (XX), or any of the intersex variations (XXY, XYY and XXYY).
Fig. 6 Cosmetic box of the royal butler Kemeni, ca. 1805 B.C. reign of pharaoh Amenemhat IV, with a mirror and cosmetic vessels inside, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Accession Number: 26.7.1438 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/543955).
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4. If the individual had AMELY-specific peptide sequences (male individuals) or AMELX-specific peptides (present in both male and female individuals). The methods summarized above do not inform us about the hormonal status of the buried individual. The skeletal implications of various chromosomal, gonadal, endocrinal, and phenotypic differences including Klinefelter syndrome (47XXY), Turner syndrome (45XO), and Testicular Feminization syndrome (46XY) are still insufficiently clear. This problem is paired with the small number of people born with such bodies (Sofaer, 2006: 92). Furthermore, based on these results alone we cannot say anything about what it meant to be an individual with a penis, vagina, ambiguous genitals, more feminine or more masculine skeletal morphology, or one combination of chromosomes or the other (Hays-Gilpin and Whitley, 1998: 4). In order to answer this question, archaeologists turn to a comparison of the results of the analyses summarized above and the objects buried with the analyzed individuals. They find or do not find patterns indicating that only one group or another was buried with specific objects or an assemblage of objects. Comparing this with the information on the bodily features of the buried, archaeologists extrapolate that groups with one bodily feature or another could have been buried with one object (assemblage) or another. Based on this, archaeologists would make the next step and argue that some activities or the use of some objects was gendered or not, and in which way. In doing this, they make the interpretative step in which gender is assumed to be the specific connection between bodily features of some individuals and the objects found with them in graves, and that this same connection was present during their lifetime. There are several problems with this procedure. First is that the dead are buried by the community of the living, and that the dead did not necessarily have to belong to this community. Second is that some objects could be used by different people during their lifetime but would not be associated with them in different contexts, such as their death and burial (Gilchrist, 1999: 36). A good example of this is provided by the ancient Egyptian association of mirrors and makeup containers almost exclusively with women in tomb iconography (Fig. 7), although we know that both men and women used these objects during their life time and that both men and women were buried with them. Therefore, we are dealing with a culturally specific norm that regulated which gender was depicted and therefore visually associated to which object that was used in daily life. Archaeologists working with past societies that left textual and visual sources can benefit a lot from these, since they can compare these pieces of evidence to that from the mortuary record. Furthermore, the same objects can have different usage by different groups. The aforementioned ’aqi of the Chumash used regular digging sticks and
Fig. 7 Stela of Dedu, ca. 2000–1952 BC with his wife Sitsobek holding a mirror, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Accession Number: 16.10.333 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544346).
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baskets, but for undertaking business, whereas the Chumash women used them for agriculture (Hollimon, 2000: 192). Those archaeologists working on societies which did not leave such sources are limited to the archaeological record. J. Sofaer pointed to another important aspect of gender in mortuary archaeology dealing with skeletal remains from burials. Gender specific expectations and bodily modifications, such as the Chinese tradition of foot-binding women (Fig. 8) lead to deformation of the foot bones. Such practices are skeletal expressions of gender (Sofaer, 2006: 105). Although such cases are not as common, it is important to stress that many activities leave visible traces on the bones over time and that these activities can be differently gendered in various cultures (Gilchrist, 1999: 43). For example, when infanticide affects more girls than boys in a past society such as Viking Scandinavia, this tells us a lot about gender in a specific social context (Wicker, 1998). Every now and then archaeologists publish a study in which they present the case of a burial in which the individual is buried in a way or with objects which are usually not buried with individuals who have the same bodily features as them (see examples above). Such cases are considered to be “unusual combinations” which may reveal “additional gender or non-gendered roles or other life circumstances that may enhance or diminish the expression of sex and gender in death” (Nelson and Rosen-Ayalon, 2002: 6). These individuals are then variously interpreted as: 1. Transgressing the gender norms (for criticism see Matic, 2012; Geller, 2017: 11–12). 2. Belonging to a third gender and therefore providing evidence for a non-binary sex/gender system of the society which buried them (for criticism see Moral de Eusebio, 2016). More often than not, archaeologists imply that such individuals were also some kind of ritual specialists or high status individuals of their community (for criticism see Jensen, 2008; Matic, 2012). However, not all studies fall into the traps outlined above. S. E. Hollimon cautiously suggested that two burials of males could have been burials of the members of the ’aqi guild. Since ’aqi used digging-sticks and baskets for their undertaking profession, Hollimon suggested that the association of both with two male burials out of several hundred from Santa Cruz Island could be an indication that these two were ’aqi. One of them also showed a pattern of spinal arthritis characteristic of females (Hollimon, 2000: 189). Some individuals take on gender specific tasks of the opposite sex/gender by dressing and acting out in the manner of the opposite gender but without changing sex. In the Balkans, into the early 20th century, in the cases where there was no male heir, girls would be raised as boys (Gilchrist, 1999: 58). One famous example of an individual of one gender who actively took on a social role usually occupied by the individuals of the opposite gender is female pharaoh Hatshepsut (ca. 1479–1458 BC). She first depicted herself as a woman wearing royal insignia of power, for example, a crown or a nemes headcloth worn by pharaohs only (Fig. 9).
Fig. 8 A Chinese golden lily foot. Photo by Lai Afong, ca. 1870s (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Chinese_Golden_Lily_Foot,_Lai_ Afong,_c1870s.jpg).
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Fig. 9 Seated statue of female pharaoh Hatshepsut, ca. 1479–1458 BCE depicting her as a woman wearing the nemes-royal headcloth, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Accession Number: 29.3.2 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544450).
Soon after, Hatshepsut started depicting herself as a man, distinguishable as woman through the addition of her name and titles in feminine gender to her representations as the pharaoh-man. Therefore, rather than seeing these acts as a change in gender, we should interpret them in the context of rulership. Far more than adopting manliness, Hatshepsut took over the rule of the pharaoh with all of his sacred and secular duties. This meant being depicted in a specific manner in temple contexts, without necessarily implying that she dressed as a man rather than simply wearing the crown usually worn by men (Matic, 2016).
Gender and Settlement Archaeology Unlike mortuary archaeology, which besides all of its limits still has great potential for the reconstruction of at least some aspects of past gender systems, when settlement archaeology is concerned, we are pushing our possibilities to their limits. When they study different forms of past settlements (temporary or long-term, built using light or more durable materials etc.) archaeologists more often than not do not find human remains in them. The possible exceptions are cases of settlement abandonments and the remains of those people who for various reasons did not manage to get to safety (e.g., Pompeii) or settlements of those societies which buried all or some of their dead inside (e.g., under house floors or in courtyards of the houses like during the Second Intermediate Period, 1650–1550 BC, in Tell el-Dabca, eastern Delta in Egypt). Therefore, settlement archaeology deals with remains of human activities in an even more indirect manner than mortuary archaeology. Consequently, before rigorous analyses of the available data, these people should remain genderless, not meaning that they did not have gender, but that before analyses, we cannot claim anything on the gender system of those people. They are indeed what R. Tringham called “faceless blobs.” Furthermore, before analyses, we cannot claim anything on the gender of people behind the activities that left traces in the archaeological record. We first face the challenge of reconstructing the exact type of activity behind the archaeological record. This is not self-evident, and more often than not, archaeologists cannot even make it beyond this first step. The next step, which concerns gender, is investigating who was behind the activity we claim left its trace in the archaeological record. To answer this question, archaeologists can use different theories and methods, all with their own specific limitations. Archaeologists working on societies which left a rich textual and iconographic record can use the data from this record to form an interpretative basis which they can then use to assign the above mentioned activities to very specific people or groups of people. Based on the evidence from the textual and iconographic sources, this people or groups of people could have been more or less gendered. For example, in ancient Egypt, based on textual and iconographic evidence (Fig. 10), potters were mostly men (Capel and Markoe, 1996: 15).
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Fig. 10 Statue of an Old Kingdom (ca. 2686–2181 BCE) potter from the tomb of the official Ny-kau-Inpu (fifth or sixth Dynasty) at Giza (https://oi. uchicago.edu/collections/highlights/highlights-collection-tools).
However, the main limit of this method is that it ultimately relies on evidence which could have been biased for different reasons. For example, although certain activities could have been conducted by different people, only people of specific identity are attested in textual or iconographic sources as bearers of these activities. Thus, we can imagine that in ancient Egypt women and children of both genders contributed in different ways to pottery production without being potters themselves. However, without finding ways to investigate this assumption, it remains only in the imaginative realm. The context of textual and iconographic sources is as important as the archaeological context of material remains. More often than not ancient texts and representations are ideologically framed. Another method used to make the leap from the interpretation of the activities behind the archaeological record to the interpretation of those behind these activities is ethnoarchaeology. This implies an archaeologically triggered and informed observation of contemporary communities in their various activities and looking at which material traces these activities leave and how. Based on the results of these observations, archaeologists make comparisons to the archaeological record and extrapolate assumptions. One such assumption concerns the identity of the people behind the archaeological record and the ethnoarchaeological record based on the idea that, due to their similarity (analogy), both records result from the same or similar activity (Gilchrist, 1999: 39). More often than not it is argued that ethnoarchaeological data is more useful for archaeological interpretations of past societies which lived in the same place as the often much later ethnographic community under study. The underlying assumption is that either tradition, or similar or the same life conditions, make past and present communities closer or more similar. There are many problems with such assumptions, one being the assumed long-term continuity (Gilchrist, 1999: 39). By uncritically accepting gender roles attested in the ethnographic record as having long history, we risk collapsing and homogenizing the very variability we find compelling (Conkey and Spector, 1984: 3; Conkey and Gero, 1991: 18). Last but not the least, one should mention certain novel and currently debated methods. One of them is attribution of sex to fingerprints on archaeological remains, primarily pottery. This method implies that the epidermal ridge density differs in men and women. Based on the results, archaeologists are able to break the often-encountered stereotypes on the gender of the people behind certain activities such as pottery production. For example, Sanders (2015) studied 106 fingerprints on sherds from Tell Leilan in northeastern Syria and demonstrated that from 3400 to 1700 BC, one can observe a discrete change in the sex ratio of potters. Therefore, put in the context of settlement archaeology, the results of such investigations can prove to be useful for the gendering of activities and potentially also spaces in which they took place. However, this method is still under development and is not without problems (for example the shrinkage of pottery due to firing, or the usage of epidermal ridge density data based on measurements from modern individuals).
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Gender and Representations Numerous studies of gender in the past rely on visual representations (cave paintings, figurines, pottery decoration, vase paintings, wall paintings from houses or tombs, temple reliefs, etc.). Yates (1993) studied Bronze Age rock art on the west coast of Sweden on some 2500 individual panels at 2000 sites. He cross-referenced the presence and absence of weapons with four groups divided according to the physical characteristics of depicted figures, such as the penis, exaggerated calf muscles, exaggerated hands and/ or fingers, horned helmets, and long hair. According to Yates, armed phallic figures are twice as common as non-phallic, and non-phallic figures are four times as likely not to be shown armed. Furthermore, armed phallic figures are constantly depicted on a larger scale. He argued against interpreting figures without phalli as women because of the lack of female sexual characteristics. Instead, he pleaded for a division between male sexual identity and ambivalence. According to Yates, male sexuality in Bronze Age Scandinavia was not an inherent feature of the body, but was acquired (Yates, 1993). Yates imagined this process of acquiring male sexual identity in a similar manner to the Sambia of Papua New Guinea discussed above. Although his proposal that male sexuality could have been acquired, like it was in the Sambia society, remains an assumption (Yates, 1993: 57), he established iconographic patterns which are quite indicative of the close connection between warriors and phalli. Inspired by the work of J. Butler, B. Alberti argued that the sex/gender split sometimes blocks potential different interpretations. He discussed figurative imagery from Late Minoan Knossos and argued that since bodies were rarely shown with what we understand as physical sexual characteristics, this means that they were not differentiated based on sex and that genitalia were not central to body identity (Alberti, 2005: 108). Alberti argued that a single body shape found in different media is hourglass with broad shoulders, narrow waists, and broad hips. Clothing, body color, and position were used to distinguish different figures. He argued that female dresses with exposed breasts indicate that breasts and clothing in combination are mutually productive of a particular idea of the body (Fig. 11). The undressed ivory figurines with no explicit depictions of sex according to Alberti represent “the normal body of the Knossiansunsexed, unclothed with an hourglass shape” (Alberti, 2005: 117). However, in this Alberti neglects the difference in hairstyles with parallels in fresco paintings indicating clear differences between men and women. There are numerous reasons for a society not to depict genitals, as demonstrated by Robins (2008) in her study of elite New Kingdom Egyptian (ca. 1550–1070 BC) tomb representations of clothed high-status men, clothed high-status women (but with indicated sex features) and nude men of the lower classes. Also, as demonstrated by F. Frankovic (2022), the fact that differentiation of skin color for men and women in the Late Bronze Age Aegean is found also in representations of children, and that figures of different skin color can be found wearing the same clothing, does not favor the non-binary gender as argued by Alberti (2005: 117). Rather, it is an indication of different genders sharing the same occupations.
Fig. 11 Minoan “Snake Goddess” figurine, from the palace of Knossos, Heraklion Archaeological Museum (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: %CE%98%CE%B5%CE%AC_%CF%84%CF%89%CE%BD_%CE%8C%CF%86%CE%B5%CF%89%CE%BD_6393_(cropped).JPG).
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The work of gender archaeologists on past representations of bodies was in some cases (Perry and Joyce, 2001) inspired by the notion of gender being normalized through performativity, a notion J. Butler introduced to describe how people act out what is expected for a normative gender and thus naturalize and empower the gender norms with each act (Butler, 1993). However, Butler’s theory of gender performativity, although crucial for gender studies and archaeology, remains a concept which can, in archaeology at least, easily lose itself in circular argumentation.
Gender and Museums Museums are one of the key means of communicating the results of archaeological research to the broader public. Ultimately, museum exhibitions and reconstructions of past life through mutual associations of different objects, dioramas, accompanying texts, images, and videos more often than not communicate ideas on gender in past societies. Since museums disseminate knowledge and have the power to form attitudes and public opinion on certain topics (gender included), it is of crucial importance to critically deal with museum exhibitions and the ideas they communicate (Dowson, 2000: 162–165). Very often these ideas are not really thought through and are uninformed by archaeological research. Only rarely do museum exhibitions challenge stereotypes and biased assumptions coming from our own gender norms and expectations (ColtofeanArizancu et al., 2021). For example, the Swedish History Museum-Historiska asks the visitors if all families today consist of a father, a mother, and children, and since this is not the case, if all the families in the past looked like this?
Summary and Future Directions Nowadays, gender archaeology is a well-established field with its own founding texts, handbooks, organizations, and conferences, especially in the global West (Western Europe, the UK, USA, and Australia). The Archaeology and Gender in Europe (AGE) community (https://www.archaeology-gender-europe.org/index.html) of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) counts almost one hundred members from different countries in the world and regularly organizes gender themed sessions at the annual meetings of the EAA (Palincas¸, 2021). German FemArc (https://www.femarc.de) is a network of women working in archaeology with a strong feminist and gender archaeology research focus, publishing in the series Frauen–Forschung–Archäologie or Women–Research– Archaeology. However, despite its significance, gender research in archaeology is rarely found in the so called leading high impact peer-reviewed journals from the 1980s to the present (as analyzed a decade ago, Back Danielsson, 2012). The frustration with the lack of acknowledgment of gender studies in archaeology and its under-represented state (Bolger, 2013: 4) is shared by many. However, it has to be stressed that underrepresentation of gender studies in archaeology, paired with still prevalent stereotypes on gender (Coltofean-Arizancu et al., 2021), actually can be explained by the fact that the heteropatriarchal society from which archaeologists come does not have much interest in historicizing past and present gender relations. This is because such historicizing has the potential to disrupt both patriarchy and heteronormativity (Geller, 2017: 10). Furthermore, although gender archaeology is not limited to the mentioned Western centers of knowledge production, and indeed can be found elsewhere, there are some countries in which gender archaeology, in its form of critical, research informed, and reflexive dealing with gender in past societies, simply does not exist (e.g., Balkan countries, where gender focused research occupies only a handful of scholars, or Iran; Papoli-Yazdi and Dezhamkooy, 2021). There are various reasons for this. Gender archaeology is often associated to the rise of interpretive or postprocessual archaeology, but the simple tripartite paradigm shift culture historical-processual-postprocessual archaeology is not observed in all archaeological communities. Furthermore, gender studies in general are in some countries considered to be products of “Western neoliberal” ideology which is supposedly endangering so-called traditional social values, very often understood as Christian heteropatriarchal values. In such political climates, where gender and feminist studies are either unwelcomed or banned, there is also no place for gender archaeology. Therefore, gender archaeology is public archaeology or it is nothing! It needs to be critical toward such simplistic and populist right-wing propaganda by demonstrating argumentatively the richness and diversity of past and present gender experiences, positions, norms, and identities. Since the early days of gender archaeology, there has been an insistence that gender is embedded in other cultural and historical facets of identity such as status, class, race (defined as a socio-cultural construct), and ethnicity (Conkey and Gero, 1991: 9). Gender is not static but changes over the course of life, with these changes being different in different societies (Sofaer, 2006: 100). It seems that the concept of intersectionality, which describes identities which are crosscut by multiple variables, gender being only one of many, did not find its way in prehistoric gender studies at large (Bolger, 2013: 11), whereas it is more common in historical archaeologies (Geller, 2017; Matic, 2021). This is surely due to the fact that prehistoric archaeologists are limited in their possibilities to study ethnicity and class in the lack of textual sources. When the latter is concerned, the additional problem is the reluctance to acknowledge the possibility of the existence of class in prehistory. There are many future directions gender archaeology might go and some of them are shortly sketched here. Gender and queer archaeologies should benefit from the results of scientific analyses, e.g., ancient DNA, like in the case study of a Viking intersex individual (Moilanen et al., 2022) or from stable isotope analyses. Archaeologists could use these analyses to write better informed interpretations of what it might have meant to have a specific gender in the past. Gender archaeology can also significantly inform the currently hotly debated ontological turn, New Materialist and posthumanist archaeologies. For example, gender archaeologists
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Fig. 12 The Dupljaja Cart, Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000/1900–1600 BCE), National Museum in Belgrade, Serbia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/1/16/Chariot_from_Dupljaja2C_Serbia2C_c.1300_BC_28Bronze_Age29.jpg).
can explore how nonhuman actants in the past are gendered and how different materialities come together in historically contingent sex or gender specific assemblages (Matic, 2018a,b). The ontological turn, just like postprocessual archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s, urges us to seriously rethink the categories we use to analyze past societies, gender being one of them. As demonstrated by Viveiros de Castro (2015: 252), different ontologies can even produce different gender systems. For example, in Amazonia, the existence of a third gender is closely related to the master code of Amerindian cosmologies-difference in species rather than difference in gender. In such a context, the shaman, as an individual who can cross species boundaries, has a form of a third gender. This is because it is necessary for the shaman to embody both males and females of different species in order to represent and cross the ontological categories as wholes. Sometimes sexual differences observed in other-than-human beings play a crucial role in the explanation of certain human gender positions. This is for example the case with the famous Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000/1900– 1600 BCE) Dupljaja cart from Serbia (Fig. 12). The clay cart pulled by two male ducks (Anas platyrhynchos) carries a bird headed human figurine wearing bodily ornaments worn by humans of different genders in these communities. Furthermore, just as the penises of male ducks are usually not visible in nature, so are the male genitals of the figurine modeled under its dress. They cannot be seen unless the figurine is lifted and turned around. The sexual differences among the ducks and their observations and interpretations were crucial for gendering the bird-human figurine in the Dupljaja cart (Matic, 2010: 143). This is just one of the examples of the reconfigurations of anatomy in Middle to Late Bronze Age Lower Danube (Palincas¸, 2010). Last but not least, gender archaeology could engage more closely with the Anthropocene debate, which found its way to archaeology too. It can explore whether or not certain gender systems such as heteropatriarchy were some of the crucial factors paving the historical way we have taken, that ultimately led us to the pending global climate catastrophe. Feminist archaeology can tackle the Anthropos behind Anthropocene by stressing the gender asymmetry of power which is in its roots (cf. Henriksen, 2023).
See Also: Feminist Archaeology; Gender and Heritage; Identity and Power; Post-Processual Archaeology.
References Alberti, Benjamin, 2005. Bodies in prehistory: Beyond the sex/gender split. In: Funari, Pedro Paulo, Zarankin, Andrés, Stovel, Emily (Eds.), Global Archaeological Theory. Contextual Voices and Contemporary Thoughts. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, pp. 107–120. Algrain, Isabelle, 2022. Gender, perfume and society in ancient Athens. In: Matic, Uros (Ed.), Beautiful Bodies. Gender and Corporeal Aesthetics in Past Societies. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 153–176. Back Danielsson, Ing-Marie, 2012. Much Ado about nothing? Gender research in journals during the last 30 Years within archaeology. In: Back Danielsson, Ing-Marie, Thedéen, Susanne (Eds.), To Tender Gender. The Past and Futures of Gender Research in Archaeology. Stockholm University, Stockholm, pp. 17–32. Bolger, Diane, 2013. Introduction: Gender prehistorydThe story so far. In: Bolger, Diane (Ed.), A Companion to Gender Prehistory. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–20. Butler, Judith, 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, London. Butler, Judith, 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. Routledge, London. Capel, Anne K., Markoe, Glenn (Eds.), 1996. Mistress of the House, Mistress of the Heaven: Women in Ancient Egypt. Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati. Coltofean-Arizancu, Laura, Gaydarska, Bisserka, Matic, Uros (Eds.), 2021. Gender Stereotypes in Archaeology. A Short Reflection in Image and Text. Sidestone Press, Leiden. Conkey, Margaret W., Spector, Janet D., 1984. Archaeology and the study of gender. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theor. 7, 1–38.
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Conkey, Margaret W., Gero, Joan M., 1991. Tensions, pluralities, and engendering archaeology: An introduction to women and prehistory. In: Gero, Joan M., Conkey, Margaret W. (Eds.), Engendering Archaeology. Women and Prehistory. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 3–30. Díaz-Andreu, Margarita, Sørensen, Marie Louis Stig (Eds.), 1998. Excavating Women: A History of Women in European Archaeology. Routledge, London. Díaz-Andreu, Margarita, 2005. Gender identity. In: Díaz-Andreu, Margarita, Lucy, Sam, Babic, Stasa, Edwards, David N. (Eds.), Archaeology of Identity: Approaches to Gender, Age, Status, Ethnicity and Religion. Routledge, London, pp. 13–42. Dowson, Thomas, 2000. Why queer archaeology? An introduction. World Archaeol. 32, 161–165. Engelstad, Erika, 2007. Much more than gender. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 14, 217–234. Foucault, Michel, 1978. The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. Pantheon Books, New York. Frankovic, Filip, 2022. Fresco, fresco on the wall. changes in ideals of beauty in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. In: Matic, Uros (Ed.), Beautiful Bodies: Gender and Corporeal Aesthetics in the Past. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 119–152. Geller, Pamela, 2017. The Bioarchaeology of Socio-sexual Lives. Queering Common Sense About Sex, Gender and Sexuality. Routledge, London. Gero, Joan M., Conkey, Margaret W. (Eds.), 1991. Engendering Archaeology. Women and Prehistory. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Gilchrist, Roberta, 1999. Gender and Archaeology. Contesting the Past. Routledge, London. Hays-Gilpin, Kelley, Whitley, David S., 1998. Introduction: Gendering the Past. In: Hays-Gilpin, Kelley, Whitley, David S. (Eds.), Reader in Gender Archaeology. Routledge, London, pp. 3–10. Gilchrist, Roberta, 2023. Theological Anthropology in the Anthropocene: Reconsidering Human Agency and its Limits. Springer, Cham. Herdt, Gilbert, 1981. Guardians of the Flutes. University of Chicago Press, New York. Herdt, Gilbert, 2019. Intimate consumption and new sexual subjects among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. Oceania 89, 36–67. Hollimon, Sandra E., 2000. Archaeology of the ’aqi: Gender and sexuality in prehistoric Chumash society. In: Schmidt, Robert A., Voss, Barbara L. (Eds.), Archaeologies of Sexuality. Routledge, London, pp. 179–196. Jensen, Bo, 2008. Queer bedfellows: Gender. Ambiguity, shamans, hijras, “Berdache” and the problems of using ethnographic record. In: Jensen, Peter, Sindbaek, Søren, Helle, Vandkidle (Eds.), Globalization, Identity, Material Culture and Archaeology. Proceedings From the IX Nordic TAG. Århus, Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics. Århus universitet, Århus, pp. 25–29. Jensen, Bo, 2009. Rude tools and material difference. Queer theory, ANT and materiality: An under-explored intersection? Grad. J. Soc. Sci. 6, 42–71. Knapp, A. Bernard, 1998. Boys will be boys: Masculinist approaches to a gendered archaeology. In: Hays-Gilpin, Kelley, Whitley, David S. (Eds.), Reader in Gender Archaeology. Routledge, London, pp. 365–373. Laqueur, Thomas, 1990. Making Sex. Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Lugones, Maria, 2008. The coloniality of gender. Worlds Knowl. Otherwise 2, 1–17. Matic, Uros, 2010. Dupljajska kolica i tela koja nesto znace. Genero. Casopis za feministicku teoriju i studije kulture, pp. 129–159. Matic, Uros, 2012. To queer or not to queer? That is the question: Sex/gender, prestige and burial no. 10 on the Mokrin necropolis. Dacia NS LVI 169–185. Matic, Uros, 2016. (De)queering Hatshepsut: Binary bind in archaeology of Egypt and kingship beyond the corporeal. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 23, 810–831. Matic, Uros, 2018a. The sap of life: Materiality and sex in the divine birth legend of Hatshepsut and Amenhotep III. In: Lemos, Renan, Velloza, Carolina, Meynart, Érika (Eds.), Perspectives on Materiality in Ancient Egypt-Agency, Cultural Reproduction and Change. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 35–54. Matic, Uros, 2018b. Ägyptische Gottheiten und ars erotica: Ein Versuch der ontologischen Anthropologie erotischen Netzwerken im alten Ägypten. In: Verbovsek, Alexandra, Backes, Burkhard, Aschmoneit, Jan (Eds.), Funktion/en: Materielle Kultur – Sprache – Religion: Beiträge des siebten Berliner Arbeitskreises Junge Aegyptologie (BAJA 7) 2.12.– 4.12.2016. Göttinger Orientforschungen 4, Ägypten 64. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, pp. 141–160. Matic, Uros, 2021. Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt. Routledge, London. Matic, Uros (Ed.), 2022. Beautiful Bodies. Gender and Corporeal Aesthetics in the Past. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Matic, Uros, Jensen, Bo (Eds.), 2017. Archaeologies of Gender and Violence. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Meskell, Lynn, 1999. Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class Etcetra in Ancient Egypt. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Meskell, Lynn, Joyce, Rosemary A., 2003. Embodied Lives: Figuring Ancient Maya and Egyptian Experience. Routledge, London. Moilanen, Ulla, Kirkinen, Tuija, Saari, Nelli-Johanna, Rohrlach, Adam B., Krause, Johannes, Onkamo, Päivi, Salmela, Elina, 2022. A woman with a Sword? Weapon grave at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki, Finland. Eur. J. Archaeol. 25, 42–60. Montón-Subías, Sandra, 2018. Gender, missions, and maintenance activities in the early modern globalization: Guam 1668–98. Int. J. Hist. Archaeol. 23, 404–429. Moral de Eusebio, Enrique, 2016. Queerying sex, gender and sexuality in archaeology: A critique of the “third” and other sexual categories. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 23, 788–809. Nanda, Serena, 1999. Indian Hijras as Neither Man Nor Woman, second ed. Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, CA. Nelson, Sarah M., Rosen-Ayalon, Myriam, 2002. Introduction. In: Nelson, Sarah M., Rosen-Ayalon, Myriam (Eds.), In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, pp. 1–8. Palincas¸, Nona, 2010. Reconfiguring anatomy: Ceramics, cremation and cosmology in the late Bronze age in the lower Danube. In: Rebay-Salisbury, Katharina, Sørensen, Marie Louise Stig, Hughes, Jessica (Eds.), Body Parts and Bodies Whole: Changing Relations and Meanings. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 72–88. Palincas¸, Nona, 2021. Archaeology and Gender in Europe (AGE)dA working community of the EAA: The first ten years (2008–2018). In: Gutsmiedl-Schümann, Doris, Helmbrecht, Michaela, Kranzbühler, Johanna (Eds.), Feministische Perspektiven auf Gender und Archäologie. Beiträge der Tagung zum 25-jährigen Bestehen von FemArc – Netzwerk archäologisch arbeitender Frauen e.V. Frauen-Forschung-Archäologie 14, 122. Waxmann, Münster, p. 91. Papoli-Yazdi, Leila, Dezhamkooy, Maryam, 2021. Homogenization, Gender and Everyday Life in Pre- and Trans-modern Iran: An Archaeological Reading. Waxmann, Münster. Peakman, Julie, 2019. Licentious Worlds. Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires. Reaktion Books, London. Perry, Elizabeth M., Joyce, Rosemary A., 2001. Providing a past for “bodies that matter”: Judith Butler’s impact on the archaeology of gender. Int. J. Sex. Gend. Stud. 6, 63–76. Rebay-Salisbury, Katharina, et al., 2020. Child murder in the early Bronze age: Proteomic sex identification of a cold case from Schleinbach, Austria. Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 12, 265. Robins, Gay, 2008. Male bodies and the construction of masculinity in new kingdom art. In: D’Auria, Sue H. (Ed.), Servant of Mut. Studies in Honor of Richard A. Fazzini. Brill, Leiden, pp. 208–215. Rubin, Gayle, 1975. The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex. In: Reiter, Rayna (Ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women. Monthly Review Press, New York, pp. 157–210. Sanders, Akiva, 2015. Fingerprints, sex, state, and the organization of the Tell Leilan ceramic industry. J. Archaeol. Sci. 57, 223–238. Sanders, John B. de C.M., OMalley, Charles D.O., 1950. From the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels. The World Publishing Company, Toronto. Schmidt, Robert A., Voss, Barbara L. (Eds.), 2000. Archaeologies of Sexuality. Routledge, London. Sofaer, Joanna, 2006. The Body as Material Culture. A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sørensen, Marie Louise Stig, 2000. Gender Archaeology. Polity Press, Cambridge. Treherne, Paul, 1995. The warrior’s beauty: The masculine body and self-identity in Bronze-Age Europe. J. Eur. Archaeol. 3, 105–144. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 2015. Relative Native. Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. HAU Books, Chicago.
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Voss, Barbara L., Casella, Eleanor Conlin (Eds.), 2012. The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wicker, Nancy L., 1998. Selective female infanticide as partial explanation for the dearth of women in Viking Age Scandinavia. In: Guy, Halsall (Ed.), Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, pp. 205–221. Yates, Tim, 1993. Frameworks for an archaeology of the body. In: Tilley, Christopher (Ed.), Interpretative Archaeology. Berg, Oxford, pp. 31–72.
Relevant Websites Archaeology and Gender in Europe (AGE). https://www.archaeology-gender-europe.org/index.html. FemArc-Network of Women working in Archaeology in Germany. https://www.femarc.de/en/. Queer Archaeology. https://queerarchaeology.com. TrowelBlazers. https://trowelblazers.com.
Interpretive Art and Archaeology John H. Jameson*, United States National Park Service, International Committee on Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites (ICIP), ICOMOS, Savannah, GA, United States © 2024 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Art and Imagery as Public Interpretation and Education Tools in Archaeology Archaeology and Interpretive Art Utilitarian Versus Aesthetic in Archaeological Public Interpretation Archaeology as a Catalyst for Human Inspiration and Interpretation Facilitating Connections to Values and Meanings The Power of Artistic Rendering Symposium at the 2022 European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting in Budapest Published Volume “Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts” Fifth World Archaeological Congress (WAC 5) Session Archaeological Interpretation and Environmental Art Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Archaeology has inspired artistic expression in unique and interesting ways Environmental art has allowed archaeologists to understand and appreciate objects, sites, and cultural landscapes in new ways Three-dimensional artifacts are often seen as works of art If we want more effective and inspirational appreciation of archaeology, we need to produce inspirational imagery and stories based on archaeological and historical facts
Glossary Aesthetic art Art forms that are produced for recreational or pleasurable purposes or are perceived to possess recreational or pleasurable qualities or values. Environmental art Art that demonstrates a relationship with nature. The setting for these works is often a mixture of natural or cultural landscape elements. Interpretive art In cultural heritage and archaeological interpretation, interpretive art is any art form used to explore the interpretive potential of cognitive imagery that cultural and archaeological information and objects can inspire. In this sense, it is used to create opportunities for visitors to sites and exhibits to form their own intellectual and emotional connections to the meanings and significance of archaeological information and the people and events that created them. Interpretive narrative archaeology A narrative approach in presenting and interpreting data being employed by an increasing number of archaeologists in the USA and worldwide. It is sometimes described as “storytelling,” presented in the third person, and, less commonly, in the first person. Its goal is to make the results of archaeological research more relevant and meaningful to the members of the public in whose interests such work is undertaken. In other cases, it is a first person attempt to personalize, contextualize, and demystify the research process. More than just “telling the story,” interpretive narrative archaeology serves to place interpretation at the center of the archaeological endeavor. Participatory interpretive intervention Two types of participatory interpretive intervention are available to audiences. Both result in expanded cultural narratives. “Physical intervention” produces traditional onsite discussion, interaction, and feedback, such as displayed archaeological objects and public monuments. “Digital intervention,” on the other hand, enables a more democratic and widely accessible method of intervention, encouraging, creating, changing, and enhancing audience participation, changing engagement, and empowerment. Today, through participatory digital technologies and other forms of
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social media, individuals and the public can, beyond physical intervention, influence what gets remembered and how it is commemorated, interpreted, and preserved. The intersections of dissent and translational storytelling through digital media can therefore disrupt traditional narratives of the past (Jameson et al., 2024). Public art Art created in any media that has been planned and executed with the intention of being located or staged in the public domain, often in an outdoor and readily accessible setting. The term is also applied to art forms that are exhibited in public spaces and publicly accessible buildings. Public art is not confined to physical objects in that art forms such as music, dance, and poetry have proponents that specialize in public art. Utilitarian art Art forms that reflect the necessities of life.
Abstract In the 21st century, the intersection of interpretive art and archaeology has become an important topic among cultural heritage specialists and now occupies an established niche within the archaeology lexicon. This entry discusses ways in which art has been used as a public interpretation and education tool, as well as examples where archaeology and archaeological information and objects have inspired artistic expression in unique and interesting ways, expanding and adding to our understanding about the value of archaeology. Experiments in environmental art are important enhancements to archaeology’s traditional role of analyzing and interpreting evidence from material culture and the natural environment, enabling archaeologists and non-archaeologists to gain a greater understanding and appreciation for the environment. Threedimensional artifacts are often seen as works of art, and their artistic rendering gives them power for a variety of possible interpretations and impressions. The expanding literature on archaeology-to-art relationships involves a wide array of cultural object associations such as sculpture, interpretation of archaeology through contemporary art, archaeology and dance, archaeology and folk art, and many others. Art/archaeology interactive experiences are changing public interpretive perceptions, adding evocative dimensions to meanings derived from art as well as the meanings and values associated with material culture within local communities and wider belief systems. Contemporary art and contemporary archaeology are moving beyond traditional unilinear paths, creating a foundation for future collaborative engagements with critical thinking about our present and future worlds.
Introduction Archaeology is an indispensable tool in the construction, elaboration, and interpretation of the past. Viewed as a sub-discipline of anthropology, with obvious philosophical links to such fields as history and cultural geography, archaeology uses material cultural and other vestiges of the past, such as artifacts and historical accounts, to refine, expand, and update our knowledge of mankind’s history as well as cultural and physical development. Archaeological methods are used in scientific investigations of past human behavior to produce more accurate historical accounts and interpretations, helping us to understand the relevance and importance of the present as well as the past. Our studies of the past are creations of the present defined by social relationships and values of the present. In recent years, an enhanced and expanded attention to educational and community-based archaeology and inclusiveness has helped focus the public eye on the importance and relevance of archaeology in preserving and protecting multicultural values for diverse audiences. As an interdisciplinary field of study that investigates the past by finding and analyzing evidence from material culture within a contextual and natural fabric, with a focus on predicting human behavior, archaeology has long attempted to recognize and define “artistic” objects and their associated values. The early history of archaeology as an academic field in the United States was influenced by the Victorian preoccupation with classical antiquity in both the old and new worlds, coupled with emerging ethnological concepts that concentrated on Native American cultures. These factors helped to create a philosophical and theoretical framework for early American archaeology in the 19th century that attracted scholars from the academic fields of history, classical studies, the fledgling field of anthropology, as well as the art world. Although archaeological method and theory in the 20th century were expanded and transformed, drawing heavily from the physical and social sciences, the philosophical and conceptual links to the study of art have persisted to the present day. Archaeological objects can be seen as both expressions of larger cultural traditions and as tied to individual people who have their own idiosyncratic desires, experiences, and understandings, and use art and material culture partly to know and express themselves, and partly to negotiate and confirm their positions in larger social and political fabrics. Materiality is understood as corporeality first and foremost, both of ourselves as inquiring subjects and of our objects of inquiry (Hadji, 2015).
Overview and Key Issues Art and Imagery as Public Interpretation and Education Tools in Archaeology Archaeology and Interpretive Art The practice of archaeology, as well as archaeologically derived information and objects, can inspire a wide variety of artistic expressions ranging from straightforward computer-generated reconstructions and traditional artists’ conceptions to other art forms such
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as 2- and 3-dimensional art, public sculpture, poetry, music, opera, theatrical performance, and storytelling. Although some level of conjecture will always be present in these works, they may be no less conjectural than technical interpretations and have the benefit of providing visual and conceptual metaphors that can communicate context, setting, and resource significance in compelling, novel, diverse, and unique ways. Moreover, reciprocity emerges: art practices of the present can critically inform archaeological interpretation, in more aspects than the practice of art or “art” in the past. The creditability and relevance of this theme is enhanced by the observation that archaeology and heritage have a long shared history with art. Recent initiatives within and outside academia have probed into the interactive relationships between archaeology and the arts. For example, at University College London (UCL), the Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network (AHA) provides opportunities for outward-facing projects under the auspices of both the Institute of Archaeology and the Slade School of Fine Art. A key goal of AHA is to open up new and innovative ways of thinking about and researching the past and future in the present through greater engagement across these disciplines. AHA explores the varied ways in which archaeology, heritage, and art converge across a broad range of concepts and practices (UCL, 2023). Since at least the 1990s, archaeologists, interpretive specialists and educators worldwide have increasingly collaborated to interpret archaeology and cultural heritage more effectively. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, public interpretation practitioners use their knowledge and skills to create opportunities for the public to form intellectual and inspirational connections to the meanings and significance of the archaeological materials and the peoples who created them. Increasingly, they have come to appreciate the value and power of artistic expression in helping to convey archaeological information to the public and giving it new meaning. What we have termed “interpretive art” has been used successfully in paintings, drawings, posters, teaching guides, reports, popular histories, and Web presentations as ways of engaging, informing, and inspiring the public about the value of archaeology. Interpretive messages and associated meanings can be delivered through divergent artistic expressions such as two-dimensional oil paintings, three-dimensional exhibits, public sculpture, and popular history writing. Successful programs utilize techniques that both inform and entertain. The goals are to connect, engage, inform, and inspire. Both government and private archaeologists in North America and elsewhere, in outreach and public interpretation efforts, have enlisted painters, writers, and other artists to produce artistic works with the goal of complementing and helping to explain the archaeological record, while also engaging, entertaining, and inspiring the audience. Interpretive oil paintings and other evidence-based artist renderings also help dispel false or stereotypic imagery by offering an alternative, more plausible scenario. Aesthetically pleasing paintings can attract and engage while also serving a number of other interpretive objectives such as supplying detailed information and carrying conservation, commemorative, or metaphorical messages (Figs. 1e3). Some parallels to this team-oriented interpretive strategy can be drawn from recent developments in the realm of so-called “dinosaur art” where expert paleontologists have learned to work cooperatively with dinosaur artistsdto work with the artists rather than to dismiss what the experts perceive as inaccurate depictions stemming from the public’s fascination with these fantastically large, powerful, and grotesque creatures. As with archaeology, the public’s attraction to dinosaurs does not usually spring from a scientific source. The paleontologist’s inability to say what dinosaurs really looked like has no power to drive away inaccurate icons. Media-savvy paleontologists have learned to wait to publicize a dinosaur discovery until they have a commissioned painting of the creature to show. They have learned that, by working with the artist, the experts can at least inform the public about what is known. The artists usually want to be as accurate as possible because doing so lends credence and prestige to their work. Most dinosaur images today, including those depicted in television and movies, are guided by hard data, though hard data can only be a starting point. We believe that archaeologists should likewise take advantage of the public’s natural curiosity in working with artists to create images grounded in hard datadannouncing new discoveries and new interpretationsdeven if this is just a starting point, as with dinosaur art. History well told makes a compelling story. In producing popular accounts rooted in historical and archaeological research, archaeologists have partnered with artists and writers to produce works that reflect dramatic and skillful writing as well as accurate information. Popular writers of cultural resource themes can tell stories inspired by archaeology that are appealing because of the nature of the material and because of the way the story is told. They are interpreters who contribute not only to the aesthetic expressions of art, but also to human understanding and increased knowledge.
Utilitarian Versus Aesthetic in Archaeological Public Interpretation Public interpretation of archaeology involves methodologies associated with conveying factual and stimulating explanatory information to the lay public. The popularity of its products and programs reflects a growing public awareness of the importance of archaeology and the ways in which the past is represented, including the inherent value of understanding imagery both from and of the past. Art is something created by humans that is evocative; it is more than symbolism or simple representation. It causes the viewer to feel something: anger, joy, sadness, fear, energy, violence, tranquility, loneliness, awe. It causes the viewer to think. It makes a social or cultural statement. It makes us see humor where we have not seen it before. It places us in settings and moods that we have not yet encountered. It allows us to experience something in a new way. It is much more and different than mimicry. Art can do many things to us at the same time. An artist shows imaginative skills in arrangement or execution. Rendering an aesthetically pleasing effect is rendering an altered nature or an altered material world. Aristotle in the 4th century BC wrote that this modification of nature and objects produces two types of art: utilitarian art that is necessary for life, and pleasurable or aesthetic art that is produced for recreation. Art in the latter
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Fig. 1 Example of interpretive art for a public awareness poster with a conservation/protection message. Courtesy, Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service. Oil painting by Martin Pate.
sense is the conscious use of skill and creative imagination in the production of aesthetic objects. However, the classification of objects as art is cultural, subjective, and at times, controversial. Archaeologists have had a long-standing interest in art and the relationship of archaeology and art. Today, we can find university curricula that teach archaeological approaches to the study of art that are distinct from those of the other disciplines that study art. Here, “archaeology of art” takes an anthropological approach that often challenges Euro-centric and traditional Western interpretations. Archaeologists are increasingly examining how archaeological information is communicated in national parks and museums; by popular literature, film, television, music, various multi-media formats, and its overall effectiveness. We want to explore the potential of cognitive imagery that springs from an association with archaeology and its attempts to reconstruct past lifeways. We want to know how certain interpretive methodologies, in various settings, using certain media formats, can contribute to both public and professional understanding of human history. Aesthetic art has been in our own culture and in cultures around the world since recorded history, yet archaeologists rarely ask questions about aesthetics in their research designs, but rather have concentrated on utilitarian explanations. Although the aesthetic qualities of things are sometimes acknowledged in archaeological literature, they are rarely discussed. This strategy has not only been convenient, but perhaps partially justified if one assumes, as some have, that the purpose for aesthetic art is lost with an unrecorded culture. However, if only unsatisfactory utilitarian reasons can be found to justify an artifact and its attributes, then the motive for its being or creation must be aesthetic. Perhaps it is time for archaeologists to address and relate to aesthetic art forms that have been as important in all cultures as ways of showing imaginative skills more earnestly. We pose the question: Might an emphasis on aesthetic qualities also be an important element in the interpretation of the past? Perhaps more accurate interpretations would be rendered, and apparent theoretical contradictions in the archaeological record explained, if the aesthetic arts are more fully considered.
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Fig. 2 Example of interpretive art used in a commemorative poster. Courtesy, Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service. Oil painting by Martin Pate.
Archaeologists have long been at a loss, beyond utilitarianism, to explain the remarkable skill levels and apparent “artistic” attributes in many varieties of Paleo-Indian creations, including cave paintings and projectile points and tools. The knowable dimensions of a given culture are inversely proportional to its remoteness in time. More hard data is available as we come to more recent time periods and thus a less speculative starting point for the interpretive artist as well as the technical experts. As a result, it is difficult for an archaeologist to define or differentiate between utilitarian and aesthetic art forms in ancient cultures. The Paleolithic cave paintings in southern France were created over 30,000 years ago. However, the lack of knowledge of the culture seriously impedes the archaeologist from defining functional aspects of these images. In contrast, the Folsom projectile point manufactured approximately 10,000 years ago in North America has the obvious utilitarian art form of piercing and cutting in the food gathering process. With a paucity of observable material culture, are we left only with subjective or logical explanations? Do the “flutes” on the PaleoIndian projectile represent a pleasurable or aesthetic art form in addition to its utilitarian function? Those of us familiar with Paleo-Indian traditions often do not consider these examples of stone craftsmanship to be works of aesthetic art. Others, however, speculate that they may represent some kind of ceremonial function, possibly within the realm of magic or religion. But these are vague speculations at best. We suspect that some utilitarian objects through time and culture change are embellished or elaborated, sometimes to a point where the original utilitarian forms are barely, if at all, recognizable. We observe what appears to be a combination of aesthetic and utilitarian attributes, and this combination has occurred across all timelines.
Archaeology as a Catalyst for Human Inspiration and Interpretation Facilitating Connections to Values and Meanings As noted above, a great variety of values and meanings are derived from the archaeological discipline. These connections broaden the significance and relevance of archaeology for scholars as well as the general public. They reflect an inductive approach in defining and explaining archaeologically derived information and making it meaningful to the public. An emphasis on using artistic expression in interpretations is consistent with a new direction in archaeological practice that challenges the positivist paradigm of processual archaeology and promotes the relevance and validity of inductive reasoning over deductive reasoning (Jameson, 2020a,b).
The Power of Artistic Rendering Another dimension to the discussion is the consideration that three dimensional artifacts are often seen as works of art, and that their artistic rendering gives them power for a variety of possible interpretations and impressions (Jameson et al., 2024). For example, in regard to statuary monuments, an important motif for conflict commemoration has been the heroic figure on horseback, where the exalted figure is mounted on a horse that symbolizes strength, swiftness, majestic beauty, and dedication. For example, in 2019, in Richmond, Virginia, an African American sculptor erected a statue on horseback that mimics, replete with modern clothing, the classic “heroic” Confederate figure of JEB Stuart (Fig. 4), in the classic pose of the equestrian warrior in antiquity. In this case, the counter narrative of the African American “Rumors of War” statue by artist Kehinde Wiley provides an officially recognized counter narrative to the nearby Confederate statue. “Rumors of War” is a bronze monumental equestrian statue of an
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Fig. 3 Example of interpretive art with a metaphorical message about historical archaeology and the components of research, coupled with public interpretation. Courtesy, Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service. Oil painting by Martin Pate. A
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Fig. 4 Statuary depictions of heroic figures on horseback, left to right: (A) Alexander the Great figurine; (B) British General James Outram, statue erected 1864, India; (C) Confederate General JEB Stuart, statue erected 1910, Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia; (D) The anti-JEB Stuart “Rumours of War,” statue installed in late 2019, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Arthur Ashe Blvd, Richmond, Virginia. Note the consistency in historical rendering of the figures-on-horseback motif.
African American youth wearing modern-styled dreadlocks in a ponytail, jeans ripped at the knees, and Nike high-top sneakers. It was created in response to the statue of Confederate General JEB Stuart, which is in turn based upon the statue of Sir James Outram by the British sculptor John Henry Foley which stands in Calcutta, India (Fig. 4), in Richmond, Virginia. “Rumors of War” was originally unveiled in September 2019, in New York’s Times Square. In December 2019, it traveled to its permanent home at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, at the head of Arthur Ashe Boulevard, where it was situated near a row of Confederate statues and monuments, including the statue of JEB Stuart [now removed], on the city’s Monument Avenue.
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These cases underline the universal dilemma of museums of art where the museum strives to impose as few barriers as possible between the visitors and their experience of art. In these instances, the art object plays a dual role reflecting differing sets of values; as an art piece, and as a place for transformation and reflection surrounding Jim Crow era Confederate commemoration.
Symposium at the 2022 European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting in Budapest A symposium entitled “Archaeology and the Arts: Seeing the ‘Art’ in Artifacts” examined more meaningful and effective processes of interpretation that emphasize public awareness, access, and inspiration. Papers illustrated the relationships between archaeological phenomena and artistic representation, i.e., how archaeology has inspired artistic expression, and, conversely, how artistic expression has affected the ways archaeology is carried out and perceived by the public. The session served as a cornerstone for developing an innovative book with a similar theme, entitled Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts (Jameson et al., 2003).
Published Volume “Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts” In Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts (2003), the authors explored a variety of outcomes stemming from the interplay of archaeological inquiry, observation, and certain artistic expressions, and how these can lead to more meaningful and effective approaches to interpretation that emphasize public awareness, access, and inspiration. The international contributors to Ancient Muses articulated their philosophical underpinnings by explaining the importance of the development of interpretive narrative archaeology and interpretive historical fiction that employ imaginative uses of arts such as storytelling and drama in making the past come alive for public audiences. For example, Ancient Muses describes how contemporary Native American groups such as Navaho and Hopi look to the rock art as inspiration from their ancestors and a renewed understanding of the timelessness of their culture. Similarly, Aboriginal people in Australia are described as using visual arts to establish and maintain connections with the world around them; beyond mere indicators of cultural interaction, rock art images are used to convey social and cultural information and provide visual cues for oral histories. An article on archaeology and poetry describes ways in which both the poet and the archaeologist “see” what is not so obvious; they both continually reinterpret inanimate objects or “things” that they try to explain or enable to “speak” to us about their meanings. A piece involving the screenplay for the film The English Patient portrays the translation of a “too perfect” novel into film and the process of transformation of text and image over time. Another article describes interpretive writing experiences that attempt to meet the challenge of breathing life into the findings of technically oriented archaeological reports. More fine-arts related discussions convey how a public sculptor was inspired by his exposure to archaeology and cultural history in creating public sculpture. A team composed of an archaeologist and a librettist tell an intriguing tale about how their interaction and collaboration produced an original, historically based libretto and eventually a full production opera.
Fifth World Archaeological Congress (WAC 5) Session Another forum for discussion of this topic was the Fifth World Archaeological Congress (WAC 5) in 2003. In this international forum, held in Washington, DC, examples and practices from artists and archaeologist/artists, and their interplay, were demonstrated to promote the relevance and validity of the deductive reasoning approach and a shift in how archaeologists plan and conduct research and evaluate significance. For example, Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, professes to be both an American Indian artist and an archaeologist: “I have always been Indian, and I have always been an artist . In examining the relationships between Indian art and archaeology, I believe I have found a unique personification . I wanted to talk about art, from the gut, from my experience as both an Indian artist of the Iowa tribe, and as an archaeologist.” David Middlebrook, a renowned sculptor from California, in an example of public art, explains: “What peeked my interest were the thirty-thousand-year-old cave paintings of southern France which I believe were the first signs of the intellectual revolution. I have incorporated these images into many of my large-scale public art pieces. In recent years, I have become one with the technical and esthetic challenges of combining natural materials with intellectual and emotional content. The engineering tension and balance is part and parcel with the intent and substance of the work” (Figs. 5 and 6). Johannes Kranz of the foundation “Casa de los Tres Mundos” in Nicaragua explained that a sculpture park composed of oversized copies of archaeologically recorded pre-Columbian artifacts has been molded to “give back a piece of history and identity to the people of a newly constructed village.” Here, an innovative educational and preservation initiative “serves as a model for joint efforts in community building, the strengthening of local identity and the challenge of preserving cultural heritage in similar projects throughout the world, particularly in underdeveloped countries.” Christine Finn, also co-editor and contributor to the Ancient Muses book, discussed “Figures in a Landscape”: Jacquetta Hawkes’s 1953 film about the landscape sculpture of Barbara Hepworth. In the 1920s and 1930s, Barbara Hepworth was one of a small group of pioneering sculptors in London committed to exploring abstraction. By the early 1930s, she had developed her mature style: a sensuous kind of organic abstraction, sometimes incorporating strings, wires, colored paint, or holes piercing the sculpted form. Jacquetta Hawkes’ film about Barbara Hepworth was one of many works that had the goal of reminding archaeologists swept up in a frenzy of postwar scientific and theoretical advances of the human values of their profession. Hawkes’ work now begs reevaluation at a time when archaeologists are more aware of the need to communicate to the general public. In “Stratigraphy: Digging Living Layers,” Nicola Laneri, another contributor to Ancient Muses, described a multimedia art installation that represents an “excavation” of different ethnic “layers” in a New York City neighborhood. This archaeological excavation of a contemporaneous context was made by digging sounds, material culture and images of a dialogical discourse between the “conservation” of the Italian tradition, represented by the words of Rosa Morrone, the owner of an Italian bakery in East Harlem
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An example of David Middlebrook's public sculpture.
since the 1950s, and the neighborhood’s “innovative” facade, expressed by the words and work of the Puerto Rican painter-muralistchalker James DeLavega. The images and objects that form this project embody the diverse ethnicities (Italian, Puerto Rican, Mexican) now present in the neighborhood and how diverse forms of cultural interactions (peaceful and violent) between these groups have led to the re-creation of “new” material culture (for example espresso coffee made with an Italian Moka machine and Puerto Rican coffee, pizza prepared by Mexicans, Italian Madonna statues dressed with real hairdan Hispanic tradition– and worshipped by Asians) shared among all of these communities and re-made throughout the cultural, functional and ritual transformation of their values during the last century. In his paper “Sherds ABOVE the Loess: Historical Archaeology as Art,” David Orr (2003) contended that archaeological objects recovered from American historic sites, like those extracted from antiquity, possess an intrinsic aesthetic power far removed from their scientific or historic value. This paper addressed these origins and provided an approach to the utilization of historical archaeological objects and assemblages as “works of beauty” and worthy of a fine arts approach. This realization, he said, should give all of us a new perspective on the complex matrix of functions which historical archaeological material possess. An example was given that focused on a select group of early 18th century English slipware pottery found in one context in Philadelphia and how this assemblage could easily produce a very striking art historical/aesthetic exhibit. Yet, properly staged, such an aesthetically motivated exhibit of historical archaeological “treasures” would not be antithetical to American anthropologically driven archaeologists. In “From rock art to digital image: Archaeology and Art in Aboriginal Australia,” Claire Smith and Kirsten Brett (2003) explored the changing uses and meanings of Aboriginal arts from the Barunga-Wugularr region of the Northern Territory, Australia. The central theme here was the manner in which Aboriginal people use visual arts to establish and maintain connections with the world
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Detail of Middlebrook public sculpture showing prehistoric pictograph images.
around them. Rock art images are used to convey social and cultural information and provide visual cues for oral histories. When transferred into a digital format, they can form the basis for educational tools that effectively extend Indigenous forms of instruction.
Archaeological Interpretation and Environmental Art Generally speaking, environmental art is art that demonstrates a relationship with nature. The setting for these works is often a mixture of natural or cultural elements of landscape. Much environmental art is ephemeral, site-specific, and involves collaborations between artists and others such as scientists, educators, and community groups. It usually involves an interpretation of a natural form and is based on the premise that creating artwork informs humans about natural and environmental forces, issues, and processes. Environmental art “re-envisions our relationship to nature, proposing through the [artists’] work new ways for us to co-exist with our environment.” Seemingly taking their cues from the experimental archaeology model as well as environmental art, some archaeologists have explored participatory methods of interpretation where they attempt to experience and articulate new meanings and values for the past. In these contexts, the landscape is seen as not something to be copied, but as a primary source for the creation of work that is both artistic and interpretive. Its meaning and identity are not transferable to another location: the place is the work, and the work is the place. In these archaeological interpretation experiments with environmental art, the appreciation of the work becomes anchored in the landscape. By being both of the past and of the present, these archaeologists claim that the work enriches understanding of the multiplicity of meanings in a particular place and a particular landscape. Both practices of interpreting the past and producing art, they contend, result in the production of new meaning, transforming our understanding of place and space. In this case, art and archaeology act together dialectically to produce a novel conceptualization of the past that can appeal to different
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audiences in different ways and produce a means of relating to the past that is much more than the sum of its component parts (Bender et al., n.d.). In an intriguing example from Leskernick Hill on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, England, in the late 1990s, Bender et al. (n.d.) explore the conceptual links between producing landscape art works in the present and how this contributes to an understanding and interpretation of prehistoric lifeways. Initially, they experimented with writing. They opened up their interpretive text by juxtaposing diary entries with conventional prose, but eventually decided that they also needed to create more open-ended drawings and images, ones which were more subjective, full of question marks, and in some way more indicative of their various interpretative leaps, perspectives, and knowledge. To Bender and the other project archaeologists, art provided alternate ways of telling the story and expressing the “power” of stones on Leskernick Hill. They tried to capture what they perceived as a powerful sense of place that the rocks evoked through their inherent sculptural properties and positioning on the site and cultural landscape. They did not aspire to recreate the specific meanings that the stones had to the Bronze Age inhabitants of the site, but rather to propose a creative response to the physical setting and attributes of the cultural landscape. One of the many ways in which they explored this included physically transforming, and adding to the surface structures of the hill by wrapping the stones and “creating installations”:
One key response we had to the stones was to wrap them. In doing this, we were acknowledging and making tangible our actions within, reactions to, and interpretations of Leskernick’s stoney landscape, and the possible significance of these stones to its prehistoric inhabitants. The process of stone wrapping served to energise the stones with our ideas and thoughts . We wrapped stones of particular shapes: triangular, ‘whale-backed’, and pyramidal stones. These stones seemed to be of particular significance to the prehistoric inhabitants of the hill, being centrally positioned within the back walls of the houses, or sometimes having enclosure walls ’illogically’ incorporating them, and in the wider landscape of the settlement sometimes having cleared areas around them. Within the houses, we wrapped the back stones opposite the entrance ways that appeared to have a similar significance in terms of size, shape and dimensions.
. Both the materials used for wrapping (fabric during the 1996 field season; cling film and paint during the 1997 field season) and the colours produced striking effects and impacts on site. Wrapping with fabric curiously confounded the observer’s perception of depth and volume . Wrapping the stones with cling film altered and obscured surface texture but still preserved the shape. We regard shape as being a key element in the choice and arrangement of stones on the hill . Wrapping stones within cling film and highlighting them with paint we found was a particularly effective way of visually expressing the significance of these stones.
One of their goals was to find ways to make the archaeological recordings of the past, and otherwise their engagement with it, more three-dimensional. They consciously attempted to avoid nostalgia for a vanished past or an irrational mystical relationship to culture or nature. Their work did not aim at replication but in situ transformation, attempting to rework a sense of place into presentday consciousness. They also attempted to find a middle ground between the personal idiosyncratic approach to landscape characteristic of contemporary environmental artists and the disengaged and disinterested “objectivity” of visual representation in contemporary archaeology:
We are working on a hill in which a symbolic geography of place has been pre-constructed for us by its Bronze Age inhabitants. We are attempting to create a dialectic which mediates between it and ourselves, past and present. We engage with the stones through our bodies. We perceive Leskernick hill from within, not from looking at it as if in a painting. The meanings are a product of our encounter and participation and personal involvement creates perceptual intensity. The body is a constant in relation to a continuum of shapes and sizes and forms on the hill. An awareness and interpretation of the significance of different stones on the hill is ultimately a relationship between the body and the object. Our wrapped stones mark a place, they also mark a situation, an orientation, a relationship . For us, performing art is a process of engagement and enablement. It allows us to see the hill, its stones and the prehistoric architecture, in a new way. Through the visual transformation of the stones, they become solid metaphors linking our experience of place to the past. Wrapping stones is, in essence, to follow the lead already provided by them, it is to be objectively guided in which we attempt to emphasize the form and character of the stones and the particular properties they possess . Our art both aids us in interpreting the past in the present and can be appreciated, on another plane, as a contemporary cultural work. By both being of the past and of the present we would claim that it enriches our understanding of both in a recognition of the multiplicity of meanings in a particular place and a particular landscape. Bender et al. (n.d.)
Summary and Future Directions This entry has discussed ways where art has been used as public interpretation and education tools as well as examples of the reciprocal effect where archaeology and archaeological information and objects have inspired artistic expression in unique and interesting ways, expanding and adding to our understanding about the value of archaeology. Experiments in environmental art have allowed some archaeologists to understand, appreciate, and interpret objects, sites, and cultural landscapes in new and innovative ways. These artistic expressions are important enhancements to archaeology’s traditional roles of analyzing and interpreting evidence from material culture and the natural environment; they enable archaeologists as well as the public to gain a greater
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understanding and appreciation for the past. Another dimension to the discussion is the consideration that three dimensional artifacts are often seen as works of art, and their artistic rendering gives them power for a variety of possible interpretations and impressions. The preservation of archaeological sites and objects depends on the cooperation and interest of non-archaeologists who are most often the conveyors of archaeological knowledge to the lay public. In fact, the most effective presentations and the most inspirational experiences come about when archaeologists and non-archaeologists collaborate in a team approach. If we want more effective and inspirational appreciation of archaeology, we need to reach out to our communication partners: park interpreters, exhibit planners and designers, Web and social media designers, writers, poets, musicians, screenwriters, operatic composersdartisans of all typesdto produce inspirational imagery and stories based on archaeological and historical facts. The 2003 “Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts book (Jameson et al., 2003) examined a variety of examples of this approach that emphasize public awareness, access, and inspiration, as we were entering the 21st century. The book included examples from the US, UK, Central America, and Australia. This new interdisciplinary and multivocal phenomenondart inspired by archaeology and of archaeologists partnering with artists to create unique interpretationsdexamines the connections between archaeology and the arts that address modern intellectual and artistic interplay. As pointed out in this entry, recent initiatives within and outside academia have probed into the historical interactive relationships between archaeology and the arts. Present and future newcomers in the academic system, the professionals trained for the future, need to become acquainted with the new context of practicing archaeology as well as move beyond the outdated 19th c. by-product of modernism, the academic division of disciplines. It is especially relevant for students in the arts, performative and visual, to become aware of the relevance and the resonance of interpretive art and archaeology relationships. These relationships exist in the context of new developments and new understandings of the world as we approach the quarter-century mark of the 21st c. The creditability and significance of this topic is enhanced by the observation that archaeology and heritage have a long shared history with art (Jameson et al., 2003). One of the most contemporary aspects of archaeology in the post-postmodern context is the recognition of the fallacy of objectivity in archaeological interpretation. The intersection of art to archaeology presents a post-positivist, post-self-reflective context, where the interpretative is prioritized and multivocality is nourished. In the 21st century, the intersection of interpretive art and archaeology has become an important topic among cultural heritage specialists and now occupies an established niche within the archaeology lexicon (Jameson, 2000; Jameson et al., 2003; Bailey, 2017; Bailey et al., 2020; Farstadvoll, 2019; Frederick and Ireland, 2019; González-Ruibal, 2020; Russell, 2013; Thomas et al., 2018; Wall and Hale, 2020; Renfrew et al., 2004; Smiles and Moser, 2005). The existing literature explores examples of archaeology-to-art relationships involving a wide array of cultural objects and associations such as Cycladic sculpture, interpretation of archaeology through contemporary art, archaeological textiles, archaeology and dance, and archaeology and folk art. These interactive experiences are changing public interpretive perceptions, adding evocative dimensions to meanings derived from art as well as the meanings and values associated with material culture within local communities and wider belief systems. They demonstrate how contemporary art and contemporary archaeology are moving beyond the traditional unilinear ways in which these disciplines have traditionally interacted. The groundwork has been laid for future engagements with critical thinking about the world in the present and what this can lead to in the future.
See Also: Post-Processual Archaeology; Rock Art and Petroglyphs.
References Bailey, Doug, 2017. DisarticulatedRepurposedDisrupt: Art/Archaeology. Camb. Archaeol. J. 27, 691e701. Bailey, Doug, Sara, Navarro, Álaro Brito, Moreira (Eds.), 2020. Ineligible: A Disruption of Artefacts and Artistic Practice. International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, Santo Tirso. Bender, Barbara, Hamilton, Sue, Tilley, Christopher, n.d. Art and the Re-presentation of the Past. Adapted for the internet by Paul Basu. Farstadvoll, Stein, 2019. Vestigial matters: contemporary archaeology and hyperart. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 52, 1e19. Frederick, Ursula, Ireland, Tracy, 2019. “Last drinks at the Hibernian”: practice-led research into art and archaeology. Aust. Archaeol. 85, 279e294. González-Ruibal, Alfredo, 2020. Visual archaeologies: editorial introduction. J. Contemp. Archaeol. 7, 1e3. Hadji, Athena, 2015. (Dis)entangled bodies or the (be)holder vs. the spectator: detached views of Early Cycladic figures and figurines. Quat. Int. 405, 31e41. Jameson, John H., Baugher, Sherene, Veit, Richard (Eds.), 2024. Monuments, Memory, and Conflict: Layers of History and Meaning, Provocative and Silenced. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Jameson, John H., 2020a. Cultural heritage interpretation. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. Jameson, John H., 2020b. Cultural heritage presentation and interpretation. In: Jackson, John (Ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Oxford University Press, New York. Jameson Jr., John H., 2000. Public interpretation, education and outreach: the growing predominance in American archaeology. In: McManamon, Francis P., Hatton, Alf (Eds.), Cultural Resource Management in Contemporary Society, One World Archaeology 33. Routledge, London. Jameson Jr., John H., Ehrenhard, John E., Finn, Christine A., 2003. Introduction. In: Jameson Jr., John, H., Ehrenhard, John E., Finn, Christine A. (Eds.), Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, pp. 1e5. Renfrew, Colin, Gosden, Chris, DeMarrais, Elizabeth (Eds.), 2004. Substance, Memory, Display: Archaeology and Art. McDonald Institute, Cambridge. Russell, Ian Alden, 2013. The art of the past: before and after archaeology. In: Roelstraete, Dieter (Ed.), The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 296e313. Smiles, Sam, Moser, Stephanie (Eds.), 2005. Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image. Blackwell, Oxford. Thomas, Antonia, Lee, Daniel, Frederick, Ursula, White, Carolyn, 2018. Beyond art/archaeology: research and practice after the “creative turn”. J. Contemp. Archaeol. 4, 121e129.
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UCL, 2023. Archaeology-Heritage-Art Network. Institute of Archaeology, University College London. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/directory/archaeology-heritage-artnetwork. (Accessed 21 January 2023). Wall, Gina, Hale, Alex, 2020. Art and archaeology: uncomfortable archival landscapes. Int. J. Art Des. Educ. 39, 770e787.
Further Reading Finn, Christine, Henig, Martin, 2002. Outside Archaeology: Material Culture and Poetic Imagination. British Archaeological Reports (BAR) International, Oxford. Finn, Christine A., 2004. Past Poetic: Archaeology in the Poetry of WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney. Duckworth, London. Harrison, Thomas, 1998. Herodotus and the English Patient. Classics Ireland, vol. 5. University College Dublin, Dublin. Hyder, William D., 1998. Basketmaker spatial identity: rock art as culture and praxis. In: Faulstich, Paul (Ed.), International Rock Art Conference (IRAC) Proceedings, Volume 1: Rock Art as Visual Ecology. American Rock Art Research Association, Tucson, Arizona. Jameson Jr., John H., 1997. Introduction. In: Jameson Jr., John, H. (Eds.), Presenting Archaeology to the Public: Digging for Truths. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, pp. 11e20. Jameson Jr., John H., 2003. Art and imagery as public interpretation and education tools in archaeology. In: Jameson Jr., John H., Ehrenhard, John E., Finn, Christine A. (Eds.), Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, pp. 57e64. Jameson, John H., 2022. Archaeology and cultural heritage interpretation and presentation in North America, major trends. Interpreting World Heritage. UNESCO WHIPIC. Jameson Jr., John H., Baugher, Sherene, 2007. Public interpretation, outreach, and partnering: an introduction. In: Jameson Jr., John H., Baugher, Sherene (Eds.), Past Meets Present: Archaeologists Partnering With Museum Curators, Teachers, and Community Groups. Springer, New York. McCarthy, John P., 2003. More than just “telling the story”: interpretive narrative archaeology. In: Jameson Jr., John, H., Ehrenhard, John E., Finn, Christine A. (Eds.), Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, pp. 15e24. Molyneaux, Brian Leigh (Ed.), 1997. The Cultural Life of Images Visual Representation in Archaeology. Routledge, London. Renfrew, Colin, 2003. Figuring It Out: What Are We? Where Do We Come From? The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists. Thames and Hudson, London. Schrire, Carmel, 1995. Digging Through Darkness, Chronicles of an Archaeologist. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg.
Islamic Archaeology Katia Cytryn, The Institute of Archaeology and Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Islamic Antiquities and Archaeology The Partial Impact of Antiquity Laws The Emergence of Islamic Archaeology Key Issues The Islamization of the Conquered Lands Road Archaeology Muslim Religious Architecture and Mecca as the Unifying Focus of Cult Archaeology and the Literary Sources Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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The development of Islamic archaeology as a legitimate field among the other fields of archaeology and why it lagged behind The common ground among the large diversity of the field, given the many regions and many periods it covers The main topics covered by Islamic archaeology, and how they integrate multi-disciplinary research Principles for excellent and well-founded research in Islamic archaeology
Abstract Islamic archaeology deals with material finds dating from the time of the conquests in the 7th century up to the 19th century, in all areas under Muslim rule. From the outset this definition establishes the main difficulty in providing an encompassing survey of this generalizing term, given the regional variations of the landscapes, historical background, cultural, ethnical and religious composition of the populations, part of which also changed along this long time span. Nonetheless, the term “Islamic” brings together shared traits, which interest specialists in the field be them in the eastern or western lands of Islam. Some principal themes are presented in this entry, by means of archaeological finds from different areas of Islam, gathered both from past research but also from a growing bulk of fieldwork, which has become more easily available through new means of dissemination. Before delving into the various topics, some background on the formation of the discipline and some reasons for lagging behind other fields of archaeology are in order, especially to underline a still existing bias, based on ill-established stereotypes of the role of archaeology and of archaeologists.
Introduction To follow a literal and technical definition, the term “Islamic Archaeology” means the study of the regions characterized by Islamic culture, from the forming days of the Islamic world in the 630s, up to the chronological boundaries of “what is considered archaeology”din some countries extending to the 1700s, in others reaching the late 1800s. The complexity of the term “Islamic”, nevertheless, is its very encompassing nature, for it should be seen as neither an ethnic nor a religious one (for an in depth discussion on the concept of Islam and the various “Islams”, see Insoll, 1999). Islam, in the sense of the abode where Muslim society developed and ruled, first as a minority open to cultural influences in the various regions where it resided, and later as a conquering power spreading an eclectic culture, results in a very inclusive archaeology, dealing with various faiths and many regions in the Globe. In addition, a few fields in archaeology cover similar periods, despite being treated separately,
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such as Late Antique archaeology (which coincides with most of the transitional and early Islamic period) and Crusader archaeology (covering the 12th and 13th century) in areas were Faṭimids, Ayy ubids and Maml uks had only partial hold. Following the above, it should be agreed that trying to survey what Islamic Archaeology means for each region and each period in a single encyclopedic entry is an impossible task. Some general entries have been published in the past by Rosen-Ayalon (2006), Walmsley (2007), Milwright (2010) and others, and recently in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology, edited by Walker et al. (2020). For this reason, this entry highlights central topics, common in all areas that were at any stage under Islamic dominion, even though their local traditions permeated and helped creating unique forms of Islamic culture in each and every region.
Overview Islamic Antiquities and Archaeology Archaeology as a concept is fluid. Though literally “the scientific study of material remains (such as tools, pottery, jewelry, stone walls, and monuments) of past human life and activities,” as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionarydthe fact is that even the various Laws of Antiquities in the different countries have defined it differently. In general, the various laws do refer to the “movable and immovable” cultural objects of the past, yet the chronological limit changes. While in Jordan and Israel the year 1700/1750CE is the limit (though later constructions or objects, if attached to pre-1700 remains, are also protected), other countries have set a dynamic approach, considering a hundred e or two hundred e years, as a qualifier for remains to be considered as an antiquity. At least for the late Islamic periods, the varying approaches of the Law of Antiquities in the various countries relevant to our discussion created room for public and scholarly disregard to the late layers of sites and to surviving or partly surviving late Islamic buildings, as well as for the trade in objects. For many generations there has been a kind of bias against classifying Islamic antiquities as archaeology. Many would say that “it is not old enough”, or that “many of its buildings are still standing and not ruins.” In fact, scholarship has been even harsher to the field than the existing laws: it is enough to check the chronological range of many educational books to see they stop their surveys on the Arab conquests, maximum devoting a few pages to “what happened next”. Reasons for such an approach are various. Among them, the romantic view of the role of the archaeologist as that of clarifying the literary sources. In this vein, while the role of the Prehistorian and Biblical archaeologist is fully clear, that of the Classical and postClassical archaeologists, who work with a varying amount of literary evidence, is often viewed as a supplementary one, and not as the leading source of knowledge about past eras. Despite the above, there is little or no questioning regarding the role of the Classical (Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine) archaeologist, given the interest by European scholars on the past of the West, and of regions once controlled by, or interacting, with the West. That also explains the easier scholarly acceptance throughout the years of Crusader/Medieval archaeology, and even of Parthian and Sasanian archaeology. In fact, early Islamic archaeology has found its best acceptance by scholarship so-far through its use of the term “Late Antique”, which of course imbues a Classical perspective to the study of the new Islamic society. Another reason which has set Islamic archaeology aside from the others is that while Biblical (and parallel fields of archaeology such as Egyptology and Assyriology, for example) and Classical archaeology developed under Religion and/or Classical Studies, and Crusader archaeology sprang from Medieval Studies and was further legitimized by 19th-century colonialist feelings in European countries, Islamic archaeology was neither supported by religious passion, nor by geo-political interests. In fact, as M. Rosen-Ayalon wrote in her Islamic Art and Archaeology in Palestine (2006), archaeologists in Muslim countries, even after the respective colonial periods, were eager to expose the ancient link to their lands, and find self-definition in long-gone civilizations:
The various Muslim countries maintained a similar archaeological policy for several decades. There was a race to discover ancient civilizations: the Egypt of the Pharaohs, Hittite Turkey, Achaemenid Persia, as well as [Iraq’s] Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and [Lebanon’s] Phoenicia.
There are innumerous cases that could serve as examples of the outcome of such approach to Islamic archaeology throughout the years. For example, the many unfortunate cases of Islamic archaeology in Egypt, which were victim, even if unconsciously, of the infamous 19th-early 20th century activity of the sabakhın. As pointed out by Quickel and Williams (2016) and by Donald M. Bailey beforehand (1999), farmers who extracted the salty nitrogenous-rich layers of sibakh, naturally accumulated in mudbrick remains in archaeological sites and good for agriculture, in fact destroyed their upperdIslamicdlayers. In Fusṭaṭ, this activity happened even under archaeologist A. Bahgat, who consciously took advantage of the sabakhın during his excavations in 1912e1924, well aware of the layer’s value yet rather interested in museum pieces and not in the documentation of run-down remains of mudbrick construction and their associated layers. Islamic archaeology of this site only took shape once G.T. Scanlon and W.B. Kubiak started their project in the 1960s. To summarize what had happened almost until that time, and even the relatively “lucky” fate of Fusṭaṭ, it is worth quoting Kubiak in his seminal Al-Fustat: Its foundation and early urban development (1988, 29):
From the standpoint of archaeological research the site of al-Fustat was perhaps luckier than most other Egyptian mediaeval towns. For a long time it was a sad rule that whenever medieval remains overlay ancient sites and stood in the way of archaeologists looking for pharaonic remains they were recklessly removed with no records at all. With al-Fustat, this was not the case. The site did not promise to yield anything ancient and consequently was
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left alone. But because of its proximity to the capital and its suburb, Old Cairo, it has served since the abandonment of most of its quarters in the late eleventh century as a source of valuable building material.
Another well-known example is that of the upper layer in the area around the south Tetrapylon in Jarash, at the corner of which A. Walmsley and K. Damgaard eventually exposed in the 2000s an Umayyad mosque which survived at least into the 10th century (Walmsley and Damgaard, 2005). It was systematically removed in the 1920s and early 1930s, despite the importance of the site as a city of the Decapolis, and how much it could have contributed to our knowledge on the Islamization of classical cities. Same goes for the Ottoman layers of Athens (and Greek sites in general), until the change in the law in 2001dwhen finally it “included directly within the protection of the law . immovable cultural objects that date from up to 1830, all movables that date from up to 1453, and movables of the period 1454e1830 that are finds from excavations or other archaeological research or have been detached from immovable monuments, or consist of religious icons or liturgical objects” (Voudori, 2010, 553). The long-missing guidelines to what deserved to be preserved or not, and to the moral and lawful duty of any archaeologistdeven if interested in earlier periodsdto properly study the later layers, have determined a slow development of the field. Togetherdbias and lack of official protectiondfor many generations allowed the destruction of Islamic layers and the dumping of artifacts in the worst-case scenario, or shelving “for those interested in the future” in the best-case scenario. Digging, storing and publishing cost money, and for many years even the best archaeologists had to prioritize expenses, to focus on their research. Luckily this approach has mostly changed in the past 40 years or so, as gradually reflected in all channelsdin academia, in the field, and in the public reception.
The Partial Impact of Antiquity Laws In his entry from 1986 on the archaeology of Islamic Iran in Encyclopedia Iranica, R. Hillenbrand writes: It was not until the 1930s that the first group of major Islamic sites was dug (.); even then, the excavators were not primarily interested in the Islamic material that they uncovered, since the medieval period was well known from literary sources.
The change in approach apparently happened following the publication of the antiquities law by IChO (Iran Cultural Heritage Organization, now Iran Cultural Heritage, Handcrafts and Tourism Organization) in November 3rd, 1930, which expressly says in its first article: “Observing the Article 3 of this Law, all artifacts, buildings and places having been established before the end of Zandieh Dynasty era [1751e1974, KCS] in Iran, either movable or immovable, may be considered as national heritage of Iran and shall be protected under the State control.” Since May 1980, Iran has regulated as protected “antiquities and historical relics which are, according to international regulations, 100 years in age or more” (IChO Law from May 17th, 1980), though the amendment is not clear about the duty by the archaeologist in charge of exposure of research and publication. The ʿIraqi Law of Antiquities from 1958 also transpired the country’s approach to Islamic antiquities, creating a clear line between “ancient” and “Islamic”. Article 3 reads: “Inspection shall be carried out by an employee with the rank of specialist inspector or general inspector with experience in matters of administration, museology and archaeological research. He shall be directly linked to the Ministry of Education, Department of Archaeological Investigation Museumsdprovided that he cooperates in all technical matters with the Director Generaldengineers, archaeologists, draftsmen, specialists in ancient languages, ancient and Islamic antiquities, employees and their assistants.” Article 7 of chapter two of this Law (Antiquities Law no. 59 of 1936 with Amendments of 1974 and 1975), “Immovable Antiquities”, is of special interest for those dealing with Islamic archaeology, as it specifically addresses at least one of the categories of great importance to the fielddreligious architecture erected as waqf. It reads: Mosques, masjids, synagogues, churches, convents, monasteries and other ancient buildings, owned or constituted in Waqf, in the occupation of persons de facto or de jure whether registered in the Estate Registration or being of proved ownership or Waqf, either by legal deeds or by royal decrees, shall continue to be in the occupation of the owners or the guardian provided they are used for the purpose for which they have been built, subject to the supervision of the Antiquities Department from time to time. The owner or guardian thereof shall be responsible for carrying out any necessary preservation or repair worl. Should the guardian or owner prove to be incapable of doing so, the Department of Antiquities shall carry out the necessary preservation or repairs, provided that the owner or guardian abandon his right of occupation to that Department.
Despite all their shortcomings, the various laws of antiquities cannot be totally blamed for the slow development of the field of Islamic archaeology, or for the bias toward not seeing it as “ancient”. In fact, most sites and artifacts from Islamic periods are protected as antiquities according to the various laws’ chronological frame. These laws’ main fault, perhaps, was/is not imposing an equal scientific approach for all layers discovered. During the past decades, nevertheless, Islamic archaeology has been profiting from the rise of salvage excavations in many countries, e.g. Spain (see the case of Cordoba in León and Murillo (2014)), Kazakhstan (Dawkes and Dow, 2021) and Israel, just to list a few. Curiously, the latter is one of the most active countries these days in Islamic archaeology, despite still holding the old English Mandate chronological limit for antiquities as 1700, and despite the political and cultural background. The reason is the
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interpretation (as also happening in other countries) by Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) of the country’s Law on Antiquities from 1978, that land-developers or even private bodies intervening in an antiquity site (be it a declared one or newly found) are responsible for funding all archaeological activitiesdinspection, surveying, salvage excavations, preservation, study and publication of all findsdand from all layers. Considering the rich Islamic past of the country since the Arab conquest, the data added to Islamic archaeology since the early 1980s is notable, as is the rising number of specialists in Islamic archaeology within this governmental body, which also has adopted an active policy of encouraging their staff to pursue advanced studies in this very field. Together with the many academic-motivated digs of the past decades all over the countries which aredor once weredpart of the Islamic world, as well as with the increasing adoption of multidisciplinary research and modern technologies as in use in the other branches of archaeology, Islamic archaeology is not only an established field, but also a growing one.
The Emergence of Islamic Archaeology Various articles on Islamic Archaeology have focused on the history of the field and how it first developed in the turn of the 19th to the early 20th century (e.g. Petersen’s entry in Global Archaeology, 2014). Two paths are noteworthy: (1) the casual finding of important Islamic sites while looking for Biblical or Classical sites by religiously driven European archaeologists, such as the case of Khirbat al-Minya in the northwestern side of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, for example; and (2) the rising interest in Islamic material culture in Orientalist Europe, clearly expressed by the trade in antiquities, but also in the formation of museum collections. At the same time, the great interest in Oriental studiesdrepresented by the monumental work of Edward W. Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon which became the main instrument for translating Arabic to English; Max van Berchem’s Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum (Van Berchem, 1894), which discusses Arabic inscriptions within their historical and architectural context, Henri Sauvaire’s treatises on Islamic numismatics, and the growing corpus of translated Arabic literature, such as the new English translation of the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) by Edward W. Lane (and the uncensored version by Richard Francis Burton), as well as the famous translation from Persian of the Rubaʿiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, promoted a better understanding of this “exotic” culture. It is not a coincidence that among the first planned field works in Islamic archaeology is the excavation in Samarra, known from the sources as the temporary ʿAbbasid capital from 836 to 892. The archaeological works by Herzfeld, which started in the very beginning of the 20th century, exposed Samarra’s mosques and palaces, which suited the expectations of the West regarding Islamic art and architecture: many non-figurative stucco walls, varied glazed types of ceramics, unique architectural plans. Samarra’s helicoidal high minaretdthe Malwıyadbecame an icon of the “exotic” Islamic architecture, in particular for its reminiscence of the legendary shape of the Biblical Tower of Babel. Herzfeld’s, as well as Creswell’s some 30 years later, approach to Samarra’s archaeology has been discussed by A. Northedge in 1991, where he pointed out to what we would call today their missing holistic approach to the real nature of this immense archaeological site, which was achieved by that scholar almost a 100 years after Herzfeld’s first publications (Northedge, 2005). Quṣayr ʿAmra, perhaps the site which gave the first great impetus to the development of Islamic archaeology and the discussion of rooted biases in relation to Islamic art such as the lawfulness of figurative decoration, was found during Alois Musil archaeological survey of Arabia Petraea at the end of the 19th century. Once published in 1902, the surviving frescoes of this Umayyad bathhouse challenged views which believed Islamic art to be aniconic or at least non-realisticdmore in line with what was known from the stuccoes and ceramics from Samarra and the many artifacts which reached the markets. These frescoes not only present a wide range of figurative art, they also abound with nude and semi-nude depictions. They also display Classical themes which had permeated Arab culture even before the conquests, through cultural and commercial contacts between the Arabian Peninsula and the Greco-Roman world. Lately, following renewed restoration works, it has become clear that this building was erected by the grandchild of ʿAbd al-Malik, Walıd bin Yazıd, while still prince. K.A.C. Creswell’s opus Early Muslim Architecture, first published in 1932 in Oxford, best expresses the emerging scholarly interest in the field, and puts together not only his own architectural survey in Islamic countries, but also the various surveys and excavations which were taking place. At the same time, Orientalist Jean Sauvaget made great contributions, not only while engaged in field surveys in Syria during his duty as secretary of the Institut Français de Damas, but also once back in France. Sauvaget’s important works on the mosque of al-Madına (1947), in the city of Aleppo (1941), on the Maml uk royal mail/barıd and its relays (1941), on r published posthumously (1967) are, like Creswell’s works, still the foundation for historical and the Umayyad palaces/quṣu archaeological research on these fields. In addition, Sauvaget’s joint work with Étienne Combe and Gaston Wiet on the Répertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe was a natural continuation of van Berchem’s monumental CIA, still “alive” by the continuing online project directed by Ludvik Kalus Thesasurs d’épigraphie islamique under the auspices of Fondation Max van Berchem, Genève. Orientalist Leo Arieh Mayer, of Austro-Hungarian origin, emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1921 and started working at the Department of Antiquities until the 1930s, first in the field and then in the archives. He also left important contributions to the field of Islamic epigraphy, numismatics, architecture, but is most renowned for his Saracenic Heraldry which is still the main reference book for Maml uk emblems (rank). Yet, he should be remembered as one of the founding academics in the teaching of Islamic art and archaeology, having joined the first staff of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1929. Unfortunately, this specialization has remained out of the curricula of most academic institutions and institutes of archaeology worldwide until these days, reflecting issues addressed in the previous sections, hopefully in a process of change.
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Key Issues The prominent American archaeologist D. Whitcomb has rightly stressed in his entry “Archaeology” in the Encyclopedia of Islam (Third Edition): [t]he formidable difficulty of organising the vast panoply of Islamic regions was solved, literally, by al-Muqaddası [Jerusalemite geographer, KCS] in the late fourth/tenth century . His “best division” (Aḥsan al-taqasım fı maʿrifat al-aqalım) followed in part the ancient geographical Kulturkreise (culture spheres), each formulated to encircle a specified region, moving anticlockwise from a given starting point.
In his entry, Whitcomb ingeniously followed al-Muqaddası’s order of presentation, pinpointing the main archaeological works and topics for each of the regions. Starting from the Ḥijaz, where he stressed the growing knowledge about the local archaeology following works since the 1970s, he goes counterclockwise until he reaches the Maghrib. Then, similarly to the 10th century geographer’s path, he turns back to the Mashriq, and refers to the main sites in Transoxania, Iran, continues to sites at the Persian Gulf and finally advances south to the Arabian coast. It is thus redundant to repeat what Whitcomb has done so skillfully, especially as this archaeologist himself can be considered a “Muqaddası” of our times, as he has excavated sites in many of the very regions discussed by this geographerdIran, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Palestine and Egypt. It also does not seem relevant to discuss Islamic archaeology by dividing the entry into periods, as there would be a need for endless subdivisions, to try and tackle the many local dynasties and their dynamic changing borders. This entry chooses to adopt Insoll’s thematic approach in his groundbreaking monograph The Archaeology of Islam (focused on six main themesdthe mosque, the domestic environment, Muslim life, art trade and ideas, death and burial and the community environment), and treat three main topics as “case-studies,” mainly to show the nature and the ways the field developed. The three central themes are: the period of conquests and the Islamization of the landscape, the expressions of faith and interfaith relations (as seen in religious architecture) and road archaeology, which materializes the inherent nature of the culture, one of interconnections, search for knowledge, and duty of pilgrimage. Of course, it would have been beneficial to present further topics of importance: the use of Arabic as common language and the development of the various scripts; the introduction of new technologies e in construction (for example in Tiberias’ mosque, Cytryn, 2016), in water management and in agriculture (for southern Greater Syria see Avni, 2014); the introduction of new crops from the east as best learned from Andrew M. Watson in his Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (1983), which not only led to an agricultural revolution but also to a culinary one. Many lines could also be spent on a discussion on the globalization of taste in Islam, mainly from the 9th century onwards. This is expressed in many ways, pointing to close cultural contacts between the various regionsdinside and outside Islamdby means of diplomacy, trade and migration of peoples. Global trends are best seen in ceramics, as in the cases of the cream-color Buff Ware ceramics, plain or decorated White Glazed wares and of the Yellow and Green Splash Glazed ware, the latter still raising debate as to a possible Chinese influence though “the idea that classic Tang Sancai ware was exported to the Abbasid caliphate and imitated by Islamic splashed ware apparently lacks solid evidence unless new discoveries prove otherwise” (Wen, 2021), and a local development has long been argued. Since Fehérvari’s Ceramics of the Islamic World in the Tareq Rajab Museum (2000), an outstanding example of the change in approach with regards to the role of museum catalogs by engaging archaeological data to the various discussions, there have been many other publications on Islamic ceramics, still the most important tool for the field archaeologist. This entry could also plunge into the various modes of architectural decoration common to far-away centers, such as the use of similar glazed lustrous tiles in the 9th century palaces of Samarra and around the contemporary prayer niche of Qayrawan’s Aghlabı mosque, or the widespread use of stucco decoration both over brickwork and stonemasonry (already in vogue under the Umayyads), such as the examples once again from Samarra and those in Ibn Ṭ ul un’s mosque south of Cairo. A discussion on the similar bronze objects found in the shipwreck in Denia, Spain, and in the hoards in Caesarea and Tiberias in Israel, would doubtless add much depth to the point here being made. All the above topics, in addition to their intrinsic value, also act as dating tools and anchors for the archaeologist, and must be learned with care, thus the reader is referred to the many dedicated works published along the years.
The Islamization of the Conquered Lands Much attention has been given to sites which throw light on the transitional period after the Arab conquests in the various regions of Islam, and how the local societies coped with the newcomers. Social and landscape changes were a gradual process in all regions under Islam. This is best seen in the numismatics finds, in the epigraphic record (especially in the official inscriptions) and of course in the architecture and architectural decoration of the first centuries of Islam, which although deeply influenced by the local traditions, were the settings where a culture of “fusion” could be first experimented. The process of monetary change reached its maturity only some 60 years after the first conquests, with the so-called ʿAbd alMalik’s (r. 685e705) monetary reform in 77/696. For archaeologists, this means that coins are among the distinctive finds which
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help the specialist to define transitional layers. This gradual process of “Arabization” since the ceasing of influx of coins coming from rival lands, especially from Byzantium, and the creation of new mints following the new socio-political order, have been well summarized by Heidemann (1998) in his article “The Merger of Two Currency Zones in Early Islam.” He shows the parallel processes in Greater Syria/Bilad al-Sham and in the lands previously under Sassanian rule: from local imitations of the previous figural iconographydteaching about a pragmatic and also tolerant approach by the new rulersdthrough some experimental “Arabized” types (the “Standing caliph”, the “Orans” and the “Miḥrab and ʿAnazah”/“Sacrum” and Spear, on the latter see below)duntil the totally epigraphic type was introduced after the reform of 77/696. A similar process emerges from epigraphic finds. The Greek inscription from the baths of Ḥammat Gader in the Yarm uk valley, commemorating the refurbishing of the heating system by caliph Muʿawiya (r. 661e680) in 42/662, opens with a cross, spells the various Arabic names in phonetics, and dates the event by three different calendarsdthe hijrı, the local calendar of the colony (starting in 63 BCE) and the Byzantine Indiction (based on 15th-year taxation cycles). In addition, it makes clear that the overseer was a Christian from the nearby settlement of Gadera. This inscription is thus a clear witness to the ways the new government was in line with the continuation of the previous administrative order. As a fact, it was only sometime between the 660s and 690s that the previous delimitations of the Byzantine provinces were slightly changed and renamed as jund, pl. ajnad, and new regional capitals established. It is hard not to refer to the best surviving testimony of this formative period, which is the Dome of the Rock in the Ḥaram in Jerusalem, yet not the place to discuss its many aspects, especially as some might say [gratuitously] that this is not an archaeological discussion but rather an architectural one [and even if so, of fundamental knowledge to any archaeologist dealing with the period]. In any case, it is enough to remind its architectural reference to earlier Byzantine buildingsdespecially to the Holy Sepulchre and to the Kathisma church excavated on the way to Bethlehemdand the fusing of Classical and Sassanian motifs and compositions, creating a new intermixed decorative language. Together with the use of the angular Kufic script for its long original inscription, this building heralds a period when cultural (and material culture) changes started happening faster than before, as learned not only from standing or excavated buildings, but also from the new styles of pottery, glass and metal in the households (Walmsley, 2007, 48e70; see also Bonnéric, 2020 for a recent reassessment of the transitional late Sassanian-early Islamic pottery of al-Quṣ ur in Kuwait and the re-dating of the later phases of Christian monasteries in the Arab-Persian Gulf). The gradual changes reflect not only the encounter of the conquerors with the local populations, but also the impact of compulsory migration of peoples, who carried to the new lands their native customs and material culture, as well as technologies and even culinary habits. While some of this data comes down to us through the literary sources (e.g. the role by caliph Muʿawiya in introducing settlers to populate the Mediterranean coast, or him importing buffaloes and trainers to Greater Syria to improve land use, etc.). These are areas that archaeology is more able to address, through the facts on the ground, especially as most historical treatises dealing with the first two centuries of Islam date at least from the 9th century onwards, and thus are not contemporary accounts. While some sites well known from the historical recordsdstarting from Mecca and Madına, but mainly the new garrison cities ufa, Baṣra, Wasiṭ and Fusṭaṭdas well as some of the conquered cities such as Damascus and Qayrawandjust to (amṣar) such as K mention a few, do not necessarily allow us to delve into their first Islamic phases due to their continuous settlement, some, like Emmaus/Nicopolis in Israel for example, await a specialized Islamic archaeologist, who will focus on the layers and areas pertinent with the 7th century. In the case of ʿAmwas, who served shortly as the Muslim administrative capital on the road to Jerusalem, despite having been partially excavated, nothing is known about the material life of those soldiers stationed in this city, who tragically died by plague in 17e18/638e39, the memory of which is mainly expressed in the name of one of its wells: Biʾr al-Ṭaʿ un (The Well of the Plague) in the tomb of Muʿadh b. Jabal, one of the Companions of the Prophet and leading commander of the Muslim army (though believed to have died in one of the camps in Transjordan), and in the graves (single and mass graves) exposed by the Dominican Fathers L.-H. Vincent & F.-M. Abel between 1924 and 1930. Some recent worksdboth in central cities of Islam (this entry will not discuss the complex topic of what is “The Islamic City”), as well as in some smaller settlements, have nevertheless clarified some issues of importance regarding the 7th-8th centuries, which seem to reflect some general patterns. First and foremost, the repeating archaeological results leave little doubt that the Arab conquests were not a destructive and traumatic phenomenon leaving physical scarsdor to use the archaeological jargondthey did not leave clear destruction layers of ash and tumbled stones, as often expected in transitional periods marked by brutal conquests. Neither the material culture changed at once in any of the conquered regionsdmaking the task of the Islamic archaeologist a more meticulous and careful one. Such challenge is shared by those working in different countries, as shown, for example, by the survey on the central highlands of Yemen (Dhamar Survey Project), where the archaeologists have difficulties in establishing the transition between the Himyarite to the Islamic period. Mahoney (2018, 185) writes: The general processes of Islamization and socio-political transition during this period in the history of Yemen remain unclear, including the demographic effects of the departure of many of the South Arabian tribes from the region in order to take part in the conquests to the north during the early Islamic period. Although radio-carbon dated evidence from stratigraphic contexts is needed in order to prove a clear transitional occupation between these two periods, there are various indications at 12 sites for possibly continuous occupations.
Second, in most areas where the newcomers settled among locals, we see the continuity of places of cult as well as some of the public buildingsdthe abovementioned example of the baths at Ḥammat Gader near Gadera being a good such example. The survival and in some cases even erection of non-Muslim houses of prayer under Muslim rule are of special interest and should be discussed at once, even if briefly, before we dwell on the subject of mosques, which will be treated in a separate item.
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Archaeologist R. Schick has extensively written on the Christian life in early Islamic Palestine and Jordan throughout the years, for example, and documented the many archaeological examples of continuity, though also those of decay and abandonment for diverse reasons (Schick, 2021). Excavations in Tiberias by Cytryn-Silverman have shown that not only the cathedral church of the city survived and co-existed with the nearby mosque, for at least some 50 years since the mosque’s erection or more it remained the dominant feature in the city’s skyline. This reality only changed when a new monumental mosque replaced the first one, sometime in the 720s or 730s. Even then, the church retained its status, up until sometime in the 9th or 10th century when it shrank to a single aisled structure, and its apse was apparently blocked. Shivta in the Negev is another interesting site which teaches about the process of co-existence of the emerging Muslim community and the local Christians. Though vastly excavated in the 1930s by American archaeologist D.H. Colt, and alternately until the late 1980s, these works did not promote discussions on the finds and context of this important site during the transition between the Byzantine and early Islamic periods until lately, mainly for not having produced a final report and a thorough research of its finds. Epigraphic work by Moor (2013) on two inscriptions from the site revealed the contemporary use of the two churches of the site for Christians and Muslims. In addition, archaeological research has shown that new churches were erected in the Syrian realm already under Islamic rule, such as in the case of Saint Stephan in Umm al-Raṣaṣ, and of the church of Tamra in the Galilee, for example, both clearly dated by their mosaics. Those archaeological examples are then clear proof of the anachronistic nature of the Shur uṭ ʿUmar (document defining the principles toward non-Muslims and their status) which have come down to us through literary sources but also in the form of inscriptions, and attributed to the time of caliph ’Umar b. al-Khaṭṭab (r. 13e23/634e44). Various historians have already discussed this document and refuted a 7th century date, preferring to place it in a 9th century context, though recently a mid-8th century date has been proposed based on the isnad (chain of transmitters) which goes back to an 8th century transmitter (Levy-Rubin, 2005). That would still be in line with the finds from the various archaeological excavations. The process experienced in Greater Syria, nevertheless, was not shared by all regions. Surveys in northern and southern ʿIraq, which reached their settlement peak by the end of the Sassanian and early Islamic period, have shown that the process in many of the areas previously inhabited by Zoroastrians and Buddhists was rather one of Christianization and not Islamization, in agreement with the caliphate which profited from this new social order (Novácek and Wood, 2020). Further patterns of settlement change following the arrival of Islam would be in order in a dedicated discussion. First, the erection of new settlements adjacent to existing ones, in a way to keep the newcomers separate from the existing order as in the cases of r as a means by the newcomers to alienate themselves from the local popAyla, Fusṭaṭ, Ramla, etc. (on the Umayyad palaces/quṣu ulation, be it for La Dolce Vita, for economic interests or for diplomacy, see the many discussions on this topic following Sauvaget (1967), Grabar et al. (1978), Hillenbrand (1982), King (1992), but mainly the important work by Genequand (2012) in the region of Palmyra). Even in the case of Jerusalem, Muslims settled in the purposely decayed eastern portion of the Byzantine city (i.e. the Temple Mount and adjacent areas), and not on the western mound whose heart was the Holy Sepulchre. Second, as in the case of the Mediterranean coast, the option to depopulate the coastal line (though not totally, as cities like Caesarea continued to thrive despite no longer acting as a provincial capital), and opt for a chain of fortifications (ribaṭaṭ) is noteworthy (Elad, 1982). And yet, the result was of renewed settlements around these fortifications, as pointed out by Elad (1982, 150):
As with the coastal cities, the Muslim rulers were anxious to resettle and fortify them. Soldiers who settled in the border cities were granted increases in pay. Apparently, however, despite this official policy, there was no great flow of settlers and Muʿawya brought in non-Arab, mostly Persian, elements to the border cities.
Among the various such coastal sites excavated or surveyed, which have provided invaluable information about their lasting role at least until the 10th-11th centuries (and many were replaced by Crusader strongholds in the case of the Syrian coast), see AshdodYam (Maḥ uz Azd ud), Yavne-Yam (Maḥ uz Yubna), HaBonim (Kafr Lab/Lam), as well as S usa and Monastir in Tunisia. In the Maghrib, to which the latter two belong, the ribaṭs had the double function of protecting the maritime border of the Mediterranean and raiding against the enemy, together with the many islands which also served as buffers and borders vis-à-vis Byzantines, Normans, as well as pirates. These strongholds also “served to anchor and expand nascent Muslim communities in the area” (Holod and Kahlaoui, 2019), and similarly to the ribaṭaṭ in Iran and central Asia, also as stations for travelers, merchants and pilgrims. It is notable that the settlement policy of the Syrian coast adopted in early Islam was somewhat retained in later periods, though adopting a new form. The systematic erection of pilgrimage sites on the coastline of southern Bilad al-Sham/modern Israel, on the vicinity of sites previously provided with the ribaṭaṭ and also with the later Crusader fortificationsdhint to the need to control the areas a priori left unsettled after the Crusader defeat. Alas, such pilgrimage sitesdmaqams, mashhads and walısdwere also developed inland, in areas of interfaith encounters and frictions. Such were the roads leading to holy sites frequented by Christians, as the way from Jerusalem to the Jordan River (where the site of Nabı M usa was developed under the Maml uk sulṭan Baybars), as well as in various areas in the Galilee left predominantly Christian after the Crusades (e.g. Sitt Sukayna overlooking Tiberias, erected in 694/1295). Many of these sites have been surveyed and documented (Petersen, 2001).
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Perhaps this pattern of landscape change in areas eventually engulfed by Islamdfrom military or quasi-military presence to a religious disguise, echoes the transformation of early Islamic frontier fortresses in Iran and Central Asia to religious sites, as documented in al-Muqaddası in the 10th century. n), spread along the land borders and frontiers of Islam and found in Turkey, Syria and as far as central Asia, Such fortresses (ḥuṣu were first thought to solely have been populated by Muslims fulfilling their religious wish to spread Islam in the dar al-ḥarb (the Abode of War), while also defending the dar al-Islam. But as the works by archaeologists D. Whitcomb and A. Eger in the ʿAm uq Plain in Antioch’s hinterland and in the Armenian Marash (Kahramanmaras¸) valley on the frontier between Byzantium and Islam (the thaghr) show, the old romantic view of militant ghazi joining forces at the frontiers and borders to fulfill their duty of jihad does not explain the actual finds. Their works from the 1990s and 2000s, join theoretical views by Haldon and Kennedy (1980). The ḥuṣun rather governed an area of interaction between Christians and Muslims by which they lived next to each other, and sometimes even intermingled, as also learned from the sources. The surveys also showed a tendency of the new Muslim settlements to spread around the plains and marshy lands by which they could control water usage, while the Christians tended to concentrate on the upland. The lessons learned from the various patterns of religious and population interaction during the first two centuries of Islam are precious also as a background for the Islamization of further regions in the centuries to come. An outstanding example of late conquest and a complex process of Islamization within a Christian majority is that of Ottoman Bulgaria, first conquered in the very late 1300s. British archaeologist A. Petersen, who has conducted an architectural survey of Ottoman buildings and collected the data from the annual archaeological reports published by the National Institute of Archaeology, believes that some of the conclusions concerning the arrival of Ottoman Islam to Bulgaria shall shed light also on the Islamization of the central areas of the Ottoman empire (Petersen, 2017). As he pointed out, despite the rich archival materials on the central areas, few concern the 1300s and 1400s. It is important to stress that in contrast to the above advances in the archaeology of the early Islamic period (and one cannot miss neither Johns, 2003 nor Avni, 2014 in this matter), little has been done on the archaeology of the 7th-8th century conquests themselves. No landscape survey has been done to try and establish the whereabouts and the nature of the various battles in Islam such as the Battle of Ajnadayn (13/634) or the Battle of Yarm uk (15/636) for example, as done by landscape archaeologist of the Crusader period R. Lewis on the Battle of Haṭṭin in the Galileedbetween the Crusaders and Ṣalaḥ al-Dın’s army in July 4, 1187, for example. The same goes for later battles in most Islamic lands.
Road Archaeology Max van Berchem’s Corpus Inscritpionum Arabicarum opens with ʿAbd al-Malik’s milestones, and a discussion about their context. Since then, a commemorative inscription of road construction at ʿAqabat Fıq in the Golan by this same caliph was found, as well as three further Umayyad milestones (also published in Corpus Inscritpionum Arabicarum Palaestinae by Sharon, 1997e2004). It is clear that much investment was given to the road network between Jerusalem and Damascus, even though given the distance and the two main routes followeddone by the Jordan valley and the second via the coastal routedthe number of surviving milestones is notably meagre. Securing the roads and providing water and provisions to the caravans was a central factor, and pivot role of a ruler, especially if the “caravan” was an immense one, and that of the main Muslim pilgrimagedthe Ḥajj to Mecca. One could ask if the emphasis on the road between Damascus and Jerusalem under the Umayyads was a reflection of the tension with ʿAbd Allah b. al-Zubayr and the alleged deviation of the pilgrimage from Mecca to Jerusalem, yet the milestones post-date the Umayyad victory by al-Ḥajjaj. This road projectdwhich also catered to the caliph’s revival of the pre-Islamic royal mail, the barıd, was thus either left unfinished, or milestones were systematically removed, either as spolia (perhaps being the reason we do not “see” them) or for a new arrangement. Also intriguing is the low number of milestones from the post Umayyad period, none being found in Greater Syria, four of them along the Darb al-Zubayda developed under caliph Har un al-Rashıd (170e193/786e809), which linked the ʿAbbasid centers of K ufa and Baghdad in Iraq with Mecca and Madına in the Ḥijaz (al-Rashid, 1992), though only one was retrieved during an archaeological excavation (Rabadha). The important work by archaeologist al-Rashid (1980) on the Darb Zubayda has provided an invaluable archaeological documentation of the installations and buildings erected to cater for the pilgrims. The survey lists wells, cisterns, stop-overs as well as fortifications along the main route and ramifications (on the late ḥammams/baths erected during the Ottoman period, see ʿAbd al-Malik, 2013). In fact this route, systematically equipped only in the 780s, is known to have been already in use under the Umayyads, for which two dated inscriptions bear witness (see also al-Rashid’s entry s.v. “Inscriptions of the Islamic Period” in OEANE, vol. 3). But no less interesting is Whitcomb’s (1996) view that all this apparatus, erected to link the capital with the Ḥaramayn, was a type of linear settlement. The archaeological aspects of the Ḥajj have been also expressed by the various works on the fortifications of the Ayy ubid through the Ottoman period both on the darb al-ḥajj al-Maṣrı (see the various recent works by archaeologist of Egypt’s Department of Antiquities S.S. ʿAbd al-Malik, some following earlier research by Israeli archaeologist Sh. Tamari, for example) and on the darb al-ḥajj al-Shamı (with notable archaeological publications by J. Sauvaget on the Syrian portion of this route), various works by A. Petersen on the Jordanian portion, while an important archaeological work was undertaken at the qalʿa at ʿAqaba, located on
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the crossroads between these two routes. The above shows the growing information on the dynamics of the pilgrimage to Mecca by land throughout the periodsdthe biggest undertakings by rulers beyond military campaigns, and one which could strengthen or jeopardize his legitimacy. For a recent collection of essays on the pilgrimage route to Mecca following an exhibition at the British Museum, see ʿAbd al-Malik (2013). Still on road archaeology, one of the themes which crosses lands and cultures are the road-inns (khans/fund uqs/ribaṭs; on the various terms, which vary according to region and period, see Cytryn-Silverman, 2010), which catered to passers-by of all religions and traveling with different purposes. Different architectural types developed in different regionsdin Egypt and greater Syria the courtyard square structure in stone, austere and usually little decorated, endured from the early through the late Islamic periods. From the 13th through the early 16th century many of them were part of the royal postal system and also acted as horse-relays/ marakiz of the barıd. In the 16th century some were transformed into governmental fortresses where soldiers were stationed to patrol the roads but no less to tax the passers-by (Cytryn-Silverman, 2010; Tavernari, 2011). In Iran various plans were applied in brick masonry (Kleiss and Kiani, 1995)dincluding the highly decorated double-courtyard with four iwans seen in Ribaṭ-i Sharaf; in Salj uk Anatolia the courtyard plan is usually combined with a large covered structure, a good measure for the varying climate and courtly use (Erdmann, 1961); to those we add the unique Safavid and Qajar large polygonal structures, with courtyards in different plans. The unique stone structure of Tash-Rabat, found on a mountainous ramification of the Silk Road in Kyrgyzstan, today is finally accepted as originally built by the Karakhanids (r. 382e609/992e1212) as a road-inn. Its monumental domed enclosure within a rectangular compartmentalized enclosure (Legibre, 2011) adds to the variation of stop-overs found by travelers while crossing the various routes of Islam throughout times, showing regional adaptations to climate, safety conditions, but no less to building materials and local architectural styles. Usually the patronage of these inns was of a special kind, in that they were conceived as charitable institutions (those of the Maml uk Syria often being called khanat li ’l-sabıl), aiming to cater for all travelers, rich and poor, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. They were maintained by means of endowed properties (awqaf) established by their patrons, usually high-ranking officers but also caliphs, sulṭans and their families, and rich merchants. Roberto da Sanseverino, nephew of Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan (d. 1466), made his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1458. In his travelogue (Viaggio in Terra Santa fatto e descritto per Roberto de Sanseverino), he describes among others his journey to Sinai (and back), and his stay at a khan, between the 1st and 2nd of August. According to Sanseverino’s description, no one dwelled at the inn, which was a walled construction of square shape. There must have been a keeper, as they were locked-in (a common practice both in rural and urban inns). The passage teaches one about inter-cultural and inter-class encounters in such places. Despite his high social rank, Sanseverino stayed at the same place where less notorious travelers would have stayed. He shared the same facilities with other guests, and definitely was no less annoyed by the Pharaoh’s lice as probably were the members of the caravan of Muslims staying there that same night.
Muslim Religious Architecture and Mecca as the Unifying Focus of Cult Islamic archaeology, although encompassing buildings and material culture of all religions, is mostly associated with mosque architecture and decoration, as well as with few religious furniture and articles characteristic of this category, such as minbars, Qurʾans and kursis (Qurʾan stands), lamps and hanging devices, lamp holders and candlesticks (once candles were available), mats and carpets. Mosques were the main agent in the Islamization of a conquered city, and usually were placed in the heart of the new settlements, together with the governor’s palace (dar al-imara) in the case of administrative centers. Wherever their location in the Islamic world, they usually shared a common feature - the director of prayer, the qibla. The direction to Mecca was canonized already in the 2nd year of the hijrı calendar (Qurʾan 2: 142ff.), after first established as Jerusalem ( ula al-qiblatayn). Archaeology nevertheless teaches about further variations in the direction of prayer, apparently reflecting some degree of syncretism, especially in the 1st century of Islam. Therefore, cases such as the direction of the congregation mosque of Ayla excavated by D. Whitcombdfirst established in the early 7th century and facing southwest instead of south-southeast according to its locationdis puzzling but not too surprising. Later in Islam we witness qibla corrections, but these mainly reflect advances in technology pointing the right directiondas in the case of al-Azhar in Cairo. Apparently, this is also true in the case of Wasiṭ, though the archaeological data is not very clear (on summaries on the various mosques, see Antun, 2016). Archaeology has also added throughout the years important data regarding two notable architectural features in the mosque: the miḥrab and the minaret, though it is still not clear when these first appeared. The very translation of miḥrab as “prayer niche” is problematic, as there is no clearly datable niche as focus of prayer before the early 8th century, as developed in those mosques erected during the time of caliph al-Walıd (r. 705e715)dMadına and the mosque of ʿAmr in Fusṭaṭdas documented by the literary sources. Early open mosques in the Negev used standing stones as focus of prayer before developing niches, a gradual process which continued into the 8th century. In fact, excavations at Wadı Shırah in southern Jordan proves that standing stonesdand not concave nichesdwere still in use during the Umayyad period, as learned from one of the inscribed stones on the qibla wall, dated to 109/727e28. An archaeological discussion on the development of the miḥrab will not be full without at least a short reference to the important article by numismatist G.C. Miles “Miḥrab and ʿAnazah” (1952), and the recent review by Treadwell (2005), which also summarizes the various reviews on Miles’ thesis. These articles deal with an Arab-Sasanian drachma from the time of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (ca. 72e77/691e697), with an atypical depiction of the shah on the obverse (especially his headgear), and an even more
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atypical styling of the reverse, which in the past had born the depiction of a Zoroastrian fire-altar and flanking attendants. Most of the discussion revolves around the central piece of the latter, bearing a staff or lance with a blade and a hanging pair of streamers (ʿalams?), framed by a round arch on twisted columns and Arabic inscriptions - amır al-muʾminın on the left, naṣr Allah flanking the staff, and khalıfat Allah on the right. Miles’ identification of the arched structure as the earliest representation of a miḥrab, and the object within the arch as Muḥammad’s ʿanaza or ḥarba (and for some this being the root of the word miḥrab) known from the sources to have served him as a praying focus, led him to dwell on the early examples of prayer sutras and of niches (miḥrab mujawwaf). While acknowledging the limitations of the artist, Miles (1952, 160e61) assumed that the depiction in the coin referred to a form which “at the time this coin was struck it had taken its place in the architecture of the mosque.” and believed this was a very early example of a miḥrab mujawwaf, i.e. that this form already existed before the probable mint of this coin type, ca. 75/695. In his article Treadwell not only brings new numismatic data which defies Miles’ conclusions but also presents different interpretationsdsuch as A. Grabar’s and J. Raby’sdfor the iconography of the arched spear, which is best understood in an anti-Christian context. He also adds that at the time of his writing, over 50 years after Miles’ publication, no such early example of concave prayer niche has been exposed. Same goes for the earliest phase of the mosque at Tiberias, datable sometime between the 660s and the 690s (Cytryn, 2016), though one could claim that later phases might have concealed an early prayer niche. Recent excavations in Israel at the Bedouin city of Rahat in the Negev have exposed two small open mosques with protruding concave miḥrabs, attributed by the excavators to the Umayyad period. They add to the already known group of 8th century small open mosques dealt with by G. Avni, and thus are not supportive for a pre-8th century introduction of the miḥrab mujawwaf. The earliest evidence of concave niches in roofed mosquesdbe them protruding outwards and seen from the outside, or contained within the rectilinear walldpost-date the 700s, and are all an integral part of the construction itself. Such are the cases of the niche in the congregational mosque of ʿAnjardal-Walıd’s royal city in Lebanon, and at Jabal Says southeast of Damascus, also attributed to this caliphdand thus almost contemporary with his mosques mentioned in the sources as first to bear a concave niche. Further examples (list not exhaustive) are found in the Umayyad palaces of Greater SyriadQaṣr al-Hayr al-Gharbı, Qaṣr al-Hayr al-Sharqı, Khirbat al-Mafjar, Khirbat al-Minya, Umm al-Walıd (here the early phase of the mosque had no prayer niche at all), Khan al-Zabıb, Humayma and Mshaṭṭa, in the congregational mosques of Ruṣafa, ʿAmman, Jarash and Tiberias, some of them dated by inscriptions, others by proxy. uq of Hisham b. ʿAbd al-Malik in Beth Sheʾan The two-dimensional stucco depictions of miḥrabs repeating over the shops at the s (120/739) can be identified as concave miḥrabs (Agady and Arubas, 2009), which had become common at that time. A globeshaped lamp hanging from the keystone of a round arch over twisted columns suggests a proposed depth, while the prayer mat spread in front of the arch means that mats and carpets apparently had also become part of the religious iconography in formation. A further two-dimensional depiction of a prayer niche was found in a floor-mosaic of a private house in Ramla (today at the Israel Museum), dated to the 8th century or later. In this case it is not clear if the artist meant a concave or flat niche, but the Qurʾanic inscription within the arch leaves no doubt as to its function: Direct yourself to your prayers, and “be not thou of those who are unheedful” (7:205).
This leads the present discussion to refer to another type of miḥrab, that found in the second half of the 10th century extension of the mosque of Cordoba (by al-Ḥakam II, r. 961e976), which is in fact a domed enclosed cell behind a horseshoe arch, flanked by smaller similar cells, also preceded by horseshoe arches (being currently studied by F. Valdés in the framework of project “DeIure: De Iulius Caesar a los Reyes Católicos: análisis arqueológico de 1500 años de historia en la Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba y su entorno urbano”). It is not clear if this type of miḥrab was also present in the earlier phases of this mosque, and if it was inspired by nostalgic feelings and drawn from Umayyad Syrian mosques which have not retained this form of prayer niche. Once dealing with minarets (ṣawmaʿa, manara, maʾdhana/miʾdhana), it is important to define which kind of structure we are relating to. Even though Sauvaget has reconstructed four corner minarets in the Umayyad mosque of Madına (based on literary sources), it is not clear if they were low towers (to which the term ṣawmaʿa probably refers to) inspired by the remaining Roman structures at the corner of the temenos of Damascus and adapted under al-Walıd as his congregational mosque, or to tall towers, as the minarets developed at least from the 9th century onwards (Bloom, 1989). Clear pre-9th century minarets have not survived in full, like that adjacent to the Umayyad qaṣr at Qasṭal in Jordan, or the middle square tower of the qaṣr at Khirbat al-Mafjar, abutting what has been identified as the first mosque of the complex. The minaret at Buṣra, dated to 102/720e21 by an inscription found during restorations in the 1930s (at the time of caliph Yazıd b. ʿAbd al-Malik, r. 720e724) was refurbished in a later period, while the minaret erected by Hisham b. ʿAbd al-Malik at the Friday mosque of Ramla has not survived (though this author believes it relates to a tower overriding the main gate, refurbished by Baybars in 666/1268). The late 8th century minaret erected by ʿAbd alRaḥman I’s son Hisham I (r. 172e80/788e96) at the great mosque of Cordoba, also did not survive, once it suffered from the earthquake of 880. ʿAbd al-Raḥman III (r. 300e50/912e61) demolished it and had a new one erected at an enlarged courtyard. The fact it is referred to as ṣawmaʿa probably means it was still of the low-tower type as in Damascus. In the 9th century we witness unique shaped minarets such as that in Qayrawan with its tapering stages (though it has been proposed it goes back to Hisham’s time, between 724 and 727), and the two helicoidal minarets of al-Mutawakkil in Samarra with line above, yet apart from Ibn Ṭ ul un’s minaret, which seems to have been inspired by the latter, those types did not take
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root in Islamic architecture. Archaeological works at the Umayyad mosque of Jarash point to a 9th-10th century date for the insertion of a quadrangular minaret near its northeastern corner. Excavations at Tiberias’ congregational mosque seem to point to a similar date for the addition of a massive structure near its northeastern corner, of which only the core of its foundation surviveddone can also assume those are remains of an added minaret. The square-shaped minarets had taken root in Greater Syria, Egypt and north Africa by the 11th century, becoming a clear symbol of Islamization of the landscape and of the Muslim faith. Such chronology has helped Islamic archaeologists and art historians to readdress the sources of influence to the early development of the minaret, mainly ruling out church bell-towers, as those developed mainly from the 11th century onwards, perhaps even under the influence of Islam. As for the cylindrical towerdit mainly developed in the eastern lands of Islam through the media of brickwork and its many possibilitiesdbut made its way westwards following the Salj uq conquest of Anatolia in the 11th century. There it was translated into stone. Eventually the cylindrical shaft became the signature of the religious architecture of the Ottomans, and in this way penetrated into Greater Syria and Egypt, where the square tower had been the default style (with some polygonal variations) for many centuries.
Archaeology and the Literary Sources The use of literary sources in Islamic archaeology is a must in the case of both extant and non-extant buildings and sites. This is the very case of the reconstruction by Sauvaget (1947) (see also Creswell, 1932) of the Umayyad mosque of Madına abovementioned, based on the interpolation of data from al-Waqidı (d. 207/822), Aḥmad ibn Rusta (beginning of the 10th century), Ibn ʿAbd alRabbıh (d. 328/940), al-Muqaddası (fl. 375/985), al-Ṭabarı (d. 450/1058), Ibn Jubayr (579/1183), Ibn al-Najjar (d. 643/1245) and al-Samh udı (died 911/1505), the latter mainly having left a description of the poor state of the mosque at the time of his first sojourn in the city in the second half of the 9th century/mid-15th century. Such type of interpolation had already been made by L. Caetani in the early 20th century with regards to the first stage of the Prophet’s mosque, who saw it as the house of the Prophet with rooms for his wives opening onto the courtyard. In his article “House of the Prophet” and the Concept of the Mosque, Johns (1999) deconstructs Caetani’s biased reconstruction, which was endorsed and illustrated by Creswell, and repeated to these days. Johns proved that Caetani’s reconstruction is neither in line with the architecture of households of Arabia in pre-Islamic times, nor with the logical privacy needed for his household, and that Caetani’s interpretation stemmed not only from his orientalist bias, but also from his wrong assessment of the sources. Digging into the written sources as a supplement for archaeology or even as sole source of information for long-gone buildings or even cities, has also been the case of the reconstruction of the round city of Baghdad. As in the case of archaeological digs in which different scholars can reach different conclusions, the same goes for this case. Creswell and Lassner (1968), mainly based on alKhaṭıb al-Baghdadı’s description of the 11th century (in his Taʾrıkh Baghdad), reached different conclusions as to the inner arrangements of the city, for example. On the difficulties of solely working on literary sources, we should mention S. Pradines’s conclusions (2020) through his meticulous archaeological work on the walls of Faṭimid Cairo, until then mostly based on historical evidence (and mainly on al-Maqrızı, a problematic source in itself) such as in the works by P. Casanova in the late 19th century and by Creswell in the 1950s. Pradines shows how “[a]rchaeology often presents very different evidences from the stories provided by written sources.” When dealing with later periods, endowment documentation (waqfiyyas) and sijills (Ottoman court registers) are most useful to understand not only the architecture of the buildings and their phases, but also their patronage, administration, functions of the different spaces, and later uses. Such data allows archaeologists to provide well-founded interpretations, and to target their searches on informed and academically-guided hypotheses.
Summary and Future Directions For historical and ideological reasons, Islamic archaeology lagged behind its sister fields. Today it is an established and growing discipline. Such status was not easily achieved and followed a gradual “period of conquest” for spotlight at the key archaeological conferences and specialized journals. Today not only is it natural to see specialized sessions in Islamic archaeology, but there is an increasing conscience that any archaeological topic should be discussed through the Islamic periods and not stop in the early 7th century. Today the field has specialized journals, published volumes are continuously multiplying, and hopefully the various institutes of archaeology will follow and dedicate established tracks in the field. In between Islamic archaeologists there is also a growing understanding of the benefits of multi-disciplinary research, of the application of modern technologies, and the need to learn about the other regions of Islam and see processes in the macro scale. Islamic archaeology is thus blessed to be so rich in external materials, in the regions it covers, and in the periods it deals with.
See Also: Asia, Southwest: The Persian Empires; Bilad al-Sham, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula e The Islamic Period.
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Archaeol. 8, 87e110. Elad, Amikam, 1982. The coastal cities of Palestine during the early Middle Ages. The Jerusalem Cathedra 2, 146e167. Erdmann, Kurt, 1961. Das anatolische Karavansaray des 13. Jahrhunderts. Gebrüder Mann Verlag, Berlin. Genequand, Denis, 2012. Les établissements des élites omeyyades en Palmyrène et au Proche-Orient. Bibliothèque Archéologique et Historique. Institut français du Proche-Orient, Beirut. Grabar, Oleg, Holod, Renata, Knustad, James, Trousdale, William, 1978. City of the Desert: Qasr al-Hayr East. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Heidemann, Stefan, 1998. The merger of two currency Zones in early Islam. The Byzantine and Sasanian impact on the circulation in former Byzantine Syria and northern Mesopotamia. Iran 36, 95e111. Hillenbrand, Robert, 1982. La dolce vita in early Islamic Syria: the evidence of late Umayyad palaces. Art Hist. 5, 1e35. Holod, Renata, Kahlauoi, Tarek, 2019. Guarding a well e ordered space on a Mediterranean island. In: Eger, Asa A. (Ed.), The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers. University of Colorado Press, Boulder, CO, pp. 47e79. Johns, Jeremy, 1999. The “House of the Prophet” and the concept of the mosque. In: Johns, Julian (Ed.), Bayt al-Maqdis, Jerusalem and Early Islam, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, vol. IX.2. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 59e112. King, Geoffrey R.D., 1992. Settlement Patterns in Islamic Jordan: The Umayyads and their use of the land. Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 4, 369e375. Kleiss, Wolfram, Kiani, Mohammad Yousef, 1995. Iranian Caravanserais. Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, Tehran. Kubiak, Władysław B., 1988. Al-Fustat: Its Foundation and Early Urban Development. The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo. Lassner, Jacob, 1968. The Caliph’s personal domain: the city plan of Baghdad reexamined. Kunst des Orients 5, 24e36. Legibre, Pierre, 2011. Tash Rabat et Gardaneh-ye-Nir - Deux caravansérails remarquables. In: 4 Congrès du Réseau Asie & Pacifique. Sep 2011, Paris, France. León, Alberto, Murillo, Juan Fco, 2014. Advances in research on Islamic Cordoba. J. Islam. Archaeol. 1, 5e35. Mahoney, Daniel, 2018. Settlement patterns and fortification architecture in the central highlands of Yemen. J. Islam. Archaeol. 5, 181e202. Miles, George C., 1952. Miḥrab and ʿAnazah: a study in early islamic iconography. In: Miles, George C. (Ed.), Archaeologia Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld. J. J. Augustin, Locust Valley, NY, pp. 156e171. Northedge, Alaistair, 2005. The Historical Topography of Samarra. Samarra Studies I. The British School of Archaeology in Iraq and the British Academy, London. Novácek, Karel, Wood, Philip, 2020. The monastic landscape of Adiabene in the first centuries of Islam. J. Islam. Archaeol. 7, 1e20. Petersen, Andrew, 2017. “Under the Yoke”: the archaeology of the Ottoman period in Bulgaria. J. Islam. Archaeol. 4, 23e48. Pradines, Stéphane, 2020. From the Ribats to the fortresses, the Faṭimid period of transition in Muslim military architecture. J. Islam. Res. 31, 493e514. Quickel, Anthony T., Williams, Gregory, 2016. In search of siba kh: digging up Egypt from antiquity to the present day. J. Islam. Archaeol. 3, 89e108. Sauvaget, Jean, 1947. La Mosquée Omeyyade de Médine. Vanoest, Paris. Schick, Robert, 2021. The Christian Communities of Palestine From Byzantine to Islamic Rule: An Historical and Archaeological Study. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Gerlach Press, Berlin. Tavernari, Cinzia, 2011. Caravansérails et Réseaux Routiers du Bilad al-Sam (fin xiie siècle-début xvie siècle). Unpublished PhD thesis. Université Paris-Sorbonne. Treadwell, Luke, 2005. “Mihrab and ’Anaza” or “Sacrum and spear”? A reconsideration of an early Marwanid Silver Drachm. Muqarnas 22, 1e28. Vincent, L.-H., Abel, F.-M., 1932. Emmaus, sa basilique et son histoire. E. Leroux, Paris.
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Voudori, Daphne, 2010. Law and the politics of the past: legal protection of cultural heritage in Greece. Int. J. Cult. Property 17, 547e568. Walmsley, Allan, Damgaard, Kristoffer, 2005. The Umayyad congregational mosque of Jarash in Jordan and its relationship to early mosques. Antiquity 79, 362e378. Wen, Wen, 2021. Preconceptions of the Samarra Horizon, green splashed ware and blue painted ware revisited through Chinese ceramic imports (eighth to tenth centuries). J. Mater. Cult. Muslim World 2, 150e183.
Further Reading Elad, Amikam, 2020. Al-Masjid al-Aqṣa during the Umawı period: seven miḥra bs with seven domes. Jerus. Stud. Arabic Islam 49, 339e432. Levy-Rubin, M., 2005. Shurut ‘Umar and its alternatives: the legal debate on the status of the dhimmıs. Jerus. Stud. Arabic Islam 30, 170e206.
Landscape Archaeology and Socio-Environmental Patterns Johannes Mu¨ller, Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Definition of the Term Landscape History of Landscape Archaeology Relational Landscapes Methodologies and Meanings Examples of Research on Landscape Archaeology The Example of Megalithic Landscapes in Northern Germany and Southern Scandinavia Nazi Germany’s “Landscape Architecture” Institutionalisation of Landscapes Key Issues New Relational Landscape: References and Issues Empirical Reconstruction and Observation of Recurrent Socio-environmental Patterns The Identification of Long-Lasting Trends Anthropocene Discussion Definition of Space Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References Relevant Websites
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Landscapes are social practices, in which both the authorships of societies and the changing preconditions of environmental developments are visible. One of the fundamental concerns of archaeology is to decipher such landscapes and to reveal the events, structures, and processes that shaped landscapes in the sense of a socio-environmental product. Landscape archaeology thus represents a crucial element of integrative archaeology. Ideally, both the natural and life sciences and the cultural anthropology of archaeology work together to pose questions about the resilient and sustainable practices of human societies that are so crucial for our present experiences.
Abstract Landscape as a product of both nature and human society is the focus of socio-environmental research. While landscape archaeology developed from settlement archaeology and environmental archaeology on the one hand, cognitive archaeology, on the other hand, has contributed significantly to new conceptualizations and parameters in the interpretation of landscape space. Even as landscape archaeology reconstructs both natural and social constants and changes on different spatial scales, the reconstruction of socio-environmental events, processes, and structures, as well as of perception and meaning all play an important role. There are possibilities to disentangle landscape into environmental, economic, social, and cognitive spaces, which, due to technical developments of archaeological tools, can now be traced, for example, with Geographic Information Systems.
Introduction Landscapes are social practices, in which both the authorships of societies and the changing preconditions of environmental developments are visible. Topographies, which develop in association with the backdrop of ecological and climatic parameters, are distinctive, socially generated social spaces. In a historical perspective, recent landscapes become containers in which landscapes of the present and the past are coded. Modern landscapes are always past landscapes, past landscapes are always already future
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ones. Through the practice of our investigations, which are value-dependent, we can record, decipher, and understand the mentioned components (Müller, 2018a; Haug et al., 2018). One of the fundamental concerns of archaeology is to decipher such landscapes and to reveal the events, structures, and processes that shaped landscapes in the sense of a socio-environmental product. The primary aim of landscape archaeology is to answer questions about the sustainability of socio-environmental developments or the resilience of societies in the face of environmental change. In order to do this, the reconstruction of meaning and thus the perception of landscapes in human societies plays an important role (i.e. the question of the reconstruction of cultural landscapes). Landscape archaeology thus represents a crucial element of integrative archaeology. Ideally, both the natural and life sciences and the cultural anthropology of archaeology work together to pose questions about the resilient and sustainable practices of human societies that are so crucial for our present experiences (Müller and Ricci, 2020).
Overview Definition of the Term Landscape The concept of landscape is ambiguous, since it refers, on the one hand, to a view of some real entity and, on the other hand, to the potential sphere of action of an object (e.g. a lake in the case of seascapes). The English term “landscape” uses “land” to refer to mostly terrestrial areas, while “scape” tends to mean the image or view of something, in this case land. The German term “Landschaft” (similar to Swedish “Landskap”, Danish “Laandskab”, Dutch “Landschap”), unlike the English term, refers to the creation (“-schaft”) of landscapesdlandscapes are a product. Landscape is not the natural space, but what man makes of it (Bowden and Hinz, 2021; Bowden, 1999). Accordingly, landscape archaeology goes far beyond the concept of environmental archaeologydwhile the latter aims at the reconstruction of environmental conditions, the former is concerned with the reconstruction of socioenvironmental conditions.
History of Landscape Archaeology In terms of scientific history, a schematic differentiation can be made between six phases of settlement and landscape archaeological research (Müller, 2003; Davies and M’Mbogori, 2013) (Fig. 1). 1. “Völkische settlement archaeology.” In Europe, the term “settlement archaeology” or the settlement archaeological method was presented for the first time in 1911 by Gustaf Kossinna in his book Die Entstehung der Germanen (The Origins of the Germans; Kossinna, 1911). Kossinna understood this to bedperfectly in the imperial-chauvinistic spirit of the timesduncovering spatially “sharply defined cultural provinces” which are equated with tribes or peoples. In connection with the term “Heimat” in particular, the “home of the Germans,” spatial patterns of distribution of individual types of finds are interpreted as national settlement areas (cf. Jankuhn, 1977, 4ff.). Settlement archaeology takes place without settlements. 2. “Classical settlement archaeology.” It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that classical settlement archaeology developed in Europe. Herbert Jankuhn’s name (1977) should be mentioned as representative of this. It was conceived of as a subfield of historical-genetic settlement research. Taking cultural and historical premises into account, non-spatial prerequisites, palaeoecological results on landscape history, and settlement patterns are used to reconstruct the processes of settlement and devastation. Jankuhn’s classical settlement archaeology had nothing more to do with Kossinna’s cultural provincesdthis almost summarises the possibilities of settlement research whose potential was only made possible with the scientific orientation of archaeology under fascism. While here the formulation of the Cartesian concept of environment based on a given (natural) and a human (cultural) perspective was articulated, this was based on the influence of Darwinian evolutionism. 3. “Processual landscape archaeology.” Even as early as the 1960s, the system theoretic premises of processual landscape archaeology led to a different approach to interpretation in terms of the quality of the relationship between humans and the environment (Clarke, 1968). Under the influence of Higgs and Vita-Finzi (1972), for example, surviving landscape types in the surroundings of prehistoric settlements were quantified in order to model a human-environment system in connection to palaeo-ecological reconstructions of the environment and palaeo-economic data. In contrast to Central European settlement archaeology, which continued to be culture-historically orientated and which was concerned with the reconstruction of historical processes, “new archaeology” identified test regions in which human environmental behavior was to be tested and interpreted from cultural and anthropological points of view. In doing so, human culture was reflected on as an extra-environment (based on the human mind), but also as a means to adapt the given natural environment (Davies, 2013). This kind of landscape archaeology was also partly linked to behavioral ecology, in its extreme form reflecting humans as only a biological species in a natural environment. In its extreme form, “sociobiology” reduced culture to a means to satisfy basic biological needs (i.e. reproduction and subsistence) in a landscape. 4. “Classical landscape archaeology.” A synthesis between European settlement archaeology of culture-historical character and the system-theoretical orientated human-environment studies of processual archaeology was formulated by Jens Lüning under the term “landscape archaeology” in the 1990s. It was intended to reconstruct a “dynamic overall system of human existence and activity in interaction with the natural area” (Lüning, 1997: 277, cp. Zimmermann, 2003). Lüning’s landscape archaeology is intended to cover the social and economic structuring of the settlement system from the individual farm to the city, from the
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Concepts of settlement and landscape archaeology.
mine to the castle, from shrines to cemeteries, and then to traffic networks and the natural conditions. In contrast to classical settlement archaeology as characterised by Jankuhn or to culture landscape approaches, which only define areas characterized by humans as research objects, classical landscape archaeology includes the entire landscape in its development. 5. “Post-processual landscape archaeology.” Lüning’s landscape archaeology only approaches what is currently understood as landscape archaeology in European research to a limited extent. The influence of structuralism and poststructuralism have led numerous scientists to interpret landscape as a system of symbols of emotional and rational significance to traditional societies. Here, landscape archaeology encompasses the reconstruction of cognitive maps and landscape parts verified in different ways in terms of content which, as was formulated by the Czech archaeologist Neustupny (1998), does not reconstruct settlement areas any longer but community areas instead. Therefore, it is no longer only a question of reconstructing settlement systems under structural territorial concepts, but it is even more a question of reconstructing ritual landscape by emphasising the contemporaneous symbolic significance systems of archaeological objects. The concept of the ritual landscape assumes an ideological characterization of the landscape which remains characteristic in a modified form over generations, and which formed its character fundamentally and permanently. Renewals and re-interpretations of landscapes or landscape areas should become recognisable and interpretable through archaeological sources, perhaps also through a comprehensive global view of
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materialities (Kolen et al., 2015). May it be mentioned only in passing that the British archaeologist Julian Thomas (1991: 30) compares the transformation of an area with the help of objects, which emphasises the contrast between shapeless and tamed (e.g. named areas), with the significance system of song lines of the Australian aborigines which renders meaning. Accordingly, the discussion has been strongly influenced by post-processual and phenomenological approaches (Tilley, 1994; Ingold, 1993, 2000). In contrast to the distinction between real and perceived, and physical and cognitive landscapes as Karl Butzer had put it in 1982, the construction of landscapes by symbolic meaning makes all cultural meaning dominant as a matter of cognitive construction (Butzer, 1982). 6. “Integrative Landscape Archaeology.” For about 10 years, an integrative approach can be observed, especially concerning the integration of theories of complex systems (e.g. the resilience theory), but also in conclusions from the climate crisis, which also integrate mental maps into landscape archaeology. In integrative landscape archaeology, the originally formulated contradictions between structural and post-structural approaches have been resolved; at best, they are focal points of investigation on different spatial or temporal levels. Integrative landscape archaeology has been made possible by advances in data technology and, for example, the possibilities of using Geographic Information Systems to test post-processually formulated hypotheses. While integrative landscape archaeology is practiced in Europe, especially in Kiel and Gothenburg (Müller et al., 2023; Müller, 2018a; Litt et al., 2021), in the Americas the Chicago and Santa Fe schools are important. Thus, landscape archaeology means something completely different today than simply tacking together settlement archaeological, palaeo-ecological, and palaeo-economic data for a reconstruction of vegetation characteristics and anthropogenic influences on nature. Landscape archaeology attempts to order the area of the landscape according to both ecological and economic, but also social and emotional significances which were given to an area by prehistoric communities in the way they ordered it. Therefore, classical landscape archaeology and classical settlement archaeology are only subdisciplines of the new concept of reconstructing prehistoric spatial orders, including the system of symbols of our finds. Incorporated here are not only notions about the environment as social practices but also complexity theory from new ecology. Thus, agency is brought back into the relational interaction of environments, things, plants, animals, and humans.
Relational Landscapes In consequence, landscape is the product of primarily dynamic social processes, but also a relic of past social processes. In this context, the ecological aspects of landscape provide, on the one hand, the framework and, on the other hand, represent a socially relevant product themselves in light of high levels of human influence. For example, the impact of natural changes, including short, medium or long-term climate changes, influences societies, but can also be intensified by societies. Correspondingly, spatial scales are important for the different scales of social development. On a local scale, for example, the local ecological environment already exhibits signs of extreme human influence in Neolithic societies through the over-exploitation of resources, which surely led to the abandonment of settlements. On regional and global scales, the sum of events leads to corresponding processes, which can be significant for structural social formation. In a more straightforward illustration of the relationships between society and environment, (i.e. landscape), we recognize the dynamics of change between both socio-environmental components (Fig. 2) (Müller and Kirleis, 2019). The exploration of landscape processes and parameters of change, detectable in the development of, for example, settlement systems, material culture, or ritual sites, is linked to different socio-environmental components. Through different indicators and parameters, ranging from climatic aspects to social relations, the main processes of landscape change may be identified, and thus also the social practices in the background. Figs. 2 and 3 present exemplified indicators and quantitative proxies that reveal parameters are connected to domains of socio-environmental contexts. Accordingly, we can show the relational interaction between social, environmental, and cultural traits of the landscape. Thereby, how individual aspects are interwoven with each other becomes recognizable, as is the relationship between individual aspects and the corresponding reconstructions (Fig. 3). In principle, the corresponding aspects of the landscape are connected and reconstructable (Fig. 4). The landscape is visible as a node of ecological, economic, social, and ritual spheres, which are again indicated by different parameters forming different interlinked scapes.
Methodologies and Meanings In summary, the development of human societies was shaped by the landscapes in which they took place and, in turn, they shaped these landscapes. Both societies and landscapes evolved over time, partly interactively, partly under the influence of external factors like climate. Traces, left at and below the present landscape surface, offer a non-written archive of human development that can be read together with its time frame using various methods available in the natural sciences. This information complements that from written and oral sources, making other landscape and climate conditions and other stages of human development accessible to research, thus extending the study of the dynamic aspects of transforming landscapes far back in time. In addition, critical reflection on the symbolic significance of objects, structures, and landscapes has led to new interpretations and insights into the social practices that construct landscapes. Interdisciplinary methodological approaches have been able to capture relevant information regarding the influences of a complex body of interacting factors such as population density, topography, temperature, and hydrology. Usually, the geological,
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Fig. 2 Landscape archaeology: exemplified indicators/quantitative proxies revealing parameters connected to domains of socio-environmental contexts. Both the identification of categories of archaeological and palaeo-environmental archives that can be used for the reconstruction of landscapes and the translation of these categories into domains and processes are indicated.
Fig. 3 A mind map indicating the relational network of different spheres and aspects of parameters that are relevant for the reconstruction of landscapes. Indicators (red) describe the variables of socio-environmental archives, which are used to reconstruct landscape transformations.
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Different socio-environmental spheres that are interwoven in transformation processes.
biological, and climatological components of environmental change are assessed to extract purely anthropogenic changes, either by modeling or by direct observation. While soil scientists, geographers, geologists, and ecosystem researchers reconstruct soil use and landscape dynamics, archaeobotanists explore the development of vegetation, archaeozoologists trace faunal change and domestication, and palaeoclimatologists quantify climatic and hydrologic forcing. Scientific dating methods provide a time frame for bio- and geo-scientific reconstructions (Fig. 5). The information gained is used by environmental archaeology for the reconstruction of the natural environment. Environmental archaeology deals, on the one hand, with the reconstruction of climatic and weather conditions, soils, and vegetation, and with this
Fig. 5 Manifold methods are used in landscape archaeology. An example are corings, which produce cores for palaeoecological research. Here, a team from the Universities of Kiel and Bucharest is active on a lake near the Lower Danube.
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also the reconstruction of resources at a given time in a given space and, on the other hand, the reconstruction of the dynamics of climatic and ecological processes (Sutton and Anderson, 2004). Correspondingly, the archives of the various disciplines (e.g. palaeoclimatology, sedimentology and soil science, palynology, botanical macroremains analysis, phytolith analysis) are examined and synthesised into a common image of the spatially and temporally determined environment. In accordance with the possibilities and limitations of the respective scientific fields and the qualities of the individual archives, we obtain different spatial and temporal resolutions. Whereas, for instance, we achieve exact yearly dating for the reconstruction of sedimentation and vegetation developments by means of laminated profiles from Northern Germany, in some regions processes can only be reconstructed on the basis of centuries (Fig. 6). It also remains a challenge to intersect the different time-scales of different disciplinesdfor example, to match the results from low-resolution marine profiles with high-resolution profiles from lakes. In consequence, modeling aspects are taken into account. In the Holocene, most of the world does not possess environments that have not been influenced by humans. In this respect, all environmental-archaeological studies include aspects of human impact on the natural environment. The corresponding fingerprints can be characterized as anthropogenic-induced and therefore provide the opportunity to reconstruct aspects and influences of the economy and demography on the environment. In particular, environmental archaeologydin contrast to general environmental researchdincludes aspects of settlements or archaeological sites with on-site and off-site data, whereas studies which deliberately deal with anthropogenic influence and gather primary data on the role of humans, lake sediments or the like, have a rather general character, for example, when reconstructing vegetation processes. The same applies to sedimentology, which, on the one hand, can determine the intensity of local economic activities with direct investigations on colluvia and, on the other hand, contributes to assertions about general developments with regional and supra-regional cumulative curves. The intentional development and alteration of the landscape by human societies is a product of social structures and symbolic systems, including the ritual sphere (Fig. 4). The characteristics of settlement structures, which are determined by social groups, interactions, and natural conditions alike, are a significant component of any landscape. Geophysical surveying methods provide valuable assistance in making the spatial layout and character of buried remnants of identified settlements visible and in identifying hidden sub-surface traces of human activities in the landscape (cp. Pickartz et al., 2019). The interpretation of the survey results in relation to the form of social organization of the human societies concerned is subject to methods supplied by archaeology, including selective excavation (Fig. 7). The layout of settlement systems and settlement hierarchies within specific environments, the division of local and regional environments in areas for domestic and sacral uses, and the interrelation of identity groups by communication spheres provide options for analyses of differences within the human adaptation to and cultural reshaping of environmental premises. Ceremonial spaces and structures provide evidence of the conceptual space and environmental frameworks of early societies. Defensive structures and their location in the landscape reflect competition for and defense of natural resources, the development of local or regional competition, and the dominance of cultures. Objects found within the settlements may indicate, in their fabrication and in the materials used, trade networks as well as patterns of political influence, war, and occupation. All these manifold site formations are encompassed within the scope of archaeological field methods, including surveys and excavations. The increased sophistication of excavation methods also allows a better understanding between sites and site locations within the landscape.
Fig. 6 A laminated lake profile from Northern Central Europe. The annual sedimentation warves are visible. Within each ring, a further differentiation into annual seasons indicates, for example, good and bad years, which in turn set the prospects or limitations for subsistence economies.
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Fig. 7 Geophysical surveys together with archaeological excavations help to reconstruct site concepts. In the figure, a magnetic map of the Trypillia domestic mega-site Maidanetske (white: 10 nT, black þ10 nT) with the locations of target excavations is displayed (ca. 3800 BCE). The examined buildings and trenches are marked. In the lower left corner, the location of Maidanetske is marked with a star.
Of particular socio-archaeological relevance is the access to resources by individuals or groups of a society within the landscape. Different access opportunities to resources represent a fundamental pattern of socially differentiated societies, which determine the possibilities of action for different actors. Resources can and must be both of economic and cultural nature. Without considering the qualitative differences between different social formations, access opportunity can be identified in landscape areas and therefore meanings of landscapes can be discerned.
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From an etic viewpoint, it appears easy to achieve this, whereas from an emic standpoint, various methods are conceivable in order to identify the historical or prehistoric meaning of landscape spaces. The socio-archaeological relevance of landscape is thus expressed, for example, in a spatial division in settlement and grave areas, deposition areas, or in areas which are subject to taboos and access restrictions. The marking of such areas, for example, by above ground visible landmarks, belongs to social landscape design just as the inner-socially regulated, limited access to raw material reserves. Hereby, a different area is recorded than that recorded by environmental-archaeological investigation, which records the development of dead and animated material and thus refers to the changeable reservoirs for anthropogenic developments (Fig. 8). Thus, economy and culture become investigation areas of socio-ecological landscape archaeology, in which both actors and structures, in the sense of socio-environmental research, are fields of investigation. Both spatial and temporal dimensions of landscapes are discernible. We can also embed the development of structures in these fields. This is the necessary impetus in order to comprehenddin the sense of cultural anthropological significancesdthe comparability of events and processes of different times. But to investigate this more closely, a further and different basic consideration of times, things, and humans is essential. Furthermore, landscapes provide the passive reality for our biological life as well as the active power that incites our symbolic activities by which we conceptualise ourselves and our place in nature. In line with the ideadwhich has emerged during the time of
Fig. 8 The organization of Neolithic space in the Northern German region East Holstein. The spatial division between domestic sites on the lower land and on the islands and the megaliths in the hinterland is observable. The original watershed is reconstructed on the basis of palaeo-ecological data. The meaning of the landscape becomes visible.
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the Pre-Socratic philosophersdthat true knowledge can only be achieved by going beyond the surface of what is offered to the senses, landscapes offer signs to an inquiring mind and thus have to be read and deciphered in terms of their hidden essences. With a culturally-driven, extended symbolic conception of landscapes, we came to assign attributes to landscapes (e.g. locus amoenus, locus melancholicus) that originally were confined to describing sensations (e.g. mellow, calm, vivid) or the character of persons (e.g. melancholic, gentle, peaceful, august, frisky). Reciprocally, we can use attributes for landscapes, such as melliferous, to describe the character of persons. Our ability to think metaphorically is rooted in this “cognitive fluidity,” with which we are cognitively endowed and which we exploit in the course of cultural development. There are also interesting speculations in the recently emerging field of “cognitive archaeology” as to the evolutionary origin of the type of brain architecture that enables what has been called “mapping across knowledge systems” (cp. Käppel and Pothou, 2015).
Examples of Research on Landscape Archaeology The Example of Megalithic Landscapes in Northern Germany and Southern Scandinavia Among the oldest cultural landscapes in Europe are the European megalithic landscapes. Originally, about 150,000 monuments were erected in North Central Europe and Southern Scandinavia. Their history provides a good example to describe different aspects of landscape archaeology (Müller, 2019; Knitter et al., 2019; Kneisel et al., 2019; Feeser et al., 2019; Brozio et al., 2019; Kirleis et al., 2012) (Figs. 9–10). In the mentioned area, sedimentological and climatic analysis identified “40 bad years” spanning from 4050–4010 BCE in laminated lake sediment sequences of the western Baltic lakes. A shortened vegetation period during the summer months and long winters are characteristic of this weather oscillation. The change in fish and mollusc composition influenced the local foraging economies in a way where Neolithic technologies were integrated into the local foraging subsistence practices. This happened partly by acculturation, partly by the entry of farming and herding individuals, and was possible since the communities obviously opened their networks. As a consequence, patches of cultivated areas and animal feeding in open areas at water sites were established. The new economy laid the foundation for population growth that furthered other activities (e.g. the demarcation of the landscape by non-megalithic long mounds). These practices might have represented a continuation of a former demarcation of northwest areas by white shining shell middens, partly of similar size, which already indicated the special meanings of certain landscape areas by forging communities. For the first time, clusters of up to 220 m long non-megalithic mounds were imposing visible meaning
Fig. 9 The First cultural landscapes were created in North Central Germany around 3500 BCE. The reconstruction displays the erection of a megalithic tomb around 3400 BCE within a monument, which started with a long mound (Flintbek near Kiel, North Germany). The introduction of the wheel and wagon and the animal tracked plow led to a huge population increase with immense land openings. Every detail of this reconstruction is based on archaeo-ecological and archaeological data.
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Fig. 10 Graph of the intensity in monument construction, artifact deposition and land use on the southern Cimbrian Peninsula and Northern Germany ca. 4100–1750 BCE (z-scores are based on absolute numbers of monuments, artifacts and palynological proxies per 50 years). Typical ceramic shapes are displayed.
onto parts of the landscapedthe deceased were integrated into communal activities, which are visible in the manifold mound biographies, and integrated as ancestors into the world of the living. Monumental landscapes became the precursor for a development that led to significant landscape changes, especially due to new agricultural techniques. The main shift in landscape practices was due to the introduction of the animal tracked plow, deep sea maritime facilities and the wheel and waggon around 3600 BCE. The transfer from extensive to intensive agriculture is not only visible in tremendous clearances and an increase in land use, but also in a changing meaning of environmental practices. While cereals and cultivates dominate within domestic sites, gathered wild plants are predominant within the megalithic collective burials. In contrast, in central ritual and communication knots of causewayed enclosures, plants of the direct vicinity dominate (Fig. 11). This indicates a pattern of areas for economic subsistence demands, such as spaces for burials, and others for communication purposes. The latter categories of sites are of visible character, whereby demarcations in the landscape are often marked by huge twin posts at certain entrances. The perception of the partly self-made environs is consciously or unconsciously reflected in different landscape practices.
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Fig. 11 Ritual communication nodes structure the meaning of landscapes. In the Neolithic causewayed enclosure Büdelsdorf (Northern Germany), the demarcation of one of the causeways was marked with a huge wooden post. A fireplace is also discernible, at which cereals were burnt. The assemblage both enhanced the visibility of the site and encompassed the ritual situation together with special mostly rectangular fire pits that were in line with the palisade and the ditch system. Infillings and recuttings within the elongated pits were carried out according to a generational time scale.
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Of considerable importance in the newly created cultural landscape is the reconstruction of the integrative behavior and the integrative meaning content of the environment and living beings, including humans. The already mentioned distribution differences of plants in different site categories are complemented by differences in animal food. Thus, lipid analyses show that offerings of cattle meat, similar to valuable oils, are especially found as grave goods in vessels of megalithic tombs, whereas vegetables dominate the food in settlements. Accordingly, we can establish a symbolic meaning association of cattle in connection with the rite of passage to death, of collected plants as a possible connection to the wild and of domesticated plants primarily in the settlement areas. Since the distribution of settlements is related to individual areas of the lowlandsdmegaliths to the elevated hinterlands, and causewayed enclosures to important communication nodes at waypointsdsuch meanings can be applied to individual landscapes. However, regional and local differences are also significant. In the Altmark, for example, the construction and maintenance of megalithic graves can be observed in forests far away from settlements, which were neither used for herring activities nor for other economic activities. The burials take place here as in a kind of “peace forest”, i.e. landscapes that have been disengaged from economic use. In contrast, in numerous other areas it is quite clear that megaliths are directly located on the farmland and seem to serve as markers of ownership here, using the ancestors. Furthermore, a cyclic use of sites and landscapes can be observed. The archaeological legacies visualize the visitation of different sites every three or four generations in order to assure their own norms in the context of ritual actions (e.g. by ritual practices, such as recutting and infilling ditches or architectural changes at megalithic graves) (Fig. 12). Through such practices, institutional knowledge in non-literate societies is transferred via different avenues from generation to generation. One of the most important media for memory transformation is materialisation at focal places of these societies. These biographies of European Neolithic sites offer diverse rhythms for the creation of such ancestral and social memories that are embedded into cognitive landscapes. The mentioned examples from enclosures and megaliths display this materialisation and the active roles that these monuments play in such transformation processes. This can happen independently in different places at different times (Müller, 2018b; Stewart and Strathern, 2003; Schama, 1995). The boom of megalithic tombs in Northern Europe is connected to a boom of clearances and an intensification of land use (Fig. 10). Motivation and meaning of the developed cultural landscape can thus be explained by everyday subsistence activities,
Fig. 12 Timelines of memory creation in non-literate societies and in Neolithic key sites of the southern Cimbrian Peninsula. Arrows mark timespans of renewed memories and memorization.
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in which people land themselves, living, and dead objects in a ritual as well as an economic cycle of goods. A more detectable bust in the construction of megalithic tombs around 3100 BCE is associated with a decrease in agricultural activities. Accordingly, we can connect the importance of the first cultural landscape of Northern Europe here with everyday cooperation, while about two hundred years later, a new wave of monumentality is associated with other constellations. Around 2700 BCE, it is no longer agrarian activities, but status gain through participation in supra-regional networks, which produces the new transformation of the landscape.
Nazi Germany’s “Landscape Architecture” Another example of landscape archaeology can be obtained from an example of historical landscape references. Here, the layering of memory culture in the landscape plays a particular role. It concerns landscape architecture of the early 20th century, in which not only Germany but also various European countries used memorial markers in the landscape which served to lay mindscapes in the landscape. This landscape architectural “zeitgeist” was adopted by the Nazi regime into the ideological design will of landscape (van der Laarse, 2015). This included, on the one hand, the racial policy of landscape cleansing, for example, Himmler’s “General Alignment for Landscape Development in Occupied Territories in the East” (1942). Essentially, cultural theft and the destruction or reinterpretation of monuments was advanced. On the other hand, the idea was propagated that new Germanic settlers would produce a “healthy German landscape” based on German identity. A heritage-scape to be developed would consist of newly developed small towns (Heimstätten), German villages with a graveyard and a “Thingplatz”, “soldier farms”, and Saxon manor houses rewarded to SS leaders. Himmler’s nature and landscape patriotism obviously went back to romantic traditions of the 19th century. The German landscape architect Willy Lange was hired to integrate age-old oak woods or the Saxon dolmen landscape into mythical beliefs about the purity of Nordic nature. Thus, within the framework of blood-and-soil ideology, invented memorial monuments were designed as occupation-scapes with eternal values. In purely practical terms, this led, for example, to the erection of a memorial field at the Aller River, which memorized the heroic defeat of a former Saxon leader in CE 782 at the Aller. Furthermore, plans for the future after the final victory were drawn up. This included the erection of monuments to commemorate the concentration camps after the Holocaust had been completed. Strangely enough, Himmler’s leading architect, Hübotter, was commissioned after the end of World War II to erect a corresponding memorial at the Bergen Belsen extermination camp so that the memory of the extermination of the Jewish victims would not be lost locally. Only after his Nazi past became known was Hübotter removed from the corresponding commission.
Institutionalisation of Landscapes The example of the Germanic landscape symbolizes the integration of different meanings into an integrated landscape. This includes recollections of prehistoric and historical projection fields, including, for example, Neolithic megalithic monuments, as well as the erection of new, or even the transformation or destruction of old monuments. Such processes are also visible within the Neolithic landscape itself, with the changing biographies of the megaliths. In principle, we observe the manipulation of things, architecture, and environments, infusing them with symbolic power, thereby transferring power over these through manipulated landscapes and things like prestige goods or sacred objects to power over people. This basic dynamic that is printed into landscapes has been at work from the beginning of modern humans in the Palaeolithic through to the Industrial Age. The explorative character of political economies and their modes of production are always reflected within the visualised symbols of social relationships embedded into the formation of landscapes (Kristiansen, 2022).
Key Issues New Relational Landscape: References and Issues Within the framework of landscape archaeology, various aspects exist which reveal the relationship between different variables that determine the development of landscapes. In view of basic concepts on landscapes and societies, the ensuing questions of the dynamics of social-ecological research within the framework of archaeological and philological historical sciences and environmental archaeology were decidedly addressed. In principle, with the investigation of human societiesdand past societies in particulardwe are concerned with the analysis and comprehension of diverse facets of human-environmental relations. Recently, the basic structures of such analysis have been posed with three important, all-encompassing questions in landscape archaeology: (1) How have human groups conceived their natural and cultural environments? (2) How was social space re-organised in relation to changing environmental conditions? (3) How did demographic and technical change influence the formation of social groups and landscapes? All three topical issues demand basic assessments of the environment and the landscape (Müller, 2018a; Haug and Müller, 2018). The motivation behind such questions is also the concern of whether the dynamics and the receptions of current situations in our societies can be structurally compared with ancient societies. For example, is the development of irrigation technology in Mesopotamia, which enabled the emergence of urban cultures but also overpopulation with fatal critical consequences, structurally comparable with questions concerning technological development, population increases and problems of current times (Johnson, 2017)? On the one hand, aspects concerning the spatial design of landscapes (e.g. Fotheringham et al., 2000) and, on the other hand, aspects concerning the reception of one’s own situation and thus the perception of ecological and social changes (Hahn, 2000; Ingold, 2002; Käppel and Pothou, 2015) are in focus.
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Crucial for our initial, definitely simplified, linkage of various aspects of human-environmental relationships and the organisation of societies is the observation that both economies and demographics develop on the basis of ecological and climatic conditions (Sutton and Anderson, 2004; Litt et al., 2021). In our observations, ecological changedirrespective of its perception by the actors in societyddirectly affects economic and demographic constants on a short-term, medium-term, or long-term basis (e.g. Bertemes and Meller, 2013; Butruille et al., 2016; Halstead and O’Shea, 1989; Kneisel et al., 2012). Ecological changes are associated, on the one hand, with the environmental conditions of the subsistence economy and, on the other hand, with basic aspects concerning the accessibility of raw materials and the disposability of plants, animals, and humans. In addition to such important insights, landscape archaeology today increasingly has the ability to draw from big data. Within the framework of this data, it is possible to investigate transformation processes and structures on different spatial and temporal scales, which are also crucial for our society today. Two aspects are extremely important here – recurrent socio-environmental patterns and long-lasting trends.
Empirical Reconstruction and Observation of Recurrent Socio-environmental Patterns Recurrent patterns of change in the past, as observed to have marked many spheres of socio-environmental developments, emerge within different spatial and temporal scales: social inequality appears to be marked by Kuznets-waves (Milanovic, 2016: 59), identifying the increase of inequalities during the introduction of innovations, and a decrease after the full establishment of innovations. With regard to socio-environmental hazards, cycles of warmer and colder climate periods appear to be accompanied by cycles of increasing and decreasing subsistence production rates, increasing and decreasing conflicts and rebellions, and increasing and decreasing political stabilities (Fang et al., 2015). Trajectories of knowledge production and spread may be bound to recurrent patterns of intensified production of ideas and innovations during periods of environmental and societal instability and stability. Distribution patterns of epidemic diseases allow us to predict their occurrence in cases of demographic pressure and in intensified global networks. The development of urbanity is closely associated with recurrent waves of innovations, for example, the reduction of transport costs, which made the centralized production and distribution of items profitable.
The Identification of Long-Lasting Trends Current predictions of climate change and environmental and societal impacts, considering social processes, information on urban dynamics, research on conflicts and conciliation, technological assessments, and dietary constraints, are essentially visible in landscapes. Current predictions rely on the basic assumption that current socio-environmental changes have reached unprecedented levels and thus future consequences from these changes are hardly foreseeable. The fuzziness of observed and extrapolated socio-environmental trends and simulated predictions is partially due to the limited time depth of the underlying databases, which lack adequate analogues. Landscape archaeological approaches, which include extended and refined timelines of socioenvironmental variables in addition to climatic, social and economic variables, urban developments, and their co-variabilities, have to support the modeling of general trends. In different research groups, a calibration of variables representing differential spheres of societal and environmental landscape categories has and is expected to provide improved interpretations of the observed trends and the identification of potential thresholds. The critical evaluation of landscape archives and sourcesda reflective interrelation of interdisciplinary concepts (including quantitative methods and qualitative data)din landscape archaeology already achieves a hermeneutic interpretation of socioenvironmental developments that can be implemented in ongoing societal discourses and decision processes.
Anthropocene Discussion The archaeological, historical, and geographical perspectives on the production and transmission of landscapes are also integrated into discourses of the Anthropocene. The changes of landscapes and the extent of human fingerprints in the environment have led to a discussion about the beginning of the Anthropocene. While for many environmental scientists the Anthropocene did not begin before the industrial age, for others irreversible developments are evident much earlier, for example, in the third millennium BCE. On the basis of land use studies, it has become clear that all areas of the world already exhibited human influence at that time.
Definition of Space Due to the abolition of the dichotomy between environment and society in the landscape, the concept of space has taken on a new meaning. Space, including landscape space, is now conceived as topographical, material, social, and cognitive space (Davies, 2013). Topographical space refers to environmental conditions (e.g. elevation, topographical landscape divisions). Material space refers to the spaces created on these topographical conditions such as architecture in settlements or trail systems. Social space describes the location of social groups in such a spatial model, and the social meanings assigned to individual landscapes. This can also include the access rules to different resources. Cognitive space involves the spatial organization of the understanding that people develop about their landscape, their world. For example, the bone depositions of the European Early Neolithic, which are spatially quite differently accommodated in the landscape, can be associated with a more animistic worldview, which is represented in the
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organization of the landscape. Within the framework of an etic view, cognitive space is about landscape constructions, and imaginings. All of this is interwoven with the notion of social, environmental, and cultural connectivities (Müller, 2023; Litt et al., 2021).
Summary and Future Directions In summary, it can be shown that the term “landscape archaeology” is determined by the interaction of ecological environmental development and social development. The interaction of these two components leads in the best case to the resolution of the two components due to a mutual influence, so that landscape is the structural product of socio-environmental transformations. While, on the one hand, landscape archaeology developed from settlement archaeology or environmental archaeology, on the other hand, it is cognitive archaeology that has contributed significantly to new conceptualizations and parameters in the interpretation of landscape space. Thus, there are possibilities of disentangling space into environmental, economic, social, and cognitive spaces, which, due to technical developments in archaeological tools, can now be traced, for example, with Geographic Information Systems. New tendencies in landscape archaeology continue to go further into the combination of different data archives on quite a big data level. In the meantime, it is possible to combine palaeogenetic data and isotopes on animal and human mobility in the landscape with data on nutritional status, settlement development, and material culture, on the one hand, and to put vegetation history and climatic data into a continuous framework on the other. The complexity addressed forty years ago, in particular by postprocessual archaeology, can thus be covered at the present time by the new data.
Acknowledgments The research was conducted and financed in the context of the Collaborative Research Centre 1266 “Scales of Transformation – Humanenvironmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies” of the German Research Foundation (DFG, German Research Foundation – Project number 2901391021 – SFB 1266) and the Excellence Cluster “ROOTS – Social, Environmental and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies” (EXC 2150/1: 390870439) (both Kiel University). Many thanks are extended to Janine Cordts for graphical support and to Eileen Kücükkaraca for language editing (both Kiel University).
See Also: Agricultural Fields; Environmental Archaeology; Human-Landscape Interactions; Phenomenological Archaeology; Rock Art and Petroglyphs; Social Impacts on Landscapes.
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Social, Environmental and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies. Sidestone Press, Leiden, pp. 13–24. Neustupny, Evzen (Ed.), 1998. Space in Prehistoric Bohemia. Academy Prag, Prag. Pickartz, Nathalie, Hofmann, Robert, Dreibrodt, Stefan, et al., 2019. Deciphering archeological contexts from the magnetic map: determination of daub distribution and mass of Chalcolithic house remains. Holocene 29 (10), 1637–1652. Schama, Simon, 1995. Landscape and Memory. Routledge, London. Stewart, Pamela J., Strathern, Andrew (Eds.), 2003. Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives. Pluto Press, London. Sutton, Mark Q., Anderson, E.N., 2004. Introduction to Cultural Ecology. Berg, Oxford. Thomas, Julian, 1991. Rethinking the Neolithic. New Studies in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tilley, Christopher Y., 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Explorations in Anthropology. Berg, Oxford. van der Laarse, Rob, 2015. Fatal attraction. 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Relevant Websites https://www.sfb1266.uni-kiel.de/en. https://www.cluster-roots.uni-kiel.de/en.
Maritime Archaeology Jose´ Bettencourta and Juan Guillermo Martı´nb,c, a Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CHAM – FCSH/UNL e UAç, Lisbon, Portugal; b Laboratorio de Arqueología, Universidad del Norte, Colombia; and c Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y Culturales, Panamá © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Underwater Archaeology Nautical Archaeology Maritime Archaeology and Maritime Cultural Landscapes Submerged Landscapes A Heritage at Risk. The 2001 UNESCO Convention, an Effort to Protect the World’s Underwater Cultural Heritage Questioning the 2001 UNESCO Convention Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References Relevant Websites
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Maritime archaeology encompasses much of underwater archaeology and nearly all nautical archaeology and it extends inland because the influence of aquatic environments goes beyond the coastline or riverbanks. Maritime cultural heritage represents the historical and dynamic relationship between human beings and the oceans, rivers, and lakes, as transit and trade places, through which goods, ideas and populations have circulated. A significant number of early archaeological sites related to human groups that exploited marine resources more than 14.5 Ky ago are now submerged. The potential threats to the preservation of archaeological underwater heritage have grown in recent decades. The implementation of underwater cultural heritage protection measures is one of the main activities of maritime archaeology.
Abstract The field of maritime archaeology has evolved and expanded considerably in recent decades. Initially focused on the material remains of humankind and its activities on the sea, this field addressed a wide range of aspects, encompassing navigation, equipment, cargo or passengers, officers, and crews. Its scope has now become quite comprehensive, and the research approaches try to enhance the cohesion between maritime cultural remains located both on land and in underwater environments, but also the relevance of the cognitive, cultural, and social aspects of maritime activities and communities.
Introduction In his introduction to the book Maritime Archaeology, published in 1978, Keith Muckelroy defined the field of this “new” discipline as “the scientific study of the material remains of man and his activities on the sea” (Muckelroy, 1978). This perspective compelled the archaeologist to address a wider range of subjects that went beyond the study of the ship, extending the investigation to other aspects of navigation, such as the equipment, cargo, or passengers, officers, and crew (Muckelroy, 1978: 6). Following the same line of thought, Jean-Yves Blot drew attention to the importance of the ship and its material universe as “Fait Social Total” (total social fact). As an object of study, ships enable researchers to reach a large part of the social reality to which they belong (Blot, 2012: 595). The reasons are cleardships (or wrecks, in their current material condition) have long assumed a role in the social life of coastal communities; their use was massive in the exchanges of the economic space they were part of; they were one of the largest and most complex machines built by human beings; and, as a social space, they constituted a “microcosm”, with specificities that are reflected in the organization of space and in the traditions and material culture associated with their crews and users (Gearhart, 2011; Bass, 2012; Blot, 2012). Furthermore, one should also consider the important role played by ships in
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communications, politics and rituals or symbolic representations amongst coastal, riverside or lagoon communities, but also the specific characteristics of most wrecks, which correspond to unintentional contemporaneous deposits (unselected), catastropherelated, sometimes becoming time capsules preserved in extraordinary condition. The potential of shipwreck sites explains the determining role their study played in the initial development of this new subdiscipline. These sites became accessible following the development of underwater archaeology and gained a new dimension in nautical archaeology. These terms are often used synonymously but are in fact different dimensions of archaeological research.
Overview and Key Issues Underwater Archaeology Underwater archaeology is the study of underwater archaeological remains (Fig. 1). This field evolved alongside the development of diving techniques and became firmly established in the second half of the 20th century, when working methodologies that had long been used in terrestrial contexts were adapted, enabling the systematic acquisition of data in underwater contexts (Bass, 2012) (Fig. 2). Research on submerged contexts employs multiple methodologies and technologies. Regarding the preliminary research phase, or survey, this subdiscipline has long adopted technologies used by other sea users, both civilian and military. The use of geophysics in underwater archaeology, specifically magnetometry and side scan sonar, is common at several research stages (Gearhart, 2011; Quinn, 2012). Magnetometry is particularly useful in the identification and delimitation of early-modern or contemporary sites, which often feature iron alloy hardware (Fig. 3). Side scan sonar enables detecting remains overlying the seabed, which, in addition to a distinct reflection, generate easily identifiable shadows. In recent decades, surveying has made growing use of multibeam data (Plets et al., 2011) (Fig. 4). More recently, side scan sonar and other equipment have been used with underwater vehicles (AUVs), providing faster systematic coverage of large areas (Reggiannini and Salvetti, 2017). These methods are also used in non-intrusive documentation or monitoring of sites (Quinn, 2012), enabling the description of depositional environments and studying the formation processes of the archaeological record. Studies that aim at characterizing buried deposits are particularly appealing, resulting in the production of archaeological knowledge without destroying the studied subject (Plets et al., 2009). Intra-site excavation and documentation techniques are an adaptation of the methods used on land and are well established since the 1960s (Bass, 2012). However, recording techniques evolved significantly in the last decade, mainly due to the development of Structure for Motion photogrammetry (SfM), and became 3D. Based on overlapping images, SfM photogrammetry methods enable the extraction of high resolution and accurate spatial data using low-cost equipment and user-friendly software (Fig. 5). Their widespread applications encompass the recording of shipwreck sites of various chronologies, submerged structures or port and harbor areas, in shallow, deep or low-visibility waters (McCarthy et al., 2019). This method provides multiple outputs, orthomosaics, 3D or Digital Elevation Models, which can be easily combined with GIS or other information sources. The same data can be used as a basis for traditional or interpreted 3D recording of archaeological deposits. The last decade was also marked by significant advances in deep underwater archaeology, reaching sites at depths of more than 80 m. The exploration of these sites took its first steps in the Mediterranean in the 1980s, following the discovery of deep-water wrecks during industrial works and surveying. The first attempts did not enable the systematic documentation of archaeological contexts. For example, at Cap Bénat 4, located at a depth of 328 m, the mission conducted in 1981 was limited to random photographs and the recovery of amphorae, but it was not possible to carry out a precise mapping of the site. Nevertheless, this new area
Fig. 1 An archaeologist observes an 18th-century onion bottle at the anchorage area of the bay of Angra, on the island of Terceira (Azores, Portugal). The invention of the regulator for autonomous diving by Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan, in the middle of the 20th century, fostered ocean explorations and underwater archaeology. Photo José Bettencourt.
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Fig. 2 Angra B wreck (c. 1600) excavation (Angra Bay, Portugal). Several techniques used in underwater archaeology are no different from their terrestrial counterparts. In any case, the meticulous collection of data is essential due to the destructive nature of archaeological excavations. Photo José Bettencourt.
was significantly developed in the following decades, through successive attempts conducted on ancient sites located in the French Mediterranean (L’Hour and Creuze, 2016) or the Black Sea, in Turkey (Ballard et al., 2001). The study of deep-water sites is technologically demanding, requiring the use of robotic devices and submersibles, equipped with geophysical equipment, video and photo cameras, lights, positioning systems, manipulator arms or blasters, for example (Bingham et al., 2010; Drap et al., 2015; L’Hour and Creuze, 2016). This type of equipment requires the assistance of highly specialized technicians, which complicates the archaeological control of the interventions. The experiments carried out in the last decade aimed at achieving full control over the robotic devices used in underwater excavations. The advances made in France in the scope of the study of the Lune, which sank in the roads of Toulon in 1664, are particularly relevant. The 91 m-deep site served as a test case for the development of equipment to be used in the survey and excavation of archaeological sites in the deepest waters – the excavation systems aimed at controlling the extraction of sediments have been improved; accurate mapping methods were implemented, using High Definition Imaging and 3D modeling; 3D virtual environments were used to visualize, plan the archaeological operations, train and interpret the remains; methods for improved recovery of artifacts and sampling were tested (L’Hour and Creuze, 2016). On the Black Sea, 65 shipwreck sites dating from the 4th century BC to the 19th century AD, located in Bulgaria at depths between 40 and 2200 m, were recorded using remotely operated vehicles which captured high-definition
Fig. 3 The Cesium magnetometer measures the magnetic field variations. The presence of iron artifacts can be detected. Photo Juan Guillermo Martín.
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Fig. 4 The side scan sonar is used to generate images of the seabed to identify the overlying targets related to past human activities. Photo Juan Guillermo Martín.
photographs, ultra-high-definition video, acoustic bathymetric, laser, side-scan sonar and seismic data (Pacheco-Ruiz et al., 2019). Photogrammetry data are particularly useful in archaeology, being used in shipwreck analysis and in the study of shipbuilding details. On other projects, like the excavation of the Xlendi shipwreck, found off the Gozo coast in Malta at a depth of 100 m, 3D captured data were analyzed and represented using ontologies, machine learning, non-photorealistic rendering, virtual reality and lightfield imaging (McCarthy et al., 2019).
Fig. 5 Bugio 2 orthomosaic (c.1625; Tagus mouth, Portugal). Photogrammetric outputs enable the detailed documentation of archaeological sites and can also be used as an alternative to disseminate the research results. Orthomosaic José Bettencourt.
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Nautical Archaeology Nautical archaeology deals with the study of vessel remains. It has been recognized as a specialist field since the 19th century. At the time, essentially based on the analysis of written and iconographic sources, it mainly dealt with the external appearance of ships and issues such as the overall shape of the hulls, the typology of the masts and sails, the propulsion systems, the decoration or the evolution of the steering systems. The discipline, as we know it today, only became firmly established in all its dimensions from the 1960s/1970s onwards, following the development of underwater archaeology, which granted access to sites and shipwrecks ranging from prehistory to the present day (Pomey and Rieth, 2005; Bass, 2012). Access to the material remains of ships has broadened the research issues to a dimension that was absent from the written and iconographic sources (Fig. 6). Nowadays, the archaeological study of shipbuilding practices and methods supports the identification and precise analysis of raw materials and the characterization of the techniques used in the construction processes. Regarding the former, contributions can be made to the knowledge of aspects related to the organization of shipyards – selection, management and processing of raw materials or the organization of production –, leading to a reflection on their respective economic, social and cultural networks. On the other hand, the systematic study of the shape, arrangement and size of the various elements and joining techniques enables analyzing aspects related to carpentry, technological capacity, the hull assembly sequence, the means of propulsion and the function or conditions of the ship’s area of operation (Pomey and Rieth, 2005: 19). The analysis of the construction sequence is also an essential stage of studies focusing on the principles of hull design, a phase preceding construction in an operational chain markedly conditioned by the economic and functional aspects underlying the architectural project (Pomey and Rieth, 2005: 20–25). Furthermore, the archaeological study of ships is also a field of interest for the analysis of social and cultural processes (Adams, 2013). The development of nautical archaeology over the last decade has once again been deeply conditioned by technological development. The principles and methods of study have long been defined, but the documentation techniques have evolved from analogue 2D to digital 3D. On the field, photogrammetry became the standard for the in situ recording of boats and ships (McCarthy et al., 2019). In terms of timber documentation, the first adopted method involved the contact digitizing of ship timbers, involving the tracing of all significant features and outlines. In recent years, this time-consuming approach has been replaced by the scanning of all parts, subsequently used to record observations on details of the timbers and construction processes (Van Damme et al., 2020). This method is sometimes replaced or complemented by photogrammetry, providing better quality textures. Both methods provide a precise three-dimensional recording of all wooden elements, which has served as a basis for the printing and reassembly of the hulls and/or for their virtual reconstitution. Nowadays, the latter’s degree of detail can range from line plans to full reconstruction proposals. Moreover, these models can be used in capacity and performance tests. It is hardly possible to gauge all the advances made in nautical archaeology over the last decades. More than half a century of research has resulted in our current capacity to produce comprehensive overviews of shipbuilding in the Mediterranean, Northwestern Europe, America, and Asia, from Antiquity to contemporary times (see overviews in Ford et al., 2012).
Maritime Archaeology and Maritime Cultural Landscapes Muckelroy’s (1978) perspective remains altogether up-to-date with regard to the study of ships as structures, social spaces and elements of a social and economic system. However, in the introduction to his book the author establishes right away a rigid division between the archaeology of waterlogged environments and the archaeology of coastal contexts, by stating that “[.] concern
Fig. 6
General view of Angra B hull (c. 1600) after excavation (Angra Bay, Portugal). Photo José Bettencourt.
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with coastal communities which derive their livelihoods predominantly from the sea is excluded since, being primarily terrestrial settlements, they will be more closely related to surrounding communities in their material culture, and will display their maritime connections only marginally. Many of the objects used in seafaring are rarely brought ashore, and any artifact collection made there will represent very poorly the seafaring community itself” (Muckelroy, 1978: 6) (Fig. 7). While including in the field of analysis of maritime archaeology structures with an obvious relation to maritime activities, such as ramps or ports, Muckelroy excludes other terrestrial remains, such as coastal settlements, from its field of action (Fig. 3). This division still stands today in many research projects. However, the field of maritime archaeology has evolved and expanded considerably in recent decades. Its scope has now become quite comprehensive, including both submerged and terrestrial archaeological remains. Maritime archaeology therefore encompasses much of underwater archaeology and nearly all nautical archaeology. And it extends inland because the influence of aquatic environments often extends for hundreds of kilometers beyond the coastline or riverbanks. A particular analytical perspective has acquired importance in the last decades. The concept of maritime cultural landscape, first proposed by Christopher Westerdahl during surveys conducted in Sweden between 1975 and 1980 (Westerdahl, 1992), has provided the archaeology of waterlogged environments with the missing tool for the integration of shipwrecks in their nautical context. One of the novelties introduced by this approach is the enhancement of the cohesion between maritime cultural remains located both on land and in aquatic environments, but also the relevance of the cognitive, cultural and social aspects of maritime activities within the study area. This cohesion and the enlargement of the research field had consequences in terms of the sources used, either archaeological, written, or oral (Fig. 8). The analysis of parameters such as toponymy, port structures, coastal activities, defensive systems, settlement and ports or the location of shipwrecks was fostered. Such cultural parameters, both terrestrial and underwater, are analyzed in the framework of an environment in constant mutation, due to natural changes (ecological, geomorphological, or hydrographic) and/or to anthropic pressure. These changes shape different landscapes of power, economic or cognitive, for example, layered over time. The study of maritime cultural landscapes has been experienced all over the world (Ford, 2011), e.g. in Ireland (McErlean et al., 2002), Canada (Ford, 2009), Australia (Duncan, 2006) or the Netherlands (Popta et al., 2018), and is now a vibrant field of archaeological research.
Submerged Landscapes The focus of maritime and underwater archaeology has also embraced paleolandscapes. During the Last Glacial Maximum, between 26.5 and 19 Ky, the worldwide sea-level drop reached an average of 127.5 7.5 m. This means that large portions of all continents, now submerged, would have been dry and available for human occupation in the past. According to Dobson (2014), an estimated 22 million square kilometres were exposed around the planet. The available data indicate that around 14.5 Ky ago the ocean levels began to rise to their current levels. A significant number of early archaeological sites related to human groups that exploited marine resources more than 14.5 Ky ago are now submerged. Recent research has shown that detailed analysis of the seabed, using geophysical techniques, enables the reconstruction of currently submerged landscapes, facilitating the detection of early archaeological sites (Noël, 2014; Wickham-Jones, 2018).
Fig. 7 Human beings have an ancestral relationship with the oceans. Present-day artisan fishers, in Taganga, Colombia, provide insights on ancient nautical techniques, navigation and fishery practices, which are part of the maritime cultural landscapes. Photo Juan Guillermo Martín.
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Fig. 8 The transformation of the maritime cultural landscape in the Caribbean from the 16th century onwards involved the construction of a complex defensive system, customs buildings and other port infrastructures to support the Carrera de Indias (Portobelo bay, Panama). Photo Juan Guillermo Martín.
As far as early American settlements are concerned, the reconstruction of submerged landscapes begins to provide research possibilities concerning the search for sites associated with the first migration waves, which spread rapidly from Beringia to Patagonia, ultimately colonizing the continent (Erlandson et al., 2011; Mackie et al., 2018). In other parts of the planet, paleolandscape reconstructions resulted in the identification of numerous sites, adding a new subject matter to the scope of underwater archaeology and raising new theoretical and methodological challenges, in order to understand and explain the early relationships between humans and the oceans (Surdez et al., 2018) (Fig. 9).
Fig. 9 An ancient fishing innovation took advantage of sea-level changes in Saboga, Pearl Islands, Panama. A large number of different kinds of fish traps are used throughout the Pacific Ocean; some of them are permanently underwater due to climate change. Photo Juan Guillermo Martín.
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A Heritage at Risk. The 2001 UNESCO Convention, an Effort to Protect the World’s Underwater Cultural Heritage The potential threats to the preservation of archaeological heritage have grown in recent decades. Port works and the dredging of harbors and navigation channels have been running into submerged remains for several centuries (Fig. 10). There is a growing incidence of offshore prospecting for oil and other mineral resources. Climate change and coastal erosion have prompted the construction of artificial barriers. Besides the predictable direct impact on sites located in the construction areas, these structures may also trigger side impacts resulting from alterations to sedimentary dynamics. The struggle against the loss of land frequently involves beach replenishment using sand extracted from locations whose archaeological potential is often unknown. Hence, nowadays the implementation of underwater cultural heritage (UCH) protection measures is one of the main activities of underwater archaeology. Sites at risk have been provided with various physical protection solutions. In many countries, engineering projects are now monitored through environmental impact assessment processes, as a means of minimizing impact, generating knowledge and enhancing UCH. The adopted measures include the characterization of the reference situation, by means of desktop research and visual survey carried out by divers or using geophysical methods. In most cases, dredging works involve archaeological monitoring. Concurrently, whenever remains are found during the assessment phase, specific measures are subsequently defined. These may include archaeological testing, physical protection, removal or excavation of the remains, according to their scientific and heritage relevance (Bettencourt, 2016). On the other hand, underwater archaeological sites, particularly shipwrecks, have been legally unprotected for decades, lacking regulations to ensure their research and conservation. They have normally been seen as sites with treasures and objects that can be sold, particularly those associated with the Carrera de Indias (India Run) (Grenier, 2008), which has fostered their plundering and destruction by treasure hunting companies, sometimes operating legitimately and with the support of some governments. UCH represents the historical and dynamic relationship between human beings and the oceans, rivers, and lakes, as transit and trade places, through which goods, ideas and populations have circulated. Ultimately, UCH is evidence that unites nations with shared histories, making it a common heritage. The regulations related to this issue are relatively recent. In broad terms, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in Montego Bay in 1982 and ratified by 168 countries, included some aspects related to this subject; still, this was not only insufficient but also contradictory. The Convention, particularly in articles 149 and 303, promotes the protection and preservation of submerged historical and archaeological remains, as well as total sovereignty in this regard in territorial waters. However, no regulation was established outside the contiguous zone and the exclusive economic zone. Likewise, the meaning of the law of salvage and other admiralty rules was not clarified (Scovazzi, 2012: 758). In other words, the concern was raised but the measures did not help to reduce the constant plundering and destruction of UCH. The Charter on the Protection and Management of Underwater Cultural Heritage, ratified in the general assembly held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1996 by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) became the first international document aimed
Fig. 10 An iron cannon is found during dredging monitoring in Horta Bay (Faial Island, Azores, Portugal). Some of the current works aimed at improving port infrastructures all over the world have become a serious threat to underwater cultural heritage. Photo José Bettencourt.
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at the protection and management of UCH. This charter promulgates the international nature of UCH, as well as a number of actions aimed at preventing its destruction, either caused by infrastructure works, such as ports and dredging, or by the activities of treasure hunters, motivated by profit and private interests. Concurrently, it broadly outlines the scientific criteria and principles that must be applied to all interventions in underwater sites, including “submerged sites and structures, wreck sites and wreckage, and their archaeological and natural context” (ICOMOS, 1996). Based on this charter, an international group of experts, especially led by Latin American and Caribbean countries, designed, and wrote a document that seeks to protect the UCH worldwide. This is how the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, adopted in 2001, arose (Luna Erreguerena, 2010). This international treaty entered into force on January 2, 2009, when 20 states ratified it. Up to now (May 2023) it has been ratified by 72 countries out of the 193 member states (UNESCO, 2020), hoping that maritime powers such as the United States of America, Germany, the Russian Federation, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Australia also ratify it, granting it the support that such an initiative deserves. This convention is based on fundamental principles for the protection of UCH, promotes international cooperation between State Parties, and provides a set of practical rules for the management and research of UCH, in addition to clarifying the contradictions of UNCLOS, related to the law of salvage and law of finds, totally rejected by the 2001 Convention (see UNESCO, 2001). In the scope of this Convention, UCH means “all traces of human existence having a cultural, historical or archaeological character which have been partially or totally underwater, periodically or continuously, for at least 100 years” (Article 1). Accordingly, the basic principles of the 2001 Convention are the following: (A) the obligation to preserve the UCH, not necessarily by researching it but by taking specific measures for its protection. Furthermore, the Convention seeks to foster scientific research, as well as public access to this heritage. (B) In situ preservation of UCH is recommended as the first option, before engaging in any type of intervention. The use of technology that minimizes intrusions into relevant contexts is encouraged, unless otherwise necessary and supported by a scientific project. (C) The commercial exploitation of the UCH, for speculative or profit purposes, as well as its scattering in private collections, is strictly prohibited. (D) International cooperation is encouraged, in order to provide specialized training as well as the exchange of information aimed at fostering public awareness. (E) Disputes concerning the ownership of the UCH should be discussed by the State Parties involved. Apart from the general principles that support this Convention, several rules concerning activities directed at UCH are included in an annex that refers to the methodological tools to be applied by underwater archaeology projects, the first option being in situ preservation; the use of non-destructive, geophysical techniques is recommended (https://en.unesco.org/underwater-heritage/ 2001). This annex has been adopted by the United Kingdom in 2005, without the need to ratify the Convention. During the first session of the Convention, the member states established a Scientific and Technical Advisory Body (STAB) composed of experts nominated by the State Parties. The role of the STAB is to assist in scientific or technical questions (Evans et al., 2010).
Questioning the 2001 UNESCO Convention Despite the fact that the principles underlying this convention have the approval of the discipline, maritime powers are still concerned by some aspects, particularly regarding politics and practice. According to Dromgoole (2013), there is still some doubt about the uncomfortable relationship between this convention and the law of the sea, especially in relation to the regulatory framework and its impact on the principles of the said law, which generate problems in terms of jurisdiction within the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf. Similarly, there is some concern about the treatment of sunken warships. According to Dromgoole (2013: 119), the issue of sovereign immunity is not clear since any activity directed to warships should require the authorization of the flag state. Concurrently, it is understood that coastal states have the right to demand reports pertaining to flag vessels or from other states regarding their activities and discoveries. Ultimately, there is evidence of an antagonism between flag states and coastal states, both claiming their sovereignty. The best examples are Spain, the United Kingdom and Portugal, with a vast worldwide submerged heritage. In the case of Portugal and Spain, the respect, protection, and study of UCH are claimed “in exclusive behalf of science, culture and mankind” (Alves, 2010: 161). In this respect, the notion of “Verifiable Links” introduced by the Convention seeks to overcome these issues involving the coastal and flag states (Maarleveld, 2014). Of course, UNESCO has insisted that this Convention does not regulate the ownership of shipwrecks or modify the sovereign rights of states, nor does it change the maritime zones defined by UNCLOS. What it does openly prohibit is the destruction of the UCH for commercial exploitation, in all waters and maritime areas. One of the principles most criticized by treasure hunters is in situ preservation (as a legal rule and legal principle) as first option. According to them, it prevents any intervention in wrecks, keeping the public from admiring this heritage (Aznar, 2018; Grenier, 2008). However, it is broadly consensual that this alternative is the most reasonable technical decision, when the legal and political circumstances allow it, and it is not a mandatory rule. It concerns the possibility of guaranteeing the preservation of historical and natural contexts in order to preserve their authenticity and ensure future research (Aznar, 2018; Maarleveld et al., 2013; ICOMOS, 1996). It is also clear that this principle does imply a series of technical and scientific actions that require public information, stabilization of the archaeological site (without invasive intervention), monitoring and protection, avoiding non-scientific intervention, taking into account that, even today, scientific knowledge has not been able to avoid some deterioration, typical of the radical change in the conditions of underwater remains (Aznar, 2018).
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This technical principle is so well supported, in scientific terms, that on November 6, 2003, Canada, France, the United States of America and the United Kingdom, the last two without ratifying the convention, signed an agreement for the in situ preservation of the Titanic wreck (sunk in 1914 in international waters) as a result of a broad technical debate (Aznar, 2018). Of course, there are still many countries that have not ratified the convention, for the reasons stated above or because they have a legal framework that deals with this issue. Portugal, for example, managed to change the legal framework that allowed the activity of treasure hunters and ratified the convention in 2006 (Alves, 2010). In other cases, such as the USA, the country’s underwater archaeologists have adopted the technical annex within their professional practices without being obliged to ratify it (Grenier, 2008). In the Asia-Pacific region, the situation is complex since only four countries have ratified the Convention. This region is characterized by plundering and interventions for commercial purposes. About 70 shipwrecks were plundered between 1963 and 2010, eight of them with the participation of local authorities and professional archaeologists (Nishikawa, 2021). In America, the situation is similar although the cases are not as numerous. Panama, for example, the first country to ratify the convention in 2001, allowed a treasure hunting company to intervene in the wreck of the San José galleon, sunk in 1631, in the surroundings of the Pearl Islands. This plundering and destruction were thoroughly documented by members of the UNESCO STAB in 2015, at the request of the Panamanian government. It was a commercial operation in which a professor from a local university also participated. Colombia, on the other hand, did not ratify the convention but designed its own legal tool (Law 1675 of 2013) that allows the commercial exploitation of UCH in the country’s territorial waters, with a remuneration of up to 50% of what the Colombian state does not consider cultural heritage. In this particular case, private interests managed to draft a law and involve government officials and national and international professionals in the “rescue” project of the San José galleon, sunk in 1708, where several archaeologists were involved, directly and indirectly, contravening the ethical principles of archaeology (Martín et al., 2021). The same happens in Uruguay, where the “rescue” and trade of UCH is legal, and some archaeologists have also been involved, unfortunately, because decree 692 of 1986 forces the Heritage Commission to act as an advisory to commercial projects. The Dominican Republic has also been subject to intense plundering and trade of UCH, due to legal agreements between treasure hunters and the government. Finally, in 2021, this country ratified the convention and closed the door to commercial activity involving UCH. It is clear that UCH motivates multiple interests, many of which seek to satisfy commercial interests above the scientific ones. The treasure hunters have resources, technical ability, and even professional advice. They also have the possibility of establishing highlevel contacts, even modifying the laws of a country, as in the case of Colombia. For these reasons, an international legal framework is required in order to unanimously ensure the preservation of UCH for the future generations, adopting the principles that support the 2001 UNESCO Convention.
Summary and Future Directions Underwater archaeological research faces many challenges that have gradually been overcome thanks to technological advances. However, conservation is still a major issue. UCH is located underwater, in anoxic conditions, i.e. with little dissolved oxygen, which favors the preservation of archaeological materials. Their removal from stable conditions requires complex conservation and restoration procedures that are time-consuming and, in most cases, quite costly (Khakzad and Van Balen, 2012). In 1961, the Swedish government took the decision of refloating the warship Vasa, sunk on her maiden voyage in 1628. This decision, whose main objective was to build a museum exclusively dedicated to the ship, involved the design of a complex conservation program, still ongoing today. This is perhaps the best example of the full preservation of a ship and of the implications of refloating and displaying it to the public (Hocker et al., 2012). Similar museums such as the Mary Rose, sunk in 1545, also face similar conservation issues, and seek to update protocols through research and the implementation of new strategies to ensure the integrity of this warship (Preston et al., 2013). In this sense, museums have become the main disseminators of knowledge, explaining the role of maritime archaeology, the millenary relationships between human beings and aquatic environments, becoming the custodians of UCH and ensuring its safekeeping for future generations. Some outstanding examples are the ARQUA Museum in Cartagena, Spain (Fig. 11), the Viking Ship Museum in Roskild, Denmark, and the Silk Road Museum in Guangdong, China, where the main attraction is an aquarium built on the premises to house the Nanhai One, a Chinese merchant ship sunk during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279 CE). This vessel is being excavated and visitors can see it through huge windows on both sides of the aquarium (Jiao, 2010). However, given the conservation difficulties related to UCH, several alternatives have been devised to ensure the conservation and dissemination of this heritage. In some places, submerged and even virtual archaeological parks have been created which, through controlled tourism, allow the public to get closer to UCH, fostering its conservation in the same environment where it was discovered (Fig. 12). This strategy requires the commitment of local communities, sailors, and fishermen, in coordination with local authorities, to prevent plundering and secure heritage conservation (Davidde, 2002; Gambin et al., 2021). The future of maritime archaeology also lies in the adoption of minimum impact methodologies, allowing for a sustainable study of underwater cultural heritage. Current technology supports studying UCH with great precision, while limiting intrusive activities as much as possible. Valuable information can be obtained through the application of geophysical techniques, photogrammetry and 3D modeling, bringing the public closer to UCH contexts without getting their feet wet. Maritime archaeology is thus aimed at providing information to the public and consolidating the development of interdisciplinary projects based on international cooperation.
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Fig. 11 The ARQUA Museum, in Spain. Museums have the possibility and responsibility of disseminating scientific knowledge and bringing communities closer to maritime cultural heritage. Photo Juan Guillermo Martín.
Fig. 12 Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the Brazilian steamer Lidador, lost on Angra Bay in 1878 (bow is on the right), produced to support visitation of the site. In addition to its scientific utility, it can help explain details of an underwater archaeological context to the public. DEM José Bettencourt.
Acknowledgments We have to thank Armando Lucena for the translation and revision of the paper. This work was supported by CHAM (NOVA FCSH/UAc), through a strategic project sponsored by FCT (UIDB/04666/2020). It was also developed under the EU H2020 MSCA–RISE-2017 research and innovation program under grant agreement n 777998 “CONCHA – The construction of early modern global Cities and oceanic networks in the Atlantic: An approach via Ocean’s Cultural Heritage” and the UNESCO Chair in The Oceans’ Cultural Heritage.
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See Also: Maritime Silk Road; Underwater Archaeology.
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Underwater cultural heritage in Asia Pacific and the UNESCO convention on the protection of underwater cultural heritage. Int. J. Asia Pac. Stud. 17 (2), 15–38. Pacheco-Ruiz, Rodrigo, Adams, Jonathan, Pedrotti, Felix, Grant, Michael, Holmlund, Joakim, Bailey, Chris, 2019. Deep sea archaeological survey in the Black Sea – robotic documentation of 2,500 years of human seafaring. Deep Sea Res. Oceanogr. Res. Pap. 152, 103087. Plets, Ruth M.K., Dix, Justin K., Adams, Jon R., et al., 2009. The use of a high-resolution 3D Chirp sub-bottom profiler for the reconstruction of the shallow water archaeological site of the Grace Dieu (1439), River Hamble, UK. J. Archaeol. Sci. 36 (2), 408–418. Plets, Ruth, Quinn, Rory, Forsythe, Wes, et al., 2011. Using multibeam echo-sounder data to identify shipwreck sites: archaeological assessment of the Joint Irish Bathymetric Survey data. Int. J. Naut. Archaeol. 40 (1), 87–98. Pomey, Patrice, Rieth, Eric, Rival, Michel, 2005. L’Archéologie Navale. Errance, Paris. Popta, Yftinus T., Westerdahl, Christer L., Duncan, Brad G., 2018. Maritime Culture in The Netherlands: accessing the late medieval maritime cultural landscapes of the northeastern Zuiderzee. Int. J. Naut. Archaeol. 48 (1), 172–188.
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Preston, Joanne, Smith, Andrew D., Schofield, Eleanor J., Chadwick, Alan V., Jones, Mark A., Watts, Joy E.M., 2014. The Effects of Mary Rose Conservation Treatment on Iron Oxidation Processes and Microbial Communities Contributing to Acid Production in Marine Archaeological Timbers. PloS One 9 (2), E84169. Quinn, Rory, 2012. Acoustic remote sensing in maritime archaeology. In: Ford, Ben, Hamilton, Donny L., Catsambis, Alexis (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 68–89. Reggiannini, Marco, Salvetti, Ovidio, 2017. Seafloor analysis and understanding for underwater archeology. J. Cult. Herit. 24, 147–156. Scovazzi, Tullio, 2012. The law of the sea convention and underwater cultural heritage. Int. J. Mar. Coast. Law 27, 753–761. Surdez, Morgane, Beck, Julien, Sakellariou, Dimitris, et al., 2018. Flooding a landscape: impact of Holocene transgression on coastal sedimentology and underwater archaeology in Kiladha Bay (Greece). Swiss J. Geosci. 111, 573–588. UNESCO, 2001. Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/convention-protection-underwater-cultural-heritage. UNESCO, 2020. Annex II Status of Ratification of Conventions and Agreements, Adopted Under The Auspices of UNESCO (As at 1 July 2021). https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/ 48223/pf0000378425_eng/PDF/378425eng.pdf.multi.page=11. Van Damme, Thomas, Auer, Jens, Ditta, Massimiliano, et al., 2020. The 3D annotated scans method: a new approach to ship timber recording. Herit. Sci. 8, 75. Westerdahl, Christer, 1992. The maritime cultural landscape. Int. J. Naut. Archaeol. 21 (1), 5–14. Wickham-Jones, Caroline, 2018. Landscape Beneath the Waves: The Archaeological Investigation of Underwater Landscapes, first ed., Vol. 4. Oxbow Books, Havertown.
Relevant Websites Arqua museum webpage https://www.culturaydeporte.gob.es/mnarqua/home.html. Kim Cobb’s Lab. Paleoclimate and climate Change https://cobblab.eas.gatech.edu/. Maritime Solk Road Museum og Guangdong webpage https://www.msrmuseum.com/Home/Enindex. Sea Gardens Across the Pacific https://www.seagardens.net/. The Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton https://cma.soton.ac.uk/who-we-are/about/. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology https://nauticalarch.org/. The Kronan webpage https://www.regalskeppetkronan.se/en/. The Thistlegorm Project https://thethistlegormproject.com/. The Viking Ship musem webpage https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/. UNESCO 2001 Convention https://en.unesco.org/underwater-heritage/2001. Vasa museum webpage https://www.vasamuseet.se/en.
Marxist Archaeology Alessandro Guidi, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Theoretical Premises and the Archaeology of Soviet Russia Between the Two World Wars Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957): The Beginnings of Marxist Archaeology in Western Europe Marxist Approaches in the Archaeology of the Second Post-War Period Rebirth of a Marxist Perspective in Theoretical Archaeology Summary and Future Directions References
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History of Marxist archaeology Development of the Marxist approach in various countries Evaluation of the importance of this theoretical approach for the development of the discipline
Abstract This entry traces the history of the Marxist approach to the study of the human past through the investigation of the archaeological record. After a brief enquiry of Marx’ and Engels’ theories in the second half of the 19th century, it is possible to find their first application to archaeology in Soviet Russia, where a “theory of stages” based on the relations of production, became the official “doctrine” of historical studies. From 1934, year of his first visit to the U.S.S.R., Vere Gordon Childe became a passionate supporter of Marxist materialism, which he mixed, in an original and unsurpassed synthesis, with the study of European and Near Eastern prehistory. After World War II, in Eastern Europe the orthodoxy of the stage’s theory was slowly substituted by other traditional approaches, while Marxist theory widely informed the archaeological schools of France and Italy; in the United States we can find elements of Marxist theory in the neo-evolutionist school of White and Steward. In the theoretical foundations of New Archaeology it is possible to find analogies with the Marxist approaches; from the 1980s onward, we attest a sort of rebirth of Marxist theory, paradoxically in the same years as the global failure of Communist regimes. Today Marxist theory is still alive and well in the fields of gender and minority archaeology, especially for the study of ethnicity and its political utilization.
Introduction Marxist theory has been (at least from the end of World War II) a sort of fil rouge that connects various “regional” archaeological traditions in the wider framework of European archaeology (Hodder, 1991a: 22), while the overwhelming irruption in the debate of themes like post-colonialism and minorities studies made this theory very popular also in the United States. This entry aims to reconstruct various lines of the evolution of Marxist archaeology in different periods of growth of our discipline (on the history of archaeology see Guidi (1988), Trigger (1989); about Childe and his importance in archaeology see Trigger (1980); on Marxist “archaeologies” see Iacono (2018); on the influence of Marxist theories in Anglo-American archaeology see Patterson (2003)).
Overview and Key Issues Theoretical Premises and the Archaeology of Soviet Russia Between the Two World Wars Karl Marx, in one of his manuscripts of 1857–1858 entitled Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen ökonomie (published only at the end of the 1930s), addressed for the first time the definition of the modes of production in the ancient world by distinguishing a primitive stage, characterized by forms of community tribal ownership, and a second stage “of the ancient community and of the state”. This second stage was divided into three different economic formations, the eastern one (or Asian mode of production), common to oriental and Mesoamerican civilizations; the ancient one, marked by the appearance of private property, typical of the GrecoRoman world; the Germanic one, characteristic of Celtic tribes and of the barbarian migrations period. The work of Friedrich Engels,
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Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels, 1972 (1884)), published a year after Marx’s death, was based on Marx notes in Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), a work whose outline forms the backbone of Engels’ book. Engels superimposes an interpretation of the evolution of primitive communities based on the analysis of modes of production on the stages of development identified by Morgan (savagery-barbarism-civilization): 1. Primitive communism (savagery). 2. Lower state of barbarism with the first great social division of labor between tribes practicing hunting and others practicing pastoralism. 3. Average state of barbarism with the invention of agriculture in Asia and a consequent increase in the social stratification associated with the birth of slavery. 4. Superior state of barbarism with the invention of iron, the second social division of labor with the separation between agriculture and crafts, the creation of cities and the first assignment to families of the land coinciding with the affirmation of the monogamous family organization. Engels considered typical exponents of this phase to be the Greeks of the “heroic” age, the Italic tribes of the period immediately preceding the foundation of Rome, the Germans of the time of Tacitus and the Normans of the Viking period. Engels defined the form of government of these communities as “military democracy”, characterized by the increasingly important role of warrior leaders whose office became hereditary over time, leading to the birth of real social classes typical of the following phase. 5. Civilization, in which the organization based on gentes was replaced by the state, mediator of social conflicts in favor of the ruling class. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin established in 1919 the Academy of the History of Russian Material Culture (GAIMK), with the aim of reinterpreting the heritage of historical and archaeological evidence of the Soviet Union in an evolutionary sense. In this context, the young P-P. Efimenko, Paleolithic specialist, who first defined this phase based on exceptional findings from the settlements of Kostienki (1923), Gagarino (1927), and Malta (1928), adopted Engels’ terminology, characterizing the Palaeolithic society as a typical “pre-clan society.” With the rise to power of Stalin and the formation of a cell of young Communist archaeologists within the GAIMK, the most influential of which was V.I. Ravdonikas, the situation became radicalized, with the condemnation of all forms of “bourgeois” archaeology, the abolition of the three-age scheme, and the prohibition of using the categories of diffusionism, then prevalent in European archaeology, in favor of evolution. Under the direction of the philologist N.Y. Marr, GAIMK devoted itself to replacing the old interpretative schemes with the theory of stages derived from the classifications of Morgan and Engels. Prehistory, based on this theory, was divided into the following periods: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Society prior to the clan (Lower Paleolithic). Clan society with a matriarchal structure (Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic). Clan society with a patriarchal structure (Neolithic). Period of the progressive decomposition of the clans, the transition from the clan to the village community and the birth of the class society (Age of Metals).
Several authors (for example Efimenko, Kruglov, and Podgayetskij) followed this scheme in their works. In the same years, the archaeological collections in museums were also rearranged according to the new theories, at the cost of breaking down the original associations of grave goods to better show the difference between the material culture of the ruling classes and that of the oppressed classes. With the death of Marr, in 1934, the situation changed; the following year, the campaign against “traditionalist” archaeologists ended and archaeology timidly began to reuse concepts that had long been out of fashion, such as the chronological system based on the theory of the three ages or archaeological cultures. At the end of this paragraph it is important to remember the figure of Antonio Gramsci for his “heterodox” theories. This Italian communist intellectual, imprisoned for years by the Fascist regime, wrote while in jail his Prison Notebooks, which were published in 1947 (Gramsci, 1992–2007). The most important novelty, according to Bruno D’Agostino was that “while the Marxist vulgate was inclined to present history as a product of economics, Gramsci regarded the link between economics and culture, and between structure and superstructure as dialectical” (D’Agostino, 1991, 57).
Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957): The Beginnings of Marxist Archaeology in Western Europe In New Light on the Most Ancient East of 1934, Childe, who had already made himself known in the English archaeological world for his important syntheses on the Bronze Age in Europe and the Near East, used for the first time the terms “Neolithic revolution” and “Urban revolution” to indicate, respectively, the passage from the hunting and gathering economy to the productive one and the birth of the first state and urban entities. It is certainly no coincidence that in the same year he made his first trip to the Soviet Union, familiarizing himself with the theory of stages and noting an unexpected coincidence between the advent of the Neolithic and the passage from the savage state to barbarism and between the birth of the cities and the passage from barbarism to civilization. The assimilation of these theories was happily grafted onto the diffusionist system of his works, definitively orienting his interests toward the reconstruction of the economy and social organization of prehistoric communities. From now on, he would favor
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materialistic interpretations, according to which, in historical explanations, economic changes and scientific discoveries should be placed in the foreground. Parts of the third edition of The Dawn of European Civilization (1939), The Story of Tools (1944; written for the League of Young Communists), and Scotland before the Scots (1946) refer explicitly to an attempt to reinterpret archaeological data on European and Near Eastern prehistory based on Marxist theories, where ownership of the means of production is a concept at the center of all cultural changes. In the article The Social Implications of the Three Ages in Archaeological Classifications (1946), the Stone Age is seen as a society based on kinship, analogous to Marx’s “primitive communism”, while the birth of Eastern civilizations in the Bronze Age is interpreted as a rupture of the clan organization replaced by a true class society. In this context, What Happened in History (1942) is certainly the work that represents a systematic application of stage theory to the study of history (Paleolithic ¼ savagery, Neolithic, and European Bronze Age ¼ barbarism, Bronze Age in the Near East ¼ civilization) and of the interdependence between social and economic structure and the Marxist concept of ideological superstructure. Notwithstanding some study travels to the United States made in the late 1930s in which he became familiar with both the most recent developments in anthropological thought and with pre-Columbian archaeology, Childe believed that only Soviet scholars had managed to link the study of archaeology and social anthropology. It is no coincidence that in an article published in Pravda in 14-3-1946 Mongajt wrote, “Childe was unable to overcome many of the errors of bourgeois science. But he understands that the truth is in the socialist camp, and he is not ashamed to define himself as a pupil of Soviet archaeologists” (quoted in Miller (1956):151). In History (1947) Marxist theory is again exalted as the only one capable of offering valid aid for the historical interpretation of archaeological data without abusing the concept of class and reevaluating the role of ideology in the analysis of social transformations. In the scientific production of the 1950s Childe came ever closer to the concepts of the functionalist school without, however, ever betraying his original adherence to diffusionist theories and, above all, to Marxism. As is also evident in his last great work, The Prehistory of European Society (1958), where, for example, the demand for raw materials by the Mycenaean kingdoms is considered the determining requirement for the birth of a real European metallurgical industry, or on several pages the differences between the Near Eastern and Aegean “theocratic” society are analyzed, especially in relation to the role of craftsmen. Mark D. Leone wrote that Childe is remembered as the greatest prehistorian because “he possessed and used a powerful paradigm, Marxian materialism” (Leone, 1972: 18). Childe himself wrote, “Let me remind you that Marxism does not mean a set of dogmas as to what happened in the past (such would save you the trouble of excavating to find out) but a method of interpretation and a system of values” (Childe, 1952: 25).
Marxist Approaches in the Archaeology of the Second Post-War Period In Eastern Europe, the years following the Second World War saw a growing interest in problems related to ethnogenesis, alongside the persistence of the official interpretative paradigm, the theory of stages. In the country where a Marxist approach to archaeology had first established itself, the Soviet Union, the years following the “thaw” after Stalin’s death saw an ever-stronger revival of both typology and chronological studies, and the use of the concept of archaeological culture. In the 1960s and 1970s there was additional interest in mathematical-statistical studies for ancient technology and theory. Within the more “traditional” vein, a 1955 article by the East German scholar Karl-Heinz Otto deserves mention as it represents one of the best examples of the application of Marxist analysis to the study of prehistory. Here the rich burials of the early Bronze Age Leubingen culture, in which Otto identifies the figures of military leaders and priests, configure the existence of an elite common to other European countries in the same period (see for example the rich El Argar culture burials in Spain or those of Wessex in Great Britain), expression of a new socio-economic formation (which Otto links back to the Engelsian category of “military democracy”) responsible for the definitive decline of the kinship structures of prehistoric societies and the subsequent passage, in recent protohistory, to class society. Later, Otto’s approach to the study of necropolis data was followed by other scholars, such as Guhr, Haüsler, and Hermann. Another country in which a significant debate has developed on the issues of both the reconstruction of the development of ancient societies and ethnogenesis is Poland. Notable is the organization, from the 1960s, of seminars on research methodology by Stanislaw Tabaczy nski, as part of the activities of the Institute for the History of Material Culture founded in Warsaw in 1954 by Witold Kula, medieval historian and archaeologist. In Western Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s, Marxist theory was widely incorporated in post-war European archaeology, probably because of a different political climate that favored the diffusion of Marxist thought and, from another side, of the prevailing legacy of the most influential cultural and artistic avant-garde to the left-wing parties. As a matter of fact, here, Marxist archaeology had the same impact as New Archaeology in the United States, with a true fight of the new generation against the academic establishment (Guidi, 2016). It seems important to define the fields of the enquiry in which the influence of the Marxist approach was stronger: 1. The study of the so-called material culture. 2. A reconsideration of the history of ancient art on the ground of concepts like production, reutilization, market, etc. 3. The attempt to interpret from a materialist perspective the stages of prehistory and protohistory.
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In France a pioneer in the use of Marxist notions like the history of material culture was André Leroi-Gourhan. In the field of Classical and Medieval Studies, the few theoretical collaborations between archaeologists and historians interested in Marxist thought or Marxism-derived theories arose in the stimulating environment of the Annales school. Among the archaeology articles published in the important journal Annales: économie-société-civilisation, special mention should be made to a review from a collective 1965 volume, Villages désertés et histoire économique XI-XVIII s. (1965), published by the École Pratique des Hautes Études, that constitutes a multifaceted analysis on evolution, structure, and material culture of deserted medieval French and Italian villages (Ponsot, 1968). The long and detailed fieldwork to prepare the book (based on an idea by Fernand Braudel) was undertaken by the Medieval Archaeology Group, created in 1965 by Jean-Marie Pesez, a scholar who introduced the notion of material culture in France. The École Pratique des Hautes Études was also the institution in which, in 1964, the communist historian of antiquity JeanPierre Vernant founded the Center Louis Gernet (from the name of another famous adherent of this school) for the study of ancient societies. From the beginning, a special interest of the scholars that worked in the Center was the consideration of burial practices as metaphor rather than mere reflection of the living society (a sort of anticipation of post-processual theory), the subject of an oftenquoted cycle of lessons by Vernant at the Collège de France in 1976. In the following year, a French-Italian congress on this topic was held in the island of Ischia (Naples), yielding a collective volume (La mort, les morts dans les sociétés anciennes) in which the most important archaeological paper was by an Italian scholar who always privileged academic links with French colleagues, Bruno D’Agostino (Gnoli and Vernant, 1982). Not by chance, the first serious article about New Archaeology was published in the Annales in 1973 (but written at the end of 1971) by three young scholars belonging to the generation rioting in May 1968 in Paris: Alain Schnapp, Jean-Paul Demoule, and Serge Cléziou (Cleziou et al., 1973). Even the title, Renouveau des méthodes et théorie de l’archéologie, barely conceals the authors’ sympathy for New Archaeology; moreover, one of them, Serge Cléziou, was deeply involved with Binford and other AngloAmerican processualists. In Italy, the first author to indicate a truly new Marxist perspective for the study of ancient Italian economy was Emilio Sereni, a communist historian who made a wide use of linguistic, archaeological, and palaeobotanical data, trying to reconstruct the history of agriculture from the Neolithic to the historical period, individuating the remote causes of a degradation continuing today. The key figure of the introduction of Marxist theory in Italian archaeology is undoubtedly the famous historian of ancient art, Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli. He used the Gramscian concept of subordinate culture (Gramsci, 1992–2007 [1948–1951]) to analyze and reevaluate Etruscan and Italic art and, at the same time, he studied the role of those who commissioned the art masterpieces in their genesis and diffusion and the connections between artworks and the society that produced them. In 1964, a group of young left-wing archaeologists decided to create a new periodical for their revolutionary ideas and asked Bianchi Bandinelli to be the director and leader of the group. The review was Dialoghi di Archeologia and the group called itself “Amici dei Dialoghi” (among them we can mention some wellknown scholars like Andrea Carandini, Mario Torelli, and Filippo Coarelli), giving life to a stimulating experience in which, alongside scientific articles, a session was dedicated to the discussion of archaeological policy themes (Iacono, 2014). In the Dialoghi volumes, many studies of material culture, with the first systematic use of statistics, were published (for a first important contribution on these themes see also Carandini (1975)). A parallel initiative was developed in the field of medieval archaeology. Here, too, the road was opened not by archaeologists but by a group of Marxist geographers, among which Lucio Gambi and Massimo Quaini, author, in 1974, of a widely translated volume on Geography and Marxism (Quaini, 1982). Highly interested in the history of settlement as well as in landscape studies, Quaini created the Institute for the Study of Material Culture in Genoa, where, from the beginning, Tiziano Mannoni began to study cultural items from an archaeometric point of view. Together with Mannoni, another left-wing archaeologist interested in a new development of medieval archaeology was Riccardo Francovich, who created, in 1974, Archeologia medievale, a valuable periodical active to this day. Deeply influenced by the team of the Torcello excavations directed by the yet mentioned, Stanislaw Tabaczynski, studies in material culture were given an important place in this journal as well. Finally, we can view prehistory as the preferred field for Marxist reconstruction of ancient societies. One of the two leading scholars in this perspective is Salvatore Maria Puglisi, who studied for a brief period with Childe in London. His seminal book, La civiltà appenninica, published in 1959, constitutes a milestone for the wide use of anthropological theory in the reconstruction of the history of Central and Southern Italian societies of the Middle Bronze Age (Puglisi, 1959). Not by chance, two of his pupils, Maurizio Tosi, and Alberto Cazzella, were the first Italian scholars to use processual methods in their research. The other, Renato Peroni, strongly linked to the central European school of prehistory, progressively embraced a Marxist interpretation of Italian prehistory. After his first synthesis article in 1969, in which for the first time he used categories like “patriarchal clan” clearly derived from the orthodox East European Engelsian theory (Peroni, 1969), Peroni participated in 1970 in a wide discussion on an article by a historian of Antiquity, Carmine Ampolo, published in Dialoghi di Archeologia, using Marx’ and Engels’ ideas on ancient societies and quoting Maurice Godelier’s works (Ampolo et al., 1970–1971). In 1974, Peroni finally elaborated on his scheme of the evolution of protohistoric Italian societies (Peroni, 1978), taken up in the following years in many books and articles (Peroni, 1996): - Lineage community with stable social differentiation (Early Bronze Age, 2300–1700 BC). - Tribe as defined chiefly on a territorial level by Marx and Engels (Middle and Recent Bronze Age, 1700–1200 BC).
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- Community based on a gentilicial/patronage system, with leading families and client followers (comunità gentilizio-clientelare; Final Bronze Age, 1200–950 BC). - Proto-urban community (Early Iron Age, 950–730 BC, in North Italy 950–500 BC). In the same years Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri using, like Peroni, a Marxist paradigm, proposed an alternative model for the development of Italian protohistorical communities, clearly inspired by the substantivist school of Polanyi and from the traditional categories of band, tribe, chiefdom, and state (Bietti Sestieri, 1976–1977, 1996). Only in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, both for political and ideological reasons, did a similar process of assimilation of Marxist theories affect Spanish and Greek archaeology (Cleziou et al., 1991; Vázques and Risch, 1991; Kotsakis, 1991). On different levels, the protagonists of the rebirth of evolutionist thought in America in the 1950s and early 1960s, Leslie White and Julian Steward, were also influenced by Marxist theories. If the former explicitly used interpretative categories such as the importance of technology in the development of societies or the identification of the “church-state” as the regulator of all human activities (White, 2005 (1949)), the latter borrowed theories on the importance of arid environments in the origin of cities and archaic states by Karl August Wittfogel, a Marxist scholar who escaped from Nazi Germany, first to England and then to the United States, and dedicated himself to the study of the Asian mode of production (Wittfogel, 1957). The long season of New Archaeology, characterized by strong environmental determinism and the consideration of social conflicts (from the Marxist point of view the trigger of social evolution) as a pathology given the importance, in a system theory derived approach, of the balance between differing parts of society, seems, at a first glance, totally alternative to the Marxist approach to the study of extinct societies. On the other hand, we must underline what two leading prehistorians think of this argument. Hodder, in 1991, wrote that “. the materialism inherent in most Marxist traditions in Europe, reminiscent of the strongly American processual archaeology, coupled with the evolutionary views of the New Archaeology which themselves had Marxist affiliations, allowed a close association between the two perspectives .. While in North American Archaeology Marxism is frequently viewed with suspicion . in the European (archaeology) middle between the eagle and the bear, positivism, science and Marxism are often conjoined” (Hodder, 1991a: 15). In the first edition of the handbook written with Bahn, published in the same year, Renfrew, speaking about Marxist worldsystem theories wrote, “There is nothing . that is inappropriate to a processual analysis . The positive features that this Marxist analyses share with functional-processual archaeology include a willingness to consider long-term change in societies as a whole, and to discuss social relations within them . functional-processual archaeology and Marxist archaeology have much in common. The common ground is all the clearer when they are both contrasted with structuralist and “post-processual” approaches” (Renfrew and Bahn, 1991: 415). Lastly, we must remember the influence of Marxist theories in some Asian and Latin American experiences (see bibliography in Iacono (2018)).
Rebirth of a Marxist Perspective in Theoretical Archaeology In the 1980s, a decade of bitter critique against New Archaeology methods and theories, Marxist theory played a central role in Anglo-Saxon countries (Guidi, 1988: 230–241; Trigger, 1993; McGuire, 1992). In fact, in 1976 Matthew Spriggs organized an international conference in Cambridge that marked an awakening of interest of English-speaking archaeologists in the Marxist approach (Spriggs, 1977). This was the first in a series of congresses and interdisciplinary experiences with other European and North American colleagues (between them Mike Rowlands, Kristian Kristiansen, Antonio Gilman, Phil Kohl, and Maurizio Tosi) which culminated in the collective work on “Marxist perspectives in archaeology” (Spriggs, 1984). Some interesting examples of this theoretical perspective are a paper by Gilman on the relationships between forms of capital intensification and the emergence of social stratification in prehistoric Europe (Gilman, 1981), the analysis of craft indicators as material culture items typical of a state level social organization at Shar-i-Shokta, the excavation performed by Maurizio Tosi in Iran (Tosi, 1984), and the original perspective on the evolution of American archaeology and anthropology in the work of Tom Patterson (Patterson, 1986). Even more stimulating is the paper of Gailey and Patterson (1988) in which the authors argued that in primitive social systems (still dominated by lineage relationships) “. class and state formation can be understood as the articulation of diverse communal and tributary modes of production” (see Patterson, 2003: 100), according to the influence of weak or strong neighboring state systems. In the literature of that period, it is possible to appreciate the elaboration of theories rooted in the Neo-Marxist and Structural Marxist currents of thought or the application to archaeology of Wallerstein’s “World System Theory”. At the same time, the PostProcessual school chose from the beginning to utilize various Marxism-derived theories (Foucault, Derrida, the Frankfurt critical theory, gender studies, etc.). After the fall of Berlin’s wall in 1989 and the end of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, one of the most curious consequences of the new political and cultural climate, dominated everywhere by the neoliberal ideology, was the strengthening of a Marxist approach to archaeology (McGuire, 1992), further evidence of the importance of critical and dialectical theories in the “globalized” world. So, for example, in the theoretical model elaborated by Jean-Paul Demoule (1993), the social evolution of central-western Europe is seen as a continuous oscillation between archaeologically perceptible phases of strong power concentration (the megalithic burials of final Neolithic, the rich Early Bronze Age graves, the proto-urban settlement of the early Iron Age, and the oppida of
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the Late Iron Age) and other less “articulated” phases (e.g., the Copper Age or the evident devolution toward village community structures between Early and Late Iron Age). These last periods can be seen as successful attempts to stem too centralized and unequal forms of power, following the theories of Pierre Clastres about the resistance toward the State (Clastres, 1990). In another interesting paper written by Tosi (1994), he suggests that in all phases of steppe populations’ social evolution there is a dominance of the egalitarian ideology, a useful tool to “rule” the frequent feedbacks to the tribal structure of nomad peoples in contrast with the ceremonial inequality of sedentary societies.
Summary and Future Directions In recent years, the presence of a Marxist “perspective” in the theoretical panorama of archaeology has become increasingly evident due to the emergence of issues such as gender, post-colonial, and minorities archaeology (Cuozzo and Guidi, 2013). Work groups and studies of a Marxist and feminist matrix date back to the 1980s with the “Catalan Days on Women” of 1982 and the meetings of the Permanent Seminar of Studies on Women active in Madrid for over twenty years, later transformed into a University Institute of Studies on Women (Diaz-Andreu and Sorensen, 1998). In other contexts, the connection between the monopoly of war activities, understood as the management of violence and weapons, on the one hand, and female social and sexual enslavement, on the other, has been identified as the basis of gender asymmetry and male domination. Monopoly and the management of violence are still considered to be the basis of male power by some feminist strands (Gilchrist, 1999). Important neo-Marxist studies have investigated the methods of construction and “coagulation” of ethnic groups, starting from forms of resistance to colonial situations, slavery, or oppression by authoritarian states (Jones, 1997, 2010). From this point of view, anthropological and archaeological studies are of particular importance, because they focus on the analysis of the different forms that resistance strategies can acquire, distinguishing from the open “resistance” to the dominant system in political terms, a “daily” resistance (silent resistance)dstrictly connected to the concept of “negotiation”dwhich does not imply direct confrontation, but feeds, sometimes unconsciously, the construction of alternative ideologies through the manipulation of the meanings of objects, behaviors, and/or through forms of conservatism (the first type seems to form the basis for the construction of the second (McGuire and Paynter, 1991)). It is evident that these anthropological approaches to ethnic phenomena mark a substantial change with respect to the traditional notion of ethnic groups as an expression of circumscribed and delimited entities that recognize themselves in a territory and in a language with important repercussions also in the archaeological debate. Randall McGuire, in an article in which he traces the long history of the encounter/clash between white people and indigenous peoples over the centuries, observed how the past, which for archaeologists must be “discovered,” has always existed for natives (McGuire, 2004). Indigenous archaeology therefore constitutes the point of arrival of the process, outlined up to now, of the progressive emancipation of one’s past by ethnic minorities, with the acquisition of “own” (and not Euro-American) concepts of heritage, time, and past. In conclusion, a Marxist approach, based on the reconstruction from the archaeological record of the conflicts between communities seen as a necessary dialectic process and not as a form of social “pathology”, seems today more apt to cope with some fundamental problems concerning the prehistory and early history of mankind, like the birth of the (age, gender or social) inequality, the emergence of private property or the reciprocal influences between the socioeconomic and the ideological realms. For this aim a fundamental improvement can arrive from the most recent progresses in archaeology. Kristiansen (2014) in an inspired paper listed the advent of Big Data, DNA and stable isotope analyses, new models like the network analysis speaking of a “third science revolution” in archaeology; for an approach aiming to the reconstruction of ways and means of production of ancient societies a massive use of these new methodological advances seems to be the greatest challenge.
See Also: History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Postcolonial Archaeology and Colonial Praxis; Processual Archaeology.
References Ampolo, Carmine, Coarelli, Filippo, Johannowsky, Werner, Peroni, Renato, Torelli, Mario, 1970–1971. Discussione sull’articolo di Carmine Ampolo ‘Su alcuni mutamenti sociali nel Lazio tra l’VIII e il V secolo’. Dialoghi di Archeologia 4–5, 69–99. Bietti Sestieri, Anna Maria, 1976–77. Contributo allo studio delle forme di scambio della tarda età del bronzo nell’Italia continentale. Dialoghi di Archeologia 9–10, 201–241. Bietti Sestieri, Anna Maria, 1996. Protostoria. Teoria e pratica. La Nuova Italia Scientifica, Firenze. Carandini, Andrea, 1975. Archeologia e cultura materiale. di Donato, Bari. Childe, Vere Gordon, 1952. Archaeological organization in the USSR. Anglo Sov. J. 13 (3), 23–26. Cleziou, Serge, Demoule, Jean-Paul, Schnapp, Alain, 1973. Renoveau des methods et theorie de l’archèologie. Ann. ESC 28, 35–51. Clastres, Pierre, 1990 (1974). Society against the State. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Cleziou, Serge, Coudart, Annik, Demoule, Jean-Paul, Schnapp, Alain, 1991. The Use of Theory in French Archaeology. In Hodder, Ian (Ed.), Archaeological Theory in Europe. Routledge, London, pp. 91–128. Cuozzo, Maria Assunta, Guidi, Alessandro, 2013. Archeologia delle identità e delle differenze. Carocci editore, Roma. D’Agostino, Bruno, 1991. The Italian Perspective on Italian Archaeology. In Hodder, Ian (Ed.), Archaeological Theory in Europe. Routledge, London, pp. 52–64. Demoule, Jean-Paul, 1993. L’archéologie du pouvoir: oscillations et resistances dans l’Europe protohistorique. In: Daubigney, Alain (Ed.), Fonctionnement social de l’âge du fer. Opérateurs & hypotheses pour la France. Editions du C.N.R.S, Paris, pp. 259–274.
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Diaz-Andreu, Margarita, Sorensen, Marie Louise, 1998. Excavating Women: A History of Women in European Archaeology. Routledge, London. Engels, Friedrich, 1972/1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in Light of the Investigations of Lewis H. Morgan. International Publishers, New York. Gailey, Christine W., Patterson, Thomas C., 1988. State formation and uneven development. In: Gledhill, John, Bender, Barbara, Larsen, Mogens Trolle (Eds.), State and Society. The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization. Unwin Hyman, London, pp. 77–90. Gilchrist, Roberta, 1999. Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past. Routledge, London. Gilman, Antonio, 1981. The development of social stratification in Bronze age Europe. Curr. Anthropol. 22, 1–23. Gnoli, Gherardo, Vernant, Jean-Paul (Eds.), 1982. La Mort, les morts dans les sociétés anciennes. Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. Gramsci, Antonio, 1992–2007 [1948–1951]. Prison Notebooks, 3 vols. Columbia University Press, New York. Guidi, Alessandro, 1988. Storia Della Paletnologia. Laterza, Roma-Bari. Guidi, Alessandro, 2016. Marxism in the European archaeology of the sixties: the case-studies of Italy and France. In: Delley, Geraldine, Diaz-Andreu, Margarita, Djindjiean, François, Fernandez, Victor M., Guidi, Alessandro, Kaeser, Marc-Antoine (Eds.), History of Archaeology: International Perspectives (Proceedings XVII Congress, Burgos 2014). Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 161–168. Hodder, Ian (Ed.), 1991a. Archaeological Theory in Europe. The Last Three Decades. Routledge, London. Iacono, Francesco, 2014. A pioneering experiment: Dialoghi di Archeologia between Marxism and political activism. Bull. Hist. Archaeol. 24 (5), 1–10. Iacono, Francesco, 2018. Marxist archaeologies. In: Gardner, Andrew, Lake, Mark, Sommer, Ulrike (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory. Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford University Press), Oxford. Jones, Siân, 1997. The Archaeology of Ethnicity. Constructing Identities in the Past and in the Present. Routledge, London. Jones, Siân, 2010. Historical categories and the praxis of identity: the interpretation of ethnicity in historical archaeology. In: Preucel, Robert W., Mrozowski, Stephen A. (Eds.), Contemporary Archaeology in Theory. The New Pragmatism. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, N.Y., pp. 301–310 Kotsakis, Kostas, 1991. The Powerful Past: Theoretical Trends in Greek archaeology. In Hodder, Ian (Ed.), Archaeological Theory in Europe. Routledge, London, pp. 65–90. Kristiansen, Kristian, 2014. Towards a new paradigm? The third science revolution and its possible consequences in archaeology. Curr. Swedish Archaeol. 22, 11–71. Leone, Mark D., 1972. Issues in anthropological theory. In: Leone, Mark D. (Ed.), Contemporary Archaeology. A Guide to Theory and Contributions. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edmondsville, pp. 14–27. McGuire, Randall H., 1992. A Marxist Archaeology. Academic Press, San Diego. McGuire, Randall H., 2004. Contested past: archaeology and native Americans. In: Meskell, Lynn, Preucel, Robert W. (Eds.), A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell, London, pp. 174–195. McGuire, Randall H., Paynter, Robert, 1991. The Archaeology of Inequality. Blackwell, Oxford. Miller, Michael, 1956. Archaeology in the USSR. Atlantic Press, London. Otto, Karl Heinz, 1955. Die Sozialökonomische Verhalnisse bei den stämmen der Leubinger Kultur in Mitteldeutschland. Etnographisch-Archäologische Forschungen 3, 1–124. Patterson, Thomas C., 1986. The last sixty years: towards a social history of American archaeology in the United States. Am. Anthropol. 88, 7–26. Patterson, Thomas C., 2003. Marx’s Ghost. Conversations With Archaeologists. Berg, Oxford-New York. Peroni, Renato, 1969. Per uno studio dell’economia di scambio in Italia nel quadro dell’ambiente culturale dei secoli intorno al mille a.C. La Parola del Passato 24, 134–160. Peroni, Renato, 1978. Le prime popolazioni dell’età dei metalli. In: Archeologia – culture e civiltà del passato nel mondo europeo ed extraeuropeo. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano, pp. 139–170. Peroni, Renato, 1996. L’Italia alle soglie della storia. Laterza, Roma, Bari. Ponsot, Pierre, 1968. Villages désertés en Europe du XIe au XVIIIe siècle (review of Villages désertés et histoire économique [XIe-XVIIIe siècle], Les hommes et la terre-IX- Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1965). Ann. ESC 23, 663–669. Puglisi, Salvatore Maria, 1959. La civiltà appenninica. Origine delle comunità pastorali in Italia. Sansoni, Firenze. Quaini, Massimo, 1982 [1974]. Geography and Marxism. Blackwell, London. Renfrew, Andrew C., Bahn, Paul, 1991. Archaeologies: Theory, Methods, and Practices. Thames and Hudson, London. Spriggs, Matthew (Ed.), 1977. Archaeology and Anthropology: Areas of Mutual Interest. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford. Spriggs, Matthew (Ed.), 1984. Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tosi, Maurizio, 1984. The Notion of Craft Specialization and Its Representation in the Archaeological Record of the Early States in the Turanian Basin. In Spriggs Matthew (Ed.), Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology, pp. 22–52. Tosi, Maurizio, 1994. The egalitarian foundations of steppe empires. In: Genito, Bruno (Ed.), The Archaeology of the Steppes: Methods and Strategy. Istituto Universitario Orientale: Napoli, pp. 651–666. Trigger, Bruce G., 1980. Gordon Childe. Revolutions in Archaeology. Thames and Hudson, London. Trigger, Bruce G., 1989. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trigger, Bruce G., 1993. Marxism in Contemporary Western Archaeology. In Schiffer, Michael B. (Ed.), Archaeological Method and Theory, Volume 5. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, pp. 159–200. Vázquez, Varela José M., Risch, Roberto, 1991. Theory in Spanish Archaeology Since 1960. In: Hodder, Ian (Ed.), Archaeological Theory in Europe. Routledge, London, pp. 25–51. White, Leslie A., 2005[1949]. The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. Percheron Press/Eliot Werner Publications, New York. Wittfogel, Karl August, 1957. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Networks in Archaeology Jessica Munson, Department of Anthropology-Sociology, Lycoming College, Williamsport, PA, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Historical Overview and Key Issues Nodes and Ties: Constructing Archaeological Networks Material Culture Networks Geographical Networks Text-Based Networks Simulated Networks Biological Networks Methods and Scales of Analysis for Archaeological Networks Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Networks are an emerging paradigm in archaeology that offer an integrated analytical and conceptual framework to uncover and interpret past relational phenomena The unique properties of networks allow archaeologists to study a wide range of topics at multiple scales of analysis using networks constructed from material culture data, geographic data, textual sources, biological data, and simulations
Abstract From the evolutionary links of our human ancestors to the gifts and goods exchanged in marketplaces to the social ties that connected communities and political ideologies that divided nations; connections are central to the human experience. Networks have recently emerged as a distinct research tradition in archaeology, offering unified conceptual and analytical frameworks to uncover and interpret relational phenomena using archaeological data. This entry charts this trajectory, introducing key terms, concepts, and techniques of archaeological network analysis as well as highlighting recent examples to illustrate the range of topics and scales of analysis made possible by this new research tradition.
Introduction Connections are central to the human experience. From the evolutionary links of our human ancestors, to the gifts exchanged and goods traded over long distances, to the social bonds of past communities and political ideologies that united and divided ancient states; networks may be universal, but they are difficult to observe directly in the archaeological record. Archaeologists study the human behaviors and activities of people in the past using the material remains that are left behind, but reconstructing the relationships and interactions that gave meaning to social life in the past can be challenging with traditional archaeological methods. Network approaches offer a unified conceptual and analytical framework for analyzing archaeological data to uncover and interpret these relational phenomena. This emerging paradigm offers students and researchers essential tools, models, and datasets to further explore, analyze, and interpret networks in the past. This entry introduces the basic terms, concepts, and techniques of archaeological network analysis, and highlights some recent case studies to illustrate the range of topics and scales of analysis that are made possible by this new research tradition. For a deeper exploration of the intellectual history and diverse applications of this approach as well as more advanced methodological treatments, the reader is directed to the list of further readings at the end of this contribution. A network is simply a formal representation of the structure of connections among a set of actors. These can be depicted using a network graph, where actors are represented by nodes (also called vertices) and edges (or ties) are the lines connecting pairs of actors. Nodes can represent a range of entities, but in archaeological applications, nodes most commonly denote sites, groups of people or individuals, and artifacts. Edges indicate some kind of relation between the nodes and can vary widely in terms of what they represent: direct contact or proximity; the flow of goods, ideas, or movement of people; as well as general patterns
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Fig. 1 Visualization of an archaeological network depicting sites as nodes (color-coded by region) and edges based on measures of ceramic similarity. The network graph depicts two highly connected clusters that closely align with geographic distance, identifying communities within the greater Cibola region of the American Southwest. Used with permission from Peeples (2011).
of relatedness, shared culture, or affiliation with specific groups. Additional attribute information can be attached to both nodes and edges to facilitate visualization and further evaluation of the underlying network structure and dynamics. These unique properties of networks allow archaeologists to study a wide range of topics at multiple scales of analysis as discussed in detail below. Fig. 1 illustrates the basic components of an archaeological network. In this example, nodes represent archaeological settlements located in the Cibola culture area (AD 1150–1325) of the American Southwest and are color-coded by subregion. The edges are determined by measures of similarity based on technological attributes of ceramic artifacts. A tie between two sites indicates they share similar ceramic production practices to some measurable degree. The relative size of each node is scaled by the number of ties at each site. The resulting network graph reveals two highly connected groups of nodes with fewer ties between the groups. These clusters are closely aligned with geographic distance, and are interpreted as northern (Group 1) and southern (Group 2) communities within the greater Cibola region (Peeples, 2018). This network visualization demonstrates the power of networks to convey multiple kinds of information and the complex interrelationships among those entities.
Historical Overview and Key Issues Network analysis may not be new to archaeology, but a number of recent trends, critical publications, and collaborative projects have helped establish a distinct tradition of archaeological network research in recent years. This brief historical overview identifies several important developments that have helped pave the way for this relatively young, yet remarkably robust and promising field of study. Archaeology has long borrowed and benefitted from methodological advances in other disciplines, so it should not be surprising that early studies drew inspiration from the diverse fields of anthropology, sociology, geography, mathematics, computer science, and physics. Early applications of network thinking and analysis are scattered across a handful of archaeological studies beginning in the 1970s (see Brughmans and Peeples, 2017). This work was largely based on graph theory, which employed geographical models and methods to explore patterns of past social interaction. A classic study and among the most cited examples of this early work, Terrell (1977) used proximal point analysis to create networks based on geographic proximity of Solomon Island communities to evaluate potential patterns of inter-island interaction and movement. Although graph theoretic methods remained popular among anthropologists and archaeologists working in the Pacific (Hage and Harary, 1991) and in some other island contexts (Broodbank, 2002), it was not until the early 2000s that network approaches became more widespread in archaeology.
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Advances in computing power and the availability of new software programs may partly explain the increased number of archaeological network publications around the turn of the century, but important parallel developments in social network analysis (SNA; Wasserman and Faust, 1994) also contributed to the adoption of formal sociometric methods and the expansion of archaeological network studies at this time (see Mills (2017) and Peeples (2019) for more detailed historical overviews). Another recognized source of intellectual inspiration draws upon a set of network models developed in physics, mathematics, and computer science (Barabási and Albert, 1999; Watts and Strogatz, 1998), and are collectively referred to as complexity science approaches (Peeples, 2019). In contrast to the more empirically-driven work of SNA, these methods explore the emergent properties and dynamics of networks by focusing on the general principles or rules that govern network behavior and evolution (Newman et al., 2006). Collectively, these three domains of research (graph theory, SNA, and complexity science approaches) have contributed to the rapid rise in the number of archaeological publications over the last decade (Collar et al., 2015). However, most of these cited studies emphasize formal network methods that prioritize visualization techniques, analytical models, and computational approaches over more humanistic accounts of relational phenomena. Parallel to these documented trends, a growing body of scholarship dedicated to relational theorizing in archaeology has taken hold within more interpretative circles (e.g., Hodder, 2012; Knappett, 2005). Drawing upon new materialism and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), these approaches emphasize material agency and human-thing relations as they seek to understand the flows, entanglements, and dependencies between material and social worlds. Rooted in divergent epistemological traditions, these two approaches may contrast in their emphasis on formal analytical techniques versus interpretive relational frameworks, but both fundamentally address relational phenomena in the past. There is growing recognition that this “relational turn” in archaeology can do more than identify and analyze connections between archaeological phenomena; it can also bridge theoretical perspectives that have long been at odds with one another (Knappett and Mol, 2023). Such optimistic views hold promise for the continued growth and further integration of these network perspectives. Archaeological network research may be emerging as a distinct and more unified tradition of scholarship, but as this brief historical overview demonstrates, its intellectual roots are fundamentally interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse. The cross-pollination of ideas, methods, and specialties is evident in the composition of international research teams and collaborative projects that have employed these techniques. Some of these initiatives are now developing online repositories for the long-term curation and public access of archaeological network data (e.g., cyberSW, The Past Social Networks Project). The establishment of dedicated centers (e.g., Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, https://urbnet.au.dk) and formation of scholarly communities (e.g., The Historical Network Research Community, https://historicalnetworkresearch.org and Connected Past, https://connectedpast.net) with dedicated journals and annual conferences focused on network research further demonstrate the interdisciplinary scope, breadth, and support for this kind of work. Additional signs that the field has entered a more mature and established stage of scholarship is demonstrated not only by the number and variety of tracked publications (Brughmans and Peeples, 2017), but also by the quality of synthetic reviews (Brughmans, 2013; Mills, 2017; Peeples, 2019), comprehensive handbooks (Brughmans et al., 2023), and dedicated methodological textbooks (Brughmans and Peeples, 2023) that include valuable online tutorials tailored specifically to archaeological questions and the unique challenges presented by archaeological data (Peeples and Brughmans, 2023). These are all important resources that should be consulted for more in-depth and up-to-date discussions of the theoretical issues and methodological challenges associated with the rapid growth of this new field.
Nodes and Ties: Constructing Archaeological Networks Networks are not unique to archaeology, but the unique nature of archaeological data raises important issues for constructing and analyzing networks. As discussed above, the foundational concepts and analytic tools used by most current research were not developed with specific archaeological agendas in mind. Thus, there is a real concern and need to not only recognize the potential limitations and pitfalls of these approaches, but also to actively address these challenges by developing specific techniques and tools that meet the unique demands and data requirements of archaeology (e.g., Peeples et al., 2023). This section discusses the primary parameters and processes for constructing archaeological networks. As defined above, two basic components are needed to construct a network: a well-defined set of social actors and a method of measuring or identifying a specific type of relation among them. Generating these data may be more straightforward for social network researchers working in contemporary settings than it is for archaeologists working with incomplete and indirect records. Archaeologists are well-aware of the fragmentary nature of the data they work with and this often constrains the data that are available for network analysis. At a minimum, archaeologists should aim for representativeness in their network datasets, however this is defined for their particular research context. Comprehensive relational databases compiled by projects like SW Social Networks, Nexus1492, and other regional studies serve as aspirational models for future research, and are ideal testing grounds for new methods, including techniques specifically designed to deal with uncertainty and missing data (Peeples et al., 2016). Regardless of the sample size or scope of the dataset, the set of nodes and associated attributes selected for an archaeological network should be appropriately matched to the research question. Defining the edges of archaeological networks poses a more significant challenge. Given the central importance of connections in a network, it is crucial to address the process of translating archaeological data into relational data. Since the phenomena that archaeologists study are not often directly observable, ties are commonly represented using proxy estimates of connectivity. These may range from measures of artifact similarity and geographic distance to more direct evidence of contact or interaction. Selecting the appropriate measure may partly depend on data availability, but should also align with specific archaeological research goals.
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Types of Ties for Archaeological Networks Similarities Attribute Artifact type Stylistic element Raw material source
Membership Same workshop, neighborhood, etc.
Participation Same activity Dependency
Proximity Time period Site location Geographical distance
Relations Affective Likes, hates, etc.
Hierarchical Political rank order
Kinship Familial Lineage Clan
Interactions Contact Warfare Face-to-face encounter
Movement
Migration Change of status
Flows Transmission Information Beliefs Resources Disease
Transaction Economic exchange Transfer of goods
Other role Political/social roles Titles of rank or position Specialization
Fig. 2 A typology of network ties for archaeology. Four types of ties are defined based on whether they rely on continuous or discrete data. Examples of the kinds of information that archaeologists commonly represent as network ties are italicized beneath their relevant class type. Adapted from Borgatti et al. (2009).
Generating proxy estimates of tie formation requires that assumptions be made explicit during the network conceptualization process (Collar et al., 2015). It is important to identify what types of ties are being used as proxy estimates to ensure these are distinct from the phenomenon being studied (Fig. 2; Munson, 2019). In many cases, the edges in archaeological networks can best be described as probabilities of connection rather than literal representations of past interaction (Peeples et al., 2023). Precisely because different social processes may produce the network structures we observe, archaeologists need to pay particular attention to the types of ties used and how these proxies are generated in order to appropriately model and analyze archaeological networks. Constructing archaeological networks involves a process of abstraction in which the phenomenon of interest is defined and conceptualized in terms of some measurable proxies, and then the network is formally represented and analyzed (Collar et al., 2015: Fig. 3). The utility of defining network models in this two-step manner is that it requires researchers to begin with a research question and then clearly identify what constitutes a tie between nodesdboth theoretically and empirically. The most common types of data used for archaeological networks are discussed below and can be grouped into five categories: material culture data, geographic data, textual sources, biological data, and simulations. The following sections briefly outline some of the ways in which archaeologists have conceptualized and constructed networks using these various data sources to highlight the range of topics addressed by contemporary archaeological network research, but is by no means comprehensive.
Material Culture Networks As the primary source of information for archaeology, material culture is among the most popular data sets used in archaeological network analysis. Archaeological networks can be constructed using different classes of material culture, including artifacts and architecture as well as specific features such as mortuary contexts. These materials may come from archaeological excavations, survey projects, as well as museum collections. Networks derived from these different lines of material evidence can be used to model patterns of material flows and exchange, the movement of people, ideas and influence, technological innovation, the structure of power relationships, and important topics of culture change. More detailed reviews and specific examples of these approaches can be found in Brughmans et al. (2023), Mills (2017), and Peeples (2019). Network connections built on material culture ties can be classified into three different groups: networks based on geochemical sourcing of artifacts and other provenance studies (Golitko, 2023); networks defined by shared stylistic attributes (Blair, 2023); and networks based on technological characterizations of certain artifact classes (Peeples, 2018). Compositional studies can facilitate network analyses of movement, trade, and exchange as illustrated by studies of Hopi ceramic circulation (Bernardini, 2007) as well as the procurement and distribution of obsidian across Mesoamerica (Golitko and Feinman, 2015). In the absence of sourced artifacts, one of the more developed techniques for defining ties in archaeological networks involves the use of presence/absence and artifact frequency data. Ties are defined based on shared attributes and often measured using the Brainerd-Robinson coefficient of similarity, with the underlying assumption that higher similarity scores indicate a greater probability of shared participation or
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past interaction; however, the specific nature of that relationship depends on the underlying assumptions and bridging arguments of the particular study. This method has been widely used by archaeologists in a variety of research contexts with several examples cited in the further readings section.
Geographical Networks Some of the earliest applications of network methods in archaeology involved the use of settlement pattern data and locational information, and these remain prevalent approaches today (Brughmans and Peeples, 2020). Geographical networks are distinct from classic spatial models in archaeology because they can examine the complex patterns between spatial and social processes at multiple scales of analysis. This includes models of potential movement and travel across the landscape, patterns of visibility within and between archaeological sites, and the spatial configuration and organization of the built environment. Generating data for spatial networks is usually conducted using geographic information systems (GIS). One common technique for network studies uses geographic position to measure likely paths of travel between settlements and the associated costs of moving across different kinds of landscapes (Ducke and Suchowska, 2022; Herzog, 2023). These hypothetical travel networks allow archaeologists to generate models of social interaction that can be evaluated against other lines of data. GIS has also been used to formally construct networks of intervisibility among archaeological sites and other natural features. In one example, Bernardini and Peeples (2015) used network methods and visibility analysis to examine the connections between settlements with common views of prominent peaks across the US Southwest. Another study presents a series of more complex analyses exploring the role of intervisibility of Iron Age and Roman period sites in southern Spain (Brughmans et al., 2014). Such studies demonstrate the potential theoretical bridge between formal network studies and more interpretative landscape perspectives discussed above (Brughmans and Brandes, 2017). Other sources of archaeological data, such as documented roads, trails, and other transportation corridors, provide more direct evidence for analyzing geographical networks. Networks based on these features can facilitate investigating a variety of processes such as trade, militarism, and religious pilgrimages at the regional scale as well as intra-settlement analyses of household inequality within sites. Rivers form natural networks that can also be treated as spatial models for comparing settlement distributions, the flow of materials and ideas, as well as the emergence of regional political centers. Important sources for network studies of commerce, transportation, and social movement include the extensive and well-documented Roman roads as well as maritime networks. Examples of archaeological network studies that address these topics and data sources can be found in the further readings section.
Text-Based Networks The use of written sources forms a smaller subset of current archaeological network research, but parallel trends in historical network research point to the rapidly growing field of text-based network studies. In general, scholars working with historical documents face similar challenges as archaeologists in constructing and analyzing networks (Lemercier, 2015). Given the close relationship between these disciplines and their joint focus on the past, both would benefit from increased dialogue and collaboration surrounding methodology and new analytical techniques. Epigraphy provides an important and multifaceted source of information for network analysis (Cline and Munson, 2023). By considering the dual nature of texts as artifacts as well as the content of the inscriptions themselves, Cline and Munson (2023) discuss how the multi-layered nature of information on text-bearing objects can facilitate network studies across a range of case studies. Classical archaeologists working in the Mediterranean have by far made the most use of network analysis among the historical sciences. For example, Graham (2006) used the Antonine itineraries to reconstruct travel routes between Roman provinces. Other studies have reconstructed elite interaction using the Amarna letters (Cline and Cline, 2015) and investigated the structure of Greek and Roman artisan workshops (Graham, 2014; Larson, 2013). In the Americas, Classic Maya political and religious networks have also been reconstructed using hieroglyphic inscriptions to investigate the spread of royal rituals (Amati et al., 2019b; Munson et al., 2014) and the structure of dynastic institutions (Munson and Macri, 2009; Scholnick et al., 2013). Many of these studies focus on micro-scale interactions (Knappett, 2011) between individuals or within intimate social settings, which are otherwise difficult to observe through material remains. Text-based networks may provide more specific evidence of direct contact between individuals than other types of archaeological networks, but researchers should not be lulled into thinking these sources are exempt from critical examination.
Simulated Networks More complex computational skills are required to reconstruct archaeological networks using simulations and formal mathematical models. These approaches demonstrate the relationship between network research and complexity science for studying past complex systems (Romanowska, 2023). Two areas of focus for archaeological network research include agent-based modeling (Cegielski, 2023) and exponential random graph modeling (Amati, 2023). Agent-based models have been around longer and are thus more widely used in archaeological network studies (see further readings for examples). These approaches typically
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simulate the role of individual human behavior to explore how it can lead to different network outcomes and structures. This allows archaeologists to test ideas about the nature and scale of interactions by generating models that can then be evaluated with archaeological data. Such techniques can be particularly effective in sparse data contexts like the Lower and Middle Paleolithic time periods (Gravel-Miguel and Coward, 2023). Exponential random graphs are a relatively new approach which holds particular promise for archaeological networks given their ability to infer the mechanisms that may have contributed to network formation in the past (Amati, 2023; Amati et al., 2019a; Brughmans et al., 2014). Despite the complexity of these mathematical models, these approaches allow archaeologists to test hypotheses about the structural characteristics and generative processes that created the observed networks.
Biological Networks Among the most recent applications of archaeological network analysis is the use of biological data to model network processes in the past. Skeletal markers offer important biometric data that are used to formally explore patterns of biological relatedness using network approaches (Johnson, 2023). Network methods have also been used to model food webs in archaeological contexts to understand the interactions among species (Crabtree et al., 2017; Dunne et al., 2016). Such archaeo-ecological networks harness the long-standing tradition of human-environment studies in archaeology with the analytical power of networks to address key questions about how humans are interconnected with wider ecosystem dynamics (Crabtree et al., 2021). These approaches build upon and benefit from many of the computational techniques described above. There is much potential for this particular domain of archaeological network research especially given the recent growth of ancient DNA studies and other established fields like zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, and bioarchaeology (Munson et al., 2023).
Methods and Scales of Analysis for Archaeological Networks The simple dyadic structure of a network, defined by a pair of nodes connected by an edge or tie, is the basis for studying a wide variety of entities and their relationships as illustrated in the diverse case studies identified above. This section takes a step back from the particular applications of archaeological networks to address more general methodological issues and describe the different scales of analysis that distinguish this approach. Drawing upon the tradition of SNA, there are two primary methods used to characterize network properties based on their essential elements: the position of nodes and overall network structure. Node position refers to how the location of the node within a network may influence its behavior and associated attributes. Centrality is among the most common measures of node position used in archaeology, in part because of its association with familiar theoretical concepts of capital and social prominence (Mills, 2017). There are a number of different ways to measure centrality, each with its own set of model assumptions, and archaeologists are directed to more detailed methodological treatments of these issues (e.g., Borgatti et al., 2013; Wasserman and Faust, 1994). Another measure of node position used by archaeologists is based on the concept of brokerage. Similar to the more popular notion of weak ties (Granovetter, 1973), brokerage refers to the way that disconnected or isolated nodes can interact across a variety of social, economic, or political domains. This method has been applied to assess the outcomes for archaeological brokers and identify sites that occupied key intermediate positions during periods of social and political transformation in northern Iroquoia (Hart et al., 2019) and the US Southwest (Peeples and Haas, 2013). Complementing these node-based methods, the overall structure of a network can be characterized using several different whole network measures such as cohesion, network density, preferential attachment, and by analyzing subgroups and components. Specific definitions of these concepts as applied to archaeological networks can be found in the useful glossary of terms provided by Collar et al. (2015). Node-based and whole network analyses are complementary approaches for examining a wide range of topics, including the diffusion of innovations, migration, identity, inequality, political institutions and organization, religious movements among many others (see further readings for examples). Among the distinctive characteristics of archaeological networks are the multiple and different scales of analysis that are made possible by these methods. Not only do network approaches lend themselves to application across different theoretical gradations (Mills, 2017, 389), but archaeologists can address questions at different spatial scales ranging from individual settlements to macroregions and across a variety of social scales from foragers to empires. Perhaps the greatest asset of archaeology is its long-term perspective, which allows for network studies over multiple spans of time. Archaeological networks offer opportunities to study patterns of relations over much longer periods of time than is possible in many other areas of network research. This holds promise for the potential contribution of archaeological networks to the wider world of network science.
Summary and Future Directions Network studies in archaeology have grown exponentially over the last decade (Brughmans and Brandes, 2017), and the recent compilation of major edited volumes (Brughmans et al., 2023) and other critical resources (Brughmans and Peeples, 2023; Peeples and Brughmans, 2023) indicates these trends will continue into the future. Archaeological network research has emerged as a distinct scholarly tradition that offers a unified conceptual and analytical framework to investigate a wide range of relational
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phenomena in the human past. While the future is bright, there are several domains within archaeology yet to be explored that could benefit from network approaches (Munson et al., 2023). The continued development of discipline-specific tools and methods to meet the unique challenges of archaeological data will also further expand these applications. Finally, it is the social networks defining teams of collaborators that make these projects a success. Such diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives strengthen the ties among students, scholars, and community members to form partnerships that are essential to the continued growth and expansion of this emerging paradigm.
See Also: Agent-Based Modeling; Post-Processual Archaeology; Road and Transport Networks.
References Amati, Viviana, 2023. Random graph models. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Amati, Viviana, Mol, Angus, Shafie, Termeh, Hofman, Corinne, Brandes, Ulrik, 2019a. A framework for reconstructing archaeological networks using exponential random graph models. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 27, 192–219. Amati, Viviana, Munson, Jessica, Scholnick, Jonathan, Habiba, 2019b. Applying event history analysis to explain the diffusion of innovations in archaeological networks. J. Archaeol. Sci. 104, 1–9. Barabási, Albert-László, Albert, R., 1999. Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286, 509–512. Bernardini, Wes, 2007. Jeddito yellow ware and Hopi social networks. Kiva 72, 295–328. Bernardini, Wesley, Peeples, Matthew A., 2015. Sight communities: the social significance of shared visual landmarks. Am. Antiq. 80, 215–235. Blair, Elliot H., 2023. Material culture similarity and co-occurrence networks. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Borgatti, Stephen P., Ajay, Mehra, Daniel J., Brass, Giuseppe, Labianca, 2009. Network analysis in the social sciences. Science 323, 892–895. Borgatti, Stephen P., Everett, Martin G., Johnson, Jeffrey C., 2013. Analyzing Social Networks. Sage, Los Angeles. Broodbank, Cyprian, 2002. An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Brughmans, Tom, 2013. Thinking through networks: a review of formal network methods in archaeology. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 20, 623–662. Brughmans, Tom, Brandes, Ulrik, 2017. Visibility network patterns and methods for studying visual relational phenomena in archeology. Front. Digit. Human. 4. https://doi.org/10. 3389/fdigh.2017.00017. Brughmans, Tom, Keay, Simon, Earl, Graeme, 2014. Introducing exponential random graph models for visibility networks. J. Archaeol. Sci. 49, 442–454. Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), 2023. The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Brughmans, Tom, Peeples, Matt, 2017. Trends in archaeological network research: a bibliometric analysis. J. Hist. Netw. Res. 1, 1–24. Brughmans, Tom, Peeples, Matthew A., 2020. Spatial networks. In: Gillings, Mark, Hacigüzeller, Piraye, Lock, Gary (Eds.), Archaeological Spatial Analysis: A Methodological Guide. Routledge, London. Brughmans, Tom, Peeples, Matthew A., 2023. Network Science in Archaeology. In: Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cegielski, Wendy H., 2023. Networks, agent-based modeling, and archaeology. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cline, Diane H., Cline, Eric H., 2015. Text messages, tablets, and social networks in the late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean: the small world of the Amarna letters. In: Jana, Mynárová (Ed.), Egypt and the Near East: Crossroads II. Proceedings of an International Conference on the Relations of Egypt and the Near East in the Bronze Age. Charles University in Prague Press, Prague, pp. 17–44. Cline, Diane Harris, Munson, Jessica, 2023. Epigraphic networks in cross-cultural perspective. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Collar, Anna, Coward, Fiona, Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., 2015. Networks in archaeology: phenomena, abstraction, representation. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 22, 1–32. Crabtree, Stefani A., Dunne, Jennifer A., Wood, Spencer A., 2021. Ecological networks and archaeology. Antiquity 95, 812–825. Crabtree, Stefani A., Vaughn, Lydia J.S., Crabtree, Nathan T., 2017. Reconstructing Ancestral Pueblo food webs in the southwestern United States. J. Archaeol. Sci. 81, 116–127. Ducke, Benjamin, Suchowska, Paulina, 2022. Exploratory network reconstruction with sparse archaeological data and XTENT. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 29, 508–539. Dunne, Jennifer A., Maschner, Herbert, Betts, Matthew W., Huntly, Nancy, Russell, Roly, Williams, Richard J., Wood, Spencer A., 2016. The roles and impacts of human huntergatherers in North Pacific marine food webs. Sci. Rep. 6, 21179. Golitko, Mark, 2023. Geochemical networks. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Golitko, Mark, Feinman, Gary M., 2015. Procurement and distribution of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican obsidian 900 BC–AD 1520: a social network analysis. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 22, 206–247. Graham, Alan, 2006. Networks, agent-based models and the Antonine itineraries: implications for Roman archaeology. J. Mediterr. Archaeol. 19, 45–64. Graham, Shawn, 2014. On connecting stampsdnetwork analysis and epigraphy. Les Nouvelles de l’archéologie 135, 39–44. Granovetter, Mark S., 1973. The strength of weak ties. Am. J. Sociol. 78, 1360–1380. Gravel-Miguel, Claudine, Coward, Fiona, 2023. Paleolithic social networks and behavioural modernity. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hage, Per, Harary, Frank, 1991. Exchange in Oceania: a graph theoretic analysis. Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hart, John P., Winchell-Sweeney, Susan, Birch, Jennifer, 2019. An analysis of network brokerage and geographic location in fifteenth-century AD northern Iroquoia. PLoS One 14, e0209689. Herzog, Irmela, 2023. Transportation networks and least-cost paths. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hodder, Ian, 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, MA. Johnson, Kent M., 2023. Biodistance networks. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Knappett, Carl, 2005. Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Knappett, Carl, 2011. An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Knappett, Carl, Mol, Angus, 2023. Network epistemologies in archaeology. 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Larson, Katherine A., 2013. A network approach to Hellenistic sculptural production. J. Mediterr. Archaeol. 26, 235–260. Lemercier, Claire, 2015. Formal network methods in history: why and how? In: Fertig, Georg (Ed.), Social Networks, Political Institutions, and Rural Societies, Rural History in Europe. Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, pp. 281–310. Mills, Barbara J., 2017. Social network analysis in archaeology. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 46, 379–397. Munson, Jessica, Amati, Viviana, Collard, Mark, Macri, Martha J., 2014. Classic Maya Bloodletting and the cultural evolution of religious rituals: quantifying patterns of variation in hieroglyphic texts. PLoS One 9, e107982. Munson, Jessica, 2019. Epistemological issues for archaeological networks: mechanisms, mapping flows, and considering causation to build better arguments. In: Kerig, Tim, Mader, Christian, Ragkou, Katerina, Reinfeld, Michaela, Zachar, Tomás (Eds.), Social Network Analysis in Economic Archaeology: Perspectives From the New World. Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn, pp. 37–50. Munson, Jessica, Macri, Martha J., 2009. Sociopolitical network interactions: a case study of the classic Maya. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 28, 424–438. Munson, Jessica, Mills, Barbara J., Brughmans, Tom, Peeples, Matthew A., 2023. Anticipating the next wave of archaeological network research. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Newman, Matthew, Barabási, Albert-László, Watts, Duncan J., 2006. Structure and Dynamics of Networks. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Peeples, Matthew A., 2011. Identity and social transformation in the prehispanic cibola world: A.D. 1150–1325. PhD Dissertation. Arizona State University, Tempe. Peeples, Matthew A., 2018. Connected Communities: Networks, Identity, and Social Change in the Ancient Cibola World, Illustrated ed. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Peeples, Matthew A., 2019. Finding a place for networks in archaeology. J. Archaeol. Res. 27, 451–499. Peeples, Matthew A., Brughmans, Tom, 2023. Online Companion to Network Science in Archaeology. https://book.archnetworks.net/. Peeples, Matthew A., Haas, W. Randall, 2013. Brokerage and social capital in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest. Am. Anthropol. 115, 232–247. Peeples, Matthew A., Mills, Barbara J., Haas Jr., W.R., Clark, Jeffery J., Roberts Jr., John M., 2016. Analytical challenges for the application of social network analysis in archaeology. In: Brughmans, Tom, Collar, Anna, Coward, Fiona (Eds.), The Connected Past: Challenges to Network Studies in Archaeology and History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 59–84. Peeples, Matthew A., Roberts Jr., John M., Yin, Yi, 2023. Challenges for network research in archaeology. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Romanowska, Iza, 2023. Complexity science and networks in archaeology. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Scholnick, Jonathan, Munson, Jessica, Macri, Martha J., 2013. Positioning power in a multi-relational framework: a social network analysis of Classic Maya political rhetoric. In: Knappett, Carl (Ed.), Network Analysis in Archaeology: New Approaches to Regional Interaction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 95–124. Terrell, John, 1977. Human Biogeography in the Solomon Islands. Fieldiana. Anthropology 68, 1–47. Wasserman, Stanley, Faust, Katherine, 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. In: Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences, vol. 8. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watts, Duncan J., Strogatz, Steven H., 1998. Collective dynamics of “small-world” networks. Nature 393, 440–442.
Further Reading Apolinaire, Eduardo, Bastourre, Laura, 2016. Nets and Canoes: a network approach to the pre-Hispanic settlement system in the Upper Delta of the Paraná river (Argentina). J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 44, 56–68. Blake, Emma, 2013. Social networks, path dependence, and the rise of Ethnic groups in pre-Roman Italy. In: Knappett, Carl (Ed.), Network Analysis in Archaeology: New Approaches to Regional Interaction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 203–230. Brughmans, Tom, Poblome, Jeroen, 2016. Pots in space: understanding Roman Pottery distribution from confronting exploratory and geographical network analyses. In: Barker, Elton, Bouzarovski, Stefan, Pelling, Christopher, Isaksen, Leif (Eds.), New Worlds from Old Texts: Revisiting Ancient Space and Place. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 255–280. Cegielski, Wendy H., Daniel Rogers, J., 2016. Rethinking the role of agent-based modeling in archaeology. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 41, 283–298. Collar, Anna, 2013. Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas. Cambridge University Press, New York. Crabtree, Stefani A., 2015. Inferring ancestral Pueblo social networks from simulation in the central Mesa Verde. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 22, 144–181. Fulminante, Francesca, 2012. Social network analysis and the emergence of Central Places: a case study from central Italy (Latium Vetus). Babesch 87, 1–27. Golitko, Mark, James, Meierhoff, Feinman, Gary, Williams, Patrick Ryan, 2012. Complexities of collapse: the evidence of Maya obsidian as revealed by social network graphical analysis. Antiquity 86, 507–523. Graham, Shawn, Scott, Weingart, 2015. The Equifinality of archaeological networks: an agent-based exploratory lab approach. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 22, 248–274. Hart, John P., 2012. The effects of geographical distances on pottery assemblage similarities: a case study from northern Iroquoia. J. Archaeol. Sci. 39, 128–134. Hart, John P., Engelbrecht, William, 2012. Northern Iroquoian ethnic evolution: a social network analysis. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 19, 322–349. Hart, John P., Shafie, Termeh, Birch, Jennifer, Dermarkar, Susan, Williamson, Ronald F., 2016. Nation building and social signaling in southern Ontario: A.D. 1350–1650. PLoS One 11, e0156178. Holland-Lulewicz, Jacob, 2023. Networks and sociopolitical organization. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Isaksen, Leif, 2008. The application of network analysis to ancient transport geography: a case study of Roman Baetica. Digit. Mediev. 4. http://doi.org/10.16995/dm.20. Jenkins, David, 2001. A network analysis of Inka roads, administrative centers, and storage facilities. Ethnohistory 48, 655–687. Jennings, Benjamin, 2016. Exploring Late Bronze Age systems of Bronzework production in Switzerland through network science. STAR 2, 90–112. Kandler, Anna, Caccioli, Fabio, 2016. Networks, homophily, and the spread of innovations. In: Brughmans, Tom, Collar, Anna, Coward, Fiona (Eds.), The Connected Past: Challenges to Network Studies in Archaeology and History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 175–198. Leidwanger, Justin, 2023. Maritime networks. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lulewicz, Jacob, 2019. The social networks and structural variation of Mississippian sociopolitics in the southeastern United States. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 116, 6707–6712. Mills, Barbara J., Clark, Jeffery J., Peeples, Matthew A., 2016. Migration, skill, and the transformation of social networks in the pre-Hispanic Southwest. Econ. Anthropol. 3, 203–215. Mills, Barbara J., Clark, Jeffrey J., Peeples, Matthew A., Haas Jr., W.R., Roberts Jr., John M., Brett Hill, J., Huntley, Deborah L., et al., 2013. Transformation of social networks in the late pre-Hispanic US Southwest. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 110, 5785–5790. Mills, Barbara J., Peeples, Matthew A., (forthcoming). Migration and archaeological network research. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Mills, Barbara J., Peeples, Matthew A., Haas Jr., W. Randall, Lewis, Borck, Clark, Jeffery J., Roberts Jr., John M., 2015. Multiscalar perspectives on social networks in the late Prehispanic Southwest. Am. Antiq. 80, 3–24.
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Orengo, Hector A., Livarda, Alexandra, 2016. The seeds of commerce: a network analysis-based approach to the Romano-British Transport system. J. Archaeol. Sci. 66, 21–35. Östborn, Per, Gerding, Henrik, 2014. Network analysis of archaeological data: a systematic approach. J. Archaeol. Sci. 46, 75–88. Östborn, Per, Gerding, Henrik, 2015. The diffusion of fired bricks in Hellenistic Europe: a similarity network analysis. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 22, 306–344. Pailes, Matthew, 2014. Social network analysis of Early Classic Hohokam corporate group inequality. Am. Antiq. 79, 465–486. Pailes, Matthew, 2023. Social networks and inequality. In: Brughmans, Tom, Mills, Barbara J., Munson, Jessica, Peeples, Matthew A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research. Oxford Universtiy Press, Oxford. Peregrine, Peter, 1991. A graph-theoretic approach to the evolution of Cahokia. Am. Antiq. 56, 66–75. Romanowska, Iza, Wren, Colin D., Crabtree, Stefani A., 2021. Agent-Based Modeling for Archaeology: Simulating the Complexity of Societies. SFI Press, Santa Fe. Schillinger, Kerstin, Lycett, Stephen J., 2019. The flow of culture: assessing the role of rivers in the inter-community transmission of material traditions in the Upper Amazon. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 26, 135–154. De Soto, Pau, 2019. Network analysis to model and analyse Roman transport and mobility. In: Verhagen, Philip, Joyce, Jamie, Groenhuijzen, Mark R. (Eds.), Finding the Limits of the Limes: Modelling Demography, Economy and Transport on the Edge of the Roman Empire, Computational Social Sciences. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 271–289. Watts, Joshua, Ossa, Alanna, 2016. Exchange network topologies and agent-based modeling: economies of the Sedentary-period Hohokam. Am. Antiq. 81, 623–644. Wernke, Steven A., 2012. Spatial network analysis of a terminal Prehispanic and early colonial settlement in Highland Peru. J. Archaeol. Sci. 39, 1111–1122.
Phenomenological Archaeology Bjørnar Julius Olsen, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview “To the Things Themselves”dSome Phenomenological Pillars Key Issues A Phenomenology of Landscape and Its Legacy Fluid and Visualized Landscapes Heidegger’s Things Bringing to Mind Bringing Close: Circumspection, Region and Directionality Summary and Future Directions References
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Describe and critically review the introduction and reception of phenomenology in archaeology Outline basic features of phenomenological thinking Describe and explore Heidegger’s tool analysis and its wider relevance Discuss the reasons why a phenomenological archaeology never developed Reflect on why the works of Heidegger lately have gained a new interest in archaeology
Abstract The entry deals with phenomenology and its introduction into archaeology from the 1990s onward. It argues that the phenomenology that initially was enthusiastically embraced represented a very modified version heavily affected by postprocessualist thinking. A main reason for this was that the idealist basis of this thinking, and the wider sociopolitical concern with individualism and human agency, made it difficult to fully take on the radical consequences of a philosophical project precisely challenging the modern idealist legacy. The entry further explores some crucial aspects of phenomenological thinking that remained marginal in its archaeological version and how these may enrich archaeological reasoning about things and things’ being. Finally, it provides some reflections on why the attempt to build a genuine phenomenological archaeology failed but also, and paradoxically, why phenomenological thinking regardless of this is more present than ever in archaeological reasoning.
Introduction The 1990s saw an important theoretical reorientation taking place in archaeology, or more precisely, within the confines of the then most influential theoretical branch of the discipline, post-processual archaeology. Though not manifested as an abrupt shift, one significant development was that the instrumental emphasis on symbolic and communicative aspects of material culture became weakened and a new concern with people’s doings and their lived engagement with the world developed. This change was partly based on a wide range of social theory running from Pierre Bourdieu to Michel Foucault, partly on phenomenological thinking. While the social theory mobilized can be seen as an extension of the post-processual legacy, phenomenology promised a new theoretical engagement that became an important and, sometimes, lasting source of inspiration for many archaeologists. This inspiration was particularly strong in parts of British landscape archaeology. By emphasizing experience as also a bodily faculty, attention was turned to how monuments and landscapes, through human engagement with them, served to shape experiences, memories, and lives. Crucial was the notion of landscape as experienced and humanized space, something to be studied and experienced from inside, and the associated emphasis on the body as a universal locus for experiencing the material world. While important in its own respect, and indeed immensely productive and successful, the question may still be raised whether what came out of this really was a genuine phenomenological approach or rather a domesticated version heavily affected by postprocessualist thinking. When the latter is argued to be the case, it is because the idealist basis of much post-processual thinking, and
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the wider sociopolitical concern with individualism and human agency, made it difficult to take on the radical consequences of a philosophical project precisely challenging the idealist legacy of modern Western thinking. Accordingly, the version of phenomenology that made its way into archaeology and landscape studies may be seen as a negotiated outcome of these conflicting objectives and interests. In the first part of this entry I shall explore this schism in more detail by expanding on some basic features of phenomenological philosophy, which are then compared to how it was presented and used in its early archaeological applications. In the second part I will explore in more detail some aspects of phenomenological thinking as developed primarily by Martin Heidegger and how these may enrich archaeological reasoning about things and about peoples’ engagement with the world they inhabit. It all ends with some reflections of why the attempt to build a genuine phenomenological archaeology did not succeed but also, and paradoxically, why phenomenological thinking despite this is more present than ever in archaeological reasoning.
Overview “To the Things Themselves”dSome Phenomenological Pillars Phenomenology can be seen as a reaction to idealism and the sway it held over modern philosophical approaches to how we experience the world. This experiencing was by and large a cognitive faculty through which sensory images, mainly based on vision, were filtered and transformed by our mind and language. Idealism, thus, left us with a notion of matter as largely passive and inert, while the human mind was seen as active and creative. Assumed belonging to two separate realms, the gulf between them became a neverending source for modern epistemological inquiries about howdor ifdour conception of the world could correspond with the material reality “out there”. This also fostered a skeptical attitude as epitomized by René Descartes’ “methodological doubt”, by which our perception of the “external world” could not be trusted as any secure basis for knowledge; actually, it might all prove to be constructions in our heads. If not unreal, matter de facto became mere surface without any significant power or potential; meaning and ideas about it had to be located in the thinking subject (Matthews, 2002: 8–26, Thomas, 2004: 16–18). As for much of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant’s reasoning on this issue became highly influential. Though things’ existence was not to be doubted, they could, according to Kant, not be grasped directly or in their own terms. As objects of experience, things are accessible to us only through the way they appear to us, i.e. as transcendental objects or what he defines as phenomena. Even if things in this transcendental mode in some way are related to how they are “in themselves” (the nomena), this internal state of their being is still excluded from our experience. Our concepts and understanding can only extend to appearances, and “consequently to mere things of sense; and as soon as we leave this sphere, these concepts retain no meaning whatever” (Kant, 1783/ 2001: 55). It was this idealist philosophical heritage that the phenomenological project of the 20th century challenged. At first, however, the challenge was not that obvious. Actually, Edmund Husserl, commonly recognized as the very founder of phenomenology, initially took a position that to some extent rather may be seen as a development of Kant’s “transcendental” approach, though paired with the notion of intentionality. The crucial issue for Husserl, very simplified, was how our consciousness relates to its objects, for which he proposed what may be described as a “rigorous science” of subjectivity. In order to grasp the meaning or essence of these objects, Husserl reintroduced the concept of intentionality. Our awareness of an object is always intentional; it exists for us as a meaningful object of or for something. This intentional object, however, should not be confused with the actual physical thing; the intentional object is an ideal object possible to grasp only in our thinking (actually, some objects are only imagined without any material equivalent, e.g. ghosts). Rather than relating to the real worlds of objects, intentionality becomes a “transcendental” way to bridge our consciousness with this realm of ideal meaningful objects. It was in this bridging that Husserl proposed his famous “method” of phenomenological reduction. In our “natural attitude” of actual and everyday dealings with things we are concerned with how they look, what they are used for, where they are, and so forth. However, since this natural attitude is a potential source of disturbance and digression, this lived engagement with them must be “bracketed off”. In order to grasp their essential meaning as intentional objects of our consciousness, things’ real existence has to be “put in parentheses” or reduceddwhat he denoted as the “phenomenological reduction” or epoché (from the Greek word meaning “holding off from” or “suspending judgment”) (Matthews, 2002: 24–25; Husserl, 1982). Husserl uses the thinking about of an apple tree as an example. Though related to the actual tree, it is still different from the physical object growing in the garden. To bring forth the intentional apple tree, our assumption about the real tree must be suspended. Whatever happens to the real tree, regardless of whether it is chopped down or burned, the meaning of the tree as an intentional object (“as something meant”) remains (Husserl, 1982: 214–15). Thus, although Husserl coined the phenomenological slogan, “zu den Sachen selbst” (“to the things themselves”), things as material beings were of less concern compared to their transcendental existence as “thought objects,” which was the true Sachen of Husserl’s early phenomenology. Husserl’s later philosophy (in the 1930s) took a turn that at least partly brought it closer to the very different and “entangled” approach to human perception proposed by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1970). This “turn” implied introducing the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as constitutive for human understanding. While his former phenomenological reduction might be seen as yet another version of the methodological doubt of Descartes, in the sense that consciousness was the only secure basis for knowledge, Husserl now emphasized our ordinary life experience as constitutive for our perception of the world. What needs to be “put in parentheses” is not the real world, but rather the abstract categories and concepts of science
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and philosophy. Whereas Husserl (like Kant and Descartes) was previously preoccupied with how the world existed “in us,” the question now rather became “how we are in the world” (Matthews, 2002:28–29). This conception of being as entangled being was already a starting point for Heidegger, as it became for Merleau-Ponty. Our engagement with the world is not a matter of intellectual contemplation performed by a detached subject, but always-already a direct and situated involvement. Heidegger molded phenomenology as a radical break with the idealist tradition, which also included its conceptual and linguistic legacy that was to be substituted by a genuinely created vocabulary of “neologisms” (cf. Inwood, 2000). For example, using a term such as subject would be counterproductive due to its embedded distancing and contrasting legacy (e.g. subject-object), and though Heidegger’s alternative, Dasein, may sound strange (literally, “being there”), it points directly to our situatedness in the world. This situatedness, moreover, is not something arrived at through a gradual process. It constitutes an inevitable condition where we at the very outset, “always-already,” find ourselves “thrown” (geworfen) into the midst of the world. This entanglement is also tellingly expressed by Heidegger’s generous use of hyphens, such as in his being-in-theworlddshowing quite literally that we are tightly joined in the world we seek to understand (Heidegger, 1962). Phenomenology was launched as a “relearning to look at the world,” proposing a return to lived experience unobscured by abstract philosophical concepts and theories. In other words, to that which is nearest in being but often becomes furthest away in analysis (Macann, 1993:164). Before we think about the world in a conscious, reflexive way, we are already engaged in a practical, habitual dealing with it. Prior to the Cartesian “I think,” it is necessary to acknowledge an “I can” or “I do,” that is, a practical, non-discursive experiencing that governs our relationship with the world and is expressed in routinized practices and actions (Merleau-Ponty, 1962:137ff.). Phenomenology, more generally, can be described as a dedicated attempt to reveal or make manifest our relationship with the world. Crucial here is the concern with how the world itself manifests itself to us, a “showing”, thus, that should not be confused with our subjective interpretation of it. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is the things themselves, “from the depth of their silence”, that phenomenology wishes to bring to expression (1968:4), and in doing so it also exposes “the layer of living experience through which other people and things are first given to us” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962:57). Or as articulated by Heidegger, phenomenology is to let “that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself . expressing nothing else than the maxim . ‘To the things themselves’” (1962:58). The phenomenological approach to human perception implied two important insights: First, our relatedness to the world. We are entangled beings fundamentally involved in relations of human and nonhuman beings. Second, we relate to the world not (only) as thinking subjects but also as bodily objectsdour being in this world is a concrete existence of involvement that unites us with the world. As stated by Merleau-Ponty:
Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is when it has incorporated it into its “world,” and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made up independently of any representation. Merleau-Ponty (1962:138–39).
Although our somatic engagement with the world is far more explicit in Merleau-Ponty’s work than in Heidegger’s, central to both philosophers was the attempt to break down the subject-object distinction implied in previous approaches to perception. As Merleau-Ponty’s latest work suggests, the material character of our own being (our common “fabric” as “flesh”) is essential for our integration with the world. The ability to touch and be touched, to see and be seen, to act upon things while at the same time being acted upon by them, can only happen if there is some kinship, “if my hand . takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968:133).
Key Issues A Phenomenology of Landscape and Its Legacy It was excerpts from this body of phenomenological thinking that were introduced to archaeology in the 1990s. Seminal in this respect was Christopher Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994). In this work, Tilley set out to use phenomenological thinking to break away from what he conceived as disengaged objectivist approaches to landscape and space. Important here was the notion of human being as somatic being; that our carnal existence is crucial to our being in the world. As stated by Thomas (1996:20), it was an approach which acknowledged that the body is not just something we live in, but a means by which we experience the world, something we live through. Our perception of a landscape will always be mediated by the body and where it is placed, it is always experienced from a certain perspective and, also, affected by a range of sensorial exposures. Following Tilley, landscapes should therefore be studied from inside; that is, as an experienced and humanized space as opposed to the abstracted and mediated space produced by maps, aerial photography or computer aided technologies. Personal experience, being there, cannot be substituted (see also Tilley, 2004, 2008, 2010). Using the surveying archaeologist as the key interlocutor, this somatic experience was also conceived of as a methodological possibility to embrace how past peoples themselves experienced the landscape and monuments surveyed. There are, of course, evident connections to phenomenological philosophy in this general framing of Tilley’s phenomenology of landscape, in terms of the notion of being as always situated and “thrown”; i.e. as being-in-the-world. Significantly impacting Tilley’s initial approach, also as a methodological device, however, was a subjective and human-centered emphasis that sets it apart
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from the phenomenology outlined above (though not free of anthropocentrism itself). One significant aspect here is “directionality” and the assumption that the orientation and spatiality of the human body provides a universal basis for comprehending landscapes and for our somatic experience of space more generally. Outlining how walking the English landscape enables one to grasp its full and perspectival richness, Tilley states, “Things in front or behind you, within reach or without, things to the left and right of your body, above and below, these most basic of personal spatial experiences, are shared with prehistoric populations in our common biological humanity” (1994:74, see also Tilley, 2004:4–10). While this has been targeted for reducing the human body to a uniform male, middle-aged, western gestalt, and also for ignoring social relations and cultural values (for a critique of this but also for a sympathetic and informative reading of Tilley and Thomas’ works, see Brück, 2005), less attention is given to the centrality it assigned the human subject itself and thus to the possibility that the directionality of the body may be subject to more-than-human attachments. As I shall return to below, the latter may have better footing in phenomenological thought. Tilley’s first book on landscape phenomenology was heavily influenced by postprocessual thinking and the struggle for a “humanized space” (as opposed to “spatial science”) may likely have been fought without bringing in phenomenology as an emblematic concept; it anyway mostly serves an “auxiliary” role. Actually, its title notwithstanding, phenomenology constitutes only one among a formidable lineup of theoretical providersditself presented in less than three pages (Tilley, 1994:11–14). Much the same may be said of the interpretations Tilley offers here and in his subsequent books on landscape phenomenology (Tilley, 1999, 2004, and 2010), which hardly differed that much from those emerging from other theoretical strands popular among postprocessual archaeologists at the time. Megalith monuments and rock art were still much about structural oppositions, symbolizing principles of social order and identity, and with rituals dedicated to spirits and ancestors as an ever present ingrediency. Discussing the Brittany menhirs, for example, we learn that the individuality of these primarily naturally shaped stones “would act to sustain a sense of social identity for the people who erected them and subsequently lived with them. People would recognize themselves, where they were, and who they were through the material qualities and identity of the individual menhirs” (Tilley, 2004:37). Despite Tilley’s important attempt to transfer a sharing of experience from mind to body, the experiencing power still remains firmly anchored within the human individual, as also confirmed by his initial definition of phenomenology as “the understanding and description of things such as they are experienced by a subject” (1994:12). The discrepancy between his conception of phenomenology and the one outlined above is further revealed by the following longer description:
[Phenomenology] is about the relationship between Being and Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world resides in a process of objectification in which people objectify the world in order to set them apart from it. This results in the creation of a gap, a distance in space. To be human is both to create this distance between the self and that which is beyond and to attempt to bridge this distance through a variety of meansdthrough perception (seeing, hearing, touching), bodily actions and movements, and intentionality, emotion and awareness residing in systems of belief and decision-making, remembrance and evaluation (1994:12).
While this may work well as a summary of theories of embodiment and objectification (partly based on Hegel’s notion), popular among archaeologists, anthropologists and social theorists at the time, it is hard to find justification for most of this in the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty that are claimed as sources. The objectifying “gap,” the intentional striving to overcome it, and a Being separated from Being-in-the-world, just to mention some very problematic notions, are hardly conceptions in compliance with the 20th-century phenomenological project as laid out by these philosophers (see also Barrett and Ko, 2009). It is interesting to note that despite other works that suggested more subtle and worked-through approaches (including some of Tilley’s later works, see especially his 2004 book), it was this first phenomenology that became particularly influential and for long proliferated in archaeological studies and textbooks in the Anglo-American world (see, however, Thomas, 2006, 2008; Karlsson, 1998; Fuglestvedt, 2009; Olsen, 2010 for different approaches). One reason for this may well be that its novelty was still largely conceived of as being safely within the confines of post-processual thinking; in other words, it did not pose any serious challenge to symbolic, structuralist and social constructivist approaches but could easily be accommodated to them. Moreover, as noted by Thomas (2008: 300, 304; see also Tilley, 2010: 480), the flood of “phenomenological archaeologies” that followed in the wake of Tilley’s book contributed to a further trivialization of its analytical and theoretical content. In many cases it ended up as yet another “technique” that could be applied to a certain landscape alongside others and, equally simplified, to use that as a convenient means to replicate the thoughts and perception of past peoples. As tellingly claimed by Van Dyke and Alcock (2003:7), the strength of the phenomenological approach is that it “allows us to think about the ways in which landscapes and built forms were experienced, perceived and represented by ancient subjects.” Another irony of this was that it made phenomenology undeservedly vulnerable to much ill-grounded critique.
Fluid and Visualized Landscapes The conception of landscape that came out of this early corpus of phenomenology depicted a subjective and supple sphere held together and made meaningful by humans. Landscapes were open, multivocal, and ever changingdin other words, always relative to the situated actors’ conception of them. According to Barbara Bender, a phenomenological approach “allows us to consider how we move around, how we attach meaning to places, entwining them with memories, histories and stories, creating a sense of belonging . We have seen that landscapes are experimental and porous, nested and open ended”(Bender, 2002:13–37, emphasis added). It is quite telling that when summarizing Bender and Tilley’s phenomenological conception, Ashmore states that for these two scholars,
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“landscapes are primarily social constructs” (2004:260). For sure, this is neither to say that this is a correct description (especially for Tilley’s work), nor that all those advocating such conceptions of landscape saw themselves as doing phenomenology. However, the concept was conspicuously present in these discourses, and the difficulty of distinguishing those who explicitly advocated phenomenology from those who confessed to social constructivist and idealist perspectives, with some notable exceptions, is probably quite symptomatic. Another significant feature was the emphasis on vision and visuality. Despite advocating the need for acknowledging the full range of sensory experiences as unified by the body (see Tilley, 2004, 2010: 29–30), the concern with vision and the way sights and visual fields changed with the location of the viewer achieved a very important role in phenomenological field studies (cf. Tilley, 1994; Tilley et al., 2000; Cummings and Whittle, 2003; Bender et al., 2007). While a critical distance may be said to be kept to the detached Cartesian observer, one that “skims the surface; surveys the land from an ego-centered viewpoint”, and whose gaze “is about control” (Bender, 1999:31; see also Tilley, 2004:14–16, 2008), this critical awareness did little to question the pivotal role vision played in British landscape phenomenology itself (though see Thomas, 1993; Brück, 2005). Actually, it may be argued that the emphasis on sights and view angles has much in common with the Cartesian perspectivalist tradition in landscape painting (see Jay, 1998). Taking into consideration how crucial the subject-centered Western metaphysics is to this spectator gaze, merging the “I” and the “eye”, so to speak, the precedence of vision became yet another contradictory feature of the early phenomenology of landscape.
Heidegger’s Things Another irony in the attempts to introduce phenomenological thinking to archaeology, is that the most explicitly thing-oriented phenomenological approach, Heidegger’s tool analysis, was mostly left unattended. Again, the post-processual preoccupation with the social, symbolic, and ritual is a likely suspect for this omittance. Given the impact this legacy had on phenomenological archaeology, Heidegger’s detailed concern with mundane things in their everyday uses, with equipment and their referential assignment, most likely seemed irrelevant. Moreover, his very vocabulary, such as the “in-order-to,” “serviceability,” and “usability,” probably sounded embarrassingly functionalist to scholars who had spent most of their career telling us exactly the opposite about things. The departure from the everyday and the ordinary actually comes close to a diagnostic feature of the phenomenological project in archaeology, leaving us with a phenomenological archaeology strangely alienated from the everydayness of herding sheep, clearing fields, cutting woods, building houses, cooking and feeding (though see Hamilton et al., 2006). In order to compensate a little for this omission, it may be valuable to have a closer look at Heidegger’s reasonings on things (see also Dreyfus, 1991; Harman, 2002). Things remain a long-standing concern in his philosophy, most importantly developed in his 1927 opus magnum, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). It might be a measure of his dedication to trivial things that he once made the somewhat resigned comment about what others made out of Being and Time: “For Heidegger, the world consists only of cooking pots, pitchforks and lampshades; he has nothing to say about ‘higher culture’ or about ‘nature’” (Heidegger quoted in Inwood, 2000:130). Challenging the Cartesian notion that our relationship to the world is mediated and orchestrated by the mind, Heidegger proposed that our being in the world involves an immediate engagement and entanglement with things. Our everyday dealing with things (Umgang) relates to a mode of being that is ontologically fundamental and prior to any conscious (detached) cognition of the world (Dreyfus, 1991:60–61). What does this everyday Umgang with things consist of? First of all, we relate to things by using them to accomplish something. The fork is there for eating, the axe for chopping, the bow and arrow for shooting, and so on. Heidegger applies the word Zeugd“equipment” or “gear”dto emphasize this functionality (the “in-order-to”). Things, moreover, are connected in chains of references, so that strictly speaking “there is no such thing as an equipment”; it “always belong to a totality of equipment . constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’ such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability” (Heidegger, 1962:97). The hammer relates to the nail, the nail to the plank, the plank to the framework, the framework to the house and so forth. In our everydayness, we are always dealing with things that relate and refer to other things and beings. In this practical way of dealing with them, Heidegger calls things “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden). In this mode, we do not “see” the thing, but are practically and skillfully involved with it. The hammer, the spear, or the laptop are not objects for conscious attention; actually, they tacitly “withdraw” from our conscious concern when they are properly working as part of our everyday conduct (Heidegger, 1962: 98). Readiness-to-hand, however, does not render us blind to or unconcerned with the things we engage with. It involves a kind of sight which Heidegger refers to as Umsichtdthe “look around” something, or the “view beyond” (Heidegger, 1962:98–99). Thus, the involvement with any object brings about a wider field of related things. Repairing the bow brings forth not only this immediate piece of equipment but also the materials, the arrow, the hunt, the prey, and so on. Rather than a conscious observation of isolated objects, Umsicht may better be understood as a “circumspection”da habitual awareness of how things are in their relatednessdin other words, come together in our practical everyday involvement with them. Our doings and movements are monitored by this Umsichtdwe instinctively “know” what to do next, where things are, what they offer us, how to work with them, and so on (Dreyfus, 1991:66–67). In this sense, there are probably some significant differences between the “visions” of a Mesolithic hunter stalking his prey, a Neolithic farmer working the fields, and a phenomenological archaeologist looking for views and monuments.
Bringing to Mind For things to remain in their mode of readiness-to-hand, their ordinary and well-functioning use must endure. In our everyday conducts we implicitly expect that things will last, that they will work as they have done, and that the world will continue in its
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current state. However, as we know, interruptions and breakdowns will sooner or later happen. Such disturbances cause a new mode of awareness by which things become objects of conscious concern, or what Heidegger refers to as present-at-hand (vorhanden) (Heidegger, 1962:102ff.). A car tire is rarely an object of conscious concern; however, if it flattens, we suddenly become aware of it and its importance to the functioning of the car; we realize, to quote Heidegger, “what it was ready-to-hand for” (1962: 105). A similar awareness arises when something is missing or is in the wrong place. If we lose the key to our car, it becomes urgently “present” to us; its absence makes it “obtrusive.” Something more is also implied in Heidegger’s exposition of the triggering of the present-at-hand: we become aware of the relational assignment and entanglement of the thing that is missing or malfunctioning. It is not only the missing key, the flattened tire, or the misplaced hammer that become noticed. Their importance in relation to making other things perform is also revealed, as well as the wider field in which they are combined. The “in-order-to,” which earlier was part of an implicit, tacit knowledge, is transformed into a conscious relational awareness: “The context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection” (Heidegger, 1962:105). Heidegger’s reasoning on these two modes of things’ being has relevance far beyond the philosophical settlement. It may here be helpful to think of other instances that may turn peoples’ ready-to-hand dealings with things into a conscious and present-at-hand mode. For example, the introduction of new and unfamiliar technology, such as metal implements in a stone-tool-using society, will naturally cause conscious awareness and curiosity about the new objects themselves. However, their presence will also, and likely in a challenging way, create a new awareness of the directly affected old stone tools and the wider relational field in which they were entangled (see Sharp, 1952 for an excellent example). Encounters with the alien or unfamiliar, thus, may also bring to consciousness that which is familiar and taken for granted. Arrows and bows may present themselves in ways never thought of when confronted with firearms. Form, function, and materials may be compared and evaluated, properties rejected or swapped, and new technologies learned. In such contexts, things’ ready-to-hand mode may temporarily be “overruled” by their present-athandness. Heidegger’s conception of present-at-handness implies that this is an accidental mode of things’ being. Things momentarily light up due to some interruptions, and will when repaired and replaced soon return to their ready-at-hand slumber. However, some objects are “always” seen, or remain persistently conscious to us in a primarily present-at-hand mode. There are of course a number of reasons for why some things constantly show up, are selected for special attention as e.g. “inalienable,” individualized, aestheticized, or otherwise removed from the everyday taciturnity of their fellow beings. However, whatever the specific reason may be for this attentive persistency, one should be cautious to think of this only as a consequence of the attitudes of those humans who are involved with such things. Things also draw attention to themselves by being peculiar, different, or conspicuous in their own various ways. Stonehenge, for example, is clearly more than a collection of rocks in the field. In other words, present-at-handness as a mode of things’ being may also be activated by other features than disturbance and breakdown. Regular natural phenomena, such as rainbows, northern lights, and sun sets and rises, may further exemplify the attentive power of certain things. Notwithstanding the character of the things that “consciously come to mind”, it is still the case that things in this mode will only surface as the tip of the enormous iceberg of the ready-to-hand. Ready-to-handness is always the dominant mode of things’ being. Interruptions are mostly leveled out and the unfamiliar in most cases becomes familiar. After some time, the iron ax, the long house, and the firearm become normalized as ready-to-hand equipment, “noticed” only as an object of circumspective concern. The constant dominance of the ready-to-hand is also a product of a certain “perceptive necessity” as argued by Bergson (2004: 2728, 276). Faced with the numberless impacts of myriad things and their networks, the conscious perception of the material world must by necessity be “subtractive.” As also implied by Heidegger, for some things (or some aspects of a thing) to show up and become illuminated, there must be a diminishing and darkening of others.
Bringing Close: Circumspection, Region and Directionality A possible field of great interest and attractiveness to archaeologists and anthropologists concerned with the phenomenology of landscape, is Heidegger’s discussion of the spatiality and directedness of the ready-to-hand (1962:134ff.). According to Heidegger, space is not conceived of as measurable distances but as modes of proximity or availability. In our everyday lives, we relate to things through such modes of closeness (or remoteness), rather than in terms of objectively measured distances. Embedded in this habitual being is also an attitude of bringing-close and Heidegger actually defines closeness as an essential human tendency, as an “existential”. He depicts this tendency conceptually by using unfamiliar words as Ent-fernung, “deseverance”, which he explains as “making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing it close” (1962:139). In other words, for Heidegger to bring something close is not about overcoming a geographic distance, at least not in any strict measurable sense, but relates more to a mode of becoming familiar with, making something ready-to-hand. Accepting new tools, techniques, and raw materials always involves this circumspective process of bringing close, of “putting it in readiness, having it to hand” (Heidegger, 1962: 40). The same applies when moving to new territories, other places, and the process of settling in. For example, the peopling of the Scandinavian peninsula after the last glaciation will likely have involved this process of bringing close. Places and landscapes which immediately may have appeared conspicuously different and present-at-hand became familiar and ready-to-hand. From a phenomenological perspective, this should not be confused with an intentional act of domestication; it is not about embodiment or appropriating an alien or meaningless world. Rather it was an outcome of habitually bringing close; that is, of using and modifying previous experiences and knowledge in order to become part of and dwell in a new land. Being-in-the-world, Heidegger claims, “is
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always in some way familiar [bekannt]”, it is grounded beforehand in the “thrown” condition of always-already being situated and entangled (Heidegger, 1962:85, 88). Contained in our circumspective dealings with things is also a notion of “belonging somewhere” (Heidegger, 1962:136–37). As noted above, our routine dealings with things presuppose a certain order of things, which also explains why misplacing and other anomalies appear as disturbances. In our everyday dealings with things, we implicitly know that they belong to certain places and tasks, the bed in the sleeping room, the fridge in the kitchen, the hammer with the other tools. Particular things belong somewhere and are used to conduct certain tasks, which applies as much to our own daily academic routines as to mobile Mesolithic hunters. The range of these related “somewheres” of things, which we habitually foresee through our dealings with them, constitutes what Heidegger calls a “region” (Gegend) (Heidegger, 1962:136). Again, this should not be thought of in strict geographical terms, as Heidegger relates proximity and spatiality also to care and concern. For example, that which is spatially close to us, but not of concern, does not belong to the region. Thus, objectively measured distances rarely conform with “lived” spatiality. Something desired but objectively distant may feel closer than something spatially closer but less desired. Heidegger’s concepts of Umgang, Umsicht, and region (Gegend) are closely related. Our everyday dealing with things is to deal with things ready-to-hand, they appear to us implicitly through our habitual engagement with them. In certain aspects this resembles the perspectives proposed by early phenomenological landscape archaeologies but also differences appear if we briefly return to how spatiality and directionality respectively are conceived. As mention above, in Tilley’s works, somatic or bodily space is experienced through a human-centered directionality: “An understanding of this space takes as its starting point the upright human body looking out on the world” (1994:16). Directionality is thus claimed to always be relative to the position of the standing human subject; that is, “we order places and their significance, through our bodies, through the articulation of the basic distinctions between up/down, front/back and left/right” (Tilley, 2004:9). Heidegger, however, is far from seeing spatiality and directionality as something exclusively created by us. Circumspection means that things belong “somewhere” within our range and our region, and that we are related to them. Relating to things always involves directionality, the human being (as Dasein) is always oriented and drawn toward something. This directionality, thus, is far from prescribed by human intentions alone. It should rather be understood as an outcome of our belonging to this world and what the world affords or has to offer in our habitual dealing with it. Our positioning, and the distinction between e.g. left and right, is relative to this fundamental attachment and involvement; in short, it is our concernful dealings with the world and its things that orient us (Heidegger, 1962:143–144). Thus, for the landscape phenomenologist the individual looking out on the world should not constitute a self-evident starting point. This, actually, may be indicative of what Heidegger in his later philosophy claimed typical for the calculative and manipulative attitude, reducing things to representing objects. This way of conceiving the world is dependent on our own position, seeing only “the side turned toward us,” that is, an embodied region filled with our own representational view (Heidegger, 1966:63–64). The human-centered conception of space is also challenged by anthropological and cognitive linguistic studies, showing for example, how the topography of landscapes may constitute the organizing principle for how directions and orientations are perceived and conceptualized (e.g. Bickel, 2000). Though Tilley in his later works also acknowledges this perspective, a humancentered directionality is still present as a pivotal orienting premise (see Tilley, 2010: 26–28).
Summary and Future Directions Attempts at doing phenomenological archaeology peaked in the late 1990s and the 2000s. Nevertheless, it is hard to identify any such genuine archaeology emerging out of these endeavors. The reasons for this are diverse. As mentioned above, phenomenology was introduced by archaeologists dedicated to the objectives of post-processual archaeology and this intellectual legacy, eventually, proved hard to combine with the philosophy of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The influence of post-processualism was further facilitated by the curious fact that in Britain, the very home ground of phenomenological archaeology, it became close to synonymous with a phenomenology of landscape, and thus inclined to carry on the hegemonic post-processual tradition of seeing landscapes and monuments as socially and ritually constituted. As a consequence, a phenomenological archaeology of the everyday or, even more strangely, of things, never came to feature prominently on the agenda (see, however, Tilley, 2017). Post-processualism was also and aptly labeled “interpretive archaeology,” and this specific focus constituted yet another part of its effective legacy. Interpretation in its ordinary sense is of course unavoidable for any scholarly conduct, but came here to represent a constant urge to always penetrate beyond the immediate, the everyday, and the actually present, in order to recover a deeper and more “complex” meaning, preferably associated with the social and the ritual. It likely was the realization that phenomenological thinking did not comply well with this interpretative imperative, that led Tilley to the conclusion that “a ‘pure’ phenomenological approach on its own remains inadequate. It has to be linked to an awareness of the hermeneutics of interpretation that goes beyond a descriptive exercise.” (Tilley, 2004: 224). Such hermeneutics, however, was always present in the attempt to build a phenomenological archaeology, giving some unintended validity to Van Dyke’s claim that “phenomenology in archaeology refers to an interpretive method . developed by British post-processualists” (Van Dyke, 2014: 1). It should also be said that beyond the few seriously dedicated, the knowledge of phenomenological philosophy generally was weak, allowing inconsistencies, trivializations and right-out erroneous conceptions to flourish. Discovering the complexity of phenomenological thinking, and how ill-fitted it was for any convenient ready-to-use application, was likely an additional reason why its popularity did not exceed beyond its early phase of enthusiastic reception. This likely included acknowledging that despite frequent claims to the opposite, phenomenology was never formulated as an interpretive epistemology; it was overall an ontology of being.
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Since the 2000s, phenomenology seems to have been running out of steam in archaeology and the enthusiasm it once mobilized as an “approach” is definitely fading. This, however, is not to say that the serious attempts to build a phenomenological archaeology were unrewarding. Especially Christopher Tilley’s later works should be mentioned here since they may be said to reflect both a consolidation of a certain phenomenological attitude (to fieldwork) and, at the same time, a development of departure where phenomenology is less explicitly heralded as crucial. This disparity is reflected both in his concrete archaeological engagements and in how he relates to phenomenological theory. With regard to the latter, his 2010 volume, Interpreting Landscapes, despite being promoted as a “key theoretical statement”, contains no references to the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty or Husserl. For general theoretical and philosophical discussions of phenomenology, Tilley confidently finds it sufficient to refer to his own earlier works (besides one from Thomas) (2010: 25). His 2017 book, Landscape in the Longue Durée, gives much the same impression, with a few en passant references to central phenomenological works, and without, as earlier, phenomenology being emblematically used neither in the title nor as part of a phenomenological landscape series (see also Tilley and Cameron-Daum, 2017). For Tilley, phenomenologydas understood and conceptualized by himdmay thus be said to have become “normal science” (sensu Kuhn), a way of reasoning in no need of further theoretical legitimation. At the same time, Tilley’s archaeological works reflect an increasingly more detailed and concrete engagement with monuments and landscapes, stones and pebbles, which represent an impressive attempt to attend to the material record without necessarily engaging in (very) heavy theorizing. Actually, this development may be claimed very much in the spirit of the phenomenological motto, “to the things themselves” (see especially 2017). Nevertheless, what Tilley has provided over nearly three decades of research is not so much a phenomenological archaeology as a new approach to landscape archaeology. The core of this approach is a phenomenological inspired set of field practices (excellently summarized in Tilley, 2008), which in many ways also take seriously the experiential dimension and sensibility that always have been part of archaeological fieldwork but often sadly neglected in previous research. As with our ordinary life, that which is nearest in being became furthest away in analysis. When it comes to analysis and its theoretical grounding, however, phenomenology mostly gives way to hermeneutics and social theory. Perhaps this will change, but so far phenomenology has not impacted considerably his conclusions (see also Tilley, 2019). Regardless the unfulfilled promises of a phenomenological archaeology, there has over the last decade been another and very different trend, discernible by the fact that the works of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and, especially, Heidegger are more present in archaeological discourses than ever before. This interest is in some ways “topical”, in the sense that it is confined to specific issues without any ambitions of campaigning a wider phenomenological approach. Heidegger’s work has been particularly influential in new-materialist and contemporary archaeology as well as in the cross-over field of critical heritage studies (e.g. Olsen, 2010; Pétursdóttir, 2012; Edgeworth, 2013; Witmore, 2020; Olsen et al., 2021; Vennatrø and Høgseth, 2021). Here perspectives from Heidegger’s later philosophy are prominent, including those pertaining to the beings of things. For example, in relation to heritage, his concept of Gelassenheit, or “releasement,” (Heidegger, 1966: 46–47) has been suggested as an alternative attitude of nonintervention in discussion of ruination versus preservation. Heidegger’s critique of the modern attitude to things and nature have likewise played an important role in debates on ethics and care, both in relation to environmental concern, heritage, and reburials (e.g. Svestad, 2013; Tienda Palop and Currás, 2019; Olsen et al., 2021). One crucial issue here is his argument that things become disclosed to us only as resourcesdas things-for-usdand how our attitude to humans themselves has come to mirror this instrumental and calculative way of conceiving things and nature as Bestand (standing-reserve or supply) (Heidegger, 1993). Beyond these fields, Heidegger’s dwelling perspective, describing our habitual and existential embeddedness, has also attracted new attention, as manifested in Philip Tonner’s book on Paleolithic dwelling (Tonner, 2018, see also Thomas, 2008). Thus, despite the failure of building a phenomenological archaeology, phenomenological thinking has never been more present in archaeological reasoning. To some extent, but only marginally so, this can be seen as an outcome of the first wave of landscape phenomenology. Far more important, however, are the paradigmatic turnsdontological, material, affectivedthat have shaken the intellectual landscape over the last two decades, including archaeology (e.g. Harman, 2002; Gumbrecht, 2004; Thrift, 2007; Olsen, 2010; Alberti et al., 2011; Hamilakis, 2013; Olsen et al., 2021). Significant here is the questioning of ontological polarities and the will to extend agency beyond humans, but also a new interest in the ontology of things and a desire to explore aspects of experience, knowledge and sensibility that cannot be grasped by the dominant hermeneutics of meaning and representation. This new intellectual climate has created a fertile ground for phenomenological perspectives to develop beyond the interpretative imperative. What also characterizes much of this new interest is a dedication to engage seriously with the works of phenomenological philosophy. Discussions of Heidegger’s works abound, but for some of the ontological issues at stake today Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and especially his latest work (1968), remains an equally valuable and still underexplored source for future discussion.
See Also: Landscape Archaeology and Socio-Environmental Patterns; Philosophy of Archaeology; Post-Processual Archaeology.
References Alberti, Benjamin, Fowles, Severin, Holbraad, Martin, Marshall, Yvonne, Witmore, Christopher, 2011. “Worlds otherwise” archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference. Curr. Anthropol. 52 (6), 896–912. Ashmore, Wendy, 2004. Social archaeologies of landscapes. In: Meskell, Lynn, Preucel, Robert (Eds.), A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 255–271. Barrett, John C., Ko, Ilhong, 2009. A phenomenology of landscape: a crisis in British landscape archaeology? J. Soc. Archaeol. 9 (3), 275–294.
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Bender, Barbara, 1999. Subverting the Western gaze: mapping alternative worlds. In: Ucko, Peter J., Layton, Robert (Eds.), The Archaeology and Anthropology of landscape. Shaping Your Landscape. Routledge, London, pp. 31–45. Bender, Barbara, 2002. Landscape and politics. In: Buchli, Victor (Ed.), The Material Culture Reader. Berg, Oxford. Bender, Barbara, Hamilton, Sue, Tilley, Christopher, 2007. Stone Worlds: Narrativity and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, Calif. Bergson, Henri, 2004. Matter and Memory. Dover, Mineola, N.Y. Bickel, Balthazar, 2000. Grammar and social practice: on the role of “culture” in linguistic relativity. In: Niemeier, Susanne, Dirven, René (Eds.), Evidence for Linguistic Relativity. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 161–192. Brück, Joanna, 2005. Experiencing the past: the development of a phenomenological archaeology in British prehistory. Archaeol. Dialogues 12 (1), 45–72. Cummings, Vicki, Whittle, Alasdair, 2003. Places of Special Virtue: Megaliths in the Neolithic Landscape of Wales. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Dreyfus, Hubert, 1991. Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Division 1. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Edgeworth, Matt, 2013. The clearing: archaeology’s way of opening the world. In: Gonzales Ruibal, Alfredo (Ed.), Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity. Routledge, London. Fuglestvedt, Ingrid, 2009. Phenomenology and the Pioneer Settlement on the Western Scandinavian Peninsula. Bricoleur Press, Lindome, SE. Gumbrecht, Hans U., 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Hamilakis, Yannis, 2013. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory and Affect. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hamilton, Sue, Whitehouse, Ruth, Brown, Keri, Combes, Pamela, Herring, Edward, Thomas, Mike Seager, 2006. Phenomenology in practice: towards a methodology for a “subjective” approach. Eur. J. Archaeol. 9 (1), 31–71. Harman, Graham, 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Open Court, Chicago. Heidegger, Martin, 1962. Being and Time. Harper and Row, New York. Heidegger, Martin, 1966. Discourse on Thinking. Harper and Row, New York. Heidegger, Martin, 1993. The question concerning technology. In: Krell, D. Farell (Ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Harper Collins, San Francisco. Husserl, Edmund, 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill. Husserl, Edmund, 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, Netherlands. Inwood, Michael, 2000. A Heidegger Dictionary. Blackwell, Oxford. Jay, Martin, 1998. Scopic regimes of modernity. In: Mirzoeff, Nicholas (Ed.), The Visual Culture Reader. Routledge, London. Kant, Immanuel, 1783/2001. Prolegomena to any future metaphysics. Hackett, Indianapolis. Karlsson, Håkan, 1998. Re-thinking Archaeology. Gotarc series B, Archaeological Theses 8. Department of Archaeology. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg. Matthews, Eric, 2002. The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal. Macann, Christopher, 1993. Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. Routledge, London. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL. Olsen, Bjørnar, 2010. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD. Olsen, Bjørnar, Burström, Mats, DeSilvey, Caitlin, Pétursdóttir, þóra (Eds.), 2021. After Discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics. Routledge, London. Pétursdóttir, þora, 2012. Concrete matters: ruins of modernity and the things called heritage. J. Soc. Archaeol. 13 (1), 31–53. Sharp, Lauriston, 1952. Steel axes for stone-age Australians. Hum. Organ. 11 (2), 17–22. Svestad, Asgeir, 2013. What happened in Neiden? On the question of reburial ethics. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 46 (2), 194–222. Thomas, Julian, 1993. The politics of vision and the archaeologies of landscape. In: Bender, Barbara (Ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Berg, Oxford. Thomas, Julian, 1996. Time, Culture and Identity: An Interpretive Archaeology. Routledge, London. Thomas, Julian, 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. Routledge, London. Thomas, Julian, 2006. Phenomenology and material culture. In: Tilley, Chris, Keane, Webb, Kuechler, Susanne, Rowlands, Mike, Spyer, Patricia (Eds.), Handbook of Material Culture. Sage Press, London. Thomas, Julian, 2008. Archaeology, landscape and dwelling. In: David, Bruno, Thomas, Julian (Eds.), Handbook of Landscape Archaeology. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA. Thrift, Nigel, 2007. Non-representational Theory; Space, Politics, Affects. Routledge, London. Tienda Palop, Lydia, Currás, Brais X., 2019. The dignity of the dead: ethical reflections on the archaeology of human remains. In: Squires, Kirsty, Ericckson, David, MárquezGrant, Nicolas (Eds.), Ethical Approaches to Human Remains. Springer, Cham, pp. 19–37. Tilley, Christopher, 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Berg, Oxford. Tilley, Christopher, 1999. Metaphor and Material Culture. Blackwell, Oxford. Tilley, Christopher, 2004. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Berg, Oxford. Tilley, Christopher, 2008. Phenomenological approaches to landscape archaeology. In: David, Bruno, Thomas, Julian (Eds.), Handbook of Landscape Archaeology. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA. Tilley, Christopher, 2010. Interpreting Landscapes: Geologies, Topographies, Identities. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA. Tilley, Christopher, 2017. Landscape in the Longue Durée. UCL Press, London. Tilley, Christopher, 2019. Introduction: materialising the urban landscape. In: Tilley, Christopher (Ed.), London’s Urban Landscape. Another Way of Telling. UCL Press, London. Tilley, Christopher, Cameron-Daum, Kate, 2017. An Anthropology of Landscape. UCL Press, London. Tilley, Christopher, Hamilton, Sue, Bender, Barbara, 2000. Art and the re-presentation of the past. J. Roy. Anthropol. Inst. 6 (1), 36–62. Tonner, Philip, 2018. Dwelling: Heidegger, Archaeology, Mortality. Routledge, London. Van Dyke, Ruth, 2014. Phenomenology in archaeology. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. Van Dyke, Ruth, Alcock, Susan, 2003. Archaeologies of memory: an introduction. In: Van Dyke, Ruth, Alcock, Susan (Eds.), Archaeologies of Memory. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–14. Vennatrø, Ragnar, Høgseth, Harald B., 2021. Craft as More-Than-Human. Practice-led research in a posthumanist perspective. FormAkademisk 14 (2), 1–13. Witmore, Christopher, 2020. Objecthood. In: Wilkie, Laurie, Chenoweth, John (Eds.), A Cultural History of Objects: Modern Period, 1900 to Present. Bloomsbury, London.
Postcolonial Archaeology and Colonial Praxis Uzma Z. Rizvi, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview: Anticolonial/Decolonial/Postcolonial Projects Key Issues Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References Further Reading
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Colonialism did not happen the same way around the world. Colonialism deeply impacted the development and practice of archaeology. Epistemic critique is important in order to move toward a more equitable practice of archaeology. Postcolonial critique is a key framework for much archaeological practice in the Global South. Anticolonial work has been one of the earliest forms of resistance to colonial practices. Decolonizing archaeological methodologies is a practice, not just a theoretical stance.
Abstract Colonialism engendered many responses in the scholarly world. Within the academy three are most noted: the postcolonial critique, anticolonial writing and action, and decolonizing efforts. This entry will cover responses to the colonial nature of archaeological practice and the many ways contemporary archaeologists are contending with the deeply colonial histories of our practice.
Introduction It is important to recognize that colonization did not happen in similar ways around the world. Although the field of archaeology does study colonialization in antiquity, coloniality that is being discussed here is primarily the experience of European colonialism in the 16th to the 19th centuries. Many would argue, with good reason, that colonialism did not end in the 19th and 20th centuries, but continues even today (Dei and Asgharzadeh, 2001; Pagán-Jiménez, 2004). Although other parts of the world experienced colonialism at various time periods, such as Japanese colonialism in Korea and China, the larger impact of European colonialism tends to be at the heart of most critique (Il-Pai, 2010). Anti-colonial movements are mostly understood to have taken place during the first half of the 20th century, with scholarship writing back to imperial power, and questioning the deep assumptions of the civilizing mission of the Western powers, and simultaneous to that, whether or rather how, colonized bodies might imagine a radical future without colonialism. Whether we look to the work of Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, or Aimé Césaire, the work of anti-colonial writing is clearly a mode of resistance against oppression, while also recognizing the difficulty, if not impossibility, of ever truly being postcolonial in the truest sense. As George Dei and Ali Reza Asgharzadeh point out, “The anti-colonial discursive framework is a counter/oppositional discourse to the repressive presence of colonial oppression. It is also an affirmation of the reality of re-colonization processes through the dictates of global capital” (2001: 301). There is, thus, a clear understanding within anti-colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial modalities that these research frameworks are ways by which we study the past and the present. Although Fanon established the relationship of decolonization as something that changed the social order, he also framed and understood it primarily as being a violent act. Within the framework of revolution, this violence could be contextualized. However, within academics, this violence suggests that as the critique is done, the undoing of structured ways of knowing must be done (Schneider and Hayes, 2020). The practice of decolonization then is fundamentally and at its core an agentive and active reformation of ways of doing, being, and thinking. That undoing was most effective as it was framed within a critique; that space of critique was found through postcolonial studies.
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Whether we look to the volumes such as Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique (2008) or the Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology (2010), both trace their intellectual genealogy to work done by Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978), the subaltern studies group (like Spivak, Bhabha, and others), and Indigenous scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies, 1998). These bodies of scholarship had enormous influence within archaeology, leading to early work done linking decolonization and Indigenous archaeology by Smith and Wobst (2005), Atalay (2006), and decolonization within global south archaeology, my own work (2006), alongside an earlier call by Nick Shepherd for archaeology and social justice through postcolonial frameworks (2002). As Bruchac (2014: 2069) notes in her text on “Decolonization in Archaeological Theory,” key strategies for decolonization include: “critical analysis of social and political relations; collaborative consultation and research design; reclamation of cultural property; restoration of cultural landscapes and heritage sites; repatriation of human remains; co-curation of archaeological collections; and devising more culturally accurate museum representations.” Bruchac’s account is focused, appropriately, on decolonization as crucial for Indigenous archaeology, echoing and amplifying Sonya Atalay’s early work. In this important collection of essays in American Indian Quarterly (2006), Atalay clearly illustrates the ways by which settler colonial engagement with archaeology erases Indigenous voices, pasts, and how to move forward, an Indigenous archaeology must center Indigenous ways of being and understanding the world, and most importantly, be “with, for and by” Indigenous people (2006: 283). As early as 2002, armed with experience in South Africa, Nick Shepherd urged archaeology to reconsider how theory needed to take into account issues of social justice through the utilization of the postcolonial critique. Within the Global South, this critique allowed decolonial methods to emerge. In parts of the colonized world, such as in India and Pakistan, the post-colonial nation-state continues and maintains the colonial project of systematically destabilizing, disenfranchising, and disempowering marginalized and Indigenous communities (Jamir, 2016; Kalash, 2022; Rizvi, 2013, 2022). As a part of the colonial legacy, the Global North academy continues to make demands on all othered colonized bodies and forces certain forms of knowledge to be considered more legitimate than others. Decolonizing archaeology and heritage directly addresses the significance of epistemic violence and highlights how a decolonial approach means destabilizing the canon. In much the same way that the local context is significant for understanding the impact of coloniality, the process of decolonization then must also be locally relevant to be effective. Centering Indigenous concerns is certainly a core ethic within decolonizing archaeology globally, as exemplified by work done by Indigenous archaeologists, Kalash (2022) and Jamir (2022). There are a variety of different issues that emerge while working in the Global South, in particular because largely, these spaces are considered post-colonial. They are not, however, always decolonized. As Jamir reminds us, in countries where colonial traditions of practice are maintained, such as in post-colonial India, the only way toward a more inclusive archaeology is through community based practice with Indigenous communities. His work highlights the significance of repatriation of Indigenous peoples remains, cultural patrimony, the centrality of Indigenous knowledge systems, and participatory praxis (2022: 256). Kalash, in her work in post-colonial Pakistan, contextualizes community based heritage work as existing within the same realities as issues around livelihood, health, and education of Kalasha people. She insists that key changes are needed that improve education and livelihoods and through which heritage work can be safeguarded – these have to be interrelated projects (2022: 33). The political requirements of any decolonial action must destabilize the constitutive nature of colonialism which melds together a classist, racist, heteropatriarchal way of thinking and doing. Within the South Asian context, an important factor is also caste violence, and decolonial work must contend with the incredibly violent forms of erasure and trauma that caste political evidence; indeed, decolonization can only happen through explicit caste abolition. These are all connected forms of violence that need to be addressed. Decolonization is an approach within archaeology that recognizes the relationship of colonialism to the development of a practice as a discipline; and decolonization as a method proceeds to intentionally dismantle and reframe colonial forms of knowing. Unless we choose to decolonize archaeology, the systems by which we are taught research continue to reinstate older, oppressive, racist, chauvinist, patriarchal models of being that get coded into all of us, whether we want it or not, and if not actively addressed, we continue to replicate them (Rizvi, 2006, 2008, 2015). Decolonizing our archaeological work is no easy task and requires an enormous amount of self-reflection at every step – it is asking more from us as practitioners than post-practice self-reflexivity. Moreover, it is complicated to decolonize archaeology in the Global South because of the deep and intimate relationships previously colonized states have to their archaeological sites and collections as monuments to nation-building and authorized heritage (Chadha, 2021; Gullapalli, 2008). These relationships held by normative populations and governance are locally specific, however, what unites the various geographies is the history of colonization, and the continued violence on othered bodies in those locales (Sunberg, 2014). These othered bodies are marked by racism and ethnicism – and it is that “colonial difference” that Walter Mignolo argues is required for colonial power to be fully realized, and for what modernity was to base its existence upon (2001).
Overview: Anticolonial/Decolonial/Postcolonial Projects In this section, we will take a look at some projects that are explicitly anti-colonial/decolonial/postcolonial in their approach and practice. It is important to read through a variety of case studies as this theory is not one that is disengaged from action – it is very much about the doing of archaeology. This includes the many ways we teach archaeology as well (for example, Hutchings and La Salle, 2014).
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Projects like the Projeto Quebra-Anzol are explicitly engaged in anti-colonial archaeology. This project is focused on the Triangulo Mineiro region of Brazil, with extensive field work and surveys aimed at establishing the long-term history of the Southern Kayapo territorial occupation. The project has focused on documenting new archaeological information in order to use the evidence to “counteract” the colonial discourse about the region. The project has engaged in a holistic approach within which the archaeological data is brought together with colonial archival data and other historical documents that provide a larger context through which they can decentralize the narrative to highlight the colonized, rather than center the colonizer which, in this specific example shifts our narrative from the Portuguese to the indigenous perspective (Denardo, 2021). This sort of work realigns narratives of colonizers to be more reflective of the violence that they actually inflicted on the people and landscapes. Anti-colonial archaeology has also been explicitly outlined within marine archaeology. Here we can look to early work done by McGhee (1993) on postcolonial nautical archaeology, in which McGhee explicitly outlines the impact of imperialism and colonialism on the development of nautical archaeology as a sub discipline. Perhaps most clear is the query of why there is no archaeology of slave ships – this absolute neglect maintains a colonial framework for what is considered fundable scientific research. Building on that history of work, there are significant archaeological projects now working on underwater archaeological sites and bringing to light these histories that had been neglected. For example, recent work on maritime archaeology highlights the many different histories, such as Justin Dunnavant’s work on maritime marronage which draws attention to the many Black bodies who would jump ship in order to achieve freedom, and the new pathways and lifeways that were charted as a result (2021). This sort of an approach lifts and highlights the agentive histories of these folks and celebrates the knowledge that they had to navigate the sea and survive. At a larger scale, and more of a network are projects like the Slave Wrecks Project.1 SWP is a multidisciplinary, global research network that brings together maritime and historical archaeology, history, museology, and anthropology. In addition to research, this project engages in capacity building, collaboration, public education, and professional training. It is precisely this sort of work that scaffolds research that is decolonial to its core as it addresses both the historical issues as well as the contemporary inequity in access to knowledge and specialized training. In addition to this sort of practice based work, current research by Rich et al. (2022) continues to maintain what anti-colonialism means in relation to maritime archaeology: This includes, at the very least: (a) (b) (c) (d)
recognizing sovereignty regardless of the object’s status as sacred or otherwise, honoring equal partnerships while acknowledging unequal power relations; understanding the origins in Christian imperialism of the conservation paradigm; and equating colonialism and pollution, which implicates petrochemical industries and their artifact conservation materials (Rich et al., 2022: 3674)
I bring this up specifically to highlight the relationship of colonialism and pollution, which in this study, emerges from engagement with Max Liboiron’s work, Pollution is Colonialism (2021). This book, securely placed within Discard Studies, has a deep connection with archaeological research as the work that we do is so deeply connected to land. In this book, Liboiron makes a strong argument for pollution being a product of ongoing colonial relations to land, and that it is best understood as “the violence of colonial land relations rather than environmental damage, which is a symptom of violence” (2021: 6–7). It argues for a different way to do environmental science and insists on new relationships with the land. Land relations are a methodological issue and thus a key site where we may engage in good relations, which is framed as ethical practice. The work on reorienting the conversation around how science is done in relation to land, has significant impact on how we might consider the future of archaeological work. For those of us practicing decolonizing methodologies for a couple of decades, what has shifted is the ability to bring these conversations into archaeological scholarship and the modes by which decolonization can happen through explicitly anticolonial methods. For example, earlier work that I did in Rajasthan (2000–2003) focused on community based and public initiatives as decolonizing methods (Rizvi, 2006, 2008). Current work through the Laboratory for Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage (LIAVH) maintains the explicitly feminist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-castist stance, while expanding the praxis by developing capacity building, pedagogical interventions, interdisciplinary projects, and reimagining what the future of archaeological practice might be through such work. In the current project at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Mohenjo-Daro, our teams work on providing transferable skill sets to local university students, who are often first generation students coming from the villages surrounding the archaeological site (Rizvi et al., in press). We see this also in Kristina Douglass’s deeply collaborative projects, in particular the Morombe Archaeological Project (MAP) in Madagascar in which they intentionally worked with local, Indigenous, and descendant (LID) communities, and the project was explicitly built on “Africanist perspectives to decolonize practice in environmental archaeology” (Douglas et al., 2019: 310). They are clear in their purpose around decolonization and how critical it is, in particular in the Global South, “where communities bear a disproportionate burden of global environmental and climate change” (ibid). History sometimes can also be specific to the ways anthropological violence maintains the othering of local communities. For example, Asmeret Mehari and her colleagues have worked with the Maasai communities near Oldupai (Olduvai) Gorge, and drew attention to how the Maasai view archaeo-paleontological practice. In their ethno-archaeological work with the community, it became very clear that the colonial legacy of practice continued to disenfranchise the Maasai community, they understood
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https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/initiatives/slave-wrecks-project (last accessed 2/16/2023).
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archaeologists to be engaged in extractive and invading practices (Mehari and Ryano, 2016). Certainly contemporary archaeological praxis in these areas is now more aware and working to redress these issues. There is still a long way to go, but decolonizing and anticolonial methodologies assist in ensuring some change, and challenge the maintenance of othering communities. These are also core concerns in terms of respecting sovereignty within Indigenous lands, and guidelines for how to practice such archaeological work are absolutely needed. For example, in the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail Project, Sara Gonzalez provides a way to think about low impact field methods in which she outlines how Historic Preservation Offices (HPOs) may be able to develop long term care for and protection of tribal heritage. She recommends a “catch and release” survey methodology in which artifacts were collected via a systematic stratified sampling strategy, documented and analyzed, and then they were released back to their original provenience with a ceremony conducted by Kashaya elders. Such a methodology models a sovereignty based approach to tribal historic preservation (Gonzalez, 2016).
Key Issues Decolonial archaeological praxis is about respect, consent, reparation, restitution, and a recognition of the history of violence. Each project that focuses on decolonization exists at the nexus of these issues, and is interconnected with other such efforts around the world (see Meloche et al., 2020). As Lindsay Montgomery and Kisha Supernant remark in the 2022 Year in Review article for American Anthropologist,
In 2021, amid increasing awareness of the impacts of cultural genocide on Indigenous peoples, an ongoing global pandemic, and heightened attention to anti-Black racism, it became even clearer that archaeology has an important role to play in documenting historic injustices and settler-colonial violence. This can be seen in how archaeologists are reckoning with historical trauma, working with Indigenous, Black, and descendant communities on repatriation and reclamation, and addressing broader calls to decolonize the discipline. (2022: 801)
In their article, they identify some key discussions that are taking place currently in the discipline of anthropological archaeology. These include the SAA’s (Society for American Archaeology) conversations and revisions to the “Statement Concerning the Treatment of Human Remains,” as well as new mobilization around an African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Moreover, debates around the ethics of DNA research have emerged as key issues within anticolonial archaeology. Even after so many years of activism, science, and ethical interventions, repatriation continues to be an issue within archaeological scholarship. From an anti-colonial/decolonizing/postcolonial framework, there is no gray area here: all ancestors should be respectfully returned to the communities in question. If there is no consent, research continues to be a violent act. Museums can work collaboratively with local and descendant communities to ensure concerns are addressed, etc (see Meloche et al., 2020). Relationships between museum collections and repatriation seem to be better globally, such as the return of the Benin Bronzes, and many Indigenous communities within the United States are working collaboratively with Museums on ethical return practices. However, we continue to hear of many instances in which Indigenous sovereignty is pitted against scientific research. By creating this either/or scenario, the question of repatriation creates incommensurable differences within the archaeological community. Within the United States, NAGPRA (Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act) continues to be the legal basis for the work on repatriation. It is of utmost importance that these conversations are recontextualized. NAGPRA is not anti-science, nor are most Indigenous communities. Repatriation should be considered as the threshold of conversation around respect and consent; these are ethical considerations. Good rigorous science should be one in which ethical practice is held to high standards. Using NAGPRA as a spring board, the African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (AAGPRA) has been proposed in order to “emulate such provisions as a grant program, prohibitions against the sale and transfer of human remains, and a review committee to oversee the law and adjudicate disputes” (Dunnavant et al., 2021: 339). Presenting two principles, Dunnavant et al. recommend an inventory process – this process would be federally funded and would be a full public inventory of all human remains. The second principle is one in which, similar to NAGPRA, consultation and deliberation with community leaders and descendant communities would be required for all projects. By actively prioritizing an inclusive decision making process, engagement and conversations between various stakeholders, meaningful collaborations are engendered – and that is good science. There are four steps recommended toward creating an antiracist, anticolonial, and respectful way by which we might interact with ancestors and descendant communities: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Pass the African American Burial Grounds Network Act (HR-1179) Catalog existing osteological collections Pause the unethical study and use of Black remains in collections Amend and extend other federal legislation (Dunnavant et al., 2021: 340)
These points can lay the groundwork for a more equitable archaeology and recognize the violence of practice, which is an important first step. This relationship between bones and science is long, old, and problematic (Crossland, 2018; Rizvi, 2015). The colonial desire to own and collect other humans’ remains conflates itself with scientific research, and we are often faced with an either/or scenario. As mentioned above, Indigenous archaeology and anticolonial archaeology are not anti-science. Complicating these
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relationships are recent genomic studies as the growth of sequenced ancient genomes has created a condition within which scientists are now rushing to bones once again to extract DNA for information (Cortez et al., 2023). These scenarios create conditions within which ancestors are not cared for in appropriate manners, and conflict and confusion arises in terms of consent (Cortez et al., 2021). Cortez et al. continue to regard paleogenomic/genomic research to continue to be research done about Indigenous people, rather than with and for Indigenous communities. This is a current and important issue that needs more attention and clarity. In many of these cases, the genomic records are being pushed to be open access. Whereas the larger ethics around open science and open access data are significant and important, in these cases, often the descendant communities do not really have access to the data and it is made difficult to use (Cortez et al., 2023). Not so much in the field of genomics, but data accessibility is something that must be carefully thought through and evaluated. Given the significance of big data in our contemporary moment, we can look to Neha Gupta’s work in Canada around decolonizing data as a way to engender anti-colonial archaeology. In particular, we may examine the collaboration between Westbank First Nation Archaeology Office and the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, in which they created digital maps, involved local communities, and thought more expansively about how one might enact Indigenous data governance (Gupta et al., 2022). This is key because as legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie explains, tribal sovereignty must extend to data sovereignty, which then refers to the “right of a nation to govern the collection, ownership and application of data” (2019: 230). It is important to recognize such data sovereignty as control over data as well as access to the data. The decision of who has access to the cultural intellectual property should be a decision made by the Indigenous communities (Gupta et al., 2022). Gupta intentionally bases her work on CARE principles, which she identifies as collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics. These core principles are designed explicitly to support Indigenous people’s rights and interests when it comes to open access/open data. The acronym of care is not one that is lightly used. The significance of care and care-full futures is something that has informed decolonial praxis from the start (Rizvi, 2016). Most recently, we see it in the edited volume, Archaeologies of the Heart (Supernant et al., 2020). As Lyons and Supernant say in the introduction, by a focus on the heart, we are able to think through how archaeology impacts and is impacted by the whole person, including the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical selves (Lyons and Supernant, 2020). A heart centered archaeology then is one in which our relations are significant, it is how our practice is about how we engage with one another, community members and all the diverse publics we may engage with through our practice. This approach is really what is at the heart of much of decolonizing practices within archaeology.
Summary and Future Directions The violence of colonialism is something that all colonized spaces, bodies, and materials share; in particular, the ways and methodologies developed by extractive archaeological praxis and how those are linked to colonial systems. The postcolonial critique, anti-colonial movements, and decolonizing methodologies are responses directed at undoing that very violence by creating a more equitable practice. One of the arenas were we are seeing more possibility for equitable practice to emerge is within digital archaeology and visualization. More and more we are seeing projects turn to 3D work as a way to bring archaeology to different publics. By making it more accessible, and by engaging local and descendant communities, we can literally visualize archaeology differently. Integrating story telling within these data sets allows us to decolonize the data in ways previously we were unable to because we simply did not have the technology. This new expanded arena allows us to integrate the deep relationships we have with art/crafting/making and how we understand what it means to be human within archaeological praxis. At some point, we will also have to consider the environmental impact of excavations. To be blunt, excavations are not methodologically primed to be in good relations with the land. The extractive nature of the discipline is due for a revision. In terms of future directions, I certainly see this as being a significant conversation in the discipline. Although anticolonial, decolonial, and postcolonial critiques are happening within archaeology, there is still a lot to be done. As Tsim Schneider and Katherine Hayes say in their article on epistemic colonialism, “. we must acknowledge that the work to decolonize and decenter archaeology is still in the very early stages” (2020:142). But that the work is happening is important to acknowledge, witness, and appreciate.
Acknowledgments This entry was written on unceded Lenape Land. I acknowledge the many generations of scholars who have come before me and helped shape and create my practice. Many thanks to Professor Peter Biehl whose patience is unparalleled and gracious.
See Also: History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Post-Processual Archaeology.
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Crossland, Zoë, 2018. Forensic afterlives. Signs Soc. 6 (3), 622–647. Dei, George J. Sefa, Asgharzadeh, Alireza, 2001. The power of social theory: the anti-colonial discursive framework. J. Educ. Thought 35 (3), 297–323. Denardo, Thandryus Augusto Guerra Bacciotti, 2021. For an anti-colonialist archaeology: the Southern Kayapo occupation in Triangulo Mineiro and the colonization of war/Por uma Arqueologia anticolonial: a ocupacao Kayapo Meridional no Triangulo Mineiro e a colonizacao de guerra. Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia 37, 132–148. Douglass, Kristina, Morales, Eréndira Quintana, Manahira, George, et al., 2019. Toward a just and inclusive environmental archaeology of southwest Madagascar. J. Soc. Archaeol. 19 (3), 307–332. Dunnavant, Justin P., 2021. Have confidence in the sea: maritime maroons and fugitive geographies. Antipode 53, 884–905. Dunnavant, Justin P., Justinvil, Delande, Colewell, Chip, 2021. Craft an African American Graves protection and repatriation act. Nature 593, 337–340. Gonzalez, Sara L., 2016. Indigenous values and methods in archaeological practice: low-impact archaeology through the Kashaya Pomo interpretive trail project. Am. Antiq. 81 (3), 533–549. Gullapalli, P., 2008. Heterogeneous conditions: archaeology, identity and colonial histories. In: Liebmann, Matthew, Rizvi, Uzma Z. (Eds.), Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, Archaeology and Society Series. Altamira Press, New York, pp. 35–52. Gupta, Neha, Bonneau, Nancy, Elvidge, Michael, 2022. Connecting past to present: enacting Indigenous data governance principles in Westbank first nation’s archaeology and digital heritage. Archaeologies 18 (3), 623–650. Hutchings, Rich, La Salle, Marina, 2014. Teaching anti-colonial archaeology. Archaeologies 10, 27–69. Il Pai, Hyung, 2010. Resurrecting the ruins of Japan’s mythical homelands: colonial archaeological surveys in the Korean peninsula and heritage tourism. In: Lydon, Jane, Rizvi, Uzma Z. (Eds.), The Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek: CA, pp. 93–112. Jamir, Tiatoshi, 2016. Decolonizing archaeological practice in Northeast India: towards a community-based archaeology at Chungliyimti, Nagaland. Savage Minds Notes Quer. Anthropol. 2016. Jamir, Tiatoshi, 2022. Indigenous archaeology. In: Wouters, Jelle J.P., Subba, Tanka B. (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Northeast India, first ed. Routledge India. Kalash, Sayed Gul, 2022. Indigenous archaeology and heritage in Pakistan: supporting Kalash cultural preservation through education and awareness. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 9 (1), 33–43. Liboiron, Max, 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press, Durham. Lyons, Natasha, Supernant, Kisha, 2020. Introduction to an archaeology of the heart. In: Supernant, Kisha, Baxter, Jane Eva, Lyons, Natasha, Atalay, Sonya (Eds.), Archaeologies of the Heart. Springer, Cham, pp. 1–19. Mehari, Asmeret, Ryano, Kokeli P., 2016. Maasai people and Oldupai (Olduvai) Gorge: looking for sustainable people-centered approaches and practices. In: Schmidt, Peter, Pikirayi, Innocent (Eds.), Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing Practice. Routledge Press, Oxfordshire. Meloche, Chelsea H., Spake, Laure, Nichols, Katherine L. (Eds.), 2020. Working with and for Ancestors: Collaboration in the Care and Study of Ancestral Remains. Routledge, Oxfordshire. McGhee, Fred L., 1993. Toward a postcolonial nautical archaeology. Assemblage 3. Mignolo, Walter, 2001. Coloniality of power and subalternity. In: Rodriguez, Ileana (Ed.), The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 424–444. Montgomery, Lindsay M., Supernant, Kisha, 2022. Archaeology in 2021: repatriation, reclamation, and reckoning with historical trauma. Am. Anthropol. 124, 800–812. Pagán-Jiménez, Jaime R., 2004. Is all archaeology at present a postcolonial one?: Constructive answers from an eccentric point of view. J. Soc. Archaeol. 4 (2), 200–213. Rich, Sara A., Sievers-Cail, Cheryl, Patterson, Khamal, 2022. What is there to do if you find an old Indian canoe? Anti-colonialism in maritime archaeology. Heritage 5 (4), 3664–3679. Rizvi, Uzma Z., 2006. Accounting for multiple desires: decolonizing methodologies, archaeology and the public interest. India Rev. 5 (3–4), 394–416. Rizvi, Uzma Z., 2008. Decolonizing methodologies as strategies of practice: operationalizing the postcolonial critique in the archaeology of Rajasthan. In: Liebmann, Matthew, Rizvi, Uzma Z. (Eds.), Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, pp. 109–127. Rizvi, Uzma Z., 2013. Creating prehistory and protohistory: constructing otherness and politics of contemporary Indigenous populations in India. In: Schmidt, Peter R., Mrozowski, Stephen A. (Eds.), The Death of Prehistory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 141–157. Rizvi, Uzma Z., 2015. Decolonizing archaeology: on the global heritage of epistemic laziness. In: Kholeif, Omar (Ed.), Two Days after Forever: A Reader on the Choreography of Time. Sternberg Press, Berlin, pp. 154–163. Rizvi, Uzma Z., 2016. Decolonization as care. In: Pais, Ana Paula, Strauss, Carolyn (Eds.), Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice. Valiz Publishers, Amsterdam, pp. 85–95. Rizvi, Uzma Z., 2022. Community engagement in archaeology and heritage in Pakistan. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 9 (1), 1–8. Rizvi, Uzma Z., Daniell, R., Sucuoglu, C., In Press. New research technology and archaeological methods at MohenjoDaro: the laboratory for integrated archaeological visualization and heritage (LIAVH) research and pedagogical projects. Centenary Celebrations Commemorative Volume of MohenjoDaro Excavations. National Fund of MohenjoDaro and Government of Sindh, Pakistan. Said, Edward, 1978. Orientalism. Vintage, New York. Schneider, Tsim D., Hayes, Katherine, 2020. Epistemic colonialism: is it possible to decolonize archaeology? Am. Indian Q. 44 (2), 127–148. Shepherd, Nick, 2002. Heading south, looking north: why we need a post-colonial archaeology. Archaeol. Dial. 9 (2), 74–82. Smith, Claire., Wobst, Hans Martin (Eds.), 2005. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. Routledge. Sundberg, J., 2014. Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cult. Geogr. 21 (1), 33–47. Supernant, Kisha, Baxter, Jane Eva, Lyons, Natasha, Atalay, Sonya (Eds.), 2020. Archaeologies of the Heart. Springer, New York. Tsosie, Rebecca, 2019. Tribal data governance and informational privacy: constructing Indigenous data sovereignty. Montana Law Rev. 80, 41.
Further Reading Césaire, Aimé, 1955. Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press, New York. Fanon, Frantz, 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, New York. Memmi, Albert, 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Orion Press, New York. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 1995. Silencing the Past. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Primate Archaeology Katarina Almeida-Warrena,b and Alejandra Pascual-Garridoa, a Primate Models for Behavioral Evolution Lab, Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; and b Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behavior, Universidade do Algarve, Faro, Portugal © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview: Discoveries and Contributions to Human Origins Research Technology Landscape Use Coastal & Aquatic Adaptations Anthropogenic Change Key Issues Challenges of Comparing Human and Non-human Primate Records Are All Non-human Primates Good Models? Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading Relevant Websites
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Primate archaeology combines the use of archaeological methods with animal behavior techniques to study non-human primate technologies. Methods include the study of tool use and manufacture; site use and formation; surveys, excavations, experimental studies; behavioral observation and camera trapping. Primate archaeology provides a new comparative perspective to human origins researchdyielding insights into the origins and evolution of technology, adaptations to coastal environments, and environmental modification. Primarily focusing on chimpanzees, this approach has now been expanded to other habitual tool-using species, including capuchins and macaques. Primate archaeology has largely focused on lithic technology; however, this new approach is expanding to other fields of research including perishable (plant) tool use and landscape use, among others.
Glossary Anthropogenic Resulting from the influence of human activities, typically used in reference to changes in the natural world. Bark stripping The removal of bark from plants and trees. Among non-human primates this is usually achieved with the incisors or nails. Buttress drumming In a chimpanzee context, this involves pounding on tree buttressesdlarge above-ground rootsdwith hands and/or feet to produce acoustic signals. Châines opératoires In archaeological terms, it refers to a method employed to reconstruct the complete operational sequence of a technological activity, such as raw material selection, raw material extraction, tool manufacture through modification, utilization, and eventual discard. Cumulative Culture Cultural traits (including behaviors, artifacts, and technology) that are gradually modified over multiple episodes of social transmission to become more effective or advantageous over time. Distance-decay effect A negative correlation between the weight of stone materials at a site, and the site’s distance from the raw material source. Enculturation In relation to non-human primates, this refers to the process by which animals reared by humans become conditioned by the human environments and culture they were raised in. Ethoarchaeology The study of non-human animal behavior and the active formation of the resulting material traces to help infer past behavior from the species archaeological record. Facultative bipedalism The ability of a species that is not primarily bipedal to walk upright on two (hinds) legs for short periods of time.
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GNSS Global Navigation Satellite System. It is an umbrella term for satellite navigation systems that provide autonomous geospatial positioning at a global scale. Examples of GNSS systems include GPS, Galileo, and GLONASS. Nut cracking The use of stone or hardwood tools in an anvil-hammer pair to crack open hard-shelled nuts to access the kernel inside. Speleology The study or exploration of cave systems. Stigmergy The concept that the behavioral traces left by an individual or group will stimulate subsequent activities from the same or other individuals in a self-perpetuating cycle. Termite fishing The use of plant tools to fish out termites from inside the termite mound. Tool set Consecutive use of more than one type of tool for a single task. USOs (Underground storage organs) Starchy subterranean plant parts such as bulb, tubers, and rhizomes, typically rich in carbohydrates.
Abstract Primate archaeology is a novel field that combines the use of archaeological methods with animal behavior approaches to study non-human primates and their technology. At the intersection of primatology and archaeology, this burgeoning field is providing a new comparative perspective to the study of the origins and evolution of technology in humans and other hominids. Research includes the study and analysis of tool making, site use and formation, surveys, and excavations of activity sites. This entry provides an overview of the history and development of this field, its contribution to archaeological interpretation, key methods, current challenges, and future directions.
Introduction Primate Archaeology is the application of archaeological methods and theory to the study of non-human primate tool-use and material culture. Akin to the archaeology of human origins, primate archaeology provides a framework for investigating the history and evolution of primate technological behavior, including our own. Primate archaeology also encapsulates ethoarchaeologydthe study of the relationships between observed behaviors and their traces. This enables an in-depth understanding of how an archaeological record forms, as well as the cognitive, social and cultural mechanisms and contexts of contemporary primate technology. Primate archaeology emerged in response to the need for new comparative perspectives to study the evolution of technology in our own lineage (Box 1). Early research primarily focused on chimpanzees as the only habitual tool users among our closest living relatives (Fig. 1). Today, however, it has expanded to other habitual tool-using species, including bearded capuchins (Sapajus libidinosus), Burmese long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis aurea), and white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus imitator). As such, it
Box 1 A brief history The seed of primate archaeology was planted more than 40 years ago with a cross-cultural comparison of the plant tools used by three wild chimpanzee communities to fish termites (McGrew et al., 1979). Although not directly implied, this was the first study to use archaeological methods to investigate non-human artifacts, initiating a discussion on the challenges shared by archaeologists studying the tool-use of extinct hominins. This discussion was further expanded by Sept (1992) who recognized that chimpanzee nesting sites formed clusters of debris similar to early hominin assemblages. This precipitated the first comparative research of chimpanzee material culture to inform our understanding of the formation of early archaeological sites and the origins of shelter. However, it was not until the archaeological excavation of a chimpanzee nut-cracking site at the turn of the millennium that this new era of primatological and archaeological research began to flourish. The excavation recovered 4300 year-old chimpanzee nut-cracking tools, revealing that, much like early hominins, chimpanzees were also capable of producing a recognizable and durable archaeological record (Mercader et al., 2007). The new research avenues that arose from this discovery formalized the establishment of Primate Archaeology. At the intersection of primatology and archaeology, its goal was to consolidate an interdisciplinary methodological framework that would enable greater understanding of the evolutionary foundations of primate technology and behavior (Haslam et al., 2009). By 2009, it became clear that it was not only humans and chimpanzees that could create long-lasting records of material culture. Excavations of capuchin nutcracking sites in Serra da Capivara, Brazil, have begun to tap into the capuchin archaeological record, revealing that this behavior dates back to at least 3000 years (Falótico et al., 2019). At macaque mollusk processing sites in Thailand, geological and sea-level reconstructions of excavated contexts are suggesting that these activity sites may have formed up to 1000 years ago (Haslam et al., 2016). As such, the application of archaeological methods to traditional primatological approaches has enabled researchers for the first time, to study non-human primate technology with the same granularity as the human material record, uncovering previously unidentified behavioral, spatial and ecological patterns.
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Fig. 1 Chimpanzee nut-cracking with stones (Bossou, Guinea): (A) Two adult chimpanzees and one juvenile crack oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) nuts in a forest clearing; (B) Nut-cracking tool set composed of a granite hammer resting on a granite anvil. Note the use-wear on the tool surfaces. Image credits: K. Almeida-Warren.
has evolved into its own field of research and has become an established approach to investigate the past and present of non-human primate material culture and our collective evolutionary trajectories. By providing comparative evidence of primate tool use, primate archaeology is helping address long-standing questions in human origins research: What were the precursors of stone tool use? For how long have humans been using tools? What are the anatomical, cognitive, social, and ecological conditions for tool use to emerge? Did it originate in a single species or multiple species? What can archaeological assemblages tell us about past behaviors? How did early hominins navigate the landscape? What was the role of coastal and aquatic areas in human evolution? When did humans start modifying their environments? We discuss these questions within four overarching themesdtechnology, landscape use, coastal and aquatic adaptations, and anthropogenic change. While we recognize the relevance of captive experimental studies, we primarily focus on natural behaviors occurring in the wild.
Overview: Discoveries and Contributions to Human Origins Research Technology Primate archaeology has largely focused on technology, particularly the use of stone tools, because of its direct application to the early archaeological record. Studies of chimpanzee nut-cracking have been instrumental for investigating the cognitive, anatomical, and social pre-requisites of hominin stone tool use and the adaptive role of technology (Wynn et al., 2011). Research at two longterm chimpanzee field sitesdTai (Côte d’Ivoire) and Bossou (Guinea)dhas revealed that chimpanzees are selective of the lithic raw materials they use and transport hammers following a distance-decay effect, akin to patterns found at some early hominin sites (Carvalho et al., 2008; Luncz et al., 2016). Similar evidence was uncovered at the excavated site of Noulo (Mercader et al., 2007), suggesting that this strategy may have remained in place for at least 4300 years. Primate archaeology has also revealed variation in the raw materials and manual techniques used between neighboring chimpanzee communities, suggesting that chimpanzee lithic techniques are driven by social influences (Luncz et al., 2016). Cultural transmission may have been commonplace in Oldowan technology (Stout et al., 2010). However, that social norms are already present in chimpanzee nut-cracking technology, suggests that cultural influences on human technology are much older than originally thought. Research into wild macaque and capuchin nut-cracking is providing further detail to this picture (Fig. 2); but it is perhaps their unique technologies that are making a greater contribution toward our understanding of the technical diversity and origins of stone technology. Studies of long-tailed macaque shellfish processing are shedding light on the manual dexterity and diversity of hand grips employed in stone tool use (Gumert et al., 2009). Their lithic technology comprises two primary techniquesdaxe-hammering and poundingdtailored to the type of marine prey. For each technique, these macaques use tools with different morphological characteristics and employ different manual skills (Gumert et al., 2009). For example, they use flat axe-like stones held in a precision grip to chip at oysters attached to boulders or trees, and rounder pounding hammerstones held in a power grip to crush shellfish and nuts on anvils. This is offering a framework for inferring from hominin hand morphology the types of tool use that they may have engaged in, as well as the types of resources exploited (Rolian and Carvalho, 2017). Similarly, the macaques’ use of stone tools for processing animal prey can be used as a close approximation for the reconstruction of early hominin carcass processing (Wynn et al., 2011). More recently, it has been found that capuchins are capable of producing stone flakes from stone-on-stone percussion (Proffitt et al., 2016). This behavior involves striking a stone conglomerate with a quartzite cobble to produce fine powder that the capuchins
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Fig. 2 Capuchin nut-cracking in action (Serra da Capivara, Brasil): (A) Capuchins use their entire body strength to wield stone hammers that can weigh up to half of their body mass; (B) In this sequence a male capuchin uses a quartz hammer on a wooden anvil. Image credits: A. PascualGarrido.
subsequently lick. Often this activity results in the unintentional production of stone flakes. Unlike the lithic tool fragments generated through chimpanzee (or capuchin) nut-cracking (Proffitt et al., 2018), these flake byproducts exhibit the same conchoidal fracturing characteristic of Oldowan assemblages, challenging the long-standing assumption that Oldowan flakes could only be produced through intentional and calculated knapping. Together with research on the use of chimpanzee nut-cracking byproducts (Carvalho et al., 2009), these studies are providing further support to the hypothesis that early stone flaking emerged as a byproduct of pounding activities, only later developing into an intentional standardized technology (Mora and de la Torre, 2005). They also raise the exciting possibility that non-human primate species may have contributed toward the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record and pose important questions regarding the methods currently used for identifying intentionality in archaeological assemblages. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of plant-based tools in non-industrialized human societies and chimpanzees suggests that plant technology pre-dates the earliest stone tools and may have even been more prevalent. Among chimpanzee technological repertoires, ephemeral technologies also constitute some of the most complex and diverse forms of tool use and the only ones involving manufacture (Pascual-Garrido and Almeida-Warren, 2021). Although the paleo-archaeological understanding of plant and bone use is gradually expandingdwith milestone discoveries in the last two years including 200,000-year-old remains of grass bedding in South Africa (Wadley et al., 2020), the earliest evidence of fiber technology at 50 ka (Hardy et al., 2020), and a large assemblage of worked bone tools used for hide and fur processing dated between 90 and 120 ka (Hallett et al., 2021)dno direct record of plant or bone tools exists prior to 300 ka or 2 Ma, respectively (Backwell and D’Errico, 2001; Conard et al., 2015). As likely precursors of stone tool use, studying plant technologies in nonhuman primates is therefore key to understanding underlying skill sets involved in the extraction and modification of materials to produce functional and efficient tools, which may have a heritage far older than stones, but remain obscured from the earliest archaeological records. When chimpanzees source tool materials from plants, a scar is left at the point of extraction (Pascual-Garrido, 2018). These “tool negatives” can remain identifiable for several monthsdand probably for as long as the plant remains alive. Raw material studies examining these traces in tandem with the tools produced for termite fishing, have found that chimpanzees are selective of the plant materials and species they use for tool manufacture (Fig. 3). Furthermore, differences in raw materials used relative to ecological availability suggest some degree of cultural variation between chimpanzee communities. The fact that this parallels findings from the Oldowan, provides the first tentative evidence of a behavioral continuum which originated prior to the emergence of stone technology (Pascual-Garrido and Almeida-Warren, 2021). With these findings archaeologists are now readdressing our technological timeline and considering the possibility that our technological origins may go back as far as our shared last common ancestor around 7–8 Ma (Rolian and Carvalho, 2017).
Landscape Use Archaeologists have been developing interpretative models of hominin land-use patterns since the discovery of the first Oldowan tools in the 1930’s (Plummer, 2004). Indeed, understanding what early lithic assemblages represent in terms of our ancestral lifeways has been one of the most compelling yet challenging endeavors. It has been a subject of great interest not only because of the reconstructions of foraging and ranging strategies they provide, but also because of the various underlying cognitive and social behaviors they imply (e.g., forward planning, spatial navigation, food transport, food sharing, sexual division of labor). From an evolutionary perspective, these models have served to hypothesize aspects of biological evolution pertaining to dietary shifts,
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Fig. 3 Chimpanzee termite fishing using plant tools (Gombe, Tanzania): (A) An adult female inserts a long piece of bark into the termite mound; (B) QGIS map of tool discard around a termite mound. Different colors indicate different days; (C) Bark and twig tools used for termite fishing. (A) Image credit: A. Pascual-Garrido, (B) Map credit: K. Almeida-Warren, (C) Image credit: A. Pascual-Garrido.
and potential associations with environmental change and the timing of anatomical adaptations, such as dental reduction and increase in brain size. Studying modern human populations, namely hunter-gatherer societies, using ethno-archaeological approaches has constituted an important frame of reference for developing these models. Nevertheless, due to the sparsity of the early archaeological record, empirical tests of these hypotheses have remained limited and there is still little consensus among scholars (Plummer, 2004). Non-human primates were first recognized as important models to inform this debate, with the identification of chimpanzee nest-construction as a spatially discrete debris-generating activity (Box 2). This research found that chimpanzee populations in Ishasha (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Issa (Tanzania) frequently re-use places in the forest for nesting, and that the nest distribution across the home-range was non-random and akin to that of early hominin assemblages (Sept, 1992; Hernandez-Aguilar, 2009). Furthermore, it was found that the location of nesting sites coincided with habitats that were preferred by chimpanzees for feeding, establishing the first tentative spatial relationships between two different activitiesdsleeping and foragingdand the formation of behavioral debris. More recently, this research has been expanded to chimpanzee stone tool use, where landscape archaeology methods were employed to study non-human primate records for the first time (Almeida-Warren et al., 2022). Landscape archaeology broadly involves the study of the distribution and interrelationship of archaeological evidence and their associations with environmental contexts across a landscape. This study examined the ecological drivers of site selection, re-use, and abandonment in wild chimpanzee nut-cracking in Bossou (Guinea), with a focus on the role of three key resources: food, water, and shelter. The results showed that in addition to proximity to a nut tree and availability of raw materials for tools, abundance of food-providing trees and proximity to nesting locations were significant predictors of nut-cracking activity in Bossou. This implies that the establishment of nutcracking sites is spatially mediated by the broader foraging and behavioral context, such as feeding on perennial foods and nocturnal sleeping. These patterns are reminiscent of the “favored places” model for hominin site formation proposed by Schick (1987), which posited that tool sites formed in association with activity hotspots where hominins could forage, process food, rest and socialize, with sites being used more intensively in areas of higher resource abundance. As such, these findings constitute the first empirical evidence that chimpanzee stone tool use shares affinities with the patterns of landscape-use that have been proposed for our earliest tool-using ancestors. Further to this, it was found that sites with low nut-cracking activity had, on average, a lower number of useable tools present, and that fewer tools corresponded with a higher likelihood of a site falling into disuse (Almeida-Warren et al., 2022). In contrast, the number of raw materials (stones) had no significant effect on site inactivity. Together, these findings provide compelling evidence of stigmergy, which has been proposed to have led to the emergence of persistent places during the Middle Pleistocene (Shaw et al., 2016). Despite being the first studies of this kind, the landscape archaeology of chimpanzee technology is already providing a promising outlook on the research ahead.
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Box 2 Current methods in primate archaeology Over the years, primate archaeology has borrowed a number of methods from archaeology including excavation techniques, spatial data collection, chaıˆnes ope´ratoires, raw material studies and use-wear analysis. Nonetheless, unlike human archaeology which deals largely with the material records of past populations, primate archaeology primarily focuses on living populations. As such, prior to conducting any archaeological work on non-human primates, particular attention needs to be given to the implications of disturbing or potentially destroying activity sites which could have deleterious effects on the primates that created and use them. Such considerations are key to decisions on what methods and instruments to use. In some cases, this has led to the development of new archaeological methods to facilitate data collection in primate environments. Here we briefly summarize the main approaches currently used and discuss some points for consideration. Archaeological Excavations and Surface Surveys. In primate archaeology, excavation techniques have been employed to examine the chronological changes of tool assemblage characteristics over time, and date the earliest evidence of tool use. As with human archaeology, the excavation protocols employed vary widely and are largely dependent on the environmental setting, the material being excavated, the level of resolution required, and the budget available. Given the destructive nature of the excavation process, it is paramount to ensure that the target areas are not active sites and that the proposed activity will not affect primate behavior in the long term. A non-destructive and less invasive approach is to conduct successive surface surveys. These are useful to document how living archaeological sites are formed and record the accumulation and loss of archaeological signatures and artifacts in real time (Carvalho et al., 2008). This can be achieved by tracking, through time, the position and movement of tools, the modification of pre-existing tools, the appearance of new tools (See Fig. 2B), and their eventual discard. In this sense, surface surveys provide a life history of primate tools and the assemblages they are part of. Spatial mapping. Spatial data is an important component of archaeological research. The state-of-the-art of modern-day human archaeology is the Total Station, which enables fast and highly accurate spatial measurements. Recent technological advances have also introduced photogrammetry techniques and GNSS instruments to the archaeologist’s toolkit. However, these are not always compatible with the inaccessible, forested and humid environments characteristic of many nonhuman primate habitats. As such, the most frequently used alternative method in primate archaeology has been the manual distance-azimuth method. While highly portable, this method is considerably inaccurate and imprecise relative to the methods more commonly used in archaeology, which becomes especially problematic for comparisons between early hominin and modern non-human primate records. A solution to this is the DistoX2da method commonly used in speleological mappingdwhich has been proven to be an optimal alternative choice for mapping non-human primate activity sites (Almeida-Warren et al., 2021). Raw material studies. Applied to non-human primates, raw material studies serve to investigate tool material selection and transport. The first is achieved by comparing the proportion of tool materials used versus the availability of raw material near tool use sites (Luncz et al., 2019). The latter requires the identification of sources either by direct observation of use (Carvalho et al., 2008), or indirectly through traces left as a result of the raw material procurement process (i.e., scars on source plants) (Pascual-Garrido, 2018). Raw material studies can also be used to investigate the physical and mechanical properties of raw material types used in tool use and manufacture including flexibility, size, weight and hardness, among others (Carvalho et al., 2008; Visalberghi et al., 2009). Combined, raw material studies can help uncover cognitive, ecological and social influences on the uses of technologies by non-human primates (Falótico et al., 2022; Pascual-Garrido and AlmeidaWarren, 2021). Use-wear studies. As with human tools, use-wear analysis can provide an understanding of the techniques and manipulative skills involved in the use of tools. Paired with observational data, use-wear damage on tools (i.e., use wear size and distribution) can help distinguish tools from other non-tool materials, aiding their identification in the archaeological record (Caruana et al., 2014). Furthermore, distinct use-wear patterns can help determine the target prey (Luncz et al., 2019). For stone tools, microscopic use-wear methods include the production of 3D models (via photogrammetry or 3D-scanning) and morphometric analysis for the investigation of their virtual surfaces (Benito-Calvo et al., 2015). Similarly, use-wear analysis on plant-based tools can help reveal tool types and behaviors. This includes the presence of use-wear traces (i.e., honey, soil, hair) (Fowler and Sommer, 2007) and modifications on tool ends (i.e., rounded, brushed, etc.), tool surface alterations (i.e., striations) (Heaton and Pickering, 2006), and tooth marks left on source plants as a result of the raw material procurement process (Pascual-Garrido, 2018). Ethoarchaeology. Built on the conceptual frameworks of ethnoarchaeology and cultural ecology, ethoarchaeology is the study of the material traces of living nonhuman primates in tandem with the behaviors that generated them. In practice, this methodology involves a combination of animal observation techniques with archaeological surveying and mapping. While being an effective method for habituated populations, recent concerns have been raised regarding the impacts of observation intensive research and habituation on natural primate behavior and welfare (Green et al., 2020). An alternative, less invasive approach which is gaining increasing popularity is the use of motion-trigger cameras which allow the remote collection of images and video footage (Pebsworth and LaFleur, 2014). Paired with the latest developments in machine learning and computer vision which allow automated individual recognition (Schofield et al., 2019), it is becoming a powerful tool for recording and analyzing behavioral data quickly and efficiently. Importantly, it is also a method that can be used in both habituated and unhabituated populations, which is crucial for comparative studies where the use of the same methodological protocols is important. Experimental studies. Essentially experimental archaeology applied to non-human primates, this approach was originally employed to investigate the stone-tool making and flaking capabilities of non-human apes (Toth et al., 2006). The best-known example is that of Kanzi, a captive bonobo taught to make flakes. Similar studies in captivity have since been applied to chimpanzees and orangutans, and more recently experimental frameworks have been extended to investigate the emergence of technical behaviors and cumulative culture (Motes-Rodrigo et al., 2022; Vale et al., 2021). The use of captive subjects has its limitations, namely the non-natural setting, the diversity of captive-rearing experiences (e.g., enculturation; rescue; time in captivity), and the variation in captive group composition. Some researchers have addressed this caveat by conducting experimental research in the wild (Carvalho et al., 2008; Koops et al., 2022), which typically involves establishing a “natural outdoor laboratory” within a population’s home range where raw materials for tools are provided. Nonetheless, when dealing with wild populations, careful consideration is needed as to the location chosen and decisions regarding the materials and provisions supplied so as to minimize the impacts on natural behavior and ensure compliance with current welfare guidelines.
Coastal & Aquatic Adaptations Water is an essential resource to all living primates, including humans. It provides hydration, allows organisms to stay cool, and is an important source of high-quality foods (Joordens et al., 2014). Both modern humans and earlier hominins such as Neanderthals consumed aquatic resources (Guillaud et al., 2021), with the earliest evidence of aquatic faunivory dating back to 1.95 Mya (Braun et al., 2010). Unlike terrestrial food, aquatic foods contain relatively large amounts of fatty acids and iodine which may have played
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a key role in hominin brain expansion (Joordens et al., 2014; Hohmann et al., 2019). It is also likely that they constituted an alternative food resource in times of scarcity (Wrangham et al., 2009). In non-human primates, aquatic food exploitation is rare, with only 20 species consuming this resource, which includes worms, shellfish, crabs, and fish (Russon et al., 2014). However, only two species use tools to access them: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) and long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis aurea). The former use long sticks and twigs to fish for fresh-water algae (Boesch et al., 2017); the latter make use of stones to prey on coastal marine intertidal species, including oyster and snails (Gumert and Malaivijitnond, 2012). Of these, the specialized exploitation of coastal resources by long-tailed macaques has received considerable attention. Like coastal stone tool-using macaques, human populations have a long history of using technology to prey on the intertidal fauna. Furthermore, the diversity of marine foods exploited by long-tailed macaques, spanning a total of 43 animal species, is comparable to the diet of modern coastal-foraging humans (Gumert and Malaivijitnond, 2012). Though highly debated (Erlandson, 2001), human coastal adaptation may have been key for modern human geographic growth, cultural advancement and the decline of competing hominin species (Jerardino and Marean, 2010). Moreover, the latest research suggests that coastal forests may have acted as primary refugia for early hominins during environmental turnovers and played a key role in early human evolution and dispersal (Joordens et al., 2019). Equally true is the possibility that early humans, and likely other hominins, may have captured and consumed aquatic coastal resources in an individualistic and opportunistic fashion like macaques do today. This includes not only the exploitation of the most available and productive foods, but also the development of sufficient cognitive and manual skills to access hard-cased food sources, such as shellfish, clams or gastropods, with tools (Gumert and Malaivijitnond, 2012). Further to this, long-tailed macaques are providing a direct primate analogy to investigate a phenomenon observed through the archaeological record. Recurrent exploitation of shellfish features prominently in Middle Stone Age (MSA) and Later Stone Age (LSA) Southern Africa (Steele and Klein, 2008), with variation in shell middens used as a proxy for hominin population expansion. While some argue that the increase in shellfish densities during the LSA results from a behavioral transition into what is commonly termed modern human behavior (Steele and Klein, 2005), others suggest that it was the outcome of changing environmental factors (Sealy and Galimberti, 2011). Among great apes the consumption of aquatic fauna is limited to freshwater and is rare (Koops et al., 2019; Russon et al., 2014). The harvesting of aquatic flora, on the other hand, is well-documented in gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), bonobos (Pan paniscus), and chimpanzees (Boesch et al., 2017; Stewart, 2010). The consumption of some of these resources has been suggested to reflect long-term feeding adaptations (Kingdon, 2003), such as the exploitation of Hydrocharis roots by gorillas and bonobos which can only be accessed while sitting in water (Kuroda et al., 1996). Similarly, the procurement of aquatic and wetland food resources by apes as a fallback food relative to more preferred habitats and resources, may constitute a useful model for inferring the possible strategies employed by late Miocene apes and early hominins in changing and contracting environments (Stewart, 2010). However, archaeological approaches are yet to become established for these behaviors.
Anthropogenic Change Technology has allowed humans to become one of the most successful animals on the planet (Luncz et al., 2017). Consequently, we have also become one of the most destructive species, causing one of the largest mass extinctions in history. But when and how we transitioned from a species where our lives were largely controlled by the environment to one that modifies it for its own gains remains largely unknown (Thompson et al., 2021). Previously it was thought that human alteration of the environment first occurred with the domestication of plants and animals, but the latest archaeological evidence suggests that such phenomena were already taking place in the Pleistocene (Boivin et al., 2016; Thompson et al., 2021). For example, the dietary diversification toward small, difficult-to-obtain-prey such as fish, rodents, and rabbits, in the late Pleistocene may have been caused by the depletion of preferred resources by the hominins themselves. Furthermore, the heightened incidence of burned sediments in the Middle Stone Age record of southern Africa, may indicate that early hominins were systematically using fire to manage vegetation composition and increase prey abundance in ways that parallel the use of fire by modern hunter-gatherers (Thompson et al., 2021). Lastly, the archaeological record in shell middens suggests that the exploitation of intertidal species, may have been one of the earliest forms of human-induced ecosystem modification, having been repeatedly over-exploited by anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals, and Homo erectus in various parts of the world (Mannino and Thomas, 2002; Cortés-Sánchez et al., 2011). Nevertheless, identifying the processes of human depletion and environmental modification in contrast to baseline environmental changes remains challenging. Recent studies on long-tailed macaques are providing new avenues to address this question. Research comparing populations living in neighboring islands has found that the tool-assisted exploitation of shellfish is leading to a localized reduction in prey size and abundance analogous to patterns of human coastal exploitation (Luncz et al., 2017). The long-term effects of overharvesting could potentially lead to unsustainable foraging, which in return could minimize the reliance on tool use and lead to the loss of technological knowledge. The microhabitat of these island-dwelling macaques therefore provides an ideal environment to study how simple technologies may influence prey population behavior, life histories and phenotypes (Luncz et al., 2017). Away from the coastlines, other examples of resource depletion include the tool-mediated exploitation of army ants (Dorylus sp.) by chimpanzees. This destructive harvesting technique, which involves the use of long stick toolsdand perhaps bare handsdto extract the prey, drives the insects to relocate to a new site within days, rendering this localized resource unsustainable in the
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long term (Pascual-Garrido et al., 2013). Excluding the use of tools, there is also evidence that chimpanzees in Ngogo (Uganda) may be hunting red colobus monkeys (Procolobus rufomitratus) at unsustainable levels, potentially leading to local extinction (Teelen, 2008). However, there is also tentative evidence of sustainable practices such as the bark stripping of Kapok trees (Ceiba pentandra) by chimpanzees in Comoé (Côte d’Ivoire), where chimpanzees may wait for the tree to heal in between foraging bouts (Lapuente et al., 2020). With still much to explore, the study of non-human technological primates is providing new unprecedented comparative data to further our understanding of how the use of technology by primates may contribute toward resource sustainability and environmental change.
Key Issues Challenges of Comparing Human and Non-human Primate Records Negotiating the inherent differences between non-human primate and hominin archaeological contexts has been one of the biggest challenges that primate archaeology has faced since its inception. Like humans, modern non-human primates are the product of millions of years of evolution, therefore their anatomical and behavioral adaptations have also diverged since our last-common ancestor. Equally, the current habitats of living non-human primates differ from the paleo-environments associated with early hominins and have the added caveat of being influenced by human activities. Another key difference is that in primate archaeology we have access to both the archaeological evidence and the behaviors that formed it, while in the hominin record, we are limited to time-averaged assemblages that may extend over longer timescales than the current non-human primate archaeological evidence. Finally, rigorous empirical comparisons can only be achieved when data collection methods and sample sizes are equally comparable. While this is more easily achievable under controlled laboratory settings, reproducing the same methods and achieving equal levels of success in distinct field environments is no simple task. Developing new methodologies that can be applied to both records will be key to narrowing this gap. Emerging research is beginning to address this issue, such as the adaptation of a new spatial data collection method that enables the mapping of primate archaeological sites with higher resolution than previous methods (Almeida-Warren et al., 2021); Other research is harnessing the potential of agent-based modeling, to create virtual environments where real-world non-human primate characteristics can be combined with other variables for hypothesis testing (Reeves et al., 2021).
Are All Non-human Primates Good Models? The potential value of non-human primates in reconstructing early hominin socio-ecological behaviors has been explored since the 1960’s, when Washburn and DeVore (1961) began studying the social behaviors of yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) in Kenya. While baboons are not our closest evolutionary relatives, they were considered good proxies because they demonstrated a number of traits that had been ascribed to early hominins, namely a high degree of terrestriality, and similar social systems and environments (Mitani, 2013). However, when it comes to the evolutionary origins of technology, research has traditionally focused on chimpanzees because they are one of our closest living relatives, and present one of the largest and most diverse technological repertoires compared to any other non-human primate species. Anatomically, they are the extant primate species that most closely matches our earliest ancestors in terms of body size, bone morphology, and brain size (Hunt, 1994). It is likely, therefore, that they also share similar life histories, nutritional requirements, and metabolismdimportant for reconstructing long-term activity patterns and associated landscape-use. Ecologically, their range covers a suite of mosaic habitats, from high-canopy forests to open woodlands and dry savannas, that match some of the paleolandscapes that have been reconstructed for our earliest ancestors (Reed, 1997). Research has also proposed that they would have had similar diets, rich in fruit, nuts, insects and the occasional meat (McGrew, 2014). As such, the study of chimpanzees has enabled us to address key questions in the archaeology of human origins such as: What technical behaviors may have already been present in the last common ancestor? What did plant technologies and other forms of tool use that rarely preserve archaeologically look like? What were the processes involved in early tool manufacture and raw material transport? How did complex tool sets involving the use of multiple manufactured tool types emerge? What were the technological capabilities and manual dexterity of the earliest facultative bipedal hominins (e.g., Ardipithecus sp.)? Nevertheless, there are limitations as to what chimpanzees can inform us about. For example, their lack of stone tool manufacture makes them poor models for understanding the origins of knapping. Furthermore, their hand morphology, specifically their digit proportions (i.e., ratio of thumb length to finger length), limits their ability to make and use stone tools (Rolian and Carvalho, 2017). Therefore, if the question of interest pertains to the precursors of stone tool manufacture, then capuchins would be better models as they are the only non-human primate species known to detach, reuse and reshape lithics (McGrew et al., 2019; Proffitt et al., 2016). Equally, while chimpanzee stone tool use within a foraging context is limited to nut cracking, both capuchins and long-tailed macaques use stone tools for a much wider variety of foraging tasks. Thus, studying stone-tool using monkeys is more informative than apes for investigating the diversity of behaviors that may have been associated with early hominin stone tool use. Conversely, there are research questions that would benefit from a broad comparative framework that examines multiple populations and species simultaneously. For example, both chimpanzees and capuchins crack nuts and dig for USOs using tools.
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Current literature suggests that both these resources were likely exploited by early hominins, but also that multiple hominin species may have been responsible for the Oldowan record. These species may have occupied different ecological niches, which could have contributed toward the technological diversity found in the archaeological record. As such, focusing on a single primate model in this context would be insufficient. In addition to being mindful of which species are best suited for the research question at hand, it is equally paramount to be realistic about which questions we are able to address. For example, the use of bone tools has never been recorded in any wild non-human primate, and tool-assisted processing of animal carcasses is extremely rare (McGrew et al., 2019). Therefore, we should seek referential models elsewheredfor example in modern hunter-gatherer and other non-industrialised societies.
Summary and Future Directions More than a decade has passed since the formal inception of Primate Archaeology (Haslam et al., 2009) and this new field continues to thrive. We now have four primate lineages with an archaeological record and technological histories, all demonstrating the “hallmarks” of hominin technologydfrom raw material selection to tool modification, transport, and the formation of archaeological sites. This will inevitably expand to other species and research is already emerging outside the Primate order (Emslie et al., 2014; Haslam et al., 2019). Primate Archaeology has proven invaluable for human origins research, providing fruitful comparative models to address longstanding questions and test hypotheses, new and old. It has also given a frame of reference for identifying preOldowan records and has spurned archaeologists to search for, and find, archaeological evidence in ever more ancient deposits (e.g., Harmand et al., 2015). Nevertheless, as a budding field, there is still much left to explore and a vast array of archaeological methods to tap into. Importantly, primate archaeology will be instrumental to primate conservation. As anthropogenic forces are increasingly reducing the chance for primates’ survival (Estrada et al., 2017), it is now more critical than ever to continue building the evolutionary history and adaptive significance of primate technology and culture. Even in its infancy, the contributions that Primate Archaeology has made toward our understanding of technological primates, including our own species, are far reaching. Nonetheless, its full potential is yet to be explored. Archaeology is the study of the material and immaterial remains of past human life and activities. The same can and should be applied to other members of the primate order. Beyond tool-assisted foraging, non-human primates engage in a variety of debris generating activities such as feeding, repeated use of travel routes, hand-digging, accumulative stone throwing, buttress-drumming, use of medicinal plants, manufacture of leaf pillows and umbrellas, as well as the use of tools in social contexts and grooming. Expanding Primate Archaeology toward exploring these other behaviors will allow us to unveil other hitherto obscured archaeological signatures in the hominin record. Primate Archaeology will also benefit from broadening its study subjects to include other non-human primates such as orangutans, who habitually use a variety of plant tools in both foraging and non-foraging contexts. Furthermore, while tool use in wild gorillas and bonobos is not as prevalent (Musgrave and Sanz, 2018), it may still leave archaeological signatures which are worth exploring. Perspective research over the next few years is set to expand primate archaeology beyond technology. This, in turn, will open up opportunities to further incorporate non-technological primates who may also leave an archaeological signature such as bark stripping in baboons and other species (Di Bitetti, 2019; Lapuente et al., 2020). It is also necessary to expand primate archaeology to multiple populations within species. Even though research has spread from chimpanzees to capuchins and long-tailed macaques, only a handful of communities have been studied within these species. This limits our understanding of the intra-specific diversity of archaeological signatures that exist among primate cultures and likely existed among ancient hominins. While primate archaeology has emerged from the application of traditional archaeological approaches, research has so far been limited to a handful of methods. However, technological improvements have allowed modern day archaeology to access a wide array of techniques such as soil and residue analysis, ancient-DNA, and micro-archaeology, which are providing greater resolution of past populations and behaviors. The future of primate archaeology will be to explore the wealth of information that these methods could provide when applied to non-human primate records.
See Also: Evolutionary/Neo-Darwinian Archaeology; Experimental Archaeology.
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Toth, Nicholas, Schick, Kathy D., Semaw, Sileshi, 2006. A comparative study of the stone tool-making skills of Pan, Australopithecus, and Homo Sapiens. In: Toth, Nicholas, Schick, Kathy (Eds.), The Oldowan: Case Studies Into the Earliest Stone Age. Stone Age Institute Press, Gosport, IN, pp. 155–222. Vale, Gillian L., McGuigan, Nicola, Burdett, Emily, Lambeth, Susan P., Lucas, Amanda, Rawlings, Bruce, Schapiro, Steven J., Watson, Stuart K., Whiten, Andrew, 2021. Why do chimpanzees have diverse behavioral repertoires yet lack more complex cultures? Invention and social information use in a cumulative task. Evol. Hum. Behav. 42 (3), 247–258. Visalberghi, Elisabetta, Addessi, Elsa, Truppa, Valentina, Spagnoletti, Noemi, Ottoni, Eduardo, Izar, Patrícia, Fragaszy, Dorothy M., 2009. Selection of effective stone tools by wild bearded capuchin monkeys. Curr. Biol. 19 (3), 213–217. Wadley, Lyn, Esteban, Irene, de la Peña, Paloma, Wojcieszak, Marine, Stratford, Dominic, Lennox, Sandra, D’Errico, Francesco, et al., 2020. Fire and grass-bedding construction 200 Thousand Years ago at Border cave, South Africa. Science 369 (6505), 863–866. Washburn, S., DeVore, Irven, 1961. Social behaviour of baboons and early man. In: Washburn, S. (Ed.), Social Life of Early Man. Aldine, Chicago, pp. 91–105. Wrangham, Richard, Cheney, Dorothy, Seyfarth, Robert, Sarmiento, Esteban, 2009. Shallow-water habitats as sources of fallback foods for hominins. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 140 (4), 630–642. Wynn, Thomas, Hernandez-Aguilar, R Adriana, Marchant, Linda F., McGrew, William C., 2011. “An Ape’s view of the Oldowan” revisited. Evol. Anthropol. 20 (5), 181–197.
Further Reading Biro, Dora, Haslam, Michael, Rutz, Christian, 2013. Tool use as adaptation. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci. 368 (1630). Carvalho, Susana, Ameida-Warren, Katarina, 2019. Primate Archaeology. Encyclopaedia of Animal Behaviour, second ed. Academic Press, San Diego. Carvalho, Susana, Beardmore-Herd, Megan, 2019. Technological origins: primate perspectives and early hominin tool use in Africa. In: Spear, Thomas (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Matsuzawa, Tetsuro, 2011. Field experiments of tool-use. In: Matsuzawa, Tetsuro, Humle, Tatyana, Sugiyama, Yukimaru (Eds.), The Chimpanzees of Bossou and Nimba. Springer Japan, Tokyo, pp. 157–164. Musgrave, Stephanie, Sanz, Crickette M., 2018. Tool use in nonhuman primates. In: Callan, Hilary, Coleman, Simon (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Oxford, UK, pp. 1–7. Riley, Erin P., Bezanson, Michelle, 2018. Ethics of primate Fieldwork: toward an ethically engaged primatology. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 47 (1), 493–512.
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Setchell, Joanne M., 2019. Studying Primates: How to Design, Conduct and Report Primatological Research. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Setchell, Joanne M., Curtis, Deborah J., 2011. Field and Laboratory Methods in Primatology: A Practical Guide. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Whiten, Andrew, Goodall, Jane, McGrew, William C., et al., 1999. Cultures in chimpanzees. Nature 399, 682–685.
Relevant Websites Conversations in Science at Indiana University – Back to the Stone Age: Why study primate archaeology?. https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/2019/07/06/primate-archaeology/. Science News – Aping the Stone Age. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/aping-stone-age. National Geographic – These monkeys are 3,000 years into their own “Stone Age”. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/capuchin-monkeys-used-stone-tools3000-years-oldest-outside-africa. Scientific American - Monkeys Make Stone “Tools” That Bear a Striking Resemblance to Early Human Artifacts. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkeys-make-stoneldquo-tools-rdquo-that-bear-a-striking-resemblance-to-early-human-artifacts/. Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution Lab. https://primobevolab.web.ox.ac.uk/home. Technological Primates Research Group. https://www.eva.mpg.de/technological-primates/. Capuchin Culture Project. https://capcult.net/. Tools and Culture Among Early Hominins Project. https://sites.google.com/view/toolsandculture/. STONECULT Project. https://sites.google.com/view/stonecult/. Capuchin Culture Film. https://www.lucaantoniomarino.com/capuchin-culture. Documentary “The secret culture of the apes”. https://youtu.be/k1My8pv4ItY. PlosOne Media – There is more than one way to crack an oyster. https://youtu.be/sjHXETaQ_c4. Primate Conversations Seminar – Cracking the origins of tool use in a macaque model system with Dr. Amanda Tan. https://youtu.be/HRI9EfmNi-0. Primate Conversations Seminar – Bringing primate technological landscapes to life using computer simulation with Dr. Katarina Almeida-Warren. https://youtu.be/qoZJjHQWZic.
Archaeological Ethnographies Yael Dansac, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Aims of Archaeological Ethnographies Where Do Archaeological Ethnographies Come From? Overview Archaeological Ethnographies in Practice Key Issues Critically Reflexive A “Total” Ethnographic Approach Multi-sited Multi-temporal and Concerned With Materiality Embodied Engagements With the Past Politically Sensitive and Collaborative Summary and Future Directions References
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Archaeological Ethnographies seek to understand the effects of archaeological heritage activities upon local publics and how these publics engage in heritage discourses. This discipline considers the material traces of the past not as inert things upon which academic and historical interests are bestowed but as active agents that participate in social, political, and economic spheres. Archaeological Ethnographies produce reflexive thoughts on what archaeologists do, why they do it and how their practice impacts contemporary societies. As a space for rethinking and re-shaping archaeological practices, these kinds of ethnographies are critically reflexive, politically sensitive, multi-sited, multi-temporal, and collaborative. Archaeological Ethnographies enable ethnographers to analyze multiple conversations and interactions involving scholars, institutions, and local communities, among others.
Abstract This entry considers the origins, development, applications and main elements of Archaeological Ethnography, a transdisciplinary and trans-cultural field concerned with the multiple and conflicting meanings of archaeological heritage. Seeking to establish new ethical frameworks in archaeological research, this discipline applies an ethnographic approach characterized by being critically reflexive, politically sensitive, multi-sited and multi-temporal. The intention of this entry is to analyze how Archaeological Ethnographies have been conducted in multiple contexts and to present this field as a space of interactions, conversations and interventions between different disciplines and different groups. I argue that Archaeological Ethnographies are essential for the future of the archaeological practice.
Introduction Archaeological ethnographies provide trans-disciplinary spaces of inquiry and practice that encourage multiple engagements and critiques centered on material culture, society, and temporality. Although the term Archaeological Ethnography was introduced in the 1970s to address ethnographic research with archaeological goals (Watson, 1979), over the last twenty years, its significance has radically changed to focus on a variety of related but diverse phenomena: from contemporary claims of archaeological sites by indigenous groups and rural societies to critical engagements with heritage stakeholders, from ambivalences in the politics of archaeological heritage to relationships between archaeology, politics, and identity (Breglia, 2006; Castañeda and Matthews, 2008; Dansac, 2013; Hamilakis, 2011; Meskell, 2005). This field has been defined as a transcultural space for dialogue and critique centered upon archaeological remains involving researchers and diverse publics (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos, 2009:73). It has also been regarded as holistic anthropology that is improvisational, context-dependent, and reflective of the need to adopt
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decolonized methodologies (Meskell, 2007:384). Making extensive use of ethnographic methods, this field seeks to understand the effects of archaeological heritage activities upon local publics and how these publics engage in heritage discourses.
Aims of Archaeological Ethnographies The name Archaeological Ethnography was proposed by Hamilakis (2011:402) to differentiate this field from others concerned with the multiple and conflicting meanings of archaeological heritage. However, this field shares common objectives and methodological tools with contemporary disciplines. Archaeological Ethnographies are related to the Ethnography of Heritage, a discipline focused on the recovery and analysis of meanings, uses and values conferred to archaeological vestiges by local societies through time (Breglia, 2006). Ethnographies of heritage have been conducted in a large variety of cultural contexts, assessing how different private and public actors compete for the right to benefit from controlling cultural patrimony and identifying challenges and contradictions in heritage projects (Butler, 2007). Our subject of interest is also associated with Public Archaeology, a field interested in promoting the active collaboration of archaeologists with the public who interact with the vestiges of antiquity (Okamura and Matsuda, 2011). Examining the socio-economic and political implications of archaeological practice for contemporary communities, Public Archaeology seeks to improve the relationship between archaeology and society. Working in the same line of Ethnographic Archaeologies and Ethnocritical Archaeology, Archaeological Ethnographies participate in discussions regarding contemporary dilemmas of archaeological science, critical engagements between diverse publics, ethical practice, and power relationships (Castañeda and Matthews, 2008). As mentioned above, Archaeological Ethnography is one of several disciplines interested in (1) how heritage agents produce knowledge about the material evidence of the past from their positioned perspectives; (2) how different publics relate to archaeological objects and sites; and (3), how archaeological heritage representations are deployed and contested. Pursuing a critical and reflexive understanding of archaeological practice, Archaeological Ethnography considers the material traces of the past not as inert things upon which academic and historical interests are bestowed but as active agents that participate in social, political, and economic spheres.
Where Do Archaeological Ethnographies Come From? The foundations of Archaeological Ethnographies can be traced back to the 1980s and 1990s when critical interpretative approaches and post-processual archaeology emerged and proliferated not only in relation to multiple critiques of positivist epistemology but in reaction to the discipline’s historical association with political projects of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism (Castañeda and Matthews, 2008:2). At that time, the emergence of a diversity of archaeological approaches, including interpretative, feminist, Marxist, and post-processual, emphasized multivocality and reflexivity, highlighting the intrinsic nature of the archaeological practice (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos, 2009:69). The adoption of critical approaches in archaeology was triggered by the recognition of the legitimacy of specific claims promoted by diverse groups over archaeological sites and the emergence of new ethical frameworks that value and prioritize local meanings about the material past. Consequently, in the 1990s and 2000s, archaeologists produced substantial literature reporting contested archaeological heritage management, denouncing epistemic violence in archaeological discourses, and calling for the inclusion of multiple narratives of the past (Gnecco and Ayala, 2011; Habu et al., 2008; Layton, 1989; Meskell, 2007; Trigger, 1984). The establishment of new ethical frameworks in archaeological research was only possible by challenging monolithic interpretations of archaeological vestiges and decentering or repositioning the role of archaeologists and archaeological practice in the discussion of constructing the past (Mortensen and Hollowell, 2009:7). In this entry, I provide a concise synopsis of the applications of Archaeological Ethnography in a variety of cultural contexts to identify the relations between different cases of study. Next, I address the current debates regarding this discipline. Finally, I delineate the contemporary trends of Archaeological Ethnography and argue how this consolidated field can contribute to the future of a more ethical, more reflexive, and more accurate archaeology.
Overview Ethnography is a qualitative research method central to knowing the world from the standpoint of its social relations. As a primary method, methodology and strategy of social and cultural anthropology that is essential to social sciences and humanities in general, ethnography involves hands-on or on-the-scene learning, use of multiple tools, formulation of specific study objectives and systematization of the research process (Gerring, 2012:5). The allure of ethnography in archaeology can be traced back to the 1970s, when ethnoarchaeological studies aimed to describe and explain the past via observations made in the present and via the uniformitarian assumption that archaeologists could attain knowledge of past processes by observing and systematically reasoning present-day ones (Watson, 1980:55). From the 1980s onwards, ethnoarchaeology attracted criticism for considering contemporary people primarily as sources of information to interpret the past (Fewster, 2001). Since then, ethnoarchaeology has taken on board criticism, expanding its functions beyond underlying principles and enhancing the valorization of contemporary practices and meanings about the ancient material past. On the one hand, Archaeological Ethnographies owe part of their development to the lessons learned by ethnoarchaeology, benefitting from radical changes regarding the treatment of contemporary societies in archaeology. On the other, they have been favored by a “politically loaded redefinition of contemporary archaeology as a social practice in the present” (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos, 2009:69).
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Adopting an ethnographic approach, Archaeological Ethnography and other related fields brought about a rapprochement between social archaeology and social anthropology. Even though, since the early 20th century, archaeologists have been using ethnography as a research method to study the past, in recent years, ethnographic tools have been applied to investigate archaeology as a discipline associated with contemporary processes of identity construction, tourism developments, political discourses and formation of nation-states. Becoming aware of the historical and political foundations of their discipline, archaeologists turned to ethnography as a means for addressing the political, ethical, economical, epistemological, and social issues that they confront when including aspects such as multivocality in archaeological discourses (Hodder, 2008). The new uses of ethnography within the discipline constituted an “ethnographic turn” which continues to produce reflexive thoughts on what archaeologists do, why they do it and how their practice impacts contemporary societies (Castañeda, 2008). The multiple, conflicting significations of archaeological heritage were first addressed from an ethnographic point of view by two groundbreaking studies, one conducted in the United Kingdom and another in Mexico (Bender, 1998; Castañeda, 1996). Both studies highlighted multiple problems surrounding the treatment, presentation, alternative uses, and management of archaeological sites. Setting Stonehenge within a wider landscape and exploring how use and meaning have changed from prehistoric times right through to the present, Bender (1998) explored how this archaeological site has been appropriated and contested by governmental authorities, archaeologists, Pagan groups, and local communities among others, and invokes the debates and experiences of people who have very different and often conflicting experiences of this place. This study recovered multiple discourses about Stonehenge and gave an essential role to ethnography as a tool that could be applied to explore alternative engagements with the past. Far away from Stonehenge, another research also pursued to explore how diverse groups and institutions actively participate in the elaboration and display of archaeological vestiges. Taking the archaeological site of Chichén Itzá as a case of study for analyzing the convergence of opposing interests and agendas, Castañeda (1996) argued that this famous place had been transformed into a factory of knowledge without losing sight of this site conceptualization as an artifact and the privileged site of contestations and mutual appropriations between Maya peoples, anthropologists, alternative spiritual groups, government institutions and tourist businesses. His study considers regional politics, nation-building processes, and international relations between Mexico and the United States. Applying a multi-sited and multitemporal approach, the author analyzed the cultural, political, and economic agents and processes that participated in the construction and local/global presentation of Chichén Itzá. In the last twenty years, Archaeological Ethnographies have applied ethnography as a tool and as a method to further community relations, increase archaeological interpretation, encompass multivocality, make research relevant, and detail and reflect on archaeological research projects (Hollowell and Nicholas, 2008). The ethnographic approach is not limited to participant observations and ethnographic interviews. As I will expose next through a selection of research, methods have varied depending on context, objectives, and actors.
Archaeological Ethnographies in Practice Seeking to study the links between archaeology and national imagination in modern and contemporary Greece, Hamilakis (2007) invoked the term Archaeological Ethnography not only as the core of his project but also as both a reflexive and detailed exploration of social engagements involving the material past. Claiming a “position of reflexivity”, this author draws on his own experience of Greek archaeology, a broad range of primary resources, including historical archives, newspapers, and magazines, and his knowledge of post-processual theories. His work contributed to studies interested in perceptions of the past, antiquities, and archaeology in modern Greece. His analysis has been retained and employed by scholars of diverse fields: archaeology, museum studies, management, and history. His method is defined as a “multi-sited historical and archaeological ethnography” (Hamilakis, 2007:23–25) that draws primarily on the anthropological work of Herzfeld (1991), and others. This method allows archaeologists to understand how and why societies value and use archaeological vestiges through time, emphasizing changes, dynamism, and tensions within archaeological heritage treatment. Archaeological Ethnographies are also concerned with multivocality in archaeological discourses. Taking as case of study the Çatalhöyük project in Anatolia, Hodder (1998, 2002) shows how research agendas can consider the interest of a wide variety of groups that are also stakeholders. Under his direction, this project employed social anthropologists to gather and analyze the diverse meanings given to this nine-thousand-year-old site in central Turkey. Ethnographic data shows that politicians are interested in questions of origins and identities. Local communities are interested in why their locality was chosen for settlement. Alternative spiritual practitioners of the Goddess movement are interested in using the site as a ritual space for honoring the female side of the divine. Various types of artists are interested in performing or representing the site. Recovering a multiplicity of meanings and practices, Hodder demonstrates how archaeology can and should dialogue with such interests. Other studies ponder on the centrality of archaeological heritage and its multiple roles in the formulation of new subjectivities in postcolonial nations. Reflecting on the term Archaeological Ethnography as a hybrid practice combining the field practices of archaeology and ethnography in relevant contexts, Meskell (2005) examines the production of the past in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. Her study shows how, even in a climate of new inclusivity and empowerment, the residual effects of the architecture of the apartheid continue affecting how this space is used. The author conducted interviews, participant observations, archival work, site visits, as well as sustained interaction with numerous stakeholders both inside the park and outside its boundaries to understand how the past is calibrated across a wide social spectrum: institutions, white tourists, rangers, social ecologists, and the descendants of the Venda people whose tribal territory used to be in this land.
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The ethnohistory project conducted by Colwell-Chantaphonh and Ferguson (2006) in southern Arizona provides an example of the kind of interdisciplinary and politically conscious work made possible when Native Americans and archaeologists collaborate to study the past. Seeking to understand how Native Americans view their past and their ancestral places, the authors visited archaeological sites, studied museum collections and interviewed tribal members to collect traditional histories. Specifically, they applied place-based interviews with members of the Zuni and Hopi people selected by tribal officers for their knowledge of the site. Their study shows how scholars can work with Native American stakeholders to move beyond confrontations over who owns the past, yielding a more nuanced, multilayered, and relevant archaeology. In the four cases I presented in this sub-section, the prolonged collaboration and interaction between archaeologists and local societies is one of the most important components for triggering the emergence and successful application of Archaeological Ethnographies in specific cultural contexts.
Key Issues Drawing on the work of Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos (2009:74–82), leading theorists of Archaeological Ethnography, I will discuss six main elements and features of this practice and bring into this dialogue key examples and cases. First, this kind of ethnography brings about interrogations of the position and situatedness of the ethnographer, considering them not as isolated individuals but as persons who have biographical backgrounds, political opinions, and local associations. Second, it examines all the aspects of a specific contemporary community, not only its relations with the material past. Third, it traces the multiple meanings of an archaeological site in diverse contexts and in diverse historical periods to identify and understand local, national, and global processes producing heterogeneous meanings through time. Fourth, it includes sensory and embodied engagements with the material past. Fifth, it ponders on the political connotations of archaeological practice. Sixth, it seeks to engage different groups, scholars and non-scholars, in the production of knowledge.
Critically Reflexive Critical reflexivity advocated by Archaeological Ethnographies must entail and examine the position of the archaeologist inside and outside the community. This kind of reflexivity named “research positioning” (Castañeda, 2008:45) permits us to consider the personal and academic interests that motivate our research, the community’s perceptions of archaeologists and archaeology, our ethical dilemmas when dealing with practices such as looting, and even our position as specialists who are generally funded by political and other institutions who deny or ignore alternative discourses of the past. Moreover, critical reflexivity in archaeological practice is not only about ethics and engagement but also about the ability to achieve demonstrable worth in a competitive, capitalistic, and postmodern world (Mortensen and Hollowell, 2009). A critical approach emerged from the relationships between archaeology and postmodern thought, which emphasized ethics and meaning, changed our understanding of the role of the nation-state in forming our views on the past, valorized indigenous critics and constructs, and allowed the archaeological practice to play new roles in relation to post-modern societies. Nowadays, embracing critical reflexivity as a main feature has allowed Archaeological Ethnography to position itself as a groundbreaking field that calls for a critical review of institutional discourses of heritage. It has also supported the inclusion of decolonized archaeological practices and condemnation of the epistemic violence endured by subjugated systems of knowledge about the past, and its material traces through time and even today (Bruchac et al., 2010).
A “Total” Ethnographic Approach For this critical approach to be effective, ethnographers must aim to familiarize themselves with all aspects of the groups they are studying, not only their relationships with archaeological sites or vestiges. They must be aware that, when doing ethnography, they are faced with “a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knitted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render” (Geertz, 1973:10). To consider only how a group uses, signifies and valorizes an archaeological site would be insufficient to understand the complexity of a phenomenon. An archaeological ethnographer must seek to engage in long-term participant observation, conduct interviews, engage in local practices, and elaborate a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) composed not only of facts but also of commentary, interpretation, and interpretations of those comments and interpretations. The main task must be to extract meaning structures that make up a culture. For this, a factual account will not suffice, for these meaning structures are complexly layered one on top and into each other so that each fact might be subjected to intercrossing interpretations that ethnography should study. Archaeological Ethnographies must consider historical, social, political, and economic aspects of a community to elaborate an accurate account of the object of study.
Multi-sited Archaeological Ethnographies must also be multi-sited, moving from conventional multi-sited locations to include multiple sites of observation and participation. Marcus (1995) introduces the term multi-sited ethnography to illustrate the idea of “tracking” as
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“following” the people, things, or metaphors. He based this idea on contributions by Appadurai (1986) regarding the circulation of things, meanings and practices that prompted new knowledge-making processes. This method opens the term “site” to a range of meanings beyond the mere geographical location where the community lives. A site can be an archive, a network, a website, an institution, or a geographically dispersed population, among others. Multi-siteness allows an ethnographic engagement with seemingly large-scale entities, such as international archaeological debates or transnational networks, without jeopardizing the intimate portrayal of people’s lives. This approach is well suited to study contemporary problems that cut across geographical, cultural, institutional, or organization boundaries but is also more challenging. Ethnographers must continuously negotiate access, which stimulates them to reflect on their position in the field. Hamilakis’ (2000) study on the Sanctuary of Poseidon in Greece gives us an example of the applications of this method, explaining how media and the internet also participate in the construction of imaginaries about this place.
Multi-temporal and Concerned With Materiality Taking into account that this kind of ethnography is concerned with multiple interactions with the material past in different sites, it must also be multi-temporal and interested in materiality. Archaeological ethnographies must explore the roles of archaeological objects and sites in social dynamics, considering that the life cycle of material culture is anchored in the social and symbolic universe of people. In each temporal and geographical context, objects have been “active” elements, not passive entities (Kirchhoff, 2009). Objects have been part of human dynamics for thousands of years in a process defined by Knorr-Cetina (1997) as objectualization, that is, the interaction between the social world and the material world. For example, by conducting cultural biographies of archaeological vestiges, we can understand the life trajectory of an object recounted through its changes in meaning and function. As Kopytoff (1986:66–68) points out, special attention must be paid to how the object is culturally constructed as an entity endowed with meanings in constant transformation. When an ethnographer elaborates on the cultural biography of an object, the questions he or she conceives are similar to those that would be applied to a person: what is the origin of the object and for what purposes was it produced? what is its life trajectory, and what uses has it had? what are the periods or ages identified in the life of the object? and what are the cultural markers to differentiate each one? This method can reveal an object’s multiple meanings and reconstruct its life cycles, which are animated by the relationships that people have with them (Appadurai, 1986:5). Cultural biographies of archaeological objects focus on artifacts (Bonnot, 2004) and spaces (Roymans, 1995). Other studies have centered on specific temporal contexts (Immonen, 2002) or several centuries of history (Hamilakis, 1999). Several studies have shown that the trajectory of a material element can be used to study the biographies of individuals (Albano, 2007), or the economic and territorial dynamics of a society (Dansac, 2013).
Embodied Engagements With the Past The material approach of Archaeological Ethnographies also translates into interest in sensory and embodied engagements with the material past. As highlighted by Hamilakis (2002), materiality is produced and experienced through the sensing body, through somatic experiences and movement. Bodily interactions with archaeological vestiges shape their uses and values across different times, positioning the object as an agent in local dynamics and processes. Paying attention to ritual practices, bodily techniques, and imaginaries related to archaeological sites becomes necessary for understanding the sensory dimensions of the community’s attachments to a place or an object. This approach can also reveal a trans-generational corpus of knowledge and practices related to an archaeological object. Furthermore, analysis of embodied engagements can be particularly pertinent to understanding why and how archaeological sites are constantly being reconverted into places of worship by people who adhere to alternative spiritualities. Nowadays, numerous Pagan groups use archaeological sites around the world as material supports for their ritual practices and engage in body-mind techniques to relate to these spaces (Dansac, 2021). A phenomenological approach can help us understand contemporary imaginaries and uses of ancient places.
Politically Sensitive and Collaborative Finally, Archaeological Ethnographies must reflect on the political connotations of archaeological practice and seek to engage large and diverse groups in the production of knowledge. Engaging in Archaeological Ethnography, ethnographers enter “a field of contestations with multiple power dynamics and interplays” where numerous scholars continue to embrace a lack of reflexivity (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos, 2009:79–80). Seeking to adopt new ways of practising archaeology, in the last twenty years, politicized and ethical archaeology has emerged, recognizing the role of this discipline in contemporary culture and, more specifically, in the production of discourses of nationalism, socio-politics, postcolonialism, diaspora and globalism (Meskell, 2002). Political sensitivity has also enhanced the collaboration between archaeologists and local communities by addressing social disparities, political inequalities, and trajectories of power structures such as nationalism (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos, 2009:81). This kind of collaboration must seek to be horizontal, promoting full participation in the exchange of ideas and experiences about the material past. Best archaeological practice should build from an understanding of local socio-political, cultural, economic, and power structures and build upon a notion of archaeological heritage that moves beyond the purely materialistic.
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Summary and Future Directions Archaeological Ethnographies make space for trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural encounters between different academic and nonacademic publics. They provide a critical space for rethinking and reshaping archaeological practice by attracting scholars from diverse disciplines interested in the material engagements with the past. Because of its utility for understanding the contemporary social context of material culture, archaeological practice, and “de-colonizing” archaeology, Zarger and Pluckhahn (2013) have called out for graduate programs in archaeology to include Archaeological Ethnography in the repertoire of ethnographic methods. Archaeologists can apply this kind of ethnographies to explore the relationships between archaeological vestiges and contemporary societies. On another line, Anagnostopoulos et al. (2022) have noted that Archaeological Ethnography should precede any archaeological project to inform its methodological decisions, engage stakeholders, and collaboratively shape heritage management strategies. Taking as an example a community archaeology project entitled Three Peak Sanctuaries of Central Crete, investigating prehistoric Minoan ritual sites, the authors stipulate that to achieve an ethical and collaborative approach, dialogues between archaeologists and local groups must take place before conducting archaeological research. Other researchers have continued to prove Archaeological Ethnography’s effectiveness. Seeking to promote collaboration between Indigenous groups and researchers, Bloch (2019) conducted a study on oral history and its relationship with an archaeological site. Drawing on research with members of a small, Muskogee-identified community in the US South, the author frames the large-scale earthworks at the Poverty Point site in Louisiana as representing a horned owl. In this study, the author calls for archaeology reimagined in the context of Native American and Indigenous studies, asking how mounds might animate resurgent possibilities rooted in, and routed through, deep Indigenous histories of return. Collaboration can also be analyzed in the interactions between archaeologists and collectors. Mills (2022) analyzed long-term collaborations, taking as a case study the partnership between professionals, an undergraduate student and a private collector who retroactively documented an artifact collection created over 60 years in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The author applied an archaeological ethnographic framework alongside collaborative inquiry and oral history methodologies to reveal a variety of informative and illuminating stories about these collaborations. As recent studies show, Archaeological Ethnography continues to be a fruitful space with a myriad of applications, all of them aiming at enhancing critical reflexivity, collaboration and engagement between archaeologists, scholars of other disciplines, and society. Future trends in Archaeological Ethnographies could continue analyzing the challenges of the collaboration between different stakeholders who have different interests to find new strategies for promoting full participation. They could also ponder how to fully decolonize archaeology, a practice that continues to follow a political agenda and depends on institutional funding. Considering that Archaeology will continue to evolve, adapt, and expand to be pertinent for contemporary societies at local and global scales, Archaeological Ethnographies will become a norm before, during and after conducting archaeological projects. I strongly consider that this discipline could revolutionize the way archaeology is done. The future of archaeology depends on a critical review of the power relationships within archaeology with regard to collaborators in and beyond the academy. Nowadays, there is a need for an archaeology that openly collaborates across disciplines and knowledge systems, that contributes to and influences societal change, but also that more firmly articulates itself and its value (Nilsson, 2018). As noted by Milek (2018), in the future, several fields currently considered distinct, including community-based collaborative archaeology, indigenous archaeology, and applied archaeology, could become the norm. Archaeology could translate into a method of producing knowledge about the past that does not privilege one scholar over another but gives everyone who is interested and wants to participate an opportunity to do so. Embracing an “open participation”, archaeology could nourish relationships of mutual respect, collaboration, and trust between academics and diverse groups. Archaeological Ethnographies is a space that provides a future for archaeology. This space cultivates collaboration, engagement, dialogue, and conversation. Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos (2009:83) consider that the identification of Archaeological Ethnography as a space and not as a practice opens the possibility of multiple coexistences, the coexistence of scholars of different disciplines, multiple epistemologies and ontologies, groups with diverse backgrounds and knowledges about the material past. Integrating ethnography into its core processes and dynamics, Archaeological Ethnographies help scholars to develop archaeology as a reflexive and social science which is critically conscious of its sociopolitical and economic dimensions.
See Also: Ethnoarchaeology.
References Albano, Caterina, 2007. Displaying lives: the narrative of objects in biographical exhibitions. Mus. Soc. 51, 15–28. Anagnostopoulos, Aris, Kyriakidis, Evangelos, Stefanou, Eleni, 2022. Making Heritage Together. Archaeological Ethnography and Community Engagement With a Rural Community. Routledge, London. Appadurai, Arjun, 1986. The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Bender, Barbara, 1998. Stonehenge: Making Space. Berg, Oxford. Bloch, Lee, 2019. Oral traditions and mounds, owls and movement at Poverty Point: an archaeological ethnography of multispecies embodiments and everyday life. J. Soc. Archaeol. 19, 356–378. Bonnot, Thierry, 2004. Itinéraire biographique d’une bouteille de cidre. L’Homme. Revue Française d’Anthropologie 170, 139–163. Breglia, Lisa, 2006. Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage. University of Texas Press, Austin. Bruchac, Margaret, Hart, Siobhan, Wobst, Martin, 2010. Indigenous Archaeologies. A Reader on Decolonization. Routledge, London.
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Butler, Beverley, 2007. Return to Alexandria: An Ethnography of Cultural Heritage, Revivalism, and Museum Memory. Routledge, New York. Castañeda, Quetzil, 1996. In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichén Itzá. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Castañeda, Quetzil, 2008. The ‘ethnographic turn’ in archaeology: research positioning and reflexivity in ethnographical Archaeologies. In: Castañeda, Quetzil, Matthews, Christopher (Eds.), Ethnographic Archaeologies. Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices. Altamira Press, Lanham, pp. 25–61. Castañeda, Quetzil, 2008. Introduction. Ethnography and the social construction of archaeology. In: Castañeda, Quetzil, Matthews, Christopher (Eds.), Ethnographic Archaeologies. Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices. Altamira Press, Lanham, pp. 1–23. Colwell-Chantaphonh, Chip, Ferguson, T.J., 2006. Memory pieces and footprints: multivocality and the meanings of ancient times and ancestral places among the Zuni and Hopi. Am. Anthropol. 108, 148–162. Dansac, Yael, 2013. Son más que piedras: una biografía cultural de Los Guachimontones de Teuchitlán, basada en testimonios orales. Trace 64. Dansac, Yael, 2021. The enchantment of archaeological sites and the quest for personal transformation. Ciencias Sociales y Religión/Ciências Sociais e Religião 23, 1–27. Fewster, Jane, 2001. The responsibilities of ethnoarchaeologists. In: Pluciennik, Mark (Ed.), The Responsibilities of Archaeologists: Archaeology and Ethics. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 65–73. Geertz, Clifford, 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books, New York. Gerring, John, 2012. Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework. Cambridge University Press, London. Gnecco, Cristobal, Ayala, Patricia (Eds.), 2011. Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology in Latin America. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek. Habu, Junko, Fawcett, Clare, Matsunaga, John (Eds.), 2008. Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies. Springer, New York. Hamilakis, Yannis, 1999. Stories from exile: fragments from the cultural biography of the parthenon (or ‘Elgin’) marbles. World Archaeol. 31, 303–320. Hamilakis, Yannis, 2000. Cyberspace/cyberpast/cybernation: constructing Hellenism in cyberreality. Eur. J. Archaeol. 3, 241–264. Hamilakis, Yannis, 2002. The past as oral history: towards an archaeology of the senses. In: Hamilakis, Yannis, Pluciennik, Mark, Tarlow, Sarah (Eds.), Thinking Through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality. Kluwer/Plenum, New York, pp. 121–136. Hamilakis, Yannis, 2007. The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hamilakis, Yannis, 2011. Archaeological ethnography: a multitemporal meeting ground for archaeology and anthropology. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 40, 399–414. Hamilakis, Yannis, Anagnostopoulos, Aris, 2009. What is archaeological ethnography? Publ. Archaeol. 8, 65–87. Herzfeld, Michael, 1991. A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Hodder, Ian, 1998. The past as passion and play: Çatalhöyük as a site of conflict in the construction of multiple pasts. In: Meskell, Lynn (Ed.), Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics, and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Routledge, London, pp. 124–139. Hodder, Ian, 2002. Ethics and archaeology: the attempt at Çatalhöyük. Near E. Archaeol. 65, 174–181. Hodder, Ian, 2008. Multivocality and social archaeology. In: Habu, Junko, Fawcett, Clare, Matsunaga, John (Eds.), Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies. Springer, New York, pp. 196–200. Hollowell, Julie, Nicholas, George, 2008. A critical assessment of ethnography in archaeology. In: Castañeda, Q., Matthews, C. (Eds.), Ethnographic Archaeologies. Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices. Altamira Press, Lanham, pp. 63–94. Immonen, Visa, 2002. Functional ladles or ceremonial cutlery? A cultural biography of prehistoric wooden spoons from Finland. Acta Boreal. 19, 27–47. Kirchhoff, Michael, 2009. Material agency: a theoretical framework for ascribing agency to material culture. Techné 13, 1–11. Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 1997. Sociality with objects. Social relation in postsocial knowledge societies. Theor. Cult. Soc. 14, 1–30. Kopytoff, Igor, 1986. The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process. In: Appadurai, Arjun (Ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 64–91. Layton, Robert (Ed.), 1989. Who Needs the Past? Indigenous Values and Archaeology. Unwin Hyman, London. Marcus, George, 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 24, 95–117. Meskell, Lynn, 2002. The intersections of identity and politics in archaeology. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 31, 279–301. Meskell, Lynn, 2005. Archaeological ethnography: conversations around Kruger National Park. Archaeologies 1, 81–100. Meskell, Lynn, 2007. Falling walls and mending fences: archaeological ethnography in the limpopo. J. South Afr. Stud. 33, 383–400. Milek, Karen, 2018. Transdisciplinary archaeology and the future of archaeological practice: citizen science, portable science, ethical science. Norweg. Archeol. Rev. 51, 36–47. Mills, Nikki, 2022. Sharing collections and sharing stories: the importance of archaeological ethnography in archaeologist–collector collaborations. Adv. Archaeol. Pract. 10, 38–48. Mortensen, Lena, Hollowell, Julie (Eds.), 2009. Ethnographies and Archaeologies: Iterations of the Past. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Nilsson, Liv, 2018. A future for archaeology: in defense of an intellectually engaged, collaborative and confident archaeology. Norweg. Archaeol. Rev. 51, 48–56. Okamura, Katsuyuki, Matsuda, Akira (Eds.), 2011. New Perspectives in Global Public Archaeology. Springer, New York. Roymans, Nico, 1995. The cultural biography of urnfields and the long-term history of a mythical landscape. Archaeol. Dialogues 2, 2–24. Trigger, Bruce, 1984. Alternative Archaeologies: nationalist, colonialist, imperialist. Man 19, 355–370. Watson, Patty, 1979. Archaeological Ethnography in Western Iran, 1959–1960. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Watson, Patty, 1980. The theory and practice of ethnoarchaeology with special reference to the near east. Paleorient 6, 55–64. Zarger, Rebecca, Pluckhahn, Thomas, 2013. Assessing methodologies in archaeological ethnography: a case for incorporating ethnographic training in graduate archaeology curricula. Publ. Archaeol. 12, 48–63.
Identity and Power Rosemary A. Joyce and Laurie A. Wilkie, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is a reproduction of [Rosemary A. Joyce, Laurie A. Wilkie, IDENTITY AND POWER, Editor(s): Deborah M. Pearsall, Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Academic Press, 2008, Pages 1483–1489, ISBN 9780123739629, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012373962-9.00155-2].
Introduction Identity: Self and Group Power: Substance, Relationship, or Discourse? Categorical Aspects of Identity in Archaeology Ethnicity, Language, and Culture Status and Role Class and Wealth Sex, Gender, and Age Race The Politics of Identity Further Reading
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Glossary Class A social stratum whose members share certain economic, social, or cultural characteristics. Cultural heritage Qualities and attributes of places that have esthetic, historic, scientific, or social value for past, present, or future generations. Ethnicity The national, cultural, religious, linguistic, or other attributes that are perceived as characteristic of distinct groups. Ethnoarchaeology The study of contemporary cultures with a view to understanding the behavioral relationships which underlie the production of material culture. Identity Established characteristics that set certain individuals apart from others in society. Material culture The artifacts and ecofacts used by a group to cope with their physical and social environment.
Abstract Archaeologists routinely identify patterns of material culture as evidence for individual and group identities at multiple scales. At the individual scale, ethnicity, race, gender, age, role, and status are all aspects of personal identity and difference among people. These are simultaneously aspects of group identities, created by processes through which people in the past recognized or claimed commonalities and differences as the basis to form factions, classes, and groups as disparate as households, lineages, communities, and nations. Differences in individual and group identity in the past are often considered potential bases for differential distribution of wealth, different levels of consumption of energy or labor, and the grounds for different levels of prestige. The differential levels of prestige, influence, and ability to exercise agency that exist between different identity groups are outcomes of or proxies for power, conceived of by some archaeologists as a substantial thing people have, and by others as an aspect of relations among people. Power and identity are closely intertwined, so much so that it is difficult to imagine studying one without considering the other.
Introduction Identity and power are closely intertwined in archaeological research, and both crosscut different theoretical approaches and areal traditions. Even when not explicitly central to a specific study, archaeologists always work with models of identity, whether in the form of localized group identities of culture, language, or ethnicity, or in the form of aspects of individual identity such as gender, age, sexuality, or social role or status. Power is similarly universally at issue in archaeology, even if it is not the explicit center of analysis. In the case of power, archaeologists are always concerned with different relations of power in the past, and also have to contend with the way archaeologies, especially those of identity, are related to contemporary power struggles. Power relations in the past range from shifting relations between persons that characterized hunter-gatherer societies in the deep past to the institutionalized relations between factions, classes, or identity groups in complex societies.
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Neither identity nor power are open to being simply read off the material records that archaeologists explore. Over the history of archaeology, a range of approaches to interpreting material patterns as evidence of identity and as evidence of power relations has been developed. In the 19th century, and continuing into the first half of the 20th century, archaeologists used variation in the style of artifacts that were used for the same purposes as evidence for different group identities. Beginning early in the 20th century, and continuing to the present, differences within localized groups in such things as the amount, variety, expense to procure, or value of materials have been used to propose different individual and factional identities along lines of prestige, rank, status, wealth, or class. Inherent in both these approaches is the assumption that differences in identity would be reflected in use of objects that symbolized or represented individual and group identity and power. In the latter half of the 20th century, processual and postprocessual archaeologists brought more explicit critical approaches to bear on how material things were related to identity. New approaches viewed differences in material patterns not just as reflections of pre-existing identities, but also as the means through which people shaped their identities. This led both to concerns with material patterns potentially masking differences, and to approaches to the way that individuals and groups actively manipulated the possibilities for identification in their social settings. Much greater attention began to be paid in the last two decades of the 20th century to questions of individual experiences of personhood: to gender, sexuality, and age. While the kinds of evidence examined remained the same, the scales employed expanded to include the microscale of the person, the medium scales of the residential group and the community, as well as the regional scales of settlements across landscapes. Contemporary archaeology takes identity formation as active, multiscalar, and sees material culture both as means of formation of identities and of expressing and contesting them.
Identity: Self and Group In archaeological approaches, identity is inherently a multiscalar concept because it includes identities experienced at the scale of the person and those of persons in groups. This means that identity must be considered multiple, shifting, and relational. A person may act as a member of a group in one context, and as a member of a faction of the group in another. The same person may participate in identities that crosscut groups with which they otherwise identify, experiencing identification with others of the same sex, gender, race, ethnicity, or other identity. A person’s sense of identity may change as they mature and age, and their status may change as they learn and exercise skills and gain authority and status. From these social science observations, it follows that at the level of the person, identity should never be thought of as an essence, but should always be treated as in process. Identification, rather than identity, would be a better focus for research. Identification, of course, is not only a process of individuals, but of groups. Indeed, identification is indispensable for group formation, maintenance, and reproduction. While, on the one hand, groups are made up of persons who identify with each other, human societies also reify group identities of various kinds, often projecting them onto nonhuman features in the environment. People may identify as members of named or unnamed groups that reside together, work together, and hand down property over generations. These co-residential, familial, corporate, or house identities may be symbolized by constructed architectural features such as tombs, houses, estates, or shared property. Archaeologists routinely recover traces of these kinds of material foci of small group identities. At larger scales, groups of people may create settlements that are the context for common actions that bind together, reproduce, and symbolize broader identification, as citizens of towns, as members of regional networks of interconnected settlements, or as part of nation-states. Again, archaeologically recoverable materials, such as stylistically distinctive movable objects, or “public” spaces and buildings, can provide evidence for these processes of urban, ethnic, and national identification. Within the same settlement contexts, at scales from the small group to the largest scale of the nation or international network, people may identify with others of similar status or history in different places, and distinguish themselves from others in their immediate vicinity through habits of dress, foodways, religious practice, and the organization of household space. All of these identities of class, faction, and ethnicity, may leave material residues for archaeological investigation. Because identity is so fluid, archaeologists are challenged not to reify or simplify the situation. Treating one identity as more significant may be a choice made for the purposes of analysis, but it always must be countered by consideration of other aspects of identity. The same material remains may serve to link some people together through identification, and to differentiate them from others through disidentification. People may actively manipulate the multiple possibilities open to them, and always actively work to shape and reshape their identifications with others in ways informed by their understandings of the effects identity may have on power relations.
Power: Substance, Relationship, or Discourse? Power is every bit as complex a social scientific field of understanding as is identity. One of the major sources of variability in social theories of power is whether power is conceived of as a capacity that people have, or an aspect of relationships that results from differences between people in their abilities to make things happen. In the first case, power is seen as a kind of substantial thing. A person or group “has” power, and may even be thought of as stockpiling power for specific uses. In archaeology, approaches growing out of this kind of theory of power may see some people as potentially distinguished by innate charisma, skill, or influence. The personalization of power may be seen as reflected in such things as “status badges”, objects that distinguish certain individuals,
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often recovered in mortuary contexts. It may be indirectly reflected in the accomplishment of community works, such as building of architectural projects, especially if these projects end up as the sites of the residence or burial of one or a few selected people. Here, the energy or labor of the people who built the architecture is seen as the mobilized effect of a power that an individual leader or leading class had. From this perspective, power may also be manifest in such things as control of locations of storage of everyday and special goods, monopolization of imported goods or products of skilled craftwork, or consumption of more, better, more expensive, or rarer goods. In these respects, approaches that take power as something different people or groups have merge with a slightly different view of power as relational. In these approaches, power is a matter of influence, of differential ability to get things done, and may even be rooted primarily in the way people assess each other. Power in this sense will still be detectable through its products, and will still potentially be reflected in differences in material culture. But it may be seen as more fragile, in need of constant building and rebuilding. From this perspective, rituals, feasts, and even public artworks may be projects undertaken to simultaneously represent power relations, and to reinforce them. The differences between people or groups with more and less power will be seen as less a matter of objective control of more wealth, labor, or resources, and more a matter of representation. For many contemporary social scientists influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, both of these classic approaches are mistaken, and power needs to be reconceived as a kind of continuous product of social relations. For archaeologists drawing on this latter theoretical literature, power may be seen primarily as “discursive”, as lodged in many small, cumulative practices through which each person continuously situates him- or herself in relation to others. These archaeologists creatively employ concepts never intended to be applied to societies outside Europe, identifying “surveillance” as an effect of monumental architecture, for example, or proposing that sculpture in a uniform style was a medium of “governmentality”. It should be clear that these different ways of thinking about power actually merge somewhat into each other. All have material consequences. Power is to be seen in differences between people or groups. It is indexed by different amounts and qualities of goods available for consumption, or by the deliberate and stylized use of unusual, imported, or costly things to set off otherwise similar activities such as meals from those of less powerful people. Power may be performed explicitly in public scenes, festivals, feasts, and rituals, set in special arenas whose construction themselves required power to compel, coax, or persuade labor. Power will be projected, debated, contested, and is subject to being lost, denied, or diminished. These shifts in relative power will be archaeologically visible in changes over time in material culture on the level of small residential groups and larger communities, and even in the individual nutritional and health experiences recorded in the bones of individual people. Because identification divides up the human communities that produced archaeological sites into factions, strata, classes, or other groups, it is intimately tied to the exercise, representation, and contestation of power.
Categorical Aspects of Identity in Archaeology Classically, archaeologists have used different aspects of the identities of people and groups as focal perspectives for different analyses, even if they understand identity to be fluid, actively constructed, and multiscalar. Thus, there is a substantial archaeological literature on categorical aspects of identity. These can be viewed as framed either at the level of the group (e.g., ethnicity, class, race) or of the individual (status and role, sex, and age). Each of the major approaches to identity has its own problems, its own history within archaeology, and often, specific forms of evidence routinely used. In the history of archaeology, there is a general trend from consideration of the regional linguistic-cultural group (understood as ethnicity) toward more concern with persons (and their gender, sexuality, and age). But already in the earliest scientific archaeology, status and role identities at the level of the person were part of models, and contemporary archaeology continues to be concerned with group identification.
Ethnicity, Language, and Culture Nineteenth- and early 20th-century archaeology took regional distributions of artifacts as the beginning point to define localized patterns of material culture. These “cultures” were seen as the material expression of unified groups of people, who shared history, values, and identity. In 19th-century archaeology, taking place within developing nation-states, each culture was presumed to have also had a singular, authentic language of its own. As nation-states consolidated and began to confront internal segmentation, archaeological culture-linguistic groups were often conceived of as analogs of localized identity groups, ethnicities, that the modern nation-states were attempting to absorb. Localized factional identity thus could be represented simultaneously as authentic, and as obsolete. Archaeology was actively employed to relate modern factions within nation-states to specific pasts. Factions within nationstates embraced these localized vestiges of the past in the same way as nations themselves did, if for different reasons. Archaeologists often contributed to the identification of spatial distributions of stylistically distinctive materials as evidence of ancestors of contemporary ethnic groups through their desire to be able to interpret the archaeological materials in terms of actual living culture. This equivocal history of association of style of material culture with language and “ethnic” identity has continued to create problems for archaeology. On the one hand, because the material patterns were seen as reflecting an existing essential identity, it blocked consideration of the active use of material culture to create, reinforce, and recreate identities. By associating material culture identities with singular languages, it blocked research on the distinct ways that material culture works in identification, which may not always or even usually be analogous to the ways that language works. But at the same time, ethnicity provided a vocabulary to use to call out the distribution of distinctive material culture across the landscape. It allowed archaeologists to focus
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on how boundaries were created through differences in material culture, and how certain intimate practices, such as those of dress and foodways, were particularly important in the recreation of identity over time. Today, distributions of similar material culture are not assumed to represent evidence of identities on their own. Rather, bounded distributions of similar materials are taken as problems to be interpreted. In some instances, such as colonial Uruk settlements in Mesopotamia, or the neighborhoods of people from Oaxaca that persisted as enclaves for centuries in the great Mexican city, Teotihuacan, assemblages of distinctive material culture within communities with different patterns can be believably interpreted as evidence of ethnically distinctive groups. In these cases, the kinds of practices maintained as distinctive (especially religion and foodways) are particularly appropriate means for a group of people to maintain their differences from a larger, distinct, population. In the case of Teotihuacan, as these differences persist they remain more stable than the culture of the home region, eventually appearing archaic in comparison with contemporary Oaxaca. Similar situations can be amply documented in historic archaeology of European colonial enclaves, of Chinese communities overseas, or of communities of people of African descent. In the latter case, ethnogenesis and reproduction of ethnic identities routinely employed material culture of the dominant European culture in distinctive ways, demonstrating that our search for such factional identities within complex societies needs to observe not just the obvious stylistic distributions but more subtle differences in practices that might be taking place. So, for example, imported majolica pottery used in colonial Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador in the 16th century involved selection of bowl forms that were similar to those previously made of local materials. Ethnoarchaeological studies of the production and use of painted pottery in Amazonian Ecuador offer another example of the need for attention to subtler distinctions in order to see ethnic identities, while reminding us that these factional identities may be heterogeneous linguistically and historically. Here, within a single community, people from two different political factions produced vessels with structures of exterior ornamentation that were consistently different, even if the member of the political faction spoke a language different from the majority of the faction, and had learned to paint pottery in a different political and social setting. What this ethnoarchaeological work underlines is that identification is a process in which people use material culture, not an essence reflected or expressed in it. This work also underlines the fact that even in societies without institutionalized distinctions of social status, identity is political.
Status and Role Early archaeologists complemented their interpretation of localized distributions of artifacts as cultures with identification of distinctions in material culture within these homogeneous culture areas. Here, the main axis of distinction was understood to correspond to differential social status, prestige, wealth, rank, or class (or all of these at once). Drawing on anthropological studies of the mid-20th century, processual archaeologists systematized approaches to these within-group identities. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elman Service, archaeologists assumed that as societies progressed from egalitarian bands (in which no permanent social distinctions other than gender were found) to tribes, chiefdoms, and states, distinctive individual or group identities would develop. In bands, persons were understood to temporarily occupy roles (such as leader of a hunt), but these were not usually treated as archaeologically perceptible identities. In tribes, differences in achieved rank were expected, such that for every person who achieved distinction (in skill, authority, or knowledge) there would be a position of differential status. In chiefdoms, in addition to achieved rank, ascribed rank was understood to be institutionalized, so that shared, higher social status could be perpetuated from generation to generation. In both of these situations, archaeologists allowed for the potential to identify rank statuses held by individuals through their use of distinctive symbolic “status badges”, especially in burials. These individualized status markers might be shared among members of an institutionalized ranked group. In state-level societies, institutionalized classes occupied distinctive prestige or wealth strata. These distinctions were perceptible not only in the individualized contexts of burials, but also in the shared residential contexts where members of one social stratum lived. Materially, these indicators of identity linked individuals to groups, which in the archaeology of complex societies and in historical archaeology are generally understood as social classes.
Class and Wealth Classes are a defining feature of complex societies, states, and the modern world. In modern social sciences, classes are sometimes treated as objective groupings of people of the same relative social standing, based on things such as level of education, income, or kind of employment. But the original selection of criteria actually stems from the kind of class distinctions social scientists recognize. For example, in countries like Great Britain, where there was a history of inherited noble titles, these inherited statuses still define different classes even though the members of the different classes (royalty, nobility, and commoners) may overlap in wealth and education, and even though employment categories crosscut these inherited classes. What distinguishes classes of all kinds is that they involve ranking of groups of people, so that one class is of higher wealth, prestige, or status than another. Archaeologically, then, class distinctions involve shared identities and ranking. Where a contemporary social scientist can use interviews and histories to establish identification and ranking, archaeologists must use material proxies. Archaeologists define classes based on materially observable criteria. Household wealth has been one of the easiest potential bases to define for class distinctions in archaeological settings. Nonetheless, there has been substantial debate about how to measure household wealth. Some approaches convert everything into labor equivalents, reasoning that the consumption of human effort is independent of any social conventions of value. Experimental archaeology can provide a basis to project how much work was involved in building such things as the residences of Maya nobles,
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or the tombs of Egyptian workers, nobles, and rulers. Assessing the labor value of movable objects can be more complex. Distance from the sources of raw materials or of production of finished products contributes to the expense involved in obtaining movable objects, so such exotics or products of long-distance exchange may receive special attention in assessing household wealth. Within any category of things, the amount of work involved may vary. “Production-step measures” are a rough way to assess the different values of objects produced with more steps (more work) or fewer steps (less work, and thus less expense or value). Using ethnographic and historic analogies, archaeologists have suggested that the least useful way of stratifying groups in the past using movable objects is sheer numbers of things; this is much more strongly tied to such things as group population size, longevity of occupation, and approaches to disposal of materials. While archaeologists can produce reasonable arguments for the existence of different classes based on household wealth, these differences may crosscut more socially significant class identities, just as they do in many present-day societies. So another approach to class differences in archaeology has been to examine the symbolism of group status in things such as architectural form, decoration of artifacts, location of housing within settlements, and use of written or graphic symbols. From this perspective, it is not just important that some people’s houses took more labor to construct: they may be made of materials that distinguish them, they may follow models of higher status, and they may be embellished with elements that themselves are symbolic of social orders. This is as important an approach in historical archaeology as it is in the archaeology of states in Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Classical Mediterranean. Unlike household wealth, which actually creates a continuous scale of distribution of groups, these symbolic approaches lend themselves to identifying discrete strata or parallel segments within urban societies, like Indian castes or Aztec calpulli. When written documents are available, as they are in historical archaeology and in many complex societies, the material and visual symbols may be matched to literary terms that designate different class strata. While class is above all an identity of a group, class membership may be an important aspect of the identity of an individual as well. Documentary sources can offer critical indications of the class identity of individuals, whether these come in the form of tomb inscriptions or historical documents such as wills or legal cases.
Sex, Gender, and Age Gender has been another focus of archaeological research on identity that links individuals and groups. Gender identities are sometimes treated as simple analogs of biological sex. Mortuary and bioarchaeological studies identify adult males and females from specific traits, and then the nonbiological aspects of burials may be used to project aspects of gender identities. For example, the inclusion of certain kinds of pins in burials of females in British and European archaeological sites is taken as one of the material markers of female identity, contrasting with other kinds of clothing fasteners found with male burials. An emphasis on the display of gender differences in costume has thus been a second material route adopted by archaeologists attempting to discern gender identities. Representation of dichotomous patterns of dress in visual media provides a third way to see categorical gender identities. These approaches have been subject to considerable debate, critique, and refinement within archaeology, starting with the realization that sex itself is not really dichotomous, even if we do not consider the possible presence of biologically intersexed persons in a population. Children cannot be assigned to biological groupings on the same bases as adults, so there is always a third term in mortuary analyses, persons who may be assigned to the same gender identity as adults based on shared material patterns, or who may form a distinctive group based on age. Even within a group of adults assigned to the same sexed category, age distinctions may be relevant. In a study of burials from the central Mexican site of Tlatilco, it was noted that older males and females shared characteristics of burial treatment, as did younger adult males with younger adult females. Relatively little material culture linked the older and younger adults of the same sex. Considerations like these shift attention away from presumed identity groups symbolized by use of certain objects, to the way material culture was used in processes of identification.
Race Like gender, race has been treated as an essentialized identity inherent in biology. So too, as with gender, race has been subject to serious reconsideration by archaeologists, especially those involved in the study of the African diaspora and the history of European colonization. A simple forensic model takes race as something inherent in national origins that concentrated certain variants of physical traits in different world areas. A notable example of the pitfalls of this approach to race was the African Burial Ground Project in New York City, where the initial archaeological team failed to notice signs of distinction within the biological population that were important evidence of differences in identity among these people of African descent. Archaeologists now approach race as a historical identity created with reference to biology but not given in biology, and examine material evidence for distinctions of identity among people with similar biological characteristics. Archaeologists examine how specific practices, including religion, healing, and personal adornment, were reproduced within racially identified or identifying groups. With attention to racial identity, and the contrast between simple models archaeologists might once have used and the nuanced historical approaches they now routinely employ, archaeologies of identity most clearly intersect with contemporary issues of power.
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The Politics of Identity All of the aspects of identity examined archaeologically involve potential exercises of differential power in the societies under examination. Class, gender, race, ethnicity, and status are all implicated in social ranking and stratification, in the relative placement or groups and individuals with differential access to wealth, authority, prestige, and agency. Writing about identity in the past also always involves archaeologists in issues of power in the present. There are at least two main reasons for this. First, relations of identity and power in the past can serve as a precedent for relations of power between groups in the present. These differential positions of power may be explicitly grounded in history, as in the use of archaeology by Nazi Germany to demonstrate the superiority of a mythical “Aryan race” whose legacy was claimed by the Nazi state. Or they may be analogical bases for claims to naturalize contemporary power relations, as when arguments are made for the “natural” inferiority of women based in speculative claims that in early human history, men undertook complex tasks that privileged their intellectual development. Archaeologists investigating identity in the past have a responsibility to be exceptionally careful in outlining the logical assumptions they make to avoid contributing to such abuses. Even with such care, archaeologies of identity will still engage with contemporary politics because in the modern world, identity matters deeply as a basis for political action. The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the United States caused archaeologists in that country to engage with contemporary Native Americans who were concerned with the ways archaeological claims about identity affected their present-day political viability. By employing a simple model of identity between static distributions of things taken as reflections of essential folk identities, archaeologists created a framework in which historical change was the loss of identity, or the invention of false new identities. Even when archaeologists themselves moved on to use more sophisticated models of the relationships between identity and material culture, these 19th-century ideas about the integrity of identity and the closed bounded nature of groups remained in circulation and could be used to deny contemporary descendant communities legal standing. In Guatemala, contemporary Maya scholars and public intellectuals have pointed out that archaeological investigations have provided material for arguments of discontinuity from the Classic Maya past that contributed to characterization of the contemporary Maya as backward during the genocidal civil war in that country. These same intellectuals have contested the dominance of archaeological attention to ancient Maya warfare as a continued misrepresentation of ancestral Maya that colors contemporary understanding of the living Maya. The mobilization of the African–American community in New York City to call for a new research approach to the African Burying Ground represents a second kind of relation of archaeological identities to modern politics. The people involved were not claiming direct descent, and were not subject to losing material benefits due to archaeological use of outdated models of identity. Instead, their appeal for a voice was related to the potential archaeology offered to document otherwise lost histories. In some cases, archaeologists have found themselves uncomfortably placed in the middle of movements to claim connections with the past by nations, such as French celebration of Celtic heritage or the arguments that took place between national governments about custody of the remains of the European Iceman. Archaeologists are in a unique position to analyze the ways that remains of past societies become part of nationalist or factional discourses through which modern state governments or ethnic groups attempt to create solidarity by claiming deep roots. In their work on this modern process of identity formation through engagement with material culture, archaeologists have begun to identify problems with the modernist idea of “cultural heritage”, particularly the ways it elevates the materials of certain classes or groups as exemplary while quietly ignoring the material evidence of the experiences of others. Archaeologists have even been able to define concepts such as “negative heritage”, remains of the past that modern nations or factions deliberately eradicate because of the challenges they present to contemporary social values. Whether through their presence and celebration, or their excision from historical consciousness, the materials that archaeologists use to identify past identity formation remain politically potent in the present.
See Also: Archaeology and Human Rights; Gender and Heritage; Indigenous Archaeology.
Further Reading Bond, G.C., Gilliam, G. (Eds.), 1994. The Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power. Routledge, New York. Brumfiel, E.M., 1992. Breaking and entering the ecosystem: gender, class, and faction steal the show. Am. Anthropol. 94 (3), 551–567. Diaz-Andreu, M., et al., 2005. The Archaeology of Identity: Approaches to Gender, Age, Status, Ethnicity, and Religion. Routledge, New York. Jones, S., 1997. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. Routledge, New York. Kane, S. (Ed.), 2003. The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in a Global Context. Archaeological Institute of America, Boston. Meskell, L.M., 2002. The intersections of identity and politics in archaeology. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 31, 279–301. O’Donovan, M. (Ed.), 2002. The Dynamics of Power. Occasional Paper no. 30. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale. Orser Jr., C.E. (Ed.), 2000. Race and the Archaeology of Identity. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Schmidt, P., Patterson, T. (Eds.), 1995. Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-western Settings. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe. Stark, M.T. (Ed.), 1998. The Archaeology of Social Boundaries. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington.
Gender and Heritage Almudena Hernando, Departamento de Prehistoria, Historia Antigua y Arqueología, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Gender Heritage Overview: Gender and HeritagedState of the Art Key Issues: What Does Heritage Have to Do With Male Individualization? Summary and Future Directions References
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Both feminist criticism and UNESCO recognize gender bias in the studies, choice of sites, and management of Cultural Heritage sites. All human beings need to belong to a group and to maintain connections and emotional networks in order to feel secure. This means that we all have relational identities. However, in their political discourse, as they were gradually individualized, men began to abandon the recognition of that necessity and emphasize only the values related to individuality. Since relational identity is necessary, men secured it by: (1) preventing women from becoming individualized (until Modernity), making them responsible for the relational support of the group, (2) participating in male peer groups, and (3) mechanisms such as Cultural Heritage. The idea of Cultural Heritage is associated with the emergence of the modern nation-state. It was created by highly individualized men at a time when (suffragist) women were individualizing themselves and, consequently, starting to abandon the emotional and relational assistance that, until then, they had provided to men. Cultural Heritage is a mechanism that, like the complementarity of gender and male peer groups, creates a relational identity and a sense of belonging in people who are very individualized (mostly men). For that reason, it represents masculine values, which is why a gender-based perspective is necessary. Intangible Cultural Heritage presents more relational values, and feminist criticism has been struggling to create visibility for women’s spaces and activities and to reveal the gender inequality with which those values have been associated until now.
Abstract UNESCO has recognized that Cultural Heritage research entails a gender bias that is very difficult to modify. This text posits that the bias stems from the way men have gone about constructing their individuality throughout history. When women began to be individualized in the 19th century, Heritage came to fulfill the same function as gender relationships have fulfilled throughout history: guaranteeing individualized men a sense of belonging, connection, and group affiliation that, as history progressed, they gradually forgot how to cultivate for themselves.
Introduction To start developing the argument that will be sustained in the following pages, it is first necessary to analyse what we mean by gender and by Heritage, the two major concepts that will be put in relation in this text:
Gender Gender inequality constitutes the most generalized vector of human inequality, as it affects the immense majority of known societies. In many contemporary societies, particularly in the globalized Western world, it is compounded by inequalities of class, race, ethnicity, heteronormative sexual orientation, etc. However, the truth is that, as Scott (1986: 1055) noted, “the litany of class, race, and gender suggests a parity for each term, but, in fact, that is not at all the case,” because gender inequality lies at the heart of each of the other aspects of domination. As radical feminists (Millet, 1970) and socialist feminists (Hartmann, 1981) demonstrated in the
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1970s and 1980s, regardless the social class, race, or ethnicity to which they belong, women have, throughout history, suffered relationships based on domination by the men who surrounded them, beginning with their own fathers, husbands, and brothers. In general, people tend to believe that this relationship of inequality, based on what is called the “sex/gender system” (or the patriarchy) is universal, inherent to the very concept of gender. This is why Scott (1986: 1067) defined gender as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” While I agree that “gender” is not a substitute for women but instead alludes to the “social relations between sexes” (Scott, 1986: 1056), I believe that this relationship did not become associated with power when societies were egalitarian. Instead, inequality appeared and began growing as men occupied increasingly specialized and differentiated positions through the process of social transformation. In other words, gender inequality is associated with masculine individualization and is proportional to the degree to which that is present.
Heritage For its part, the concept and protection of Cultural Heritage is associated with the appearance, in the 19th century, of a new identity unit, that of the modern nation-state (Hobsbawn, 1987). Until the 18th century, the units of collective identity were more concrete and limited when the group was characterized by less division of functions and specialized work; that is to say, when there was less differentiation and, therefore, less individualization of the society’s (male) inhabitants. The tribe, village, parish, guild, or brotherhood had shaped the basic units of collective identity until, at the end of the 18th century, the majority of men occupied such different positions that they identified themselves as “individuals”1 and “citizens,” not as part of an undifferentiated collective. The French Revolution and the Enlightenment came to sanction what they saw as the moral superiority of this form of identity (Kant, 1794), associated with the construction of a more extensive and wide-ranging unit of collective identity, that of the nation, whose limits and consistency needed to be defined (Hobsbawn, 1987). Archaeology and the “national” museums came to facilitate the construction of that new form of affiliation (Kohl and Fawcett, 1995; Endere, 2000), introducing radically novel elements into the profound meaning of material culture. From the 19th century, based on physical evidence, archaeology began to replace myth as the discourse on our origin. They also removed the ability to protect the group from religious authorities, situating it instead on the capacity for agency, reason, and change of the men who led the nation. Objects or monuments that had previously been consecrated to the memory or exaltation of the royal family, the nobles, or the Church were assimilated into institutions supported by the new nation-states to define the particular and nontransferable traditions that differentiated them from each other (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). In this way, archaeology and the idea of Cultural Heritage became fundamental for the delimitation and definition of the new nation-states (Endere, 2000: 6), led by men who felt increasingly different from each other (in other words, they were increasingly individualized) because of the increase in the division of social functions and the specialized work that characterized the industrial revolution. Therefore, one could say that gender inequality was increasing in proportion to the individualization of men (as we shall see below) and that the idea of Cultural Heritage appeared when their level of individualization became very elevated during the industrial revolution. “Gender and Heritage Studies” have essentially focused, until now, on demonstrating the masculine character of everything related to Heritage (the types of monuments included on the list, the people who manage it, the activities related to the monuments, etc.) (Reading, 2015; Rössler et al., 2016; Shortliffe, 2016; Grahan and Wilson, 2018; Settimini, 2021). With that fundamental work as a starting point, my plan is to point out a more core aspect of that relationship. My goal is to analyze the profound connection between gender and heritage from the point of view of masculine identity in the modern world. I will consider why the idea of “Heritage” was associated with the generalization of masculine individualization that was sanctioned in 1789 in the French Revolution’s “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” which disregarded women.
Overview: Gender and HeritagedState of the Art The idea of Heritage emerged in the intellectual contexts in which the men who led the advent and institutional construction of the nation-state moved. They did not, in the beginning, manage to draw the interest of ordinary folks, who were indifferent to its meaning (Babelon and Chastel, 2000; Hernando, 2009). The idea of Heritage, as I will attempt to demonstrate, does not resonate with anyone who does not have a strong sense of their own agency, their own self. It cannot be separated from individuality. For that reason, it was only generalized to broader swaths of society, to what is classified as the “middle class,” to the extent that the professional and social differentiation of men increased during industrial capitalism. That is also the reason why it is gaining importance among people who receive higher education and acquire specialized knowledge nowadays. It could seem contradictory to argue that Cultural Heritage emerged in tandem with the generalization of masculine individuality in modern Western societies and to claim simultaneously that it still has an eminently masculine (patriarchal) nature in the present day, when women in those societies have now accessed on a massive scale the same levels of education, specialization, and therefore individualization as men. Yet, this is the situation denounced by all researchers who apply a feminist gaze or a gender lens to the analysis of Heritage. As a matter of fact, feminist criticism revealed that Cultural Heritage continues to constitute another area that constructs and legitimizes gender inequality (Smith, 2008; Reading, 2015). One of the main reasons is that the discourse on Heritage “was built 1
The concept of “individual” only became identified with the concept of person in the 17th century (Mauss, 1968; Elias, 1991: 184; Weintraub, 1978: 49).
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not only on professional values and concerns, but also on certain class and gender experiences and social and esthetic values,” specifically those that characterized the men of the privileged class at that time (Smith, 2008: 159). The result is that the discourse on Heritage has been defined by “masculine values and perceptions, particularly masculine values from the elite social classes, that have tended to dominate how heritage has been defined, identified, valued and preserved” (Smith, 2008: 159). This explains why Heritage “tells a predominantly male-centered story, promoting a masculine (.) vision of the past and present” (Smith, 2008: 159). The very practices of the representation, conservation, musealization, or management of Heritage have been seen as biased in regard to gender by all the analyses that have taken the category of gender into consideration (Bevilaqua, 2015; Smith, 2008; Reading, 2015; Shortliffe, 2016; Grahan and Wilson, 2018; Powderly and Braga da Silva, 2020). It is obvious that the spaces and contexts selected as representative of Cultural Heritage had to do with activities, institutions, and spaces related with men, not with women. One need only glance at the list of monuments and locations on the list of World Heritage sites (https://whc. unesco.org/en/list/) to confirm that Cultural Heritage is mostly composed of spectacular sites that express the institutionalized power of every time period: from monumental archaeological sites to cathedrals, mosques, castles, palaces and gardens, engineering projects, historic centers, etc., and that women’s spaces and activities are ignored, even though it would have been impossible to reproduce social life without them. The monuments on the World Heritage list are the material expression of male power or of technological, structural, or urbanistic developments led by men. We could use Foucault’s (1980) concept of dispositif to defend the idea that Material Heritage can be considered another one of the idea of Cultural through which the existence of the masculine power that has characterized history is naturalized. Attributing high social value to it, the subordinated groups sustain, unwittingly, the moral values of a capitalist and individualist society (the importance of power, richness, technology, etc.). It was not until the UNESCO Convention in 2003 that the concept of Intangible Heritage was launched, and it ended up creating something of a counterbalance to the absence of collective and popular traditions in the face of personalized or institutional power, as we will see at the end of this text. But, given its communal nature, the new category did not highlight or place value on the essential and specific contributions that women have made to the maintenance and reproduction of all human societies either. UNESCO, as an organism dedicated to promoting education, science, and culture within the United Nations, is conscious of that bias in representation, prominence, and attention that affects women (Settimini, 2021). In a report entitled “Gender Equality, Heritage and Creativity,” UNESCO declared:
The gender diagnosis of heritage and creativity identifies symptoms that are familiar in other areas of socio-economic life: limited participation of women in decision-making positions (the “glass ceiling”); segregation into certain activities (“glass walls”); restricted opportunities for ongoing training, capacity-building and networking; women’s unequal share of unpaid caregiving work; poor employment conditions (part-time, contractual work, informality etc.) as well as gender stereotypes and fixed ideas about culturally appropriate roles for women and men, not necessarily based on the consent of those concerned. Lack of sex-disaggregated cultural data is a factor concealing the gender gaps and challenges from policy-makers and decision-makers. UNESCO (2014: 134).
This type of unequal relationship seems difficult to avoid, in spite of the efforts of UNESCO itself, which, in 2005, created “Gender Focal Points” (GFPs): “persons who have been designated within an institution or organization to monitor and stimulate greater consideration of gender equality issues in daily operations” (UNESCO, 2005: 61). Numerous studies are now dedicated to resolving this bias (see, for example, the different projects and studies listed in Grahan and Wilson (2018) or Powerly and Braga da Silva (2020), and new projects by young researchers are focusing on this issue (for example, the International Meeting of Young Researchers in Tourism (RIJCT) focused on “Interrogating heritage and tourism processes through a gender perspective,” which was held online September 6–8, 2021 (https://calenda.org/855306?lang¼en). There are feminist projects to showcase urban buildings that hold particular significance for women (Reading, 2015; López Fernández Cao, 2016, 2022; Aerschot-van Haeverbeeck, 2016; Grahan and Wilson, 2018) or to value urbanism and habitable spaces differently, since the pioneer Jacobs (1961) questioned US urban planning policy in the 1950s. UNESCO itself recognized the need for a change in focus when it comes to urban landscapes when, in the Convention of 2011, it established the need to respect “the traditions and perceptions of local communities, while respecting the values of the national and international communities” (UNESCO, 2011: 3). For its part, there is an International Association of Women’s Museums (https://iawm.international/), “women’s itineraries” for several museums (López Fernández Cao and Fernández Valencia, 2018), and monographs in specialized journals (such as the one dedicated to “Gender Perspectives on Cultural Heritage and Museums” in the journal Museum 59 (4) in 2007 or the World Heritage journal dedicated to “World Heritage and Gender Equality,” from February 2016). But, achieving a profound transformation of the mainstream logic of Heritage Studies requires an awareness of the identity dynamics with which it was associated from the beginning and an understanding of the nature of the association between the idea of Heritage and the generalization of masculine individualization at the beginning of the modern era.
Key Issues: What Does Heritage Have to Do With Male Individualization? In my opinion, there is a profound ontological relationship between the increase in individualization among 19th century men (both in the degree of individuality and the number of individualized men) and the advent of the idea of Cultural Heritage. That relationship allows us to explain the androcentric nature it has had until now.
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To understand the role that Heritage plays in today’s cultural order, we must begin by analyzing how human beings construct identity. To do so, I will reference arguments developed extensively elsewhere (Hernando, 2012). The first thing that should be noted is that the reality in which we live is so complex, so immense that, if human beings were conscious of our smallness and our impotence, we would be overcome with a such a sense of angst that it could impede our survival. In order to prevent this, we have developed a series of mechanisms that allow us to believe we are strong, we are safe, and we are in sufficient control of the reality in which we live, no matter the actual material control we have over it. These mechanismsdwhich are nothing but the mechanisms of identitydvary, but they always emphasize a strong connection with the group to which we belong, as it is a fact that our personal survival depends on a collective effort. Only as part of a community are we able to feel strong and safe in the face of an immense universe. This means that, as human beings, we all develop a type of identity that is indispensable, which I will call “relational identity,” which is at the heart of who we are (Hernando, 2012; Fowler, 2016). This is the only form of identity that characterizes all people in the societies where there is no division of functions beyond those derived from the complementarity between men and women, which is present in all known societies (Murdock, 1967) and where there is not necessarily a power relationship. In these societies, every person knows who they are only to the extent that they are part of their social group (Hernando, 2012; also Fowler, 2016; Bird-David, 1999; LiPuma, 2000; Kashima et al., 1995). But when men began to occupy differentiated positions of power and work and, therefore, began to perceive difference among themselves, they began to combine (not to abandon, because it is indispensable) that relational identity with another type of identity, one that conceives the subject as someone autonomous and individual. Self-identity was beginning to emerge. In relational identity, people know who they are because they are the result of the combination of relationships that pass through them (as the son or daughter of, the husband or wife of, the father or mother of, etc.) (Leenhardt, 1979). They then construct and express that identity through a common appearance (constructed with the body and material culture), the rejection of changes (because they imply risk), and a strong connection to the territory they inhabit. Since there is no writing or map, people with relational identity are oriented only through the fixed and visible landmarks of the landscape surrounding them (that mountain, that rock, that bend in the river), which also tend to enjoy a sacred meaning. In these groups, all nature is considered sacred because it has more power than the social group, but the only way to explain its dynamics, in the absence of science, is human behavior (Hernando, 2002, 2012). For that reason, associated with relational identity, there is always a belief in the protection of a sacred authority, and this allows these groups to neutralize the angst that they could experience because of their lack of material control over the world. Since they have so little technological control, the only thing that gives them security is maintaining the form of life that they already know, so these groups (men and women) do not explain the present as the result of (undesirable) changes in the past, but as the unchanged repetition of the way of life that the sacred authority conveyed to them in the myth of origin. While modern society’s goal is to construct a present that measures up to the future we imagine, they aim to construct a future that measures up to the present they know. Any other possibility entails risk and is, therefore, dismissed. That is why the memory associated with relational identity is organized in a spatial, rather than temporal, fashion, favoring the idea of permanence and the feeling of unchanging time. The history of those groups is constructed through its association with landmarks in the landscape, which Santos-Granero (2004) called “topograms,” which can be “read” in different ordersdsuch an event happened next to this rock, at that bend in the river, beneath this tree, etc., without following a temporal sequence. We see then that, through the material culture and spatial landmarks with which memory is associated, the group constructs a “relational identity,” which is constructed as an indissoluble unit, and it neutralizes the angst that every person would experience if they felt alone in the face of an external world that they are unable to control. However, with the increase in the division of social functions and specialized work, men who occupied those differentiated positions were developing a new way of understanding themselves, a new type of identity that we call individuality. Gradually, in the same degree that they did things differently and had different positions of power, they felt logically different among themselves and they began trusting that the source of group security was the changes that they were fostering, rather than a sacred authority. As society began experiencing change as part of their activitiesdboth daily activities and life-changing eventsdthey stopped considering it a risk and, instead, began to see it as the condition of progress. In that way, little by little, the human group began thinking that their survival did not depend on their ability to preserve the way of life that the sacred authority had transmitted to them, but on decisions, personal agency, the use of reason, and the capacity for change wielded by the men leading the group. In this way, as masculine individuality and the technological control of the world advanced, social discourse changed, and memory began to be constructed through the temporal sequencing of changes experienced from the past and registered in written documents. The definitive replacement of Myth by History took place in the 19th century, when confidence in the technological and scientific capacity associated with the industrial revolution placed the security of the group definitively in the hands of men. Archaeology supported this by demonstrating that Western society had been changing since its very beginnings. This allowed the definitive construction of a “history” organized in temporal sequences. However, paradoxically, at that very moment, the idea of Heritage, which organizes memory through material and spatial landmarks and not in a sequential fashion, emerged. In other words, in connection with the inflection point in the development of masculine individuality that the industrial revolution entailed, and with the development of archaeology to confirm that change characterized the group from the beginning, a type of memory organized as a “topogram”, typical of relational identity, appeared. Does this not seem contradictory? As we have seen, individuality is governed by a logic that is structurally opposed to that of relational identity. For that reason, as men were developing traits of individualization, they spent less and less time and energy cultivating connections, caregiving, and belonging to the group. As they were in power and constructed the social discourse, they granted progressively less value to these
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aspects in the social imaginary, in spite of knowing that they were indispensable in their private lives. The nation-states were run by enlightened men, firmly convinced that the instrument of “progress” was the reason that they (not women) had developed (thus the denomination Homo sapiens that Carl Linnaeus gave our species, meaning “man who knows”). The recourse they used to guarantee belonging, without having to recognize its importance in the social discourse, was preventing women from becoming individualized (first, by limiting their mobility, and then, by preventing them from learning to read and write). This ensured that women would only hold the relational identity that previously characterized everyone in the group. Normative heterosexuality and gender complementarity came to sustain that power relationship: men attributed themselves with the capacity for agency, power, and reason, and women were left in charge of guaranteeing caregiving, connections, and belonging for men. One could say, therefore, that men “externalized” in women the guarantee of the construction of relational identity, while they were creating a discourse that only valued the ideals of individuality that they themselves represented. This is, in my opinion, the definition of the patriarchal order. It is an order that idealizes reason, technology, and individuality (embodied only by men until the onset of Modernity), and it denies the need for caregiving, belonging to a community, and healthy emotional connections (embodied by women) to feel ontological security. In fact, relational identity is so indispensable that men were not satisfied with simply “externalizing” its construction onto women. Instead, they themselves construct it without being conscious of it. Through peer groups, defined by sharing activities and appearancesdfor example, armies, sporting teams, professional associations, or associations of power (such as the suit and tie with which men are identified), men have guaranteed the construction of that which they do not recognize in the discourse they create. We live in a social order that maintains that it is personal agency, technological development, or the advance of science that gives security to our group, and personal success, professional triumph, riches, and the use of cutting-edge technology that gives security to the person. However, we all know that this is not the case, that neither triumph nor money nor social appearance give stability and personal security if we do not have anyone to love or anyone who loves us. Levels of depression and anxiety are rising in young people (Santomauro et al., 2021), and even suicides are increasing in that age group because of society’s growing individualism (Shain et al., 2016). The pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has made it clear that the “essential jobs,” without which society cannot live, are those dedicated to the care for and maintenance of society, and that lock-down and personal isolation have created a level of psychological suffering that can often be called traumatic (Benjamin et al., 2021). We all know that this is the case, but social discourse continues to say that security stems from technology, science, and the development of reason, because these are values in which men have been “specializing” throughout history. My argument is that the idea of Heritage constituted a new mechanism of the unrecognized or unconscious construction of relational identity between individualized men at the beginning of the modern era. Coinciding with the industrial revolution, the quantitative and qualitative increase in masculine individuality, and the appearance of the nation-state, women began to be individualized, as a result of their unstoppable access to writing and higher education. The suffragists began to demand equality of rights with men, revealing the existing contradiction between the principles of the Enlightenment that had served as the basis for the French Revolution (“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”) and the fact that those principles excluded women. This was a time when, simultaneously, masculine individuality was reaching previously unknown heights and women’s individualization could put at risk the relational support that they had represented for those men throughout history. It was at this very time, when the fantasy upon which the discourse that governed the social order was based could be unveiled, that the most individualized men, the leaders of the nation, invented the idea of Heritage, which is nothing but a mechanism dedicated to reinforcing (unconsciously) their relational identity, thus allowing them to continue constructing their fantasy of individuality. However, if Heritage appeared as a relational mechanism to encourage the feeling of belonging to the community of the most individualized men, then it would have to adopt the structure of myths: there would have to exist a protective authority, that could no longer be God (because those men understood the world rationally and entrusted the destiny of the group to their ability for personal agency) or bosses who determined it (because individuality is based, precisely, on the feeling of autonomy in the world, the feeling of non-subordination). It had to be an authority that allowed for neither hierarchy nor subordination, but in which, as with all protective authorities that serve to unite a human group, the essence of the group, that which is believed to differentiate them from others, was recognized. The protective authority could no longer be other than the image of their own social group, which represented itself through the material evidence that demonstrated the power of men, the grandiosity of their technological achievements, of their temples and palaces, of the urban complexes they knew how to design and manage. Like the myth, and unlike history, Heritage utilized objects and monuments to organize memory with spatial references, in the way the “topograms” did, rather than in a sequential temporal order, and it did it through the materiality of the objects, not through written documents. Heritage was only relevant for individualized men who no longer knew how to construct their own relational identity and needed to replace it through mechanisms that were neither recognized nor conscious. That is why it is a male-oriented activity, as Smith (2008: 159) pointed out, that did not, until recently, pay attention to evidence of women’s activities or contributions. It is for that reason that it has no meaning for men with less specialized jobs or less education, who are, therefore, less individualized in our society. Neither does it hold meaning for indigenous, native, or simply less individualized groups, because they do know how to build relational identity and they do place importance on caregiving and connections in their daily lives.
Summary and Future Directions Modern identity is essentially contradictory because those who access higher education and specialized jobs are forced to reconcile two modes of identity that are structurally opposed: individuality and relational identity. Women never stopped cultivating their
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relational identity even when they became individualized in modern times, because men were not socialized to guarantee it for women, so, since they knew it was essential (and that it constituted the source of gratification and the meaning of life), women combined both forms of identity to feel empowered and secure. Because of this, their lives rest upon a constant attempt to balance their ability to have agency and their ability to provide care, their search for professional projects and emotional connections, the recognition of their strength and their fragility. Individualized patriarchal men, who correspond to the portrait of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005), exist with the same contradiction, although they conceal their relational necessity and “externalize” it onto women or peer groups. Undoubtedly, in recent generations, some men, belonging especially to alternative social environments, have begun to defend the importance of relations and caregiving, thus suffering consequently the same contradiction that defines women’s lives. The problem is that the sociopolitical order is controlled by men who continue to idealize the values associated with individuality. The internet is creating an exponential increase in our ability for abstraction and people’s separation and isolation, and in this sense, we can presume the intensification of the individualist neoliberal order. This would presumably be accompanied by an increase in the importance of Cultural Heritage as a mechanism of relational compensation. In fact, the original concept of Heritage associated with the nation-states was expanded to the concept of World Heritage in 1972 (UNESCO, 1972), when Globalization (and the decolonization processes) started to weaken the idea of the nation-state. It is now the globalized world that constitutes people’s frame of action and of relationships, and people are increasingly individualized, since they connect through the internet. In recent years, as we saw at the beginning, researchers with a gender-based perspective have begun to identify significant sites for women, demanding that they be recognized in terms of Heritage. In general, any Encyclopedia of Heritage includes an article dedicated to this recuperation (Smith, 2008; Reading, 2015; Shortliffe, 2016; Grahan and Wilson, 2018; Powderly and Braga da Silva, 2020). However, it is not easy to get them included on the “list” of places recognized as part of World Heritage and, in any case, they constitute the exception allowed in order to confirm the norm of the monumental spaces that express creativity, richness, or the power associated with men from any group around the world. Parallel to those efforts to incorporate places associated with women’s activities or events, there is a movement in archaeology dedicated to “Maintenance Activities” (González Marcén et al., 2008). They aim to bring to light the importance of activities realized by women to sustain life and society, in other words, the transcendental importance of activities associated with relational identity. These activities are referring “to routine, recurrent, and quotidian practices that are essential to social continuity, stability, and wellbeing” (Montón-Subías and Hernando Gonzalo, 2022: 3), and they include basic, non-specialized activities related to foodprocessing, textile manufacture, hygiene, health and healing, the socialization and rearing of children, the provision of care, and the arrangement of living spaces. When archaeological research seeks evidence of these activities in the past, it completes and even transforms the very foundations of historic discourse. This research confirms that true social change did not occur when designs or typologies of the lavish material culture associated with the elites (tombs, weapons, tableware, etc.) were modified, but when daily routines shifted (see, for example, Brumfield, 2006). Undoubtedly, this trend of recognizing the importance of the relational includes the category of Intangible Cultural Heritage that was introduced by UNESCO in 2003. In that year’s Convention, it was defined as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skillsdas well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewithdthat communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage” (see article 2 point 1 in UNESCO, 2003). This Intangible Cultural Heritage forms part of the traditions of the group, which are reproduced and transmitted over generations. These are, certainly, practices associated with the construction of relational identity, including not only men, but also women. However, if we observe the practices integrated into the UNESCO (2021) list, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of them are from outside of the Western world (generally coming, therefore, from more “relational” societies), with the lightest sprinkling of European examples. This means that the “relational” is still associated with other cultures, not our own, although it is equally necessary in all of them. In fact, it can even be said that several of the European manifestations (such as Falconry, Alpinism, “The art of dry stone walling, knowledge and techniques” or the “Transhumance, the seasonal droving of livestock along migratory routes in the Mediterranean and in the Alps,” to mention just a few examples) find men in the leading role, and they are certainly not routine activities for sustaining the social order, which is the crucial contribution that women have made to history. In spite of this, I continue to emphasize that Intangible Heritage represents a step forward in recognizing community or collective values that are not associated with the individualizing values of power. Along those same lines, the decision at the 1972 Convention (UNESCO, 1972) to protect “natural sites” and the recommendations of the “Faro Convention,” that was held in that Portuguese city in 2005 are worth recognizing. At the “Faro Convention,” the Council of Europe established “that objects and places are not, in themselves, what is important about cultural heritage. They are important because of the meanings and uses that people attach to them and the values they represent.” Consequently, it “promotes a wider understanding of heritage and its relationship to communities and society” (Council of Europe, 2005). In conclusion, the relationship between gender and heritage is troubled because of the function that Heritage fulfilled when it appeared. This was related to the industrial revolution and the birth of the modern nation-states. After everything seen above, we could say that Heritage is a resource used by individualized people (which, in the beginning, only included men) to represent the essence of their social group and to be able to maintain (in an unconscious and therefore unrecognized fashion) their connection to a group of belonging. In this sense, it fulfills the same function that the gender relationship has fulfilled throughout history, guaranteeing men the construction of relational identity, which they were losing the ability to cultivate by themselves as they individualized. The idea of Cultural Heritage appears when men achieve a very high degree of individuality and women begin to become individualized, threatening to stop fulfilling the support role that is essential for patriarchal men. This can also explain why Heritage
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studies are increasing their importance in social and academic discourse as the neoliberal society deepens the idealization of individualist values and fails to recognize the values of community and caregiving. That is why it is essential to become aware of the values that are associated with the sites that are, now and into the future, considered deserving of being included on the Heritage list. Because if a gender-based perspective is not introduced, we all run the risk of unwittingly sustaining the social discourse of our non-solidary and neoliberal order through the support to one of the (unconscious) mechanisms that their highly individualized leaders have used to compensate their lack of relational identity, that in this way, will be kept unveiled. And if this is the case, we will, without realizing, be fostering a social order that will continue to rest upon gender domination and a political regime in which social inequalities (class, ethnicity, race, etc.) will be perpetuated and increased.
See Also: Feminist Archaeology; Gender and Queer Archaeology; Identity and Power.
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Archaeological Heritage Values and Significance Margarita Dı´az-Andreua,b,c and Ana Pastor Pe´reza,b,d, a Institut d’Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; b Departament de Història i Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; c Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain; and d Cultural Heritage Management Group, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview: Erasing the Processual Traces of Archaeological Values Key Issues: Evolution of Archaeological Values The Arrival of Cultural Significance From Landscape Archaeology to Natural Values The Critical Turn That Accompanies Materiality Challenging the Empiric Nature of Archaeological Heritage Values Through Social Practice Summary and Future Directions References
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Early studies and categories around the value of archaeological heritage. Critical analysis of the history of heritage values applied to archaeological practice. Main changes in the conceptualization of archaeological value and cultural significance: positivist and commodified values vs. dynamized hermeneutical values. Transversality of values in natural heritage and landscape archaeology. The ontological turn toward the things and the influence of materiality on values. The socialization of archaeological heritage and methods of understanding social value. Methods for ascertaining the values of archaeological heritage.
Abstract This entry presents a review of the heritage values that come into play in the field of heritage and archaeological practice. Throughout time, the different categories of values identified by heritage experts have been changing and adapting in pace with the ontological turns that archaeology has undergone, moving from positivist categories to others that are more dynamic and better socially situated. The relevance of the concept of cultural significance for heritage values, which was configured more than fifty years ago, will also be explored encompassing value criteria.
Introduction For the last four decades, the discussion of values, a key issue in the field of heritage management, has engaged experts from many different disciplines including archaeologists, architects, anthropologists, urban specialists, conservators and heritage managers (Avrami and Mason, 2019; Clark, 2019; Fredheim and Khalaf, 2016). In this article an overview of the evolution of the perception of archaeological heritage value will be presented. Issues to be stressed will be the evolution in conceptualization (Landa and Giancarlo, 2020), accessibility and democratization of cultural and natural heritage and the birth of its management strategies. As will be seen, in recent decades heritage practices have become more democratized, moving from prioritizing intrinsic, tangible, static values, to much more dynamic, multi-temporal values in which there is scope for a multi-faceted dimension allowing the same place or object to hold multiple meanings for different individuals (Tamm and Olivier, 2019). In this study the focus will be on archaeological practice, addressing the changes heritage values have gone through by also looking at the evolution of archaeological theory. In this way it will be possible to enter into an interdisciplinary ecosystem and a landscape of multitemporal archaeological sites, objects and places that seek to generate narratives and discourses that are integrated into the social problems of the present. The first question to be debated relates to the consideration, from an archaeological point of view, of the value of the past for its own sake. The lack of objectivity toward it is something implied by the theoretical turn suggested by post-processual currents in archaeology (Carver, 1996: 45), as well as the birth of the concept of “cultural significance” in the Burra Charter in 1979 (ICOMOS Australia, 2013a). The archaeological discipline itself attends to an ontology of things, which could be understood as transmitters of a past value, or as containers of values and meanings that arise from their own existence and functions throughout their useful life.
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Furthermore, each of these objects or things, or even architectural remains, have a contextual development that evolves and is transformed over time and space. Moreover, their interpretation also varies depending on time, currents of thought or the individuals who write about them. This polysemic character of archaeological heritage brings the perception of value into a complex scenario which, in turn, has prompted more global reflections on cultural heritage, such as those proposed by Laurajane Smith in the 2000s (Smith, 2006). Studies around the materiality of archaeological objects, understood as an exploration that transcends the matter of the object itself and places it on a triadic plane that includes space, time and action, are fundamental for understanding the epistemic framework configured by Smith (2006) who proposes cultural heritage as a process and as a social construction. Throughout this text readers will be invited to reflect on the evolution of the ideas of value and heritage that have been most considered in archaeological practice from the second half of the 20th century to the present day.
Overview: Erasing the Processual Traces of Archaeological Values In 1996 and 2003 Martin Carver reviewed some earlier texts about archaeological value written in English. The author critically reviewed Lipe (1984) and Darvill (1988) regarding the notions of reification, commodification and sustainability of archaeological remains in the field of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) (Darvill, 1994: 62). In his articles Carver reflected on the democratization of archaeology and the commodification of archaeological heritage, topics that permeated a good part of the later (Lafrenz Samuels, 2008) and more recent (Parga-Dans et al., 2016) academic work in this area. For Carver (1996) the categories of values proposed by Lipe (1984) (informational, economic, esthetic and associative), could be perfectly integrated into the attributes that archaeology confers on “things” (or heritage), since, through archaeological praxis, these values would be increased (Carver, 1996, 46). Carver thus proposed a revealing list of values (Table 1) that later authors, such as John Carman, typified as “economic” (2005, 51), meaning with this that they form part of the evolution of heritage sites from politicized or commodified spaces into significant, democratized or socialized spaces. These papers were the germ of a comprehensive and reflective publication edited by archaeologists Clay Mathers, Timothy Darvill and Barbara J. Little, in which a number of authors reflected on the value and social dimension of cultural heritage from an archaeological perspective (Mathers et al., 2005: 2). This discussion has continued throughout the years, with a recent example being the article by Kajda et al. (2018) resulting from the NEARCH project. In the latter article Kadja and colleagues argued that social value was essential in archaeology, meaning that the transfer of archaeological knowledge to the public should become a priority (Kajda et al., 2018). Importantly, in the last two decades, the discussion on heritage values has been framed into a reflective work. This has revolved around the value of knowledge and the social role of archaeology as an antidote in a present labeled as neoliberal by many (Lafrenz Samuels, 2008; Zorzin, 2021). If we compare the categories that we have compiled in Table 1 with those considered today (Table 2), it is possible to see that the social value of archaeological heritage has been growing in importance. It is possible to say that the very concept of value is linked to archaeological heritage in terms of its commodification and the destination and prioritization of resources for its preservation. In this sense conservation has been a recurring theoretical axis in the idea of heritage valorization (Schiffer and Gumerman, 1977). Against this commodification, critical positions in archaeological heritage have vindicated heritage valorization as a social construction, therefore, characterizing it by more polysemic values. In this respect, in 2005 Laurajane Smith argued that archaeological significance is a processual concept, since “for archaeologists, the significance of material culture often lies in its usefulness or lack of usefulness as data for research” (Smith, 2005: 77). She referred to processualism mentioning that archaeologists were concerned “with ensuring that scientific values were legally recognized and differentiated from public perceptions about the value of heritage objects” (Smith, 2005: 78–79). The author, citing Bowdler (1981), also mentions that the values of archaeological heritage are transformed depending on who and how archaeological research questions are formulated, and how they evolve (Smith, 2005: 79). Laurajane Smith’s work represented a before and an after in the conceptualization and valuation of archaeological heritage, and a beginning of the configuration of participatory methodologies for its management (Waterton, 2015). Table 1
Some of the early theorized values for archaeological heritage after Carver (1996).
Lipe (1984)
Darvill (1988)
Informational (research)
Use
Market values
Economic (price in the market)
Option
Community values
Esthetic (contemporary appeal) Associative (sentiment, familiarity, other values)
Existence
Human values
Authors’ elaboration.
Carver (1996) Values for the use of the land Capital Production Commercial Residential Amenity Political Minority/disadvantaged Local style value Environmental Archaeological
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List of values that can be applied to archaeology and archaeological practice mentioned in publications since 2010.
ICOMOS New Zealand charter for the interpretation Barreiro and Criado value chain for the world and presentation of cultural heritage sites (2010) heritage site of Altamira Cave (2015)
Fouseki et al. codification of an expert’s survey on heritage values ( 2020)
Esthetical Archaeological Architectural Commemorative Functional Historical
Esthetical Option/legacy Documental Existence Instrumental Economical
Landscape Monumental
Pedagogical Political
Nostalgia and memories Tradition Criteria/attributes/the whys Types and typologies Significance Process/construct Intrinsic Thing Benefits Significance Narratives and meanings Human needs/beliefs/morals
Scientific Social Spiritual Symbolic Technological Traditional
In recent years, decolonial and anti-academic theoretical methodological currents (de Sousa Santos, 2017) have been driven by theoretical positions contrary to cultural extractivism (Grosfogel, 2016). By cultural extractivism it is meant that actions and knowledge that emerge from the communities for their own benefit, are phagocytized by, particularly, academia. Against cultural extractivism some authors involved in community and public archaeology advocate the need of democratizing the area of heritage and archaeological management (Jones, 2017; Richardson and Almansa, 2015). Moreover, the concept of “significance” has also been questioned, describing it as a word at the service of the most rational or commodifying managers of heritage, as opposed to the sense of place in multi-layered narratives driven by works around archaeological materiality (DeSilvey and Harrison, 2020; Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2018). In the framework of the discussions about extractivism and significance, the remaining pages of this work will analyze the relationship between archaeology, heritage and values. In the following sections, we will find how those “entangled” ideas move from one place to another in dialectical transitions (Lesh, 2019). Following the initial lines of Lipe (1984), Darvill (1988) or Carver (1996), scales of value within the values attributed to archaeological heritage (Klamer, 2014) will also be addressed.
Key Issues: Evolution of Archaeological Values The earliest values endorsed by the first heritage managers in the 19th and early 20th centuries were those related to art and history (Díaz-Andreu, 2007). Since then, however, the value of archaeological objectsdincluding monuments of the pastdhas been mutating over time, and today it is considered to be multifaceted. To these changes we can link its scientific potential, esthetic features and, in some cases, its identity role in the construction of historical discourses and narratives. In addition, the extrinsic or intrinsic nature of these values is related to a multiplicity of more or less authorized contexts, times and meanings. These will be addressed in the following sections.
The Arrival of Cultural Significance When discussing heritage values, it is inevitable not to begin by addressing the work of the heritage manager and theorist Aloïs Riegl. For him objects and monuments were to be preserved if they had survived the passage of time or if they were the result of techniques that reflected the evolution of human manufacturing skill or craftsmanship (Riegl, 1903, see also Baldwin Brown, 2011 [1905]). Both Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905) and also theorist and historian of art Gerard Baldwin Brown (1849–1932), explicitly used the terms “worth” and “value” (or “Wert,” its German equivalent). This term did not imply economic worth for them, which was a departure from the semantic field most commonly used up to that time. Since then, artistic and historical values have maintained their importance throughout the decades. Yet, as will be seen below, the way of understanding these two values has changed dramatically. More than half a century later it is possible to see how the UNESCO Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage of 1972 was still marked by the early 20th century understanding of historical and esthetic values. The first World Heritage inscriptions showed a clear bias toward monumentality and, in particular, toward the “grandiose” and “esthetic” sites of the Western world (Cleere, 2001; Akagawa and Smith, 2018). Yet, a transformation in the way of understanding these values was soon to come. This had a prelude: eight years before the signing of the World Heritage Convention of 1972, ICOMOS had launched the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites signed in Venice, most commonly
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known as the Venice Charter of 1964. In its first article the charter emphasized the importance of cultural significance in the decisions related to the preservation of monuments for the benefit of future generations. The new relevance of the concept of “cultural significance” soon led to the transformation of how values were perceived. This happened in Australia in 1979 (see ICOMOS, 2013a). On that year the members of ICOMOS Australia met in Burra to discuss how to adapt the Venice Charter of 1964 to their own circumstances and the difficulties this entailed resulted in a new charter. The so-called Burra Charter fostered a radical shift in the definition of heritage values. At the core of this change was the addition of social and cultural values to those considered up to that point. This meant the transition from a more traditional, detached and static consideration of heritage values to an inclusion of context and dynamism. The radicalism of this proposal meant that, from then on, beyond grandiose monuments, heritage experts would be able to consider “modest works that have acquired cultural significance over time” (ICOMOS, 1964, 1). The 1979 Burra Charter, although initially limited to Australia, eventually revolutionized the way of approaching the evaluation process worldwide. The Burra Charter also discussed scientific value in archaeology (ICOMOS Australia, 2013a), a term that in other countries such as New Zealand is named “archaeological” value and is included in a list of values (ICOMOS New Zealand, 2010) (Table 2). Scientific value is a complex term difficult to delimit, and Holtorf (2013) rightly argues that it is related to the study of the materiality of the object. This is because, depending on the time or the state of the ongoing investigation, the remains will have one role or another. About “scientific value” the Burra Charter states that it “will depend upon the importance of the data involved, on its rarity, quality or representativeness, and on the degree to which the place may contribute further substantial information” (ICOMOS Australia, 2013a). Later, in another text that was only published in 2013, “The Burra Charter and the Archaeological Practice” (ICOMOS Australia, 2013b, also known as Practice Note), it is mentioned that “archaeologists have a strong background in the identification and analysis of material culture. Therefore, they often bring a fabric-based approach to archaeological sites. This Practice Note recognizes that places with archaeological significance (especially, but not limited to, places associated with Indigenous cultures) can also embody social and spiritual values” (ICOMOS Australia, 2013b: 1).
From Landscape Archaeology to Natural Values One of the most interesting facets of the evolution of heritage values in archaeology is the connections this has with the transformations taking place in archaeological theory and practice. The importance of natural landscapes in heritage was parallel to an increasing interest in spatial archaeology. In the 1970s and 1980s archaeologists turned their gaze to the territory in which archaeological sites were inserted and to the spatial relationships in the archaeological sites themselves. Archaeologists paid attention to scale: sites, site systems and their environments, and mapped elements and activities linked to them. This occurred in the advent of the processual movement with Trigger (1967), Clarke (1977) and Hodder (1977). One of the objectives of spatial archaeology was to link material culture, its environment and society, in order to understand social relations. Of particular interest is the diachronic study written by (Ashmore, 2002) about the social meaning of spatial archaeology. Ashmore has argued that, synergically, while social sciences paid more attention to space, those disciplines that focused on space started to pay more attention to social issues (Ashmore, 2000: 1173). In the view of anthropologist Tim Ingold, these theoretical changes led archaeologists to work from multitemporal interdisciplinary perspectives, i.e. one in which the contexts were mutating and constructing diverse social memories (Ingold, 1993). This, as will be seen later, would have an impact on the perceptions of value and the configuration of values associated with the landscapes and ecosystems that surround archaeological sites (Dalglish, 2012). It is not a coincidence that part of the postulates in archaeological theory and practice were promoted at the same time that, in the field of heritage, there was a transformation in the way values were understood. A good way to see them is to look at international legislation. The 1972 UNESCO Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention), already mentioned above, combined natural and cultural heritage, internationalizing in this way such a link between culture and nature (UNESCO, 1972). The aim of this convention was to protect cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value that is of importance for the present and future generations of all humankind (UNESCO, 1998). Other regulations followed: in 1992 the European Council indicated the importance of landscape in archaeological practice in the “Convention for the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage of Europe (Valetta, Malta)” (Council of Europe, 1992). In it the “context” in the levels of protection of archaeological heritage (understood as the territory in which the sites are located) was given a key importance. It is also possible to mention the “Council of Europe Landscape Convention (Florence, Italy)” (Council of Europe, 2002) and the Faro Convention on the value of cultural heritage that is intimately linked to the concepts of landscape, natural heritage, biodiversity and environmental issues (Council of Europe, 2005). All these international documents, apart from generating a common awareness of the importance of identifying and preserving contexts, indicated a series of values associated with them. Giving value to nature was often combined with the human presence in the area. Thus, the appreciation of these landscapes was often accompanied by anthropological and ethnological values (Tilley and Cameron-Daum, 2017), as well as by an interest in archaeology and academic significance (David and Thomas, 2016: 33). In the last few years, the valorization of current human practices in contexts sometimes considered as rural environments is giving rise to forms of interpretation that go beyond archaeological remains and also focuses on human values (Mallarach and Verschuuren, 2019). The composition of landscapes of multiple elements that heritage experts sometimes value separately is increasingly contested, while dynamic and contextual cultural values are growingly given greater relevance (Tilley and Cameron-Daum, 2017). In 2017, ICOMOS presented the document “concerning rural landscape as heritage” stating that “all rural areas can be read as heritage, both outstanding and ordinary, traditional and recently transformed by modernization activities: heritage can be present in different types and degrees and related to many historical periods, like a palimpsest” (ICOMOS, 2017, 3). In relation
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to this, environmentalists Mallarach and Verschuuren (2019) recently pointed out that the acknowledgment of conflicting relationships between society and the environment, in addition to studies of utilitarian or economic values and intangible cultural and spiritual values, are key to the conservation of natural heritage. Their study focuses on the lines developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and UNESCO. The authors stress that human-environment relationships require new conceptualizations and the need for integrated and coordinated approaches to heritage conservation (Mallarach and Verschuuren, 2019), something that also affects the archaeological context.
The Critical Turn That Accompanies Materiality In line with the shift in archaeological theory, it is important to note that the gradual abandonment of historicist theoretical positions in favor of others that are more hermeneutical, has led archaeology to expand its ways regarding interpretation. It has also led archaeologists to reconsider the value of the past in the present, acting as a reflective science (Miller, 1994). Discussions have focused on defining how studies of the peculiarities of different contexts have allowed us to move beyond static, impermeable, cryonized narratives configured around intrinsic, material values, given to heritage by the mere fact of its existence (Darvill, 1998). In the 2000s, trends in theoretical archaeology led to more social, dynamic and inclusive heritage values aligned to the understanding and definition of heritage as a cultural process (Rosas Mantecón, 2005). This view of heritage as a social construct affects archaeological heritage very closely (Harvey, 2001). This, in itself, serves as a witness to how this construction process takes place, connecting past and present, and is linked to an archaeological practice that has become situational, contextual and primarily interested in social issues that go beyond its historical or esthetic attributes. Material and/or historical values mostly identified with an instrumental legacy (Ballart et al., 1996), i.e. associated with specific uses, are being transformed into dynamic or kinetic values by different multidisciplinary actors (de la Torre, 2002, 3; Pastor Pérez and Díaz-Andreu, 2022). The depreciation of tangible values, the only values once taken into consideration, has led to an emphasis on the more intangible aspects of cultural heritage, as well as on their meaning and significance (de la Torre, 2013). The concept of “authenticity” (ICOMOS, 1994) in archaeological heritage is now understood as situational. This means that whether something is considered as heritage or not depends to a large extent on how it is perceived not only by experts but also by the members of the community concerned and on the values that are agreed among them. As discussed in the introduction, the heritage values that came into play thanks to the critical turn in current archaeological narratives have allowed us to understand them in the context of their social use, mutability and the multivocality of archaeological contexts in space-time (Meskell and Preucel, 2007). As Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels (2008, 72) argued, archaeological judgments may have the effect of creating stories that she defines as (un)authorized because of their one-sided nature. To combat these (un)authorized discourses, critical heritage experts promote an emphasis on the values that attach archaeological objects or things with their social use (Harrison, 2011). This social dimension of archaeology, which includes studies applied to the contemporary world, linked to the concept of materiality, is the one that prevails today and with which many experts who work in the field of archaeological and cultural heritage identify (Endere et al., 2018; Haber, 2016; Harrison et al., 2020). In line with the arguments above, it may be worth commenting on the poster created by artists Frederik and Katie Hayne for the symposium “(In)significance: a discussion about values and valuing in heritage” organized by the University of Canberra (see Ireland et al., 2020: 824, Fig. 1). The poster depicted flint flakes with the words: important, boring, natural, masterpiece, traditional, exemplary, outstanding, and, revealingly, insignificant, ugly and fake. The poster criticized the decontextualized valorization of material culture of a positivist nature, following it with pejorative adjectives such as “ugly” or giving a nod to the criticized universal values that are applied in World Heritage (Brown et al., 2019). Coming from the field of decolonial critical studies, the symposium organizers questioned the official discourses of value suggested by the authorities that Smith (2006) had classified as authorized, in pursuit of values produced by society. It would be possible to argue that, in the view of the poster’s creators, these values, or value
Fig. 1 Photo taken by a volunteer (Hugo García) during a community archaeology activity to decide where to start excavating at a contemporary archaeological site in Catalonia. University of Barcelona Public Archaeology and Heritage Group.
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categories (represented by the adjectives given to the flint flakes), are in tension with each other. In line with this, Tracy Ireland, Steve Brown and John Schofield argue that, if one wants to work in a sustainable line that promotes social justice, new value narratives should be established (2020: 824). These should arise from a bottom-up archaeology (Faulkner, 2000) managed by and for the communities. Yet, if we understand community as a polysemous concept (Appadurai, 2001) and not as a univocal entity, we should expect multivocal discourses from it. This will lead archaeologists and heritage managers to consider the different points of view of a community in a diverse way. Furthermore, it should be taken into account that there may be several stakeholders in the community, or even several stakeholder communities, with different and opposing views about the values of the object or landscape, which one or more of these communities consider to be archaeological heritage. Working with communities has become a complex issue.
Challenging the Empiric Nature of Archaeological Heritage Values Through Social Practice This final section will reflect on the current social facets linked to archaeological heritage. In recent decades there has been an increase in participatory and informative actions that attempt to overcome academic limits (Díaz-Andreu, 2017). The birth of community archaeology (Moser et al., 2002) is linked to heritage management and the denominator or umbrella term that we know today as public archaeology, a discipline committed to social values in archaeology, although not without certain difficulties (Gould, 2016). There are many examples that illustrate that heritage practitioners in the field of public heritage are increasingly attempting to generate more horizontal spaces for the creation and co-creation of knowledge, as well as management models where there is a series of multivocal organisms or entities that prevent discourses based on cultural appropriation, or narratives that are not agreed with the surrounding communities (Fig. 1). Regarding the heritage values that act in these consensual actions, Faye Simpson conducted an interesting exploration of the value of community archaeology, highlighting that, for a project of this type, the intrinsic value of the findings lags behind the social value of participation (Simpson, 2009, 55). In line with this, she argued that the community of experts needs to take into account that archaeological heritage may have undergone significant changes over time, both physical and interpretative, and that these have profound implications for how heritage properties are used, conserved, interpreted and appreciated. In her view, knowledge transfer and its appropriation by the communities in a sustainable way, beyond a mere educational value, becomes the most valuable or relevant part of these community projects. It could also be argued that in community excavations the way in which archaeological methodology is transmitted, shared, and applied may be as important, of the same “value” as the discoveries themselves. In this type of actions, academics may have to slow down their rate of work, as the scientific value (understood from its most positivist perspective) will not be widely associated with the finds, types of soil and structures, but rather to the degree of commitment and transfer that is achieved with the participants during the activity (Salerno, 2013). A review of the different values proposed by Faye Simpson and some comments can be seen in Table 3. In it, the values linked to the socialization of archaeological practice in the form of community and participatory archaeology actions, have now placed communities or individuals at the center of their actions (Pastor Pérez et al., 2021; Tantaleán and Aguilar, 2013). They all encompass the common meanings of understanding archaeological heritage also as a social construct that depends not only on academic stakeholders, but it is permanently linked to public funding. Academia should have a duty to ensure that economic and political priorities do not overshadow educational and social practices. In this respect, many archaeologists are exploring the different polyhedral societies that make up the inhabitants of the environments, attempting to cooperate with the maximum number of social stakeholders (Vienni, 2014). In this way, archaeologists work with anthropologists, sociologists, and other local agents, and try to critically understand the social dimension of the methods of valuing heritage, so that the different meanings are not silenced (Dragouni and Fouseki, 2018). Apart from questioning who has been able to achieve this, or how value attributions have been exercised, systems are investigated allowing narratives to be woven that decolonize knowledge (García Canclini, 2010) and are based on ethnographic work (Edgeworth, 2013; Hamilakis, 2016). There is an increasing interest in the generation of multivocal narratives, adding voices to archaeological interpretation and using archaeology as an element for discussing the problems of today’s world. It is now the time, it could be argued, to add to the list of archaeological values that of the “value of care” (see on the ethics of care, Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). This new value would assist in the generation of inclusive and shared discourses promoting diversity through multi-temporal and multi-vocal stories. This new value would encourage people to feel that a single place can contain multiple meanings, far from being commercialized centers that reproduce the values of economic and political power (Massey, 1991).
Summary and Future Directions Today, archaeology plays a key role in shaping present and future responses to social challenges. Specialized fields have emerged, such as public and community archaeology, that explore the links between contemporary communities and archaeological knowledge. Archaeologists have adopted methods that examine multi-temporal scenarios, broadening understandings of the past by generating inclusive narratives for archaeological sites that encompass a wide range of chronologies and identities. Current trends attempt to integrate these diverse stories, moving beyond a single, dominant discourse. This democratization of archaeological discourse has been accompanied by changes in the perception of archaeology itself. It has been argued that archaeology emerges not only as a discipline, but also as an (in)voluntary active agent in the generation of material culture. The material generated through archaeological practice can be considered cultural heritage, making it apt for value analysis. Contemporary archaeological
Archaeological Heritage Values and Significance Table 3
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Values in community archaeology according to Faye Simpson and some reflections by the authors. Values for community archaeology Simpson (2009)
Value
Challenges pointed out by Faye Simpson
Reflective thoughts by Dı´az-Andreu and Pastor Pe´rez
Social
Communities are not created through archaeological practice, but already exist. Participation and degrees of commitment are often irregular, and participation superficial. A large majority of the public is not interested in excavating.
Educational
The educational value of participatory archaeology can be defined as very positive, since it creates awareness of the practice and preservation of future archaeological workspaces. It generates a desire to learn more about an archaeological site and other spaces.
Economic
Free the community from public spending on excavation.
Political
Community archaeology can increase the interest of public bodies in investing in archaeology and see its socialization as something positive in their work schedules.
The social value of archaeology is unquestionable, but sometimes archaeologists have configured their discourses in a top-down way, without prior knowledge of the communities. Social value is currently including a higher degree of mutating in transversality and dynamism. Knowing the community allows actions to be generated that can be integrated into its needs. From our point of view, this knowledge transfer value is vital in archaeological practice. We are increasingly overcoming the positivist vision of the expert archaeologist as the only generator of knowledge, opening ourselves up to new challenges of knowledge co-creation. The economic value should not be allowed to impact even more on a precarious sector already punished by the different economic crises. The socialization of archaeology should not be based on free and voluntary labor and new interdisciplinary models should be explored. This should be a priority line for both value studies and management in archaeology. Political value is indisputable in the history of all archaeological practices, in part because funding depends directly on political practice. On the more communal side, it is a very prominent resource for local governments to exemplify the promotion of culture. It is a value that in many cases is used for exclusionary purposes since biased narratives and discourses can be generated.
interactions and discourses are closely connected with activities in related fields, such as cultural resource management. These connections have led to the emergence of studies on the value of both archaeological remains and the discipline’s own interactions. As seen in this text, the ideas of heritage values and cultural significance have evolved, as has, in parallel, the discipline of archaeology. In addition, these have been aligned with many of the proposals from critical heritage studies. The creation of heritage values emerged as a result of the studies that explore CRM (Cultural Resource Management) and the (neo-)liberal view of archaeological heritage as a resource to be exploited or commercialized. These changes were also closely linked to the theoretical-practical shifts in archaeology and also to a commitment to interdisciplinarity in branches of the humanities and social sciences. There is now a new scenario in which timeless archaeological values are linked to experience rather than material culture. Artifacts or objects are now primarily seen as the medium through which culture is produced and reproduced and not an embodiment of culture. In line with this, archaeological heritage values are the result of the interaction between the archaeological heritage and its social, economic and historical contexts. This recognizes that value-forming factors are primarily outside the object itself, in its contexts, and that these are determinant in shaping social and identity processes in the present.
See Also: Archaeology, Heritage and Globalization; Restitution of Collections: An Appraisal.
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Archaeology, Heritage and Globalization O. Hugo Benavidesa, Patricia Ayalab, and Marı´a Fernanda Ugaldec, a Fordham University, New York, NY, United States; b Universidad de Chile, Centro de Estudios Interculturales e Indígenas-CIIR, Santiago, Chile; and c Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador / Museum Rietberg, Zürich, Switzerland © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues The Contribution of Heritage to Power Dynamics and Forms of Inequalities: Atacameño Case Study Heritage, Diversity and Cultural Debts: Female and LGBTIQþ Case Study Heritage Production Through Social Memory and Historical Legacies: Hawaiian Case Study Summary and Future Directions References
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The dissident production of heritage is discussed, emphasizing the role of critical voices of heritage in the construction of counter-hegemonic interpretations that expose asymmetries of power and struggles within the process. The relationship between heritage and national narratives is problematized, discussing how heritage is embedded in the historical legitimization of national formations (state or otherwise) and the validation of different forms of social and political power and/or identifications. The focus of the analysis is based on unauthorized heritage discourses to make them more visible and to address the power relations and conflicts that give rise to heritage claims, official or not.
Abstract This entry addresses the interconnection between heritage production, globalization, and local identities. It focuses on the varying social and historical landscape of differing archaeologies, Indigenous struggles, social movements, contested monuments and practices, identity construction, as well as differing architectural and urban settings in the world today. Through the discussion of three case studies, it highlights the role heritage plays in the global processes of historical legitimization of national formations (state and otherwise) and the validation of different forms of social and political power.
Introduction The entry explores the interconnection between heritage production, globalization, and local and transnational identities. In the current political reality of a new war in Europe, increased immigration flows, new old global markets, etc., it seems vital to recognize and examine the valuable cultural and historical contributions of heritage to current and past globalizing efforts. The entry also provides an analysis through several case studies of how heritage and identities both affect and are continuously reproduced through their relationship with pervasive globalizing elements such as governing colonial legacies, ever-present Indigenous struggles, and modern social movements, all vying for historical legitimization and political validation. More specifically, the entry engages heritage as a dynamic, contemporary, and integrated social process of history-in-the-making. Traditional descriptions of heritage in archaeology still tend to provide a monolithic and commodity-based understanding of the concept, and one that is mainly composed and constituted by archaeological sites and historical monuments. This entry proposes a more relational and human-oriented approach, emphasizing how heritage production is embedded and develops within broader social notions of globalization and localized forms of identity production. We have highlighted several of these areas of production through our case studies, not exhaustive in any way but merely as emblematic of the complex manners in which heritage, identity and globalization intersect archaeologically. Three different case studiesdthe inequality in the scientific treatment of the dead in Atacameño territory, the ongoing struggle for heritage production in Hawai’i, and the way the LGBTIQþ movement uses the past (and present) in malleable waysdserve to express how elements of power, inequality, mobilizations and rights, as well as memory, historical legacies and social identifications, are all an essential part of the heritage process.
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Overview Theoretical approaches related to heritage are diverse and in recent decades a very broad debate has developed in this regard. In relation to the origins of heritage, some authors place it in Europe within the context of nineteenth-century modernity (Hernández, 2002; Torres and Romero, 2005; Criado and Barreiro, 2013); others consider it as a postmodern notion linked to processes of commodification and hyper-relativism. It has also been argued that the logic of patrimonialization would be part of the human condition; in the sense of the use of the past and its material culture, together with the definition of mechanisms of social memory according to specific interests (Harvey, 2001). Likewise, initial discussions accounted for a monumentalist and static perspective of heritage supported by an official conservationist discourse. Recently, many have rethought this debate, problematizing its nature and questioning the officializing expert and authoritative discourses (Smith, 2015; Torres and Romero, 2005). In this way, the understanding of heritage was reframed as a sociological construct, an active social process that reproduces itself and acts on the agents and elements that produce heritage (Hernández, 2002), involving performative and discursive aspects to represent and signify the world; or as a long-standing practice associated with a historical awareness and uses of the past (Harvey, 2001). Still other scholars define heritage as a form of cultural production (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2004) or as a way of interactive communication (Dicks, 2000). There are also authors who explore the negotiation that occurs within the interaction between memory and heritage (Macdonald, 2013) or analyze heritage as an authorized discourse articulated with the construction of nationhood, citizenship and nationalism (Smith, 2015). Also addressing the power relations and struggles that give rise to heritage, some study patrimonialization as a process of cultural appropriation, nationalization, territorialization and extractivism (Ayala, 2014; Sanz, 2019; Zorzin, 2015). The idea that heritage is an active process underlies the latest analyses and is crucial for broadening understanding of the phenomena. Beyond the concern for the technical issues of heritage management, the focus of these contributions is to understand the cultural and political contexts of production and legitimization of heritage, as well as the consequences of patrimonialization in society in general. Heritage, therefore, is a process of negotiating historical and cultural meanings and values produced by the decisions we make to preserve, or not, certain physical places/objects or intangible events, and the way these are managed, exhibited or performed (Smith, 2015: 140–141). One of the main setbacks of heritage discourse is that it naturalizes the practice of what is defined as subject to conservation and transmission to future generations and in doing so promotes as universal a certain set of Western cultural values. Consequently, this discourse may validate a set of practices and performances that populate popular and expert constructions of “heritage” and undermine alternative and subaltern (as well as local and Indigenous) ideas about it. As a result of the naturalizing effects of the authoritative heritage discourse, both its origin as a social and cultural practice and the power relations that give rise to it are obscured. In this officializing context, heritage is a discourse implicated in the legitimization and governance of historical and cultural narratives, as well as in the work these narratives do to maintain or negotiate social values and the hierarchies they support. Authoritative historical discourse (i.e., history itself) is a process of heritage production and of regulating and governing the political and cultural meaning of the past and the role it plays in defining particular social problems or issues. Heritage and archaeology were both born and are the product of the global processes of colonization and Western nationalism. They emerged in Europe during the nineteen century as part of the process of cultural and territorial domination of non-Western societies, as well as for the conservationist desire of the political elites. In the 20th century, archaeology and heritage installed a universalist discourse of the past and a “conservation ethic” (Byrne, 1991). In this context, European ideas about the past and conservation, and the nature and meaning of monuments, have become internationally naturalized and these principles have become global “common sense,” creating a hegemonic heritage discourse that spread to other parts of the world (Bertacchini et al., 2016). Inevitably, along with other professionals, archaeologists have dominated the patrimonialization processes and claimed expert authority over monuments and material culture (Ayala, 2014). By the 1970s, this hegemonic heritage discourse was already being reproduced and legitimized in national legislation and international charters, conventions and agreements concerning the conservation and management of heritage sites and places. In 1972, UNESCO adopted the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which established a global agenda for the protection and conservation of sites of “universal significance” and confirmed the presence of “heritage” as an international issue and institutionalized the conservation ethic (Meskell, 2010). This Convention has defined the ways in which heritage has been, and supposedly should be, understood. The UNESCO dominant discourse has not been unchallenged (Blake, 2009; Meskell, 2010; Meskell and Brumann, 2015; Gnecco and Días, 2015). Specifically, the World Heritage Convention has been criticized, in particular by non-Western nations, Indigenous Peoples and researchers for universalizing Western concepts of heritage and their supposed inherent values. In response to this, UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003, which attempts to recognize new and non-Western ways of understanding heritage (Smith, 2015; Silverman and Ruggles, 2009). Certainly, this convention has had a significant intellectual and political impact, but has not necessarily challenged the dichotomy between tangible and intangible heritage or included differing notions of heritage (Smith, 2015). In recent decades, organizations in different Western countries have also challenged the dominant discourse and advocated for greater diversity and community participation, demanding recognition of the voice not only of local communities but also of those united by shared social, cultural, economic, political and gender experiences. Also, Indigenous criticism has focused on the imposition of western and scientific visions on their past, as well as on the ethics of conservation installed by international heritage agencies. Added to this are criticisms of the inequalities inherent in the way museums, archaeologists and other heritage
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professionals have treated the human remains of their ancestors and other items of cultural value and importance (Arthur, 2015; Jofré, 2019; Fforde et al., 2020). At present, there are a number of dissident and critical discourses on the nature, meaning and uses of heritage. Critical research focused on understanding heritage expressions is expanding in opposition to the hegemonic heritage discourse and/or Western conceptualizations (Daly and Winter, 2011). As some scholars pointed out, authorized heritage may represent the dominant ideological discourse, but that also ensures that it can become the focus of alternative meaning for those who dissent. As all heritage is dissonant, it is inherently political in that it negotiates, produces, and creates multiple conflicts throughout its production. Our hope is that the case studies discussed below help to explore the dissonant nature of heritage, which has continually failed to be addressed in a systematic manner.
Key Issues The Contribution of Heritage to Power Dynamics and Forms of Inequalities: Atacameño Case Study This section addresses how heritage both contributes to and produces differing notions of power and inequality. This assessment of heritage is particularly important in a world where Indigenous populations have been oppressed and annihilated by a colonial onslaught over several centuries and differing official forms of governance. One element in this subject is the varied manners in which heritage is both produced by and produces power dynamics that are central to the hegemonic nation state and local community formation processes throughout the globe. Another critical element is how heritage is produced within the changing landscape of inequality and social hierarchies, resulting in authorized, universal and scientific notions of heritage being imposed on local communities. In the most traditional (and conservative) sense, heritage has been used as a folkloric denial of the unequal access to resources that produces it. An example of this process has been the treatment of indigenous bodies, whose definition as scientific heritage has allowed their exhibition, study, and conservation in emblematic museums of the colonizing powers. The case study elucidates the way inequality and power dynamics are essential building blocks of not only the categorization of bodies and sites as heritage but above all, their production and contestation. The Atacameño People are the indigenous inhabitants of northern Chile, their homeland centers around the Atacama Desert. Throughout their history, they have undergone a series of drastic changes, some of them reflected in their integration into industrial mining in the 20th century and, more recently, into the tourism industry (Vilches et al., 2015). In recent years, a process of recognition and strengthening of their identity has made the Atacameño People prominent actors in disputes over the control and ownership of archaeological heritage. Their criticism of the appropriation and scientific treatment of their ancestors has been at the center of their struggles for recognition. Archaeology in the Atacama Desert began at the end of the 19th century. Although several local and foreign archaeologists were researching this area, the arrival of the Belgian priest-archaeologist Gustavo Le Paige in 1953 was crucial for the development of archaeology and the production of a universal and scientific notion of heritage in the Atacama. In 1957 Le Paige inaugurated the Archaeological Museum of San Pedro de Atacama. Reproducing the collector and conservationist hegemonic discourse, Le Paige and the archaeologists who came after him collected more than 5000 human skulls, 400 mummified human remains and 400,000 objects. Therefore, reproducing exhibition policies initiated in colonial and national museums around the world (Bennett, 1995), the exhibits of this museum were characterized by the presence of human bodies and funerary objects. The Atacameño critique referring to Le Paige’s archaeological work is mainly associated with the excavation of hundreds of burials. The Atacameño refer to archaeological sites and cemeteries as places of the abuelos (grandparents or ancestors) or gentiles (heathens), spaces and things that must be respected and feared. From a privileged place of enunciation, Le Paige became the archaeological expert and authorized voice, contradicting local values and beliefs related to the ancestors. Also, reproducing a global practice in archaeology and museums, Le Paige donated and exchanged pieces, mummified bodies and/or human remains with colleagues and museums from other cities and countries. During the late 1960s, US public-private involvement in foreign research contributed to the dissemination of positivistic theoretical frameworks in Chilean archaeology, exhibiting the traits of imperialist archaeology. Although, at that time, there was no state control over excavations, the National Monuments Law (17.288) claimed state ownership of archaeological heritage. In the 1980s there were some changes and new archaeologists at the Archaeological Museum of San Pedro de Atacama, but the new exhibits continued to reproduce the power of the “exhibition complex” using human bodies and remains in their display (Bennett, 1995; Alegría et al., 2021). In addition, cemeteries continued to be excavated, and, therefore, archaeology continued to transgress and deny local beliefs about ancestors in favor of the heritage scientific discourse. At the time, Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973– 1990) was ruling the country. Democracy returned in 1990, and the reconfiguration of the Chilean state went hand in hand with the installation of neoliberal multiculturalism. With the enactment of the Indigenous Law (19.253) and the participation and recognition of cultural differences as a new art of government, culture and indigenous heritage began to occupy a central place in public debate and in the production of identities. This law also integrated Indigenous peoples into national history and placed the pre-Hispanic past at the origins of the multicultural Chilean nation. In a scenario of changing power dynamics, the Atacameño raised a number of criticisms and demands against the hegemonic heritage discourse of archaeology and the National Monument Council. At the same time, the display of the Archaeological
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Museum of San Pedro de Atacama continued to stereotype indigenous people as part of the past, and mummified bodies continued to occupy a central place in the exhibits. Their beliefs in the abuelos or ancestors and the unequal treatment of indigenous bodies prompted Atacameño leaders to demand the non-excavation of cemeteries, non-exhibition of human bodies and the return and reburial of archaeological collections (Ayala, 2014). These and other claims to this day are part of disputes over the control and rights of ancestral remains and archaeological sites. In response to the request to stop excavating indigenous cemeteries, the authorized heritage discourse of the Indigenous Law states that only the excavation of historic cemeteries requires a community permit. Unlike pre-Hispanic cemeteries that can be excavated without the authorization of the corresponding indigenous community with the permission of the Council of National Monuments. Although it is true that the excavation of historical cemeteries may affect these populations more directly than the exhumation of ancient human remains, it is also true that the Chilean State clearly does not understand the link claimed by indigenous people with human remains as ancestors, since it does not legally request authorization from indigenous communities for archaeological excavations (Endere and Ayala, 2011). Globally, the display of mummified bodies and human remains has been part of exhibition politics since the 19th century (Bennett, 1995; Alegría et al., 2021). To date, there is no legal criterion in Chile that supports or refutes indigenous demands not to exhibit human remains in museums. However, considering the claims raised by the Atacameño leaders, the Archaeological Museum of San Pedro de Atacama removed the human remains from its permanent exhibit in 2007. Although this process was concluded with the understanding that the withdrawal of human remains from the exhibits was an important “first step,” their representatives insisted on their request for the return and reburial of human remains deposited in this museum. Joining the international movement initiated by Native Americans, First Nations and Aboriginal People from Australia and New Zealand (Fforde et al., 2020; Arthur and Ayala, 2020), as well as the restitution claims made by Indigenous People in Argentina (Jofré, 2019), the first international repatriation and reburial from the National Museum of the American Indian (USA) to the Atacameño Community of Chiu Chiu took place in 2007. At the national level, the background of this counter-hegemonic discourse on the return of indigenous collections dates back to the 1980s, when Atacameño leaders demanded the return of pieces from the Larrache site, as well as the reburial of bodies and materials from an archaeological cemetery in Chiu Chiu. There is no repatriation or reburial law in Chile, but the Council of National Monuments does have an “Instructive guide” in this regard that favors the permanence of collections in State museums. This instruction, and the absence of mechanisms that facilitate repatriation and reburial processes, have hampered initiatives by indigenous communities to request the return of their ancestors and facilitated foreign museums and universities not to respond to such requests. In recent years, challenging the authorized heritage discourse, indigenous and non-indigenous researchers are investigating the location of bodies of the abuelos or ancestors taken from Atacameño territory as a result of collecting and archaeological practices. It is a project that defines itself as decolonial, anti-extractivist and collaborative (Ayala et al., 2022). Some Atacameño researchers contest the dominant museological discourse by proposing the creation of community museums, while others question the need to renovate the archaeological museum Gustavo Le Paige (Ayala and Kalazich, 2020). They also develop participatory methodologies in archaeological research, as opposed to those in which communication is vertical and reaffirms the authorized voices (Ogalde, 2020). In parallel, as part of an experience that had been in the making for years, Atacameño conservation specialists from the Archaeological Museum of San Pedro de Atacama, developed cultural protocols for the management of the collections of human bodies (Cruz et al., 2020). The case study described above elucidates the way inequality and power dynamics are essential building blocks of not only the categorization of indigenous bodies as heritage or the patrimonialization of the ancestors, but above all their production and contestation in indigenous territories.
Heritage, Diversity and Cultural Debts: Female and LGBTIQD Case Study Do bodies have a memory? Can bodies inherit or transport knowledge? The case study presented here looks to reflect on body politics through a very extended materiality in the Americas: figurines. According to Weismantel (2004), some very explicit sexual representations from the Moche style in Peru may have less to do with specific social/sexual practices but may better represent the transfer of symbolic ancestral knowledge or wisdom through fluids like semen and mother milk. In a similar sense, we understand bodies, in all their different materialities (flesh, clay and any other, see Ugalde 2021) as containers of knowledge and wisdom, as entities vulnerable to abuse and manipulation and as cultural and political entities, and therefore as an important component of cultural heritage. The Americas have a long durée tradition in the production of figurines, most of them of clay, showing the human body. The longest of these traditions is found on the Ecuadorian coast; it started about 3500 BC with the Valdivia Culture and lasted uninterrupted at least until the Spanish Conquista. The reason why this huge source of information has scarcely been used to approach issues such as gender relations or even politics may much more be found in present ideologies than in the lack of past materials. Contemporary hegemonic discourses tend to naturalize concepts of the patriarchal present and hide interesting issues and information contained in the ancient figurines, such as gender asymmetries, and non-binary concepts of sexuality, among others (Ugalde and Benavides, 2018; Ugalde, 2021). Few attempts in recent times have tried to approach Andean figurines from the point of view of the rationality of the intrinsic Andean cosmogony and from an engendered perspective (i.e., Artzi, 2019, for a case from the Central Andes). There are many types of messages which have been transmitted through figurines and other images over time by ancient non-writing societies. All of them
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constitute a part of the Andean heritage, often just kept in museums all over the world as isolated objects and not understood as part of a larger cosmovision intersected by multiple historical tensions and struggles. We believe discussions of these tensions and struggles is essential since it is there where critical historical processes take place and are constructed. One such example relates to gender, which lying very deep in the pre-Columbian past, is contained in a graphic narrative in the above mentioned Ecuadorian figurines. That huge corpus, analyzed from the perspective of gender and body politics, reveals an ideological discourse which is told, in a diachronic way, through this archaeological materiality. The iconographic analysis of thousands of figurines shows, for example, a breaking point in the representation of human bodies, which points to gender relations changing and turning to become extremely asymmetrical. This moment (known locally as Regional Development Period, starting around 500 BC) occurred approximately in accordance with the intensified use of metallurgy and the strong stratification of coastal Ecuadorian societies, which seems not to be a coincidence. This seems to support, in a way, Engelian ideas about the connections between the accumulation of resources or specialized knowledge and greater male dominance (Ugalde, 2021). While female figures in this period maintain a tradition of uniformity, existing since the previous Formative Period, male figures, previously almost nonexistent, make their spectacular appearance here and appropriate the figurine landscape. A clear patriarchal ideal starts from here on, which strongly emphasizes male supremacy. Male figures are individualized, while female figures are uniformized. Uniformization appears as a strategy for making these invisible. By homogenizing the female image, it progressively disappears, while the different male representations become much differentiated, almost becoming personalities. In a sense, this intention to homogenize and uniformize the female image is an attempt to globalize the idea of the woman as a primary and basic entity. While males get more and more differentiated, females become one and the same thing and are often associated with one single activity: nursing. In the last pre-Colonial period, the discourse intensified even more: while almost all clay figures are representations of males (priests, chiefs, warriors), the only female representations appear in stone sculptures and show a woman with wide open legs, in a sort of offering pose. At the same time, the diachronic analysis of the figurines has brought to light the possibility of a non-binary understanding of gender in the pre-Colonial past, whose naturality was neglected or satanized through the colonizing process (Ugalde and Benavides, 2018). This neglect is still present in the western-influenced minds of Latin American people, and this influences the way the past is seen. As young academics, notoriously primarily in Brazil, have pointed out, Archaeology, Anthropology and History as disciplines have a deep cis-heteronormative and white perspective in their way of producing knowledge (Anzini, 2021), which has tended to erase transgender stories from History (Hartemann, 2021). A very important point in this respect is to find spaces where these cultural biases can be approached honestly and new or complementary readings of the past materials can be expressed for a broader public. This is important because these “alternative” readings relate to a heritage of ancestrydand therefore identitydwhich might be of vital importance for groups of people who for a long time have been fighting for different forms of vindication, such as the LGBTIQþ community. The spaces that reflect these non-normative readings of historical processes or materialities should be precisely those which are thought to hold and preserve heritage, such as museums envisioned as safe places as well as places for discussion and reflection. Museums should not primarily contain “heritage” objects but be places where heritage is constantly rethought. In this sense, heritagedin and outside museumsdshould move forward from its comfort zone and reflect the tensions which surround its coming into existence. In this context, we see a connection between the mentioned bodies in clay represented in the ancient figures with the living heritage being performed in living bodies of activists for LGBTIQþ rights. This is an important body of heritage which is not sufficiently recognized and incorporated in the traditional “places for heritage.” Perhaps the heritage work of Pedro Lemebel, Lukas Avendaño, Sebastián Calfuqueo, among other representatives of long-lasting legacies of what we today call diversities needs to be highlighted. These works contest contemporary inequalities and, at the same time, bear memories of ancestral different ways of understanding sex and gender relations, like Enchaquirados, Two Spirit People and Muxe, just to mention a few examples in the Americas. It is also important to define safe places for these heritages, too. The Brooklyn Museum in New York, The National Museum in Bogotá, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid are, in our opinion, cases which show reasonable efforts in this direction. However, not only museums and other heritage spaces but archaeology as a discipline itself must continue to learn more from social movements such as feminism and other gender activisms. This is of utmost necessity.
Heritage Production Through Social Memory and Historical Legacies: Hawaiian Case Study This section details how heritage expresses the historical palimpsest that has birthed modernity into existence. As such, heritage is deeply embedded in the historical legacies that have, and continue to, ignite globalization’s imagination, highlighting the various forms in which history is continuously remembered, memorialized, contested and ultimately lived in the present. Heritage embodies how the past is an active building block in people’s contemporary existence and is used to actively integrate, contest, cohere and resist ongoing categorizations and definitions that are centuries, if not millennia, in the making. The case study below reflects how heritage is also about dynamic contemporary production and recycling of historical elements, which both articulate and disempower state devices as they are expressed and enacted through people’s daily lives, particularly in communities’ analyses of their own past cultural heritage and contemporary survival.
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Like in many other places, the Hawaiian Islands embody how heritage is far from a matter of the past and instead is an active building block of contemporary national and political identifications. Hawaii, along with its Polynesian counterparts, participates in an oral heritage production that incorporates quite rich millennial histories. Although it was since the 1800s when the island’s commercial promise attracted the colonizing exploits of Europeans, North American and Japanese business investments, its heritage formulation has continued to take on much more complex, hybrid and political significations (Cooper and Daws, 1990). More specifically, since the people of Hawaii were supposedly “liberated from their Indigenous monarchy” by the US Navy in 1893, the Indigenous discourses on the island have developed a coherent alternative to capitalist accumulation and resource extraction as the main source of happiness or pleasure. It is not a coincidence that this alternative discourse of social well-being has captured a global tourist industry looking to the Hawaiian shores for what they do not have in their daily lives in the West (Bacchilega, 2007). A concrete example of this vital emblem of heritage production is expressed in one of the island’s major tourist beach destinations. The beach of Waikiki in Honolulu, Oahu, shares space (both literally and ideologically) with discourses of heritage, in particular the commonly referred Wizard Stones of Kapaemahu. Each of these four rocks weighing over a ton, welcomes everyone as they enter Waikiki and tell an ancient story of the four mahus (non-binary shamans), Kapaemahu (the elder), Kinohi, Kahaloa and Kapuni, all who graced Waikiki before it was known as such. The stones refer to the ancestral mahus that arrived on the islands centuries before from Tahiti. After performing ritual cures and sacred practices, they chose four stones to embody their essence, laid to rest close to where they are still found today (where the four mahus lived and bathed). After a rich history maintained through oral tradition and later developed in local newspapers, archives and books starting in 1905, these stones have become emblems of Hawaiian heritage and pride. Kapaemahu at Waikiki is but one of myriad of examples of how heritage is signified in unequal hegemonic processes of historical production on the islands. Hawaiian case studies prove significant by the fact that there are three concrete areas where heritage gets constructed through land, life, and sovereignty. They express an alternative way in which land is seen, sustained, and reproduced in Hawaiian ancestral heritage practices. Far from land being a commodity and an object of plausible ownership, Hawaiian autochthonous discourses see land as a layered living and breathing reality that is an amalgam of life; a cosmic reality imbued in/ by nature itself (see Goodyear-Ka’opua et al., 2014). This Hawaiian ancestral knowledge is quite in tandem with most indigenous definitions throughout the Americas and the Globe. As the scholar Liboiron (2021: 7) points out in their recent book, “Pollution is Colonialism,” “land” is “the unique entity that is the combined living spirits of plants, animals, water, humans, histories, and events.” There are several key territories or social spaces where Hawaiian native communities and ancestral discourses are constructed and developed, including the cases and conflicts embodied in the Kalama Valley (Trask, 1987) and the island of Kaho’olawe (Osorio and Kay, 2014). In the early and mid-1970s, respectively, both cases helped embody what would be later referred to as the Hawaiian renaissance. In the initial case of Kalama Valley, low-income farmers were evicted to give way to developers to create high priced resort areas. This not only razed small farming plots converting and integrating them into Honolulu’s urban landscape but very much constituted an explicit attack against native Hawaiian’s ancestral lifeways, permitting even further colonial control at the hands of the white north American continental elite. These political protests, which were central in reclaiming their ancestral lifeways and historical heritages, were in a way connected to the counter-cultural movement happening in other parts of the USA and the world at the time. They also allowed for many native Hawaiians to make an important connection between the historical plantation system that had produced the initial colonial structure of the islands and see that the expanding hotel and resort industry had constituted, and continues to constitute, itself as part of the new neo-colonial structure, i.e., new plantations. These initial claims for the rights of native ancestral lifeways would lead to the even more directly politicized struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty on the island of Kaho’olawe. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor until the mid-1970s, the US Navy had made use of the island as its indiscriminate property for military training and bombardment practices, some of them so dramatic that one 500 TNT ton exercise produced a man-made crater referred to as “Sailor Man’s Cap.” By 1991, because of the constant demand by native activists, including several of them sacrificing their lives, the Island’s sovereignty was returned from the USA federal government to the state of Hawaii. The island of Kaho’olawe was also finally incorporated into the National Register of Historic Places, with over 540 archaeological sites and over 2000 individual features being recorded. It is these and other similar cases through which we can gather how heritage narratives, practices, and legacies are constructed in relationship to their assessment of what land has meant and continues to mean to Hawaiians as a living entity. It also allows us to see how these initial conflicts over land rights and ancestral places led to an Indigenous cultural resurgence which expressed concerns over many other heritage areas, including sacred sites, archaeological remains, education rights and resources, and equally important and prevalent in different movements around the world, from Ireland to Ecuador, the revitalization of native Indigenous languages. Meanwhile, very few historical works have had as lasting influence as Osorio’s (2002) work “Dismembering Lãhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887.” Perhaps one of the many significant impacts of this activist/academic contribution is taking the US occupation not as the beginning of the story of the Hawaiian nation but as its violent upending. However, far from claiming some nostalgic indigeneity purity, Osorio’s (2002) work vibes with the more contemporary heritage practices that see contemporary Hawaii inextricably linked to its Western and colonial history. His work, along with contemporary heritage efforts, valiantly ask the question of what it would look like to reclaim a heritage order of their own: “What might we do in a society where custom, law, and leadership reflect our own desires and aspirations”? (Osorio, 2002: 260).
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Summary and Future Directions This entry was envisioned differently from the more typical or traditional approaches to heritage. In it, rather, we understand heritage as an intimate political and human process. Above all, our objective was to not limit or equate heritage to monumental materiality or to a static time in the past. We also go beyond an archaeological and/or historical understanding of heritage and instead incorporate heritage as a living contemporary process with enormous political, social, economic, and cultural implications for all the communities involved. In the three case studies discussed, heritage is a dynamic and agent-filled endeavor that connects not only the past and present but also historicity’s future. In this manner, it places the emphasis on people, not things or objects, providing a dialogical invitation to reflect, debate and discuss. This is something that is particularly important in this challenging time as we enter old new (sensu Stuart Hall) global dynamics of social mobilizations, resources extraction and domination/governance. We also looked to break away from a traditional national or nation-state understanding of heritage and instead see the continental and regional impact that different notions of heritage have over vast local, transnational, and global communities. Therefore, we approach heritage as we see it today, an uneven and unending social problematic that is continuously shifting and changing contents and contours, including topical and geographical landscapes. The three case studies are far from exhaustive and hope to point to important elements that are either currently present or emerging in the global landscape. Our case studies are local in focus but global in implications, and we hope the proposed directions will continue to make a significant contribution to the existing corpus of work on heritage and globalization being carried out while also expanding its understanding to include other relevant and ever-changing contemporary political and social issues and problematics. Perhaps a couple of the most fundamental questions to ponder as we continue to think and usufruct global notions of heritage in the future might be: How are contemporary narratives of heritage manifested beyond official contexts and traditional discourses? And why do we believe these varying narratives, both in the past and present, constitute part of our heritage in the most (g)local sense possible? If one thinks in the global context, especially as we navigate a post-COVID-19 globe, the issue of bodies and space seems to be of vital importance, and even more so if one thinks of bodies (of all kinds and categorizations) occupying and moving through those different regulated and unregulated spaces. An example of thinking about heritage on a global scale is the urban spaces defined as “conflictive,” where the social tensions are an esteemed heritage for the communities involved. Examples as such is Isla Negra, where tens of thousands of people flock every year to commemorate the life of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda but also to celebrate a global struggle against fascist and authoritarian regimes. We can see this in Soweto in South Africa as well, and in the space tellingly entitled “the Bronx” in Bogotá. We see a remarkable effort by the National Museum of Colombia, which offered an accompaniment plan to part of the process of reconfiguring the space and, above all, reorganizing people and defining the humanity that had been denied them. A similar form of heritage narrative has been developed on Robben Island in South Africa, for example, where it is the same inmates that once were held in these cells that now meet the tourists and narrate their own harrowing experience at the hands of apartheid in their country. Further, to continue to think about heritage globally, it might be instructive to take something as particular and intimate as the body as focal point. To ask why and how the body moves (or is moved) from the personal to the social or collective, as it is crisscrossed by all aspects of our contemporary experience (one that is always informed historically). Bodies move through local streets and international border crossings. However, today’s governments, many times in tandem with extracting oil and mining companies, try to show us spaces and bodies that are increasingly more uniform, less local, and more populated by generic characteristics. However, in contrast to those homogenizing processes, bodies throughout the world continue to struggle and build, to protest and argue, as they are in constant motion in their daily survival. The desire to homogenize is a tool of domination and constitutes a factor of global heritage loss in all its human dimensions, not just culturally or archaeologically. As transgender biologist Brigitte Baptiste stated in her famous TED Talk in 2019, the lack of diversity, in ecological terms, leads to an impoverishment of the planet itself, and in her words, “there is nothing queerer than nature.” This is the same stance proposed by another transgender scholar, Liboiron (2021), who expounds on a model in which all systems of knowledge pledge themselves against the continued extraction of resources, particularly human beings. These contributions express how natural sciences themselves, much more positivist and traditional par excellence, are opening to the reality of greater diversity as a positive possibility. This, we argue, should also be the logical path for the humanities and social sciences and, within them, archaeology. Above all, we believe it is this recognition of greater humanity contained in our diversity and struggles that should be the concern of those dedicated to study contemporary forms of heritage from a global perspective. Thinking globally about heritage implies conceiving a reflexive and critical archaeology that values diversity and goes beyond the static institutional definitions that pigeonhole material or immaterial pasts. Our hopeful perspective is for archaeology to stop seeing itself as the science of dead objects and more as a space open to discussions and discourses about a living past that continues to live in us and that accommodates, however challenging and problematic it might be, different interpretations of heritage on a global level.
See Also: Archaeological Heritage Values and Significance; Restitution of Collections: An Appraisal.
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Archaeological Heritage and Museum Interpretation Denise Pozzi-Escota and Mayali Tafur-Sequerab, a Museo de Pachacamac, Pachacamac, Perú; and b Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues The Interpretation of Cultural Heritage Museums and Archaeological Heritage Museums, Public Archaeology in Africa, and the Construction of a National Identity Latin America, Social Museology, Decoloniality, and Ecomuseums Summary and Future Directions References Relevant Websites
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Museums have historically played an important role in the presentation and interpretation of archaeological heritage. As cultural institutions that are part of the dynamics of any society, museums have been transforming their objectives since their beginnings as cabinets of curiosities. Recognizing its origin as a colonial institution, the museum today is considered in terms of its discourse and practices. In the new definition of the museum (International Council of Museums, 2022), the “participation of communities” and “the promotion of diversity and sustainability” are named as central points. Eco museums allow more active community participation in the preservation of heritage.
Abstract As a fundamental part of social institutions, the museum has fulfilled different roles that have been transforming in relation to the cultural conceptions of heritage, to the geopolitical changes determined by the decolonization of different African countries, as well as to the complexity of Latin American thought, which has proposed new concepts such as decoloniality. In this panorama, there are new museological trends where community participation is essential for the preservation of archaeological sites.
Introduction Archaeology explores the history of people through the study of material culture, organic remains and other relics of the past. For this reason, its stories are important to understand the past of a nation and to project into the future. From the essential need to understand, to fill our existence with collective meaning and to conserve the sites that speak of humanity’s past, the public interpretation of archaeological and cultural sites is today recognized as a fundamental practice for the conservation and protection of cultural resources and the spaces we inhabit (Jameson, 2008). Therefore, the work carried out by museums with archaeological collections, interpretation centers at archaeological sites, and in situ museums is essential to establish links that strengthen the protection of heritage and, above all, contribute to the processes of consolidation of the collective identity of those who currently are in the territories of the archaeological sites from which the materials exhibited in the museums originate. Regarding archaeological sites, it is noted that their valuation significantly contributes to the cultural education of local communities, as well as to the reinforcement of a sense of belonging and responsibility in relation to archaeological and historical heritage and the strengthening of regional and national identity (Meunier and Poirier-Vannier, 2017). Likewise, in many countries, archaeology is a fundamental source of tourism valuation projects that contribute to the funding of research and the safeguarding of heritage (Meunier and Poirier-Vannier, 2017). In these processes of cultural contribution, museums have an important role since they guard archaeological collections or preside over archaeological sites.
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The International Council of Museums (ICOM), the world’s leading museum organization, was founded in 1946, and it is defined as a membership association and a non-governmental organization which establishes professional and ethical standards for museum activities. This institution drafted a definition of museums that became the official definition for the vast majority of governments belonging to the association. At the 37th Ordinary General Assembly of ICOM, held in Prague in August 2022, a new definition was adopted:
A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution at the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets, and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing ICOM (2022).
This definition, more than a starting point, is in line with the way in which museums in many places of the world understand their endeavor, with explicit aspects such as the “participation of communities” and “the promotion of diversity and sustainability.” Likewise, this definition presents the new social responsibilities that museums assume as institutions that meet the challenges of today’s world. It is worth noting that this definition can be cross-referenced with the discussions carried out by the authorities interested in archaeological heritage. The 1994 Nara Document adopted by UNESCO (Larsen, 1994), as well as the process from which it emerged, is considered a turning point in the experts’ view of heritage definition and protection. This document, which arose from the analysis of the actions aimed at heritage protection presented by 45 participants representing 28 countries, emphasizes the term “authenticity,” which is fundamental in determining the heritage value of cultural property and the type of conservation associated with it. This document is often used to justify what is considered authentic enough to warrant World Heritage Site (WHS) status. Nara þ20 is a document produced at the meeting held by UNESCO in 2014 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first document. It emphasizes the need to foster more inclusive, participatory, and holistic approaches when developing methodologies for assessing the authenticity of heritage. Furthermore, Nara þ20 recognizes that the need to build heritage is as much linked to the tourism industry and the commodification of heritage as it is to the notion of establishing a local, regional or national identity (Orbas¸li, 2015). The above coincides with the centrality given in museums to become institutions that maintain a dialogue with the community, with a view to fulfilling their objective of being useful and necessary for society.
Overview Within the framework of these reflections, it is also essential to understand the implications that the main events of international geopolitics and the new Latin American reflections have on museums as social institutions. We refer, in the first instance, to the process of decolonization of African countries that took place between the mid-1950s and the 1970s.1 It is possible to affirm that museums in Africa were colonial2 products by virtue of the time of their establishment at the hands of Europeans. European museums had the purpose of being places of knowledge, with educational intentions at the service of citizenship and focused on the construction of the national spirit; on the contrary, African museums were intended to house the peculiarities of the “tribal peoples,” satisfying the curiosity of Europeans and excluding almost entirely the local population, without taking into account the relationship with the societies in which they were imposed (Nnakenyi, 1998: 31). After the independence processes in Africa in the mid 20th century, it has been a constant in many African countries to understand museums as places of memory and construction of collective identity. Thus, these spaces became national museums and were effective tools in creating national consciousness and political unity, reaching large numbers of the population and generating a sense of belonging (Nnakenyi, 1998: 32). In recent years, many African museums have become multidimensional development factors for their communities, thus fostering the creation of new spaces with an emphasis on community dialogue, women’s museums in different countries, as well as exhibitions and activities aimed at social cohesion and participatory reflection (González, 2011). In the case of Latin America, the first museums of national scope were founded between 1820 and 1830, following the establishment of the new republics as a result of the independence processes. Thus, were born patriotic histories, national symbols, galleries of heroes, and the consideration of archaeological pieces as vestiges of a glorious past (Cartagena and León, 2014). However, these museums, by using European models to develop the patriotic history and values of the new nation, ultimately ended up affirming a series of imperial concepts and narratives, thus reproducing colonial hierarchies. As Anderson points out, the museums founded in Latin America continued the practices of cultural decontextualization of monuments, archaeological pieces and sites, as well as the logic of late colonial state domination, associated with the hierarchization, classification, and serialization of objects (Anderson, cited in Cartagena and León, 2014). After years of independence, many practices that can be associated with the colonial past were maintained. The said phenomenon has been analyzed from the concept 1 2
The colonial division of Africa among the European powers was evident in the artificial drawing of its borders at the end of the 19th century. An overview of this claim can be found in Nnakenyi (1998), González (2011), and Kusimba and Klehm (2013).
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of coloniality, coined by Aníbal Quijano and, later, by the decolonial group of thought. This notion refers to the colonial imaginaries that persist to this day around power, knowledge, gender, and race (Quijano, 1992; Lander and Castro-Gómez, 2000). According to the approaches of the decolonial group of thought, coloniality is not the same as colonialism and can be defined based on the historical continuities between colonial times and the now called post-colonial times. Likewise, the coloniality of power not only speaks of the economic and political domination exercised by the centers of power over the periphery, but also has a cultural dimension that is reflected even in institutions such as museums.
The coloniality of power is based on the imposition of a racial/ethnic classification of the world’s population as the cornerstone of that pattern of power and operates in every plane and sphere, in all material and subjective dimensions of everyday existence, and on a social scale. This coloniality is constituted based on the concept of colonial difference, not as cultural difference, but as social classification within a historical-structural heterogeneity Lacarrieu and Laborde (2018: 18).
Other forms of domination are at play in the coloniality of power, such as the coloniality of knowledge, associated with the prevalence of Eurocentric knowledge; the coloniality of being, linked to the naturalization of social injustices related to the dehumanization of the “other”; and the coloniality of seeing, which focuses on the modern/colonial way of naturalizing the hierarchization of class or racial identity categories (Cartagena and León, 2014). Museums in Latin America produced knowledge about nature and native peoples by instrumentalizing them in a way that responded to the construction of the white-mestizo hegemonic project of local elites. Therefore, such cultural spaces have participated in processes of constructing identities and otherness associated with a colonial matrix of domination (Cartagena and León, 2014: 31). In this sense, the call for activating decolonial thinking from a Latin American perspective concerns the need for changes in these cultural institutions. As a fundamental part of social institutions, the museum has fulfilled different roles that have been transforming in relation to cultural conceptions of heritage, to geopolitical changes determined by the decolonialization of different territories, and to the complexification of thought with new concepts such as decoloniality. Understanding these issues allows us to see aspects of museums mediated by the needs of conservation, research, and the enjoyment of heritage, as well as new challenges that broaden the view of what is understood and expected of a museum today.
Key Issues The Interpretation of Cultural Heritage As Jameson (2020) rightly points out, public interpretation and presentation of cultural and archaeological objects have become an essential component of the conservation and protection of cultural heritage, values, and sites. In this sense, the importance of interpretation has been reflected in dynamics that have had an international impact, such as the creation of the Interpretive Development Program (IDP) by the United States National Park Service (NPS) and the National Association for Interpretation (NAI) in the 1990s. The purpose of this program was to train NPS employees. It later became the “Module 440 Effective Interpretation of Archaeological Resources” on which many archaeological site interpretation strategies and programs worldwide were based,3 with wider coverage and importance (Jameson, 2008, 2020). The European equivalent of the NAI, Interpret Europe, acts as a platform for cooperation and exchange on interpretation issues, especially concerning research and education. Parallel to this interest in establishing different relationships with the public, the international community working on heritage issues has reflected upon agreements to establish a dimension of care associated with the specialization of archaeologists and conservators. For many years, the charters and documents that the concerned sector has continuously adopted (such as for example, the Athens Charter adopted in 1931 and the Venice Charterd1964)4 are focused on good practices of conservation and maintenance of cultural resources around the world, without much emphasis on the relationship of the public with the issue of conservation and safeguarding of heritage. Although in this context interpretation was seen as something more abstract, since the important thing was the activity that conservators undertook with the objects, it was also recognized as a practice that connected citizens with the objects and archaeological sites (Silberman, 2006, cited in Jameson, 2020). This recognition took on greater importance in the face of the boom of the transformation of cultural heritage sites into places for tourism and entertainment. In 2008, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites (known as the “Ename Charter”) (ICOMOS, 2008) was officially presented. In its presentation, the Charter describes the importance of interpretation as part of the preservation and prevalence over time of any cultural heritage:
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For a more in-depth look at the program, its components and impact, see Jameson (2008: 1543–1553). For a brief overview of the different Charters and Conventions on heritage definitions, see Vecco (2010).
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Since its establishment in 1965 as a worldwide organisation of heritage professionals dedicated to the study, documentation, and protection of cultural heritage sites, ICOMOS has striven to promote the conservation ethic in all its activities and to help enhance public appreciation of humanity’s material heritage in all its forms and diversity [.]
These earlier ICOMOS charters stress the importance of public communication as an essential part of the larger conservation process (variously describing it as “dissemination,” “popularization,” “presentation,” and “interpretation”). They implicitly acknowledge that every act of heritage conservation -within all the world’s cultural traditions - is by its nature a communicative act.
From the vast range of surviving material remains and intangible values of past communities and civilisations, the choice of what to preserve, how to preserve it, and how it is to be presented to the public are all elements of site interpretation. They represent every generation’s vision of what is significant, what is important, and why material remains from the past should be passed on to generations yet to come.
The need for a clear rationale, standardised terminology, and accepted professional principles for Interpretation and Presentation is evident [.] The purpose of this Charter is therefore to define the basic principles of Interpretation and Presentation as essential components of heritage conservation efforts and as a means of enhancing public appreciation and understanding of cultural heritage sites. General Assembly of ICOMOS (2008: 1–2).
This document is of great international importance insofar as it postulates that public interpretation is one of the most important activities to be carried out at a historic site. This is because interpretation focuses on creating links between sites, the communities most involved, and the public that approaches these places. The objective of the Ename Charter is to establish seven fundamental principles on which the processes of interpretation and presentation of heritage sites should be based (General Assembly of ICOMOS, 2008): Principle 1. Access and understanding: interpretation and presentation programs should facilitate the public’s physical and intellectual access to cultural heritage. Principle 2. Sources of Information: interpretation and presentation should be based on evidence obtained from accepted scientific methods, as well as through living cultural traditions. Principle 3. Context and setting: the interpretation and presentation of cultural heritage should be carried out in relation to its setting and broader social, cultural, and historical context. Principle 4. Authenticity: the interpretation and presentation of cultural heritage sites should respect the basic principles of authenticity, in the spirit of the 1994 Nara document. Principle 5. Sustainability: the interpretation plan for a heritage site should be sensitive to its natural and cultural setting and have social, financial and environmental sustainability among its goals. Principle 6. Participation and inclusion: the interpretation and presentation of cultural heritage must be the result of effective collaboration between heritage professionals, the local partner community, and all stakeholders. Principle 7. Research, training, and evaluation: the interpretation of heritage sites is a progressive and evolving enterprise of understanding and explanation, requiring ongoing research, training, and evaluation activities. When speaking of authenticity in terms of cultural heritage, authenticity can be understood as that which makes it possible to determine that a site, object, or practice is heritage (tangible or intangible). The principle 4 of the Ename Charter mentions that the interpretation and presentation of cultural heritage sites should follow the spirit of the 1994 Nara document. What is interesting about this point is that it stresses the importance of culture in context. It follows that authenticity is not only a matter for specialists, but that the community and its cultural practices must be considered in relation to the heritage to be analyzed, researched, or interpreted. In 2014, the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Government of Japan, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Nara Document, initiated a series of expert meetings in cooperation with Kyushu University. This resulted in the creation of the Nara þ20 document, based on an assessment of how authenticity has been used and applied in the conservation and management of cultural heritage since 1994, within different cultural contexts and for different purposes. The first point of Nara þ20 draws attention to the diversity of heritage processes and emphasizes the concept of the first document, according to which authenticity resides in its own cultural context.5 In the processes of archaeological heritage interpretation, specifically in its dimension related to the context of the territory and local valuation, it should be recognized that many categories used in the management of heritage sites, such as national monument, national park, or heritage site are western notions that often do not fit with the way a community understands such spaces The five points of Nara þ20 are (1) Diversity of heritage processes, (2) Implications of evolving cultural values, (3) Involvement of multiple stakeholders, (4) Conflicting claims and interpretations, and (5) The role of cultural heritage in sustainable development. For a description and analysis of Nara þ20, refer to Orbas¸li (2015) and Jameson (2020).
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(Jameson, 2020). Principles such as multiculturalism, interpretation work designed with neighboring communities, the incorporation of community members in the interpretation activities of the site or museum, and the use of heritage sites for activities that bring the community together (not necessarily related to the specific contents of the site), are some of the aspects that must be considered to give a real dimension of importance and broad valuation to cultural heritage. The involvement of the communities connected with the objects that are part of the archaeological and ethnographic collections of the museums, as well as the communities neighboring the archaeological sites, is fundamental for the valuation and protection of these heritages. As described below, the dialogue established between museums and their communities, in models called ecomuseums or community museums in Latin America, has been the center of action of many museums and archaeological sites. This dialogue not only validates the authenticity of different places and practices but also gives new meanings and importance to museums as part of a community.
Museums and Archaeological Heritage Many national museums founded in the 19th century reflect an era in which the aim was to have a large building where information on the history of countries could be centralized, to reinforce their identity unity through a discourse that, in many cases, justified the hegemonic nations’ possession of some colonies, as in Africa, for example. In Latin America, the newly emerged republics promoted museums that were limited to exhibiting objects rather than understanding the social and economic processes of the original peoples, who were used as mere distant references to the republican formation. De Varine neatly describes the origin of museums in the non-European world as an extension of colonialism:
Since the beginning of the 19th century, the development of museums in the rest of the world has been a purely colonialist phenomenon. It was the European countries that imposed their method of analysis of cultural phenomena and heritage on non-Europeans, forcing the elites and peoples of those countries to see their own culture through European eyes. Thus, museums in most nations are creations of the colonialist historical stage. De Varine (1979: 12).
At the beginning of the last century, the official history of some Latin American countries reinforced the hierarchical heritage of colonial society, which considered the native peoples as inferior in comparison with the colonizers, in a unilinear discourse that justified the “cultural backwardness” of the colonized peoples. As Graybeal rightly points out,
museums have made use of the material culture of indigenous communities to position the dominant group in relation to the colonized other, and their efforts are often focused on providing an authentic presentation of the values and ideals of the colonizing culture rather than illustrating the indigenous histories and identities on display (2010: 9).
Latin American republics needed to create museums to sustain their own proposal of national identity, which sought to shed the colonial ideological heritage. In several Latin American countries, museums reproduced the dominant ideology and that of the elites of the time (Chaparro, 2011: 1, cited in Puebla, 2015: 242). However, in the 20th century, museums were built with new ideas about our past, with different objectives and discourses, such as the Museum of Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Mexico, where the history of Mesoamerican peoples with their wide cultural diversity was presented. In the case of site museums, we are interested in highlighting the proposed discourse, which should reflect the links that unite the archaeological past with the society that currently occupies the same territory of the cultures that generated that material heritage. For this, the interpretation we make of the archaeological findings must be consensual (ICOMOS, 2008), so that the visitor can really understand the history of past societies. Good interpretation and the dissemination of knowledge will also contribute to the protection of heritage (Gándara, 2018). The goal is to ensure that the appreciation of this heritage can be used today to generate a better future for society. The great national museums where important archaeological collections are kept are generally located in the capitals and, even at the beginning of the 20th century, were dedicated only to the elites. A good example is the Louvre, where a large part of the treasures recovered by Napoleon’s army during his invasion of Egypt was initially deposited. The British Museum is along the same lines since its objective was, from its very creation, to collect objects for enlightened citizens (Vozmediano, 2009: 2). We could add several more examples, such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where access was also primarily intended for the ruling elites. It is necessary to point out the debates that, in recent decades, have taken place in different spaces of negotiation and dialogue. In the European case (which bears similarities with what has happened in Latin America or Africa), Aronsson, 2012 suggests four major types of negotiations between the museum, the communities directly involved, and the public: the first has to do with the arguments to define what is in the museum collections, that is, which objects have national heritage value, but also in which thematic area this materiality is located. Many indigenous communities, for example, ask that the representation of their cultures be placed in those parts of the museum where topics associated with Western culture are presented, such as social organizations, ways of constructing knowledge, history of technological development, rather than in areas associated only with natural history or the origins of society. The second negotiation is about what the communities need the museum to investigate about their material culture since
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this knowledge strengthens the construction of local identity. The third negotiation implies recognizing that, by trying to bring together different identity manifestations in a national community, the particularities of the minority groups that are part of a nation have been ignored. The fourth negotiation has to do with actions that make it possible to reflect in museum discourses the great social changes, from political transformations, as in the case of colonization, to social transformations, such as the transforming dimension of human migration. From these reflections, we can situate the discussion about the restitution of objects and human remains.
Museums, Public Archaeology in Africa, and the Construction of a National Identity Strengthening archaeology as a discipline requires that museums also have welfare. Therefore, looking at museums and public archaeology in African countries is important. As mentioned in the introduction, African museums are a product of colonization. All museums created in Africa during the 19th century served as repositories of “native cultures” and, while they presented an “exotic” glimpse of the inhabitants of the territory, they were centers for the study and preservation of many treasures of African culture (Chapurukha and Klehm, 2013). After independence, museums were the only places where the material culture of the native communities could be found, so these institutions, which previously served colonial interests, became symbols of national unity, where the diversity and dynamism of the newly independent nations could be celebrated (Chapurukha and Klehm, 2013). As Ardouin (2000) points out, the engagement that museums have in regard to history and particularly recent history is very important, as they are institutions that can impart and increase knowledge and, in this way, affect society’s perception of African communities’ relationships with each other (Chapurukha and Klehm, 2013). In their article on museums and public archaeology, Chapurukha and Klehm (2013) point out the gains and challenges. About the strengthening of museums, the authors note:
National museums are among the most important heritage institutions in Africa because they are statutory bodies empowered to regulate archaeological and paleontological sites and monuments, serve as national repositories of cultural and biological specimens, and play an important role in conservation.
However, regional museums, which are smaller, are permanently under pressure in terms of resources. These museums are in rural areas, have a low number of local visitors, and are mostly frequented by specialists. This has important consequences, especially with respect to the potential of these museums to foster national unity, increasing the community’s concern for the preservation and safeguarding of its heritage, including, of course, archaeological and sacred sites. The revitalization of the museum as a community space for generational and musical interaction in Serowe, Botswana (Khama III Museum); strategies in which the museum is decentralized, as in the traveling exhibition Pitse ya Naga, or “Zebra on Wheels,” of another national museum in Botswana, or educational programs such as the National Museums of Kenya, which are held in schools for teachers and students, allow us to see the kind of measures needed to expand the role of African museums as cultural enclaves of national cohesion (Fig. 1). Regarding the strengthening of human capital and the development of museums in Africa, the importance of programs such as The International Council of Museums, AFRICOM, is noted. Through this program, permanent meetings and training workshops are held in different African countries, which increases the skills and knowledge of professionals associated with museum work. One of the consequences of this program has been a greater commitment to protecting archaeological heritage in Africa. In this type of program, museum professionals work much more closely with local communities and those responsible for the care of
Fig. 1
Traditional House at the National Museum Botswana, 2017. Photographer: Mompati Dikunwane. Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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archaeological heritage, which promotes greater appreciation on the part of the public, while simultaneously creating an interesting professionalization space for people in these countries. The process of international collaboration between African and foreign museums has been fundamental to boosting learning and exchange in the areas of joint research, curatorship, conservation, dissemination, lending, and exhibition design and production. Some examples worth highlighting are the African Swedish Museum Network (SAMP) and The ALAS Network (Africa-Latin America-Africa-Sweden), through which exhibitions have been held that have changed the way the local and international community thinks. The challenge continues to be to strengthen resource management programs, to improve, among other things, the mapping of archaeological heritage in Africa and, of course, further to enrich museum-led interpretation and public participation programs in archaeology.
Latin America, Social Museology, Decoloniality, and Ecomuseums In Latin America, during the 1970s, a series of proposals emerged around the practice of archaeology. As Lumbreras points out, these proposals were made within a social experience (1974). This social archaeology emphasized the relationship with the community and gave central importance to ensuring that the information recovered in the field was transmitted to the community. This proposal explains why Lumbreras himself, upon assuming the direction of the National Museum of Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Peru in the 1970s, promoted a change in the contents and museography, which meant, at the time, an important renovation of the museographic discourse. Likewise, in May 1972, the “Round Table on the Development and Role of Museums in the Contemporary World” organized by UNESCO was held in Santiago de Chile. This round table drew up a document pointing out the need to update the approach to museum action: the aim was to create an integral museum designed to provide the community with an overview of its natural and cultural environment (Do Nascimento Junior et al., 2012). Many of these reflections and initiatives have been shaping what is now recognized as the new museology or social museology. Chagas6 (2007) states that it is necessary to build a new ethic and museology to develop new knowledge and museum practices, new historiographic approaches and whatever is necessary, bearing in mind that the center of the challenge of social museology is people and not objects. For MINOM (International Movement for a New Museology), one of the main concerns should be “the improvement of living conditions, the development of populations and their projects for the future” (MINOM, 1985). All these reflections are accompanied by an invitation addressed to museums to activate decolonial thinking. It is an invitation to open spaces so that new worlds, from different logics of knowledge, power, and being, can be made possible since modernity has suppressed that possibility. Decoloniality is proposed as a way of thinking that allows recovering the possibility of inhabiting and naming the world. Decolonial thinking involves the possibility of making other worlds by recovering the autonomy of naming and wording them (Vásquez, 2018). The starting point of decolonial thought is to recognize that the museum, like the university, has been one of the central institutions of modernity.7 As an institution, the museum has represented anthropocentric colonial differences, configured the normative “I” and denied otherness through exclusion or exhibition. Likewise, museums have focused on the production and dissemination of Western epistemology, presenting only one form of knowledge and contributing to the formation of normative subjectivities. Vásquez (2018) points out that the coloniality of the museum “is manifested in the negation that entails the appropriation, exhibition, and displacement of the life-worlds of other people, of animals, and the Earth, which are transformed into ‘otherness’”. The invitation to “decolonize” museums, as well as the recognition of the need for a museology that revolves around people, led to a strong acceptance in Latin America of the proposal of “eco-museums” in the multiple typologies of museums, including archaeological and site museums (Fig. 2). The concept of eco-museum, proposed by De Varine (2020) in the early 1970s, implies focusing on the territory as an element intrinsically linked to social processes. In eco-museums, we stop talking about “collection,” “building,” and “public” (or “visitor”) and start to talk about “heritage,” “territory,” and “population” (Borghi, 2017). The initiatives of the eco-museum, which make sense in the framework of the new museology, have to do with the following five criteria: (i) the extension of the territory beyond the physical site of the museum; (ii) the promotion of objects or activities relevant to heritage in the context of origin; (iii) a constant and cooperative dialogue with the population that is the possessor and user of its heritage; (iv) the direct involvement of the local community in the museum’s activities; (v) the interpretation of heritage in an interdisciplinary and non-specialized manner, capable of connecting multiple levels and visions (Borghi, 2017). The eco-museum is also a proposal for a community museum model in a specific territory that seeks the participation of its inhabitants. Conceived in the early 1970s, eco-museums appeared almost at the same time as the concept of the “integral museum” in Latin America, a concept that also spread to Africa. 6
A Brazilian poet and museologist who has promoted social museology in Latin America. Museums were the places where the Western archive was implanted, organized, and displayed: houses of knowledge. Western museums were also the place where the artifacts of the non-European world were collected and classified. Artifacts were collected, but not the memory of the peoples from whom they had been stolen by pillage or purchase. Thus museums, as they evolved in the modernizing world of the West, constituted the archive of Western civilization, but could not give life to the archives of the rest of the world. In that sense, the museum could only gather artifacts representative of “other” memories, but not activate the cultural memories of the owners and authors of these, contained in those artifacts uprooted and displaced from their environment (Mignolo, 2014, 7). 7
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Fig. 2 Gallery "Memory and Nation" of the National Museum of Colombia. Founded in 1823, since 2010 it has been undergoing a renewal process that includes multiple voices that account for the multiethnic and multicultural country that Colombia is. The renovation is aimed at creating dialogue between the art, history, ethnography, and archaeology collections, using a variety of essential themes in the nation’s historical and cultural construction to offer visitors an inclusive, participatory, and dynamic narrative that invites reflection, celebration, and acknowledgement of what we have been, are, and will be as a nation. Photographer: José Muñoz. Courtesy of the National Museum of Colombia (2015).
In Mexico, the community museum acquires importance based on the notion of the eco-museum. This is how the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) applied the notions of the Santiago Round Table in the creation of the National Program of School and Community Museums, which consisted of installing small museums in local communities in various Mexican states with the help of their inhabitants (Puebla, 2015: 243). In Japan, this type of museum has become an important mechanism for recovering the identity of some towns and communities, based on sustainable management by the community itself for the purpose of recovering old traditions, which also promoted tourism and allowed for the active participation of the community (Navajas, 2012). Site museums are also spaces that contribute to the conservation of archaeological sites, while at the same time, they can promote the development of neighboring communities. As they seek a rapprochement with the public, archaeological museums must attempt to replace a chronological approach, which does not allow for an understanding of the society of the time, with a more accessible discourse. It is crucial to discuss the meaning of archaeological heritage in relation to the general population (McManamon, 2005). Site museums should be conceived as immersed in a territory. Therefore, archaeological heritage goes beyond the simple description of a place from the material remains recovered, as it must include the landscape and societies within the territory and, through the remains recovered from excavations, present ways of life, food, technology, etc. All this information must be transmitted to the community, considering the different audiences and their different capacities. An example of these dynamics is the museum at the Pachacamac archaeological sanctuary, located south of Lima (Peru). The museum has worked to implement new forms of communication with the surrounding community that would emphasize their sense of belonging to the cultural heritage found in their territory, which contains one of the most important archaeological sites of the pre-Hispanic Peruvian coast (Fig. 3). The Pachacamac archaeological sanctuary is based on a crucial principle: today’s museums should think of themselves as institutions with social responsibility, which means being concerned with the responsibility to those who live around them. For this reason, the Pachacamac Sanctuary Management Plan (Ministerio de Cultura, 2012) explicitly points out the importance of integrating the museum with the surrounding community and society in general. The site is surrounded by a population that came from internal migrations starting in the 1950s, that is, Peruvians looking for better living conditions. In 2009, it was the last major attempt at illegal occupation, which caused many clashes between the police authorities and the community to prevent the illegal occupation of the site. The question that arose among the members of the museum team was how to create a sense of relevance, the responsibility of care, and contribution to the identity of a community that comes to a place that, in the eyes of experts, is a very important archaeological heritage (Fig. 4). At that moment, the museum team clearly understood the dimension of what it means for a museum to be an institution at the service of the community (ICOM, 2017). Since then, the museum has intensified its strategies to establish dialogues with the neighboring population, which have allowed to this day the construction of a relationship, by virtue of which the museum continues to fulfill its mission of conservation, dissemination, and research. At the same time, the community improves its quality of life and understands that the museum is part of the local actors that contribute to the construction of the social tissue. An example of this is the proposal of projects to improve the quality of life of communities living near the archaeological zone. With this purpose, since 2013, a training and community entrepreneurship project has been initiated. This project, promoted by the museum, led to the creation of the SISAN craftswomen’s association, formed by a group of women from a community with limited economic resources, who have been trained to improve their knowledge in some activities that allow them to expand their skills,
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Fig. 3
Pachacamac Museum, Lima-Peru. Courtesy: Pachacamac Museum.
Fig. 4
Community development program. Courtesy: Pachacamac Museum.
such as embroidery techniques and sewing, among others, to create products for sale with Pachacamac iconography and thus improve their quality of life (Fig. 5). This training has allowed them to learn about the history of the archaeological site, in addition to acquiring information on business organization, tourism, and business opportunities. This has strengthened their capacities and those of the museum and has allowed them to take ownership of their heritage, seeking the sustainability of the project.
Summary and Future Directions Museums are a vital part of the cultural dynamics of societies; they continue to be important spaces of social cohesion and, despite having a particular history of colonization, any change in them (whether in their discourse, in the voices they include, or the knowledge they recognize), will have a significant impact on the collective message they offer as an institution. In this line, heritage
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Women of the SISAN Association. Courtesy: Pachacamac Museum.
management is no longer conceived without its direct link with development proposals and the community. Heritage goes from being inspiration and information to being topical, problematic, contextual, a possibility for creation, and a bridge for dialogue between the past and the present. Those of us involved in the rescue, valuation, and dissemination of archaeological heritage cannot lose sight of the link between heritage and local development. To conclude, we are aware that the recovery of archaeological heritage must include its collective and democratic appropriation, as well as creating material and symbolic conditions so that all social classes can share the heritage and find meaning in it (García Canclini, 1999).
See Also: Heritage and Sustainability; Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management.
References Ardouin, Claude D., 2000. Introduction. In: Ardouin, Arinze (Eds.), Museums and History in West Africa. James Currey, Oxford, pp. 1–2. Aronsson, Peter, 2012. National museums negotiating the past for a desired future. In: Basso, Luca, Pozzi, Clelia (Eds.), Museums in an Age of Migrations. Questions, Challenges, Perspectives. Mela Books, Milan, pp. 67–76. García Canclini, Néstor, 1999. Los usos sociales del patrimonio cultural. Andalucía: Consejería de Cultura y Junta de Andalucía. Borghi, Beatrice, 2017. Ecomuseos y mapas de comunidad: un recurso para la enseñanza de la historia y el patrimonio. Estudios pedagógicos (Valdivia) 43 (4), 251–275. Cartagena, Maria F., León, Christian, 2014. El museo desbordado: Debates contemporáneos en torno a la musealidad. Abya-Yala, Quito. Chagas, Mario, 2007. Museos, memorias y movimientos sociales. IX Seminario sobre Patrimonio Cultural, Santiago de Chile, Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos. Chapurukha, Kusimba, Klehm, Carla, 2013. Museums and public archaeology in Africa. In: Mitchell, Peter, Lane, Paul J. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 227–327. De Varine-Bohan, Hugues, 1979. Los museos en el mundo. Editorial Salvat, Barcelona. De Varine-Bohan, Hugues, 2020. El ecomuseo singular y plural. Un testimonio de cincuenta años de museología comunitaria en el mundo. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones ICOM-Chile. Do Nascimento Junior, José, Trampe, Alan, Dos Santos, Paula Assunção, 2012. Mesa redonda sobre la importancia y el desarrollo de los museos en el mundo contemporáneo: Revista Museum, 1973 – Brasília: IBRAM/MinC; Programa Ibermuseos. Instituto Brasileiro de Museus. Gándara, Manuel, 2018. La divulgación significativa como estrategia de comunicación educativa. Educação Temática Digital 20 (3), 662–679. General Assembly of ICOMOS, 2008. The ICOMOS Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites. González, Mónica, 2011. Museos y desarrollo en África. Revista de la Subdirección General de Museos Estatales, 126–141. Graybeal, Lesley, 2010. La combinación de lugar y voz en los ecomuseos: educando a comunidades y visitantes en el nuevo museo. Revista Interamericana de Educación para la Democracia 2 (3), 6–23. ICOM, 2017. CONSEJO INTERNACIONAL DE MUSEOS (ICOM) Estatutos. Modificados y adoptados por la asamblea general extraordinaria, el 9 de junio de 2017. https://icom. museum/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2017_ICOM_Statutes_SP_01.pdf. Consulta: 30/10/2022. ICOM, August 24, 2022. Museum Definition. Extraordinary General Assembly of ICOM, Prague. https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/. ICOMOS, 1964. International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (The Venice Charter) General Assembly of ICOMOS. Venice. https://www.icomos. org/en/resources/charters-and-texts. ICOMOS, 2008. Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites. 16th General Assembly of ICOMOS Quebec. http://icip.icomos.org/downloads/ICOMOS_ Interpretation_Charter_ENG_04_10_08.pdf. Jameson, John H., 2008. Interpretive art and archaeology. In: Pearsall, Deborah (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology. Academic Press, Columbia, pp. 1543–1553. Jameson, John H., 2020. Cultural heritage interpretation. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, pp. 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3319-51726-1_3162-1. Kusimba, Chapurukha, Klehm, Carla, 2013. Museums and public archaeology in Africa. In: Mitchell, Peter, Lane, Paul J. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 227–327. Lacarrieu, Mónica, Laborde, Soledad, 2018. Diálogos con la colonialidad: los límites del patrimonio en contextos de subalternidad. Persona y Sociedad 32 (1), 11–38.
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Lander, Edgardo, Castro-Gómez, Santiago, 2000. La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales: perspectivas latinoamericanas. Clacso, Buenos Aires. Larsen, Knut Einar (Ed.), 1994. Nara conference on authenticity - Conférence de Nara sur l’authenticité, Japan 1994. Proceedings. Trondeheim: UNESCO World Heritage Centre/ Agency for Cultural Affairs (Japan)/ICCROM/ICOMOS. Lumbreras, Luis Guillermo, 1974. La arqueología como ciencia social. PEISA, Lima. McManamon, Francis P., 2005. The public interpretation of America’s archaeological heritage. SAA Archaeol. Rec. 5 (2), 22–23. Meunier, Anik, Poirier-Vannier, Estelle, 2017. La exposición en los museos de sitio como herramienta de sensibilización al patrimonio arqueológico. Estud. Pedagog. 43 (4), 305–318. Mignolo, Walter, 2014. Activar los archivos, descentralizar a las musas. El Museo de Arte Islámico de Doha y el Museo de las Civilizaciones Asiáticas de Singapur, Barcelona. Quaderns portàtils. Ministerio de Cultura, 2012. Plan de Manejo del Santuario Arqueológico de Pachacamac (2012). Resumen Ejecutivo. UNESCO, Plan COPESCO Nacional y Ministerio de Cultura, Lima. MINOM, 1985. The Quebec declaration: basic principles of new museology. Museum 37 (4), 148. Navajas, Óscar, 2012. La museología social como herramienta del cambio en los museos de Japón. In: Asensio, M., Ibáñez, A., Caldera, P., Asenjo, E., Castro, Y. (Eds.), Series Iberoamericanas de Museología, vol. 4. UNAM, Madrid, pp. 241–255. Nnakenyi, Emmanuel, 1998. Los museos de África: el desafío del cambio. Mus. Int. 197, 31–37. Orbas¸li, Aylin, 2015. Naraþ20: a theory and practice perspective. Herit. Soc. 8 (2), 178–188. Puebla, María F., 2015. Discursos curatoriales y representación del pasado en museos de América Latina. Revista del Museo de Antropología 8 (2), 239–250. Quijano, Aníbal, 1992. Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad. Perú indígena 13 (29), 11–20. Vázquez, Rolando, 2018. El museo, decolonialidad y el fin de la contemporaneidad. Otros Logos. Revista de Estudios Críticos 9, 46–61. Vecco, Marilena, 2010. A definition of cultural heritage: from the tangible to the intangible. J. Cult. Herit. 11 (3), 321–324. Vozmediano, Elena, 2009. Museos nacionales o monumentos personales. Revista de Libros Segunda Época 148 (9), 1–9.
Relevant Websites ICOM Missions and Objectives. https://icom.museum/en/about-us/missions-and-objectives/. ICOMOS Charters Adopted by the General Assembly. www.icomos.org/en/resources/charters-and-texts. UNESCO Legal Instruments. http://www.portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php.html.
Indigenous Archaeology George P. Nicholasa and Lindsay M. Montgomeryb, a Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada; and b Department of Anthropology & Centre for Indigenous Studies, University of Toronto, ON, Canada © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Nomenclature History Treatment of the Dead Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property Concerns Theoretical Foundations Indigenous Methodologies Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References
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Indigenous archaeology emerged in the 1980s in response to the appropriation and control of Indigenous peoples’ heritage and their ancestors by outsiders. It includes but is not limited to traditional archaeological methods, practice, and theory used in aid of Indigenous needs, goals, and values. It foregrounds the results and information derived from archaeological and heritage management projects that directly benefit Indigenous communities. It can be a powerful tool for self-governance, identity, land rights, empowerment, cultural resurgence, and political resistance. Indigenous archaeology is similar to community archaeology but differs in that it can have a strong political dimension. In addition to contributing new scientific and historical information, Indigenous archaeology also serves as a mechanism for redistributive justice, truth, and reconciliation.
Abstract Indigenous archaeology is an expression of archaeological theory and practice that intersects with Indigenous peoples’ values, knowledge, practices, and ethics through collaborative and community-based or -directed projects, and related critical perspectives. It utilizes archaeological techniques to identify and protect heritage places, objects, and ancestral remains, often in combination with Traditional Knowledge. This entry provides a description of its goals, a history of its development and theoretical orientation, and examples of contemporary practices, along with opportunities and challenges for its practitioners.
Introduction Indigenous archaeology is an expression of archaeological theory and practice that intersects with Indigenous peoples’ values, knowledge, practices, and ethics through collaborative and community-based or -directed projects, and related critical perspectives. Indigenous archaeology seeks (a) to make archaeology more representative of, responsible to, and relevant for Indigenous communities; (b) to redress structural inequalities in the practice of archaeology; and (c) to inform and broaden the understanding and interpretation of the material record through the incorporation of Indigenous worldviews, histories, and science. It is an approach to archaeology defined by relationship building between non-Indigenous researchers working with Indigenous peoples, by Indigenous scholars challenging the status quo, and by Indigenous groups addressing their own heritage needs (Fig. 1). The field of study is not limited to tribal lands or sites, but to the entire archaeological record worldwide, as well as to the nature of archaeological theory and practice. Thus, Indigenous archaeological studies have included a Secwepemc First Nation archaeologist working on Secwepemc sites in British Columbia, Canada; an archaeologist of European descent working with an Aboriginal
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Fig. 1 Malcolm Connolly (Muruwari Nation) conducting his Ph.D. field research in Queensland, Australia, collecting soil samples for micromorphological analysis and OSL dating to study human responses to palaeoenvironmental change over the last 50,000 years. Photo: Dr. Richard Robins, 2018.
community in Australia; a Ghanaian archaeologist conducting ethnoarchaeological research in Ethiopia, and an AnishinaabeOjibwe archaeologist excavating at Çatälhöyuk in Turkey. While a central goal of Indigenous archaeology is to increase the number of Indigenous people practicing archaeology (e.g., Nicholas 2010), the identity of the practitioner is subsidiary to achieving the decolonization and Indigenization of the discipline. By advocating alongside (rather than for) Indigenous peoples, nonIndigenous researchers act as “accomplices” in dismantling the colonial structures of power that have shaped archaeological pedagogy, fieldwork, site interpretations, funding, collections management, and publishing practices (Flewellen et al., 2021: 234). In its broadest sense, Indigenous archaeology may be defined as any one (or more) of the following: (a) the active participation or consultation of Indigenous peoples in archaeology; (b) a political statement concerned with issues of Indigenous selfgovernment, sovereignty, land rights, identity, and heritage; (c) a critical enterprise designed to decolonize the discipline; (d) a manifestation of Indigenous epistemologies and worldviews; (e) the basis for alternative models of cultural heritage management and museum praxis; (f) a means of empowerment, cultural resurgence, or political resistance; (g) a mechanism for redistributive justice, truth, reconciliation, and human rights; and (h) a medium for healing. Not coincidentally, the lack of precise parameters to this field contrasts with the preciseness of Western science and philosophy, and is more in line with the openness and lack of rigid categorization often found in Indigenous worldviews and ethno-classification systems (i.e., where greater variation in classification of, for example, gender roles, may not only be accepted but expected). As discussed below, such a non-absolutist view is also found in feminist theories (Todd, 2016).
Overview and Key Issues Nomenclature Over the past 30 years, the concept of “Indigenous Archaeology” has become a central facet of archaeology in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere (Davidson et al., 1995; Swidler et al., 1997; Nicholas and Andrews 1997; Peck et al., 2003; Smith and Wobst, 2005). One of the earliest uses of the term was in Canada by John Dewhirst in The Indigenous Archaeology of Yuquot (1980) to refer to the Aboriginal component of an archaeological site. However, essential aspects of the still-unnamed concept appear in print at least a decade earlier. Denton’s (1985) statement that “The development of native archaeologies requires an ongoing dialogue between traditional scientific archaeology and various native perspectives on the past” is one of several that recognized the need for broadening the scope of archaeology. It was not until the later 1990s that the term was used with some consistency in its modern connotations. The first published definition of Indigenous archaeology is by Nicholas and Andrews (1997) who used it in reference to “archaeology with, for, and by Indigenous peoples.” Thereafter, the term appears with increasing frequency, becoming widespread in 2000 with the publication of Joe Watkins’ volume, Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Although Watkins did not explicitly define the term, his review focused on the historical relationship between Native Americans and archaeologists in North America (Nicholas et al., 2022), particularly as related to CRM and to reburial and repatriation issues (Mihesuah, 2000). Aspects of Indigenous archaeology may overlap with or be synonymous with “native archaeology,” “internalist archaeology,” “anthropological archaeology,” “collaborative archaeology,” “covenantal archaeology,” “vernacular archaeology,” “community archaeology,” “stakeholder archaeology,” “participatory action research,” “ethnocritical archaeology,” “ethnographic archaeology,” “reciprocal archaeology,” and “ethical archaeology.” As a broad conceptual framework encompassing a variety of research “with, for,
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and by Indigenous peoples,” the term has now gained wide recognition and has been applied to the heritage needs of Indigenous peoples more globally. The “indigenous” part of Indigenous archaeology most often relates to the involvement of so-called “Fourth World” and/or formerly disempowered, disenfranchized, and/or colonized peoples. David Maybury-Lewis’ (2002: 7) definition of “Indigenous peoples” as those who are “marginal or dominated by the states that claim jurisdiction over them” (2002: 7) generally coincides with how the term is constituted in the present archaeological context. There are, however, indigenes who are not disenfranchized or disempowered. In many parts of Africa, for example, they are the government. Likewise, archaeology in China has always been “indigenous,” but falls outside of the realm of “Indigenous archaeology.” The United Nations’ definition (2003) is thus useful for its broad orientation: “Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them.” Indigenous archaeology generally refers to projects and developments associated with or initiated by Indigenous peoples living in settler-colonial contexts, including Australia, Canada, and the United States. However, expressions of Indigenous archaeology also appear widely elsewhere, including in parts of Africa (e.g., South Africa, Kenya), New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, northern Europe, Siberia (Fig. 2), and Central and South America (McAnany and Rowe, 2016; Nicholas, 2010). The expanding scope of Indigenous archaeology alongside political debates regarding the federal or national recognition of Indigenous identities has led to complex debates around the question, “who is ‘indigenous’?” (e.g., Castenada, 2008). In Central America, for example, only a small percentage of the native-born population currently self-identifies as “indigenous.” In contrast, Latin America, as a subcontinent, has one of the highest proportions of Indigenous peoples in the world (roughly 8.3%) yet these communities have often lacked political recognition and the power to control their cultural heritage and archaeological resources (Dufner, 2022). Indigeneity is equally fraught within the United States where individual and collective identities are subject to tribal as well as state and federal recognition criteria. While Aboriginal status in Australia is legally based on biological descent, self-identification and community recognition, in Canada, “Indian” status is determined through formal recognition by the Crown. In Africa, “community archaeology” is often employed because it avoids identity politics surrounding the concept of indigeneity. The diversity of ways in which Indigeneity is recognized globally reflects important political and social issues regarding identity and self-representation and has contributed to the heterogeneity of Indigenous archaeology.
History Indigenous archaeology, as a decolonizing approach to material-based and historical research, is an outgrowth of earlier anthropological research on Indigenous communities and their entanglements with European imperialism. Archaeological studies of Indigenous material culture have been sponsored by settler colonial governments and the results of these studies initially marshaled to construct racial hierarchies, to support narratives of Indigenous disappearance, and to justify the expropriation of Indigenous lands. A North American example of such interactions is found in the actions of the US Army Medical Museum, which diligently collected the skulls of Native Americans killed during the Indian Wars of the 1860s and 1870s. Their remains, along with those of other “races,” were used by museum personnel to develop a craniological schema that demonstrated the intellectual and biological inferiority of Native peoples (Colwell, 2017). In contrast, Indigenous archaeologies critique the colonial origins of archaeological research and seek to identify and dismantle epistemic forms of colonialism that continue to shape the interpretive frameworks and heritage management regimes used by archaeologists today (Ferris et al., 2014; Trigger, 1980).
Fig. 2 Dr. Mari Kleist (second from left) is the first Inuk Greenlander to earn a Ph.D. in Archaeology. She co-directs a research project in Avanersuaq (Inughuit homelands) in northwestern Greenland with local Inughuit and colleagues from the University of Calgary, and students from llisimatusarfik (University of Greenland). From left, Pia Egede, Mari Kleist, Pauline Knudsen, Qalaseq Sadorana, Pivinnguaq Mørch, Matthew Walls, Niels Miunge, Otto Simigaq. Photo: Matthew Walls, c. 2019.
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Informed by historical particularism and the need to construct cultural historical sequences, archaeological research during the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries largely entailed indirect collaborations with Indigenous peoples. In North America, much of this early research was shaped by the work of Franz Boas and his colleagues including Harlan Smith, Jesse Fewkes, Frank Cushing, Alanson Skinner, and Arthur C. Parker (himself Seneca Tribe); in Australia, Norman Tindale and Donald Thompson; in Saharan Africa, Jean-Paul Boeuf. This era of research was informed by a “salvage” paradigm which posited the imminent disappearance of Indigenous cultures in the wake of European settler colonialism and therefore justified anthropological efforts to assemble large volumes of material, linguistic, and ethnographic data. Early scholars placed a significant emphasis on original fieldwork, drawing on emic forms of analysis and a relativistic approach to understand the unique character and history of each culture. The importance of fieldwork meant that archaeologists and anthropologists often worked closely with indigenous community members (such as George Hunt and Paul Silook in North America; Charlie Lamjerroc and Charlie Mangga in Australiadalthough many are unnamed), relying on them to aid in locating or interpreting artifacts and sites, and for translations and other liaison services. In return, these community members not only benefited in terms of financial compensation and status, but also had a direct, often lasting influence on local archaeological practice. Another significant development that encouraged collaboration was archaeologists’ use of the direct historical approach to interpret archaeological sites by reference to contemporary Indigenous communities in the area. For the most part, however, the involvement of Indigenous peoples in archaeology conducted on their traditional lands was generally limited to service as guides and crew members, or often merely unwitting bystanders. Aboriginal communities usually benefited little from these interactions and had little meaningful input into the design of research projects, or involvement in decisions that directly affected their cultural heritage, nor learned of or benefitted from the results. In fact, the blatant quest to excavate human remains for display or study was often a violation of social mores and religious beliefs. As a result, archaeology was increasingly viewed as harmful and disturbing to many, and of little relevance or value. Although there were numerous exceptions, the primary beneficiaries of archaeology have long been the careers of archaeologists, the institutions they serve, or, in the case of CRM projects, commercial interests, and the broader public. During the latter part of the 20th century, major changes took place in the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the dominant society, informed by the anti-colonial struggles of colonized peoples in the global North and South during the 1960s and 1970s. Political demands for representation and civil rights, coupled with cultural revitalization efforts, an emerging liberal discourse of diversity and multiculturalism, and changing public attitudes toward racism and imperialism, contributed to a global shift in archaeological praxis. In the Americas, Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, demands for tribal recognition, national sovereignty, and/or acceptance of ethnic identity and values were often as much inspired by cultural heritage issues as they were by calls for social justice and restitution. The landmark Mabo Decision in Australia (1992) recognized Native title and all that entailed. In the United States, Vine Deloria Jr. clearly articulated aspects of Native American dissatisfaction, including the legitimacy and practice of anthropology and archaeology and the callous treatment of ancient human remains (see Biolsi and Zimmerman, 1997). The emergence of the American Indian Movement in the early 1970s not only brought such concerns to national attention, but also launched actions to stop the desecration of ancestral remains and places of cultural significance. Increasing political clout and support from a sympathetic (albeit wary) public resulted in federal legislation, including the American Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975) and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). Similar types of federal legislation or rulings on Indigenous rights were passed in New Zealand (Treaty of Waitangi Act [1975]), Canada (Delgamuukw v Regina [1997]), Sweden (Girjas Sameby Supreme Court decision [2020]), and elsewhere. During the 1970s in the United States, the first major initiatives to address the specific concerns of Indigenous peoples relating to the CRM and to provide training were initiated by the Zuni Archaeology Program (in 1975) and the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department (in 1978). Contemporary tribal politics affecting archaeology now include drafting heritage policies and the development of tribal permitting systems, research protocols, and guidelines (Fig. 3). The power of tribes to control the process and products of archaeology was increased through a 1992 amendment to the National Historic Preservation Act which allowed tribes to establish their own Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPO). THPO’s gave Tribal Nations direct control over heritage preservation on tribal lands and provided an alternative to the type of stewardship model (e.g., Ferguson, 2003) endorsed by the Society for American Archaeology and other organizations. Reactions to Indigenous Archaeology were initially mixed. Some expressed dismay, arguing that federal reburial and repatriation legislation, along with the inclusion of Indigenous people and values in archaeology, would be the end of some types of “scientific” archaeological investigations or promoted a form of political correctness (see McGhee, 2008 and responses). There were also concerns about the credibility and hyper-relativism of Indigenous peoples doing archaeology, especially where their research could be used in CRM or land claims. Today, Indigenous archaeology is recognized worldwide as a valid and valuable part of the vocabulary of archaeology. One indicator of this shift is the appearance of Indigenous archaeology as a topic in introductory archaeology textbooks, along with a sharp rise in popular and academic writing by Indigenous scholars (e.g., Brownlee, 2018; Montgomery, 2021). A new generation of students are growing up in a world where Indigenous archaeology is part of the archaeological landscape that they encounter. Within the context of these above events, two broad, interrelated themes strongly contributed to the grassroots development of Indigenous archaeology: (1) the treatment of the dead (and sacred objects and places); and (2) broader concerns about cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible) and intellectual property.
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Fig. 3 Intergenerational sharing of knowledge, Lyle Balenquah (Hopi) and his father Riley Balenquah, visiting an ancestral Hopi site in the Bears Ears Landscape, Utah, an area of great cultural significance that had been threatened by changes in federal policy. Photo: Lyle Balenquah, 2018.
Treatment of the Dead Indigenous objections to the collection, study, and display of human remains by archaeologists and others have had a significant effect on the practice and politics of archaeology and in some countries led to the passage of legislation to protect their religious practices and heritage. Long-standing concerns regarding both excavated and fortuitous finds relate foremost to the belief in the sanctity of human burials, and to other factors including disrespectful or inappropriate handling, display, and curation. During the late 19th century, institutions worldwide assembled major collections of non-European skeletal remains to aid the study of human biological and cultural evolution, or to establish racial classification systems. In addition, some scholars felt it necessary to establish a record of the soon-to-be-extinct Indigenous peoples of various lands. Human remains were obtained not only from archaeological sites, but also by raiding Indigenous cemeteries or collecting corpses on battlefields or from morgues; specimens were purchased and sent to museums around the world (Fforde, 2004). Thus, over the past several centuries, the remains of tens of thousands of ancestral Indigenous individuals were sent through a vast trading network between colonial alliances worldwide (Fforde et al., 2020), and accumulated in museums and other repositories where they often went unstudied or were simply forgotten about. Indigenous peoples long demanded that such practices cease, citing the desecration of their ancestors and sacred sites (Fig. 4), as well as the double standard of “scientific” inquirydIndigenous human remains were brought to laboratories to study, while those of European descent were quickly reburied. In the 1970s, the American Indian Movement and other entities took direct action against archaeologists investigating human remains, but with little lasting effect. Reburial and repatriation issues subsequently rose to national and international prominence in the 1990s in response to the highly publicized looting of the Slack Farm site in Kentucky in 1988 and similar events, to charges that archaeology was scientific colonialism, and to changing attitudes toward Aboriginal rights. The adoption of the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains by the World Archaeological Congress in 1989 along with the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act (1989) and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation
Fig. 4 “Ancestors in Boxes.” Bringing the ancestors home is important cultural work in which the Stó:lo of British Columbia have actively engaged for two decades. Photo: Paul Campion, 2010.
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Act (1990) in the United States, and the South African Resources Act (1999) directly addressed Indigenous concerns about the treatment of their dead. In 2021, the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act passed by the Australian legislators repealed the controversial Section 18 approval process within the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972 that provided private landowners with legal consent to damage, or alter Aboriginal sites. The new heritage bill embraced the cultural authority of traditional landowners by enshrining the principles of free, prior, and informed consent. These legislative reforms for the first time placed Indigenous moral values above scientific ones. The reaction of the archaeological community to reburial and repatriation varied widely. Some felt that political correctness had trumped science and reason, while others were sympathetic; the majority fell in between with a “wait-and-see” attitude. Despite initial fears, legislated or voluntary concessions by archaeologists to Indigenous concerns have proven beneficial to the longterm relationship between these groups because the controversies generated a careful rethinking of institutional policies and obliged interaction and communication. Important lessons about collaboration were provided by the Smithsonian Institution’s repatriation of 1000 individuals to Larsen Bay, Alaska, in 1991, the return of War God fetishes to Zuni Pueblo in 1989, and by a number of major repatriations in Australia, including the return by the Australian National University of the Kow Swamp remains in 1990 and of “Mungo Lady” to Lake Mungo in 1992, and that by the Natural History Museum, London, of 17 Tasmanians to Australia. The drawn-out legal battle in the Kennewick Man case in the United States (1995–2016) demonstrates that significant tensions still remain between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples. When the remains of the “Ancient One” were first discovered in Kennewick, Washington, in 1995, a group of archaeologists vehemently opposed the repatriation of these remains by a coalition of Indigenous communities led by the Umatilla tribe. In 2004, the US Court of Appeals gave archaeologists custody over the remains for scientific study based on a lack of direct evidence connecting the Kennewick remains to modern Indigenous people. Over a decade later this ruling was reversed and the Kennewick remains repatriated, based on DNA evidence demonstrating a genetic link between the Kennewick remains and modern tribal members from the Columbia Basin. Despite such controversies, the willingness of some archaeologists and major scientific organizations to work with descendant communities to rectify past inequities set the stage for later collaborations. For example, Métis archaeologist Kisha Supernant has collaborated with First Nations communities in Western Canada to identify and reclaim possible unmarked graves of Indigenous students who died or went missing while attending residential boarding schools. Similarly, tribal nations in the United States have worked with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the Army War College to successfully repatriate Indigenous students from the Carlisle Industrial Boarding school. Today, the number of Native communities allowing or requesting the scientific study of ancestral human remains is increasing (Meloche et al., 2020). As the result of reburial and repatriation legislation, in many countries archaeologists are now required to consult with Indigenous governments and organizations, and to adhere to established protocols and permitting systems for field and research projects in their territory, or for studying human remains (Meloche et al., 2020). In many cases, this brought archaeologists into direct contact with Indigenous groups whose views began to inform the research process, and whose interests in the life histories of their ancestors is growing.
Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property Concerns Care for and control over ancestral sites has figured prominently in both the origins and goals of Indigenous archaeology. By the mid-1960s, the preservation of archaeological sites was increasingly a focus of CRM and heritage legislation in North America and elsewhere (National Historic Preservation Act, US [1966]; Australian Heritage Commission Act [1975]). Such legislation reflected broad public values, but did not specifically address the concerns or desires of the Indigenous minority whose ancestors created the vast majority of archaeological sites in settler colonial countries, and who lacked the opportunity or authority to make decisions about the preservation and management of their own heritage. While “consultation” with members of descendant communities has now become a frequent, and sometimes required component of heritage management, it too often has remained only nominal with little true power sharing. In addition, many Indigenous communities lack funds and personnel to devote to archaeologists’ requests for information and externally imposed timelines. Although international, federal and state, or provincial legislation has protected the material heritage of Indigenous peoples, four topics have been especially problematic: (1) significance; (2) stewardship; (3) cultural affiliation; (4) intellectual property: 1) The concept of “significance” and its application in evaluating the value of heritage sites, as required by specific legislation has been shaped by an emphasis on tangible cultural heritage. Within most archaeological projects, scientific values have been given primacy, although historical, religious, and community values are also considered, as in Botswana and other African countries. Such a priority often runs counter to non-Western perspectives that do not require “significant” places, ancestral sites, or entire landscapes to possess material evidence of what happened there (or even to have been culturally modified at all). However, concerns about oral history and intangible heritage have been addressed by policies or legislation in South Africa, Canada, and elsewhere, and, more generally, by UNESCO. 2) The notion of “stewardship” and the role of archaeologists and their professional organizations as stewards of the archaeological record on behalf of (or in the interest of) descendant communities has been increasingly critiqued for being unilateral and paternalistic, with archaeologists assuming control over the process and imposing a different value system (their own) on other peoples’ heritage. 3) Current legal frameworks protecting the rights of Indigenous people over tangible forms of cultural heritage rely on those communities being able to demonstrate “a cultural affiliation” to those materials. Broadly, cultural affiliation refers to a contemporary shared group identity that can be traced back over time. Within NAGPRA, the cultural affiliation between human remains or objects can be demonstrated through geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, linguistic, historical,
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or oral lines of evidence. Although there are many pathways to establishing cultural affiliation, courts and institutions have typically privileged genetic data in these determinations (e.g., the Kennewick Man case discussed above (Kuprecht, 2012)). As Rebecca Tsosie (2007) has argued, the concept of “cultural affiliation” problematically places the burden of proof on often underfunded Tribal Nations who must apply Euro-American conceptual categories to their own identities, often revealing the incommensurability of Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews. The problematic nature of “cultural affiliation” as a heritage management concept is demonstrated by the recent controversy over ancient DNA research on “culturally unidentifiable” human remains from Chaco Canyon housed in the American Museum of Natural History (Cortez et al., 2021). The absence of a cultural affiliation between these human remains and a living federally recognized Tribal Nation based on Euro-American legal categories allowed archaeologists to move forward with genetic research despite objections from Indigenous communities who have an ancestral link to Chaco. 4) A key question regarding the focus on material culture in archaeology and heritage management, is who has the right to interpret, benefit from, or control access to information and objects from the past. For Indigenous peoples, the emphasis on the physical expressions of heritage may be far less important than their intangible aspects (Fig. 5). This presented considerable challenges to protecting Indigenous heritage objects and sites even when protected by law. What often goes unrecognized is that no object or place has meaning without the intangible values it holds (Nicholas and Bell, 2021). Concerns about protecting and preserving oral histories and other intangible forms of heritage have been addressed by policies or legislation in South Africa, Canada, and elsewhere, and, more generally, by UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage [2003]. Despite these legislative efforts, there are ongoing debates and ethical challenges relating to Indigenous heritage in the context of data sovereignty, paleogenomic data, proprietary information, traditional knowledge, and cultural appropriation. Tribal involvement in archaeology was underway as early as the 1950s in many countries in Africa following independence. During the 1980s and 1990s, a growing number of state government agencies and Indigenous organizations began to establish programs to train community members (e.g., “Aboriginal Rangers” in Australia) to monitor CRM projects (Fig. 6)dinitiatives that build capacity and put Indigenous people in decision-making positions. Indigenous peoples have gradually achieved greater and more meaningful control over tangible and intangible cultural heritage through various avenues over the past 30 years, although there have been regular setbacks when legislation is changed or legal precedents overturned. New or broadened legislation has ensured greater direct Aboriginal involvement, such as the requirement for First Nations in British Columbia to review archaeological permit applications (Heritage Conservation Act [1996], Canada), and offered new levels of protection (e.g., Northern Territory Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act [1989], Australia, and UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage [2003]). Additional recognition and protection of Indigenous heritage comes with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, 2007), which provides strong (but voluntary) direction for acknowledging, respecting, and protecting Indigenous heritage, both tangible and intangible (see Articles 11, 12, and 31), including traditional cultural expressions, data sovereignty, foodways, and more. Furthermore, Indigenous organizations in southern Africa, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere now require research, media, and travel permits for archaeological and ethnographic work conducted there. Increasingly, consultation with communities is a requirement of federal, state, or provincial legislation. The introduction and integration of new large-scale resource management strategies by federal agencies has developed in direct response to concerns raised by Indigenous groups. In North America, these initiatives include traditional cultural properties (under Section 106, NHPA), and aboriginal cultural properties (Parks Canada), which are similar to some indigenous stewardship programs that integrate cultural and natural resources. Indigenous communities and organizations in some countries are creating their own
Fig. 5 The Myola project team, directed by Dr. Roxanne Tsang (Lamaklik Clan, Kabil/Lagadon Villages) (third from left) comprising of archaeologists from Extent Heritage P/L, University of Papua New Guinea students, and the local landowners and villagers working with them. Photo: Ashley O’Sullivan, 2016.
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Fig. 6 The Thamarrurr Rangers were established in 2001 to address land and sea issues in their country. (from left) Stanley Kungul, Cyril Ninnal (now Senior Traditional Owner), Dan Secombe and Robert Dumoo. Northern Territory, Australia. Photo: Mark Crocombe, 2006.
archaeology or cultural heritage departments, as well as consulting companies. In Australia, successful negotiations for Aboriginal management or co-management of tribal lands and heritage sites, such as Uluru and Kakadu National Parks, also occurred with more frequency, albeit with some federally imposed limits. College and university-level archaeology programs have provided new opportunities for Indigenous peoples to access heritage management tools, as well as credentials and training in archaeology. This includes the Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies, Hokkaido University (Japan), the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona (USA), and the Yunggorendi First Nations Center, Flinders University (Australia) (Fig. 7). Indigenous concerns regarding how their histories and cultures are taught have also contributed to the creation of Native Studies and Indigenous Archaeology programs in universities and other academic settings. As part of this shifting landscape of higher education, many universities have formally recognized the importance of ethical research with Indigenous communities by adding tribal approval criteria to the Internal Review Board (IRB) process for involving Indigenous peoples based on Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. Building on these developments, Tribal Nations, like the Navajo Nation and Confederated Tribes of Graton Rancheria have created their own IRB process for archaeologists and other researchers wishing to conduct studies with tribal members or their cultural histories. Such initiatives provide Indigenous communities with policy mechanisms for securing “data sovereignty”; the inherent right of Indigenous communities to govern the collection, ownership, and use of quantitative and qualitative data produced about their peoples, lands, cultures, and resources.
Fig. 7 The Kamloops Indigenous Archaeology Program (1991–2004), developed and directed by George Nicholas, was part of a 20-year postsecondary collaboration between the Secwepemc Education Society and Simon Fraser Univesity, Kamloops, British Columbia. Photo: George Nicholas, c. 2002.
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Fig. 8 The President of the Tahcabo Museum Committee, Raquel del Carmen Rosado Aguayo, provides a tour of the community museum in Yucatán to visiting schoolchildren and their chaperones. Photo: Maia Dedrick.
Tribal and public museums are also developing new ways to effectively present Indigenous and “scientific” interpretations of the past, but also working to prevent the loss of intellectual property (e.g., the Hoodia biopiracy case in southern Africa). Various museums worldwide have responded to Indigenous concerns by considering and integrating alternate curation and management practices, shifting their roles from repositories of antiquities (or “captured heritage”) to holders of cultural treasures. The Museum of South Australia, the Canadian Museum of History, the National Museum of the American Indian, and others actively promote indigenous perspectives in exhibits and education programs (Fig. 8). In addition, the rise of community-based museums has provided new opportunities to explore and articulate local values in cultural heritage. In the United States, new sources of funding, including casinos, have enabled some groups to fully fund their own world-class archaeology programs (e.g., Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut; Ziibiwing Center for Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan; Historical Museum of the Saru River in Hokkaido). There are also online initiatives such as the Inuvialuit Living History Website that return archaeological information to the source community.
Theoretical Foundations As defined here, Indigenous archaeology is a relatively coherent body of method and archaeological theory grounded in critical, emic, reflexive, and agency-oriented perspectives. This research is contextualized by the needs, values, and critiques of Indigenous people. For example, it may operate as an extension of traditional archaeological methods conducted with, for, or by communities in CRM surveys; a pursuit of land claims; or supplementing or validating traditional histories. While such theoretical shifts have brought Indigenous peoples into deeper collaboration with archaeologists, individuals in many Indigenous communities believe they do not need archaeology to tell them what they already know about the past through other means. Much of Indigenous archaeology is strongly oriented towards identifying and addressing the limitations and biases of Western science, as well as the significant power imbalances faced by minority communities (McNiven, 2016). It attempts to make archaeology more relevant, more responsible, and more representative through a strongly postcolonial orientation. Within academia, the anti-colonial efforts of the 1960s and 1970s spurred the development of post-colonial theory led by South Asian and African intellectuals. Post-colonial approaches account for and deconstruct the political, economic, historical, and social impacts of European colonialism. Post-colonial critiques of hegemonic power in the past and present along with its futurist efforts to reimagine politics and ethics have been elaborated upon by Indigenous archaeologists working in a wide variety of settler colonial and post-colonial contexts (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders Studies, 2000; Atalay 2006; Lydon and Rizvi, 2010). Such post-colonial approaches run parallel to, or intersect with Marxist theory, cultural relativism, feminist theory, materiality, and other explicitly Indigenous constructs. Depending upon its context, Indigenous archaeology may include any of the following theoretical elements in designing and implementing research practices:
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Indigenous epistemologydlocal explanations of worldview (how things came to be); Interpretive archaeological theorydreflexivity, multivocality; recognition of relative and situated nature of knowledge; Marxist theorydexposing power relations, inequalities, motive and means for social change; theoretically informed action; Critical archaeologydrecognition of class-based nature of science and history; exposing the means by which knowledge is produced and its emancipatory potential; and
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Feminist theoryddemarginalization, reconceptualization, reexamination of categories, concepts, standpoints and perspectives; considering other viewpoints or ways of knowing.
As Indigenous archaeology has evolved, the incorporation of Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and ethics have become a central face of empirical and conceptual research within the sub-field. Building on the work of Vine Deloria Jr. and other Indigenous scholars, archaeologists have turned to Indigenous worldviews to develop culturally grounded interpretive frameworks and methodologies that can be used alongside or as alternatives to traditional schemata developed by Euro-American archaeologists in the 20th century (Fig. 9) (e.g., Crellin et al., 2020). This theoretical shift has taken a variety of forms including the use of Indigenous concepts and terminologies, the use of the oral tradition as a historical source, and the incorporation of traditional knowledge; in the context of historical ecology, these are often combined with traditional fieldwork practices. By placing Indigenous perspectives, voices, and worldviews at the center of archaeological practice, this new investment in Indigenous knowledge reflects the indigenizing mission of Indigenous archaeology. Indigenous archaeology has also been particularly engaged with feminist theory (e.g., Conkey, 2005), particularly the critiques of Fourth World intellectuals regarding the ways in which whiteness has become universalized and embedded in mainstream scholarly discourses that ignore the perspectives of people of color. As part of a broader effort to decolonize internalized forms of heteropatriarchy within archaeology, feminist approaches have been used by Indigenous archaeologists to identify the lives of Indigenous women in the material record. As laid out by Arvine et al. (2020), Indigenous feminist approaches to archaeology make several key theoretical interventions, including problematizing the relationship between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, refusing the erasure of Indigenous women, and critiquing disciplinary practices that exclude and subordinate Indigenous peoples (Fig. 10). Such integration of Indigenous forms of knowledge and beliefs into theoretical frameworks is a central facet of Indigenous feminist approaches to archaeology.
Indigenous Methodologies The principal goals of Indigenous archaeology are to broaden the scope of archaeology and to transform its practice. It seeks to do so primarily through its applications in a number of overlapping spheres in which Indigenous peoples have a vested interest, especially heritage preservation, education, community history and traditional knowledge, cultural revitalization, and repatriation of knowledge and objects of cultural patrimony. However, Indigenous archaeology has a dual and sometimes contradictory nature since it utilizes (indeed adds to) the spectrum of methods employed in archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and related fields, but also challenges them by developing alternative approaches to interpreting past lifeways. The resultant tension between competing Indigenous and Western ideologies has proven to be a productive area of new ideas. The methodologies of Indigenous archaeology emphasize ethical and culturally appropriate behavior at all stages of research (Fig. 10), including the planning, dissemination, and application of these results (Smith, 1999), while also foregrounding an ethnocritical orientation (see Zimmerman, 2008). This collaborative ethic is rooted in a concern with benefit sharing and community participation and flexibility as to how and when community members will involve themselves (Atalay, 2012). Research projects are designed with community needs and values in mind, which are often prioritized over the recovery of scientific data (which can lead to conflict with government permitting agencies) (Fig. 11). Archaeologists working with, and especially for, Indigenous peoples may thus be requested to serve as consultants, cultural brokers, facilitators, advocates, policy analysts, needs assessors, or expert witnesses. Given the different ways in which Indigenous peoples construct the world, it is no surprise that the heritage
Fig. 9 In northern Brazil, Jaime Xaman Wai Wai (M.A., Anthropology) (front) searching for the ancient village of Ahru, following Poriciwi knowledge. Body paint is used to avoid harm from dangerous spirits. Photo: Ruebens C. Queiroz, 2020.
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Dr. Bonnie Newsom (Penobscot) evaluating erosion of a coastal shell heap on the coast of Maine, USA. Photo: Alice Kelley.
Fig. 11 Students on the Picuris Collaborative Archaeological Project, co-directed by Lindsay Montgomery, learn how to make adobe bricks from Picuris Pueblo tribal liaison and elder, Richard Mermejo. Photo: Lindsay M. Montgomery, c. 2018.
concerns of communities often go well beyond the scope of archaeology. Indigenous archaeologists have acknowledged this fact through critical discussions about the role archaeologists should play in the broader effort of Indigenous communities to achieve social justice as well as the limits of the discipline in contributing to social, political, and economic change. The research methods used by Indigenous archaeologists are informed by local (internalist) values, coupled with the recognition that not all elements of past lives are reflected in material culture. The four-field approach of anthropology therefore has great relevance since it provides access to and a framework for understanding all aspects of a society, including emic and etic perspectives. Oral histories have been drawn on in developing alternative definitions of significance and have increasingly played a central role in linking archaeological data to contemporary Indigenous communities as well as Indigenous archaeology. Archaeological research is also influenced by local worldviews, which can have significant implications for appropriate CRM strategies. For example, the absence of the familiar Western dichotomies of past/present and real/supernatural realms, plus time being viewed as non-linear, mean that ancestral spirits are part of the contemporary landscape. The incorporation of oral histories and other forms of traditional knowledge into Indigenous archaeology (Bruchac, 2020) reflects a larger effort to deconstruct the standard division between historic and prehistoric periods, which creates an unnecessary separation of contemporary Indigenous peoples from their past (Fig. 12). The scale of investigation within Indigenous archaeology may vary substantially, from landscape-centered to artifact-focused, from tangible to intangible cultural heritage. Field methods include standard data observational and collection strategies from archaeology, such as site survey, testing, and excavation techniques. Concerns arise over biases or limitations associated with traditional survey and site sampling methods, as well as with the adequacy of site significance evaluations and predictive models (especially when the latter are seen or believed to contradict community knowledge of traditional or pre-contact land-use practices). In general, however, there is less reliance on empirical approaches and more standing given to non-empirical sources, including oral histories, folklore, traditional knowledge, religious beliefs, and ethnography. Ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological methods
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Fig. 12 Dr. Akinwumi Ogundiran (Yoruba) excavating a storage pit in Early Òṣogbo, Nigeria, for his research on the early modern commercial revolution and climate instability on cultural, economic, and political transformations in the Yoruba mainland, Nigeria. Photo: Akinwumi Ogundiran.
include walking the land to identify traditional cultural properties, and use of focus groups, interviewing, and participant observation (all with informed consent), which may be used to discuss customary law or to identify local concerns about, or perceptions of what constitutes heritage sites. Experimental archaeological approaches which draw on the knowledge of Indigenous craftsmen and women to reconstruct traditional technologies and practices in the past have also been used by Indigenous archaeologists to shed light on the material record while contributing to Indigenous revitalization and resurgence in the present. At the request of the community, projects may be designed to use non-destructive, non-invasive field methods or findings may be reburied on site after analysis. Other methods of note include the occasional use of non-Cartesian site grids to locate circular subsurface test units, the use of toponymic information to direct fieldwork, as well as, alternative classification systems and curation methods. Customary or hybrid ceremonial activities are sometimes conducted prior to, during, or at the close of fieldwork, and may include storytelling, drumming, singing, and offerings by elders or community members to honor the ancestors, as well as smudging and ochre face paint to cleanse or protect crew members. Care is taken to use appropriate terminology, recognize the problematic nature of some terms by archaeologists (e.g., “prehistory”) and to show respect, especially to elders, the traditional custodians of Indigenous knowledge. There have been major changes in the manner that human remains are treated, both in response to federal legislation and community consultation. Although there have been well-publicized examples of Indigenous groups employing legislation or public pressure to repatriate and rebury human remains without scientific study, there are as many cases where tribes have allowed or even requested such study, including DNA testing and radiocarbon dating. For example, in 2019 Yidinji elders worked with evolutionary geneticists at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, to determine whether the remains of ancient ancestors collected by archaeologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries were closely related to living members of the community. Some Indigenous archaeologists work in this realm, or as mediators between archaeologists and communities. The broad operating framework of Indigenous archaeology is defined by a series of incentives that range from federal legislation to local community needs and initiatives, filtered through the continuing discourse between (and within) the Indigenous and archaeological communities (see McAnany and Rowe, 2016). Foremost are meeting the needs of the community, in terms of capacity building or resolving conflicts between developers. Much of the efforts of Indigenous archaeology deal with enabling communities to manage their own cultural heritage or to evaluate the work done by others on their territory. In Australia, North America, and elsewhere, the number of Indigenous people employed full or part-time in archaeology today numbers at least in the hundreds, facilitated in many cases by new opportunities for academic, field-school, or work experience-based training. In some countries, however, Indigenous minorities are suppressed and part of the suppression involves distancing them from their archaeological heritage. Community-based protocols identifying who has rights to use and publish data and photographs are beginning to address longstanding concerns about cultural and intellectual property. Access to research results by the community, in appropriate formats (from public talks to DVDs, and from lay-oriented, jargon-free publications to technical reports) is important. There is growing use of film, digital recordings, and web-based media to record or present Aboriginal interpretations of cultural landscapes or other aspects of their culture, such as the Nganampa Anwernekenhe film series made by Indigenous Australians for both their own needs and public television. In sum, Indigenous archaeology requires developing respect and trust through meaningful community interaction, consultation, negotiation, and collaboration; culturally appropriate behavior; a relatively informal, personal approach, and a long-term commitment to the community. It also reflects an endeavor that brings news ideas about the role of the past in the present (Fig. 13) (e.g., Pollard et al., 2020).
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Fig. 13 Maya high school students from Morganton, North Carolina, USA, together with local college students from Universidad de Oriente, Valladolid, Yucatán, México, learn about ongoing excavations at Tahcabo, through participation in an InHerit program called ‘Maya from the Margins’. Photo: Maia Dedrick, c. 2021.
Summary and Future Directions Throughout the world, Indigenous people’s increasingly pointed critique of archaeological practice, coupled with the development of Indigenous archaeology, has contributed significantly to the development of new ethical standards and codes by professional organizations, including the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists, the Australian Archaeological Association, and the Canadian Archaeological Association, the Society for American Archaeology, and the World Archaeological Congress. The World Archaeological Congress’ code of ethics is framed around the obligations archaeologists have to Indigenous peoples; WAC also actively promotes and financially supports Indigenous participation in all of its meetings. Indigenous archaeology has a relatively limited presence within the Society for American Archaeology. However, the society does support Indigenous archaeologists through the Arthur C. Parker scholarship for Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, and the Bertha Parker Cody Award for Native American Women (both named after pioneering Indigenous archaeologists). More recently, the SAA has established the Task force on Decolonization which is working alongside the Committee on Native American Relations and other task forces to restructure the organization in ways that benefit Indigenous peoples. Other organizations have provided important venues for exploring Indigenous issues in archaeology, including the Chacmool Archaeology conference, which hosted “Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology” in 1999 (Peck et al., 2003), and “Decolonizing Archaeology” in 2006. Finally, Indigenous concerns regarding education have contributed to the creation of Native Studies and Indigenous Archaeology programs in universities and other academic settings. There are also community-based initiatives, a growing number of which offer credentials and training in archaeology. The scope of archaeology has clearly broadened through many “working together” projects (Dongoske et al., 2000). However, very few “collaborations” with Indigenous groups actually include true power sharing and negotiation regarding the process and products of archaeology. This is a major hurdle to decolonization since the idea of giving up control frightens many nonIndigenous archaeologists. Major issues regarding ownership of and access to cultural and intellectual property have yet to be seriously engaged. Indigenous peoples need more opportunities for education and training in archaeology. Moreover, mainstream archaeology needs to listen to and address how and why Indigenous peoples may view it as threatening to them. Indigenous archaeology grew out of efforts by marginalized peoples worldwide to challenge the imposition of archaeology on their lives and heritage. It has in a relatively short time developed a distinct body of methods and theory designed to promote ethical and inclusive practices that will further democratize the discipline, and stimulate new ideas that will significantly increase the scope of archaeology as a socially relevant and still scientifically sound discipline.
Acknowledgments We thank Sonya Atalay, T.J. Ferguson, Julie Hollowell, Chelsea Meloche, Sven Ouzman, Claire Smith, John Welch, Joe Watkins, Eldon Yellowhorn, and Larry Zimmerman for review and comments on this and the original entry.
See Also: Archaeology and Human Rights; Community Archaeology; Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution in Archaeology and Heritage; Repatriation of Human Remains.
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In: Calboli, Irene, Montagnani, Maria (Eds.), Handbook on Intellectual Property Research. Oxford University Press, pp. 304–329. Peck, Trevor, Siegfried, Evelyn, Oetelaar, Gerry (Eds.), 2003. Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology: Honouring the Past, Discussing the Present, Building for the Future. Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary. Pollard, Kellie, Smith, Claire, Willika, Jasmine, Copley Sr., Vince, Copley Jr., Vincent, Wilson, Christopher, Poelina-Hunter, Emily, Ah Quee, Julie, 2020. Indigenous views on the future of public archaeology in Australia. A conversation that did not happen. AP 10, 31–52. Schmidt, Peter R., Pikirayi, Innocent (Eds.), 2016. Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing Practice. Routledge, London and New York. Smith, Claire, Wobst, Martin (Eds.), 2005. Decolonizing Archaeological Theory and Practice. Routledge, New York. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, London. Swidler, Nina, Dongoske, Kurt, Anyon, Roger, Downer, Alan (Eds.), 1997. Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground. AltaMira, Walnut Creek, CA. Todd, Zoe, 2016. An Indigenous feminist take on the ontological turn. J. Hist. Sociol. 29, 4–22. Trigger, Bruce, 1980. Archaeology and the image of the American Indian. Am. Antiq. 45, 662–676. Tsosie, Rebecca, 2007. Cultural challenges to biotechnology: native American cultural resources and the concept of cultural harm. J. Law Med. Ethics 35, 396–411. United Nations, 2007. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: A Manual for National Human Rights Institutions. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva. Watkins, Joe, 2000. Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Altamira Press, Mountain View, CA. Zimmerman, Larry, 2008. Real people or reconstructed people? Ethnocritical archaeology, ethnography, and community building. In: Castanada, Quetzil, Matthews, Chistopher (Eds.), Ethnographic Archaeologies: Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices. AltaMira, Lanham, MD, pp. 183–204.
Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution in Archaeology and Heritage Alicia Castillo Mena and Nekbet Corpas Cı´vicos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Participatory Processes in Archaeology and Archaeological Heritage Conflicts and Resolution in the Context of Archaeology Reasons for Citizen Participation and Collaborative Resolution of Conflicts A Proposal for a Shared Methodology for Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution Analytic and Descriptive Work Proactive Work Key Issues: Current Debates Regarding Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution Summary and Future Directions References Relevant Websites
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Key Points
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Addressing the reasons to involve civil society and indigenous communities in archaeological practice and heritage. This is a key activity in the 21st century and an opportunity within the growing context of citizen science. Introducing methodological strategies and well-known tools for participation as well as methods for potential conflict resolution in archaeology and heritage. Underlining the character of archaeology as a social science; as such, considering the involvement of civil society and indigenous communities in a co-responsible way. Emphasizing the appropriateness of specialization when intervening in social relationships. Highlighting pending challenges for archaeological science from a methodological perspective as well as the opportunities it provides for improving society, as long as its use is framed through specific objectives. These objectives must avoid trivialization or generating frustration among agents and communities involved in archaeological management.
Glossary Alternative (Appropriate) Dispute Resolution (ADR): Methods to deal with conflicts that were developed as an alternative to the traditional means of handling disputes used in many countries: judicial processes (Rubenstein, 2003: 169-172). In some cases, the term “Appropriate” is preferred over “Alternative” in order to reclaim their value beyond being just the opposite of something. These methods include negotiation, mediation, arbitration or consensus building. Archaeological discourses: Socially built narratives to inform about archaeology by professional and expert groups or by those sympathetic to the knowledge of the human past obtained through material remains. Assessment of participatory processes A set of techniques used to quantify the degree of achievement of the goals of the particular process under review. The assessment should be carried out on a continuous basis in order to correct activities, monitor risks and adjust strategies and actions. It is also important to define scales of participation (e.g. Tully et al., 2022). Assessment is also vital for the parties in a dispute if they have collaborated and agreed on a solution, so they can modify the agreements adopted if the context changes. Conflict This social phenomenon has received very different definitions, but most of them underline the existence of some sort of incompatibility (see Table 1). It can be understood as a situation where two or more parties (i.e. individuals, groups) have the perception that they have incompatible interests or aspirations. As such, the situation may be characterized by an actual incompatibility (e.g. an archaeologist wants to use part of an archaeological remain for research while an indigenous community claims ownership over the find to bury it intact as it considers itself the legatee of the makers) or a perception of it. The social context where the situation occurs is important for it to be defined as a conflict (e.g. 70 years ago no demonstrations were organized protesting the destruction of archaeological remains). It is a dynamic process that can go through different phases and be analyzed regardless of the context where the dispute manifests (family, school/university, international, etc.). Conflict resolution Field of study and practice that focuses on the phenomenon of conflict from different disciplines and perspectives, such as Psychology, Law or Sociology. Social conflicts may manifest in many different contexts at the international level, in commercial or intercultural relationships etc. What resolution means is subject to debate and analysis
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from the different perspectives interested in conflicts. The field has researched and implemented several methods to handle conflicts. Some of them entail a strong involvement of the parties in the conflict. They constitute a process where certain people and/or groups participate according to some particular objectives, forms and logic. Collaborative dialogue Communication characterized by the inexistence of artificial rules about what can be discussed or changed, by the possibilities to challenge the existing status quo and assumptions, the existence of different interests among the parties and a shared perception of the interdependence existing among the parties and their dispute (Innes and Booher, 2008). Culture of peace A set of values, attitudes and behaviors in a society based on the respect of life, of human rights and a commitment towards a peaceful resolution of conflicts through education, dialogue and cooperation, enabling people at all levels to develop skills of dialogue, negotiation, consensus building and peaceful resolution of differences (UN, 1999). All of it may lead to changes in how societies, at a structural level, understand and address their conflicts, moving from competition to collaboration (Alzate et al., 2013). Education and archaeological interpretation A set of techniques and methods to help in acquiring knowledge about archaeology by both those who offer it and those who receive it. On the one hand, it can be carried out by professionals in the field, who elaborate/disseminate knowledge agreed by archaeological science. On the other, groups of people who teach knowledge related to archaeology and the study of the past but are not subject to scientific standards or requirements by the professional collective of archaeologists can also carry it out. Education and interpretation are important to address participation and may help in conflict resolution. They have to be analyzed in order to be improved to fulfill the goals of capacity-building, dissemination, interaction and co-responsibility intended. Interests These are the motives driving people to get involved in conflicts. The parties in dispute tend to make public claims that generally do not directly reflect or address their real goals. In a conflict involving archaeological heritage, the interests of parties do not have to be heritage- or archaeology-related. Participatory processes Those started with the goal of involving stakeholders, civil society or indigenous communities in decision-making in archaeological heritage management (aiming at attaining co-responsibility, regardless of succeeding in it or not) while also methodologically assessing their perspectives. It should be warned that these processes are different from social or community participation, which is not the sole realm of professionals. Participatory activities in archaeological heritage From a methodological perspective, these take the form of interaction among one or more people with archaeology; all these people or at least one of them must not work in the field of archaeology. The activity or action may be part of a participatory process, but it is not a process in itself. Such activities cannot always respond to archaeological and heritage goals, and they do not have to entail or pursue a particular participatory process. They are usually employed as part of participatory processes, or they can evolve out of them. Political and administrative dimension of cultural heritage From a management position, this is understood as the perspective of the government, as the legally responsible body for cultural heritage due to their public interest, in decisionmaking processes in heritage management. Public interest in archaeological heritage Heritage assets are considered as subject to social interest, and those materials analyzed during archaeological research are also included in this perspective. This shared interest is taken as justifying the existence of cultural heritage but also justifying that communities benefit from and decide on the maintenance, conservation, use and enjoyment of these elements. Scales of participation/stages of conflict These can be defined according to the level of implication of stakeholders, as well as to the state of co-responsibility acquired at each stage of the participatory process or in any activity. Scales should be adapted based on the goals set for each process or particular stage within it. As to conflict, this phenomenon may go through different stages (escalation, stalemate and de-escalation), and any intervention will have to take it into account (Rubin et al., 1994). Scientific-technical dimension of cultural heritage From a management position, this is understood as a specialized perspective on heritage. It is addressed by the different areas of knowledge constituting the system of science and technology, including disciplines such as Philology, Business Studies, Ecology, Engineering and Architecture, among many others. One of those scientific-technical dimensions is the archaeological dimension of cultural heritage. It is a way to handle and define cultural heritage characterized by using archaeological science. Social or community participation: This covers every context in which a group of people, at least two individuals, take part in an activity, act or process in which archaeological knowledge is involved (e.g. a demonstration by a civil society organization against a construction project affecting archaeological heritage). It does not have to be scientifically assessed or/and aimed at co-responsibility in heritage management. Social dimension of cultural heritage From a management position, this is understood as the inclusion of the perspective of civil society or indigenous communities in the way archaeological and cultural heritage is managed. Social perception This refers to how groups and communities create understandings about the surrounding reality or other groups, and of particular interest, archaeological heritage and archaeology. Stakeholders and parties In participatory processes or conflicts, these are the people or/and groups involved in archaeological heritage. They tend to be multiple. The literature of the fields of social participation and conflict resolution uses those two different terms: stakeholders and parties. They can be analyzed according to different and multifaceted classifications based on the objectives or methodologies followed. As a minimum, we can distinguish between two main stakeholders: those trained in
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or specialized in archaeology and lay people, who can be affected by or interested (both directly and indirectly) in archaeological science and heritage. Stakeholder mapping/analysis of parties Maps of stakeholders are a dynamic tool expressly created to know the people and/ or groups involved or potentially so in a participatory process. They have to be systematically adapted according to the goals pursued. Analysis of the conflicting parties is a first step in understanding a dispute: Who are they? How is their relationship? What alliances exist or will exist? As conflicts are evolving processes, the analysis of parties is also dynamic. Human Rights-Based Approach This “is a conceptual framework for the process of human development that is normatively based on international human rights standards and operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights” (UNSDG, 2022). As a result of this framework, other approaches to rights have been developed going beyond those included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1945) that can be useful for owners or direct legatees of archaeological heritage. More specifically, since 2003, the UN has considered the possibility of using this human rights-based approach for all projects, plans and programs it implements in the area of development.
Abstract This entry addresses methodologies and strategies to connect archaeology, people and current social challenges. It deals with the task of involving people and of analyzing and resolving the conflicts that arise from archaeological heritage management. Archaeology is still in the process of improving the methodologies regarding the channels it uses for communication, creating co-responsibility and empathy with non-expert people. Based on the experience of previous projects, the authors make a methodological proposal for promoting participation and addressing conflicts in a positive way whenever possible.
Introduction As a humanistic and social science, one of the challenges of Archaeology is to understand human groups. The topics studied by this scientific field range from the organization of past societies to the dissemination of knowledge (e.g. Renfrew and Bahn, 1991). Early concern for social interactions with the archaeological discipline was expressed in the 1960s in subjects such as New Museology (e.g. UNESCO, 2012), heritage interpretation (Tilden, 1957) and Critical Museology (e.g. Shelton, 2013). Yet, it became an issue of vital importance by the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. Protests and critiques from indigenous communities regarding how their past was interpreted and used, ethnographic influence in archaeology, the emergence of post-processual archaeology (Hodder and Hutson, 2003), the rise of Public Archaeology (Richardson and Almansa-Sánchez, 2015) and Community Archaeology (Marshall, 2002) from previous decades, and more recently the influence of Critical Heritage Studies (Smith, 2006) have all played a part in the wide recognition of the need to reinforce and reassess the way archaeologists interact with civil society and indigenous communities. Drawing on an archaeological and heritage management perspective, we identify significant imbalances among what we have named the scientific-technical, political-administrative and social dimensions (see Fig. 1). The challenge of the 21st century for cultural heritage management is to balance those three dimensions. In order to do so, participatory processes and conflict resolution are fundamental as applied methodologies. Social participation and conflict resolution are opportunities for the scientific growth of the archaeological discipline. They have a significant role to play in reviewing the archaeological work, the way archaeology creates and interprets the archaeological record, and the way the knowledge obtained is communicated to society. They logically affect the possibilities of adopting a more sustainable model of heritage management from the perspective of diverse communities.
Overview Participatory Processes in Archaeology and Archaeological Heritage Generally speaking, in the context of archaeology, participation entails multiple aspects. Firstly, any scientific activity carried out nowadays at the service of and with society, must count on the backing of the communities involved directly or indirectly in it (Bonney et al., 2014). Furthermore, people participating in archaeology and archaeological heritage may or may not have previous or specialized knowledge in these disciplines. A participatory process, nonetheless, has scientific goals and methods. There is a need for goals to be set and particular questions to be addressed as well as for constant assessments to evaluate to what extent these goals and questions are attained and responded to. Participation may take place at different degrees or scales: from being merely informed to being co-responsible in decisionmaking. Indeed, passive participation is also an option, that is, attending to the process but avoiding expressing any opinion or acting. Not everybody has the time and resources to participate to the same degree. Two tools are essential in the participatory
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Fig. 1 Dimensions of Cultural Heritage from a management perspective. Nowadays there is an imbalance regarding the social dimension in archaeological heritage management and in heritage management broadly speaking. Source: Castillo and Querol (2014).
process: social perception studies and stakeholder maps. Social perception studies should be carried out not just for starting participatory processes, but also to assess them. Stakeholder maps then classify stakeholders in order to help with communication and attaining goals. To participate in a one-time activity is part of a process, yet to institute participation as an exercise of coresponsibility requires different stages and forms, regardless of the scale. Communication and education are based on dialogue. To foster active participation, previous knowledge and pedagogy of the topics under discussion are important. Similarly, it is essential to count on multivocal discourses for communication and education, depending on who is involved, what stage of the process we are in, and what goals are set for participation. Finally, knowledge and specialized methodologies from the social sciences, particularly ethnography, anthropology, sociology and psychology, are very important toward promoting participation.
Conflicts and Resolution in the Context of Archaeology Understanding conflicts and being able to handle them is essential in the advancement toward more sustainable models of social organization. Different disciplines research the topic of conflict, resulting in different definitions of this phenomenon (see Table 1). Roughly speaking and for the sake of understanding, two broad theory groups can be distinguished (Schellenberg, 1996). Table 1
Summary of some reference works on conflict
Author
Definition
Galtung
Conflicts are the result of A þ B þ C Attitudes (A) Behavior (B) Content (C) Conflicts occur because human needs are not covered (mentioning some of them as identity, social recognition, security, justice) Conflicts are situations where the parties use a conflictive behavior to attain incompatible objectives and/or express hostility Those incompatible goals can be disputed resources (wealth, power, prestige); incompatible roles or values (cultural differences) Conflicts are a perceived divergence of interests or a belief that the current aspirations of the parties cannot be attained simultaneously Conflicts happen when incompatible actions occur, an incompatible action with another one prevents, obstructs, interferes or turns the second action less probable or effective Conflicts are a fight over values and demands on status, power and scarce resources
Burton Bartos and Wehr
Rubin, Pruitt and Hee Kim Deutsch Coser Source: Corpas (2021): Fig. 2
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The first relates to social, economic and political structure, in other words, covering social structure theories. Conflicts are the product of the way society is organized. In the field of cultural heritage, the main theories dealing with conflict are related to this group of theories. They focus on how the interpretation of cultural heritage may legitimize the exclusion of particular groups from the social system. This type of political use of cultural and archaeological heritage has been the subject of multiple studies, including those focused on conflicts that have escalated into war (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996; Viejo-Rose, 2007). The second group of theories understands conflicts as a process of social interaction among groups and individuals. Although there is a growing body of works on managing conflicts in archaeological and cultural heritage (Fouseki, 2015; Myers et al., 2009) based on the perspective of addressing such interactions, this perspective has not been systematically adopted. However, methods of conflict resolution have been developed significantly through this group of social process theories. We consider that these methods should be applied more reflectively and regularly in the field of archaeological heritage management than what has been done so far (for an international perspective, see Corpas 2020), always after an analysis of their appropriateness. Despite having a pejorative sense, conflict is considered as an opportunity for change in the field of conflict resolution. In this sense, it is an opportunity to change the existing social relations that, in their current form, are not satisfactory for at least one of the parties involved in the conflict. Several classifications have been created to shed light on conflicts involving archaeological or cultural heritage (e.g. Endere, 2007). The one presented here is based on the topics frequently involved in a dispute. These topics can be classified into several categories (Corpas, 2021: Fig. 13): o Land, in other words, conflicts related to issues such as the ownership of land where archaeological sites are located and the associated rights over it, such as the uses of that land; the processes of land planning (granting license for construction works, previous assessments, etc.), and the distribution of economic or social benefits and damages resulting from the proposed construction works. o Archaeological heritage, in other words, conflicts related to the ownership of archaeological heritage materials and the associated legal rights over them, such as determining their uses (e.g. public exhibition and enjoyment over other goals), and the options of access to this heritage. o Treatment of archaeological heritage can also be a topic of dispute when the parties have different perspectives on whether to intervene in the physical materiality of its components, the economic means to do so or whether physical intervention is a priority or not over other interests. o Interpretation of the archaeological heritage is also a potential topic in conflicts, as it usually is mobilized to support different identity claims among groups, and subsequent rights, entitlements or capacities. o The issue of governance refers to how decisions are made and implemented (or not). Therefore, it entails issues of coordination (i.e. who has legal responsibility over the archaeological heritage; what is the relationship among institutions directly or indirectly involved in archaeological heritage) as well as of decision-making processes (who makes decisions affecting this heritage; how should those decisions be made - e.g. bottom-up, top-down, based on scientific or economic criteria, etc.). Concerning the classification of conflicts, Myers and colleagues’ (2016) broad classification in cultural heritage management shares some points with the one proposed above. Yet, it singles out as a potential topic for conflict in cultural heritage the one that may arise when interacting with traditional communities, due to differences in interpretation or treatment of heritage sites or different value perceptions between government and traditional communities. It also singles out the topic of dealing with heritage sites of controversy, e.g. such as those valued by different religions. Regarding Alternative (Appropriate) Dispute Resolution (ADR) methods (see Glossary), some of them are based on collaboration among conflicting parties to address their dispute. Mediation and facilitation are considered particularly useful for conflicts in archaeological heritage management. Mediation entails the involvement of a mutually accepted party, who is not invested in the conflict and with no capacity to make decisions on it, to help with the communication and relationship among conflicting parties, who enter the process of mediation on a voluntary basis (Moore, 2014). This approach helps with creating a space for constructive dialogue to explore mutually beneficial solutions for all those involved, who become responsible for finding these solutions. As a voluntary process for all those partaking in it, including the mediator/s, the conflicting parties may walk away from the process if they do not agree on the solutions under consideration or if they perceive bad faith among those involved. Facilitation is sometimes referred to as the mere assistance with communication, with no intention of helping in problem-solving, yet it is usually taken as part of the mediation process. It should be noted that mediation, as used in this text, differs from its usual definition in museum contexts where cultural mediators help the public to interpret the exhibitions. The “mediator” then, in that context, helps with the relationship object-public, not with communication and conflict resolution among individuals and groups.
Reasons for Citizen Participation and Collaborative Resolution of Conflicts There are multiple important reasons why citizen participation and collaborative conflict resolution are essential. First of all, by improving communication and helping people develop more satisfactory ways of dealing with their conflicts ensures that people may attain more fulfilling lives. Second, such practices improve heritage management. Participatory techniques and conflict analysis and resolution may increase the applicability of legal normative apparatuses that have been shown to be hardly realistic or directly inoperative; therefore, producing malfunctions between planning and implementation of measures to manage archaeological heritage. Recent global challenges, such as the climate crisis, have underlined the need for holistic perspectives to deal with the complexity and interrelatedness of different social spheres. In this context, dialogue is crucial. Third, the perceived image of cultural
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heritage is directly related to the multidimensional model of cultural heritage (see Fig. 1). Some perspectives and understandings have been imposed on how to manage cultural heritage without considering the social dimension of these elements. To get more balanced narratives and understandings of archaeological heritage, it is necessary to develop participatory processes and ways of adopting consensus, whenever possible. These necessarily help with the use, maintenance and enjoyment of cultural heritage. Fourth, citizen participation and collaborative conflict resolution optimize the use of human and economic resources. From a management perspective, there are multiple situations of overlapping legal powers and a lack of coordination among acting stakeholders in archaeological heritage. There have been significant imbalances among different aspects, and this has led to poor use of already limited resources of governmental agencies legally responsible for culture and heritage. Increasing dialogue and understanding among stakeholders would improve this situation. Finally, citizen participation and collaboration would lead to more democratic forms of decision-making in management. Involvement of civil society and indigenous communities in decisionmaking processes about the past that is going to be passed on to the next generations is a human right considered in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the Declaration states, “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” (art. 27.1). This right to access to culture is an active one beyond passive contemplation.
A Proposal for a Shared Methodology for Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution There are multiple books detailing methods and styles for conflict resolution as well as techniques for carrying out participation. Participatory processes should be addressed from the following two points of view:
Analytic and Descriptive Work Analytic and descriptive work entails carrying out studies on social perception and dispute. It also entails making assessments at different time spans (short/medium/long term). Analysis and description is a reiterative work because the perception and attitudes of stakeholders or parties will change over time. Stakeholder maps are a crucial and effective tool based on communication and action because they are the basis for sharing and constructing new information to define strategies for capacity building or dissemination, while being fundamental for all logistical issues. Mapping and identifying the different parties actually or potentially involved in a dispute is also a key step in order to consider whether these would be willing to take part in a collaborative process of conflict resolution. Regarding stakeholder maps for participatory processes, they include not only contact information but are also adapted to the interests and goals set. As a result of this, stakeholders in these maps should be classified according to areas or topics, allowing tagging, and organized hierarchically. These maps also include negative stakeholders, in other words, those who do not have a receptive attitude toward the actions that managers of archaeological heritage want to carry out. These negative stakeholders are also those who may challenge these actions if they clash with their interests or motivations. Finally, individuals, beyond the entities they may represent, are fundamental in several contexts to enable participation as key stakeholders. Fig. 2 acts as an example of a stakeholder map used by a public management center for archaeological heritage. The fields used in this example are: - AGENTS: one row for each stakeholder and associated contact data. Perception studies help in collecting this information (see below). This information will be required depending on the POTENTIAL ACTION to identify who the adequate stakeholders are to activate it. This map should also list potential stakeholders, that is, those who are not currently active but could intervene at some point in the future. As already mentioned, not all of them will have a positive attitude toward cultural heritage, its conservation or management.
Fig. 2 Example of a basic classification for stakeholder maps used by a public management center of cultural heritage. Source: adapted from Castillo et al. (2015).
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- SECTOR: This field gives information on the sphere where the stakeholder works. It is important because cultural heritage, in many countries, is legally considered of public or collective interest. The stakeholders can be classified into three categories: public, private, or mixed. - IMPLICATE/INVOLVE: This field is defined according to the agent’s interest, not the heritage manager’s opinion. These two might coincide or not. It can be classified as direct/or indirect. - AREAS: There can be as many areas as the writer decides. Yet, it is necessary to standardize these areas to make it easier to identify the agents to be involved according to the actions proposed (see POTENTIAL ACTION). These areas refer to the services or functions that could be offered. - POTENTIAL ACTION: There should be a column for each activity. It is necessary to clearly define the goals for the action and select the appropriate agents according to the AREAS, i.e. building restoration, exhibition, documentary, pedagogical book, etc. a. Periodicity: yearly, monthly, weekly, daily - depending on the action. b. Achievement: Agreements, specific activities, sponsors, etc. Regarding social perception studies, it is important to consider both quantitative and qualitative methods. Indexes to monitor and assess such studies should be similarly developed. The quantitative methods include, for example, surveys, different techniques of quantifiable observation, and counting quantifiable units such as visitors, products sold, etc. Qualitative methods include interviews, observation (participatory/non-participatory), focus groups and mental maps (Fig. 3). Conflict analysis has its own peculiarities, although it may use similar qualitative methods. The assessment has to focus on the parties as well as the issues under dispute and the process of the conflict itself. Interviewing the parties separately is fundamental in order to understand their interests, values and perspectives toward each other and how they define the dispute itself. These interviews should also assess whether a collaborative process of conflict resolution is possible or adequate from each party’s view. At least
Fig. 3 Focus group and surveys in the island of El Hierro (Spain) in 2022. This project aimed at understanding islanders’ perception of the local archaeological heritage and tourism in order to make proposals to improve the engagement of these communities. As one of the first stages of the project, these images will be soon replaced by others of participatory actions to test previous knowledge acquired. Source: Diego García, 2022.
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in conflicts involving archaeological heritage, it is also important to analyze the published press on the dispute as it provides information on past events relating to the disputes, the actions undertaken by each party throughout the process, and their stated demands. Critical content analysis of this source of information can be helpful to also identify how the different parties, at least publicly, have framed the dispute. The parties may have also vented their anger through social media, so analyzing these will be necessary.
Proactive Work Proactive work entails setting in motion participatory processes and appropriate dispute resolution methods, when possible. Participation is a dynamic exercise and it is very important to take into account its different scales. These scales range from giving information to a process of co-responsibility in decision making; the latter scale is rather idealistic nowadays in the context of archaeological practice but it must be contemplated as a desirable or ideal objective. In the middle of the scale there are several intermediate states, such as phases of consult and assessment of opinions and partial acceptance of proposals; the possibility of decision making in some particular topics on an agreed basis or by demand, etc. A case in point is when an enquiry is carried out among residents or the council of an indigenous community about the past that archaeologists should address or on how to intervene in an archaeological site and respect zones or areas regarded as sacred by particular communities (e.g. Johnston, 2014). From a heritage management perspective, participatory processes can be significant to designate or protect an archaeological site, as well as to interpret it and develop and agree on touristic approaches that benefit all parties (Fig. 4). As to conflicts, setting in motion collaborative methods of dispute resolution requires not only the voluntary participation of opposing parties to try to solve their conflict, but also that decisions have not already been taken and that criminal offences have not been committed. In other words, the mediation or the consensus building process, for example, should not be used for cosmetic purposes or to suffocate dissent, but has to start early.
Fig. 4 Participatory workshop developed in the World Heritage site of Alcalá de Henares (Spain) in 2017. The goal of this project was to reclaim alternative discourses on the city’s heritage based on local perspectives in a marginalized neighborhood. These discourses ranged from the archaeological past to contemporary times. Next to this neighborhood there is a Roman archaeological site included within the buffer zone of the designated area. This World Heritage city was included in the List because of its Modern heritage, particularly its character as a university city but also because it is taken to be the birthplace of the writer Miguel de Cervantes. Source: Alicia Castillo (2017). For more information see Corpas et al. (2018).
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Key Issues: Current Debates Regarding Participatory Processes and Conflict Resolution There are two fundamental debates on participation and conflict resolution, namely those focused on the critical analysis of these processes and methods, and those centered on questioning the methods employed in the pursuit of satisfactory results for all parties. Both types of debates coincide in warning against frivolous or unthinking use of participation, or conflict resolution that is used as “advertising campaign”, purportedly aiming at transparency, collaboration and consensus reaching. One of the areas of main concern for critical perspectives is the relationship of archaeology with tourism. It is undeniable that the exercise of archaeology, archaeological heritage management and the processes of heritagization that may emerge have an effect on the presence of visitors and on the dissemination of the values of a site. World Heritage designation is an example. Not counting on local populations when nominating these sites as world heritage has produced imbalances and social conflicts, as well as difficulties in maintaining archaeological sites (Castillo, 2012, 2015, 2018). However, the trend for sustainable tourism is proposing new ways to incorporate citizen views; see, for example, UNESCO’s program on sustainable tourism. From a theoretical perspective, the main challenge is to ensure the shared use of touristic archaeological sites, particularly where there is a clear division between the use and understanding of local populations of these sites, and that of visitors and managers. The important role that indigenous communities and civil society play has led UNESCO, under the auspices of the United Nations, to use the theoretical framework of the Rights Based Approach to assess the respect paid toward the Human Rights Declaration. Since 2022, ICOMOS, as the advisory body of UNESCO to the World Heritage Convention, has launched a pilot scheme so that sites to be designated as world heritage take into account this Rights Based Approach and take measures to recognize the people involved in the topics under designation. It is then clear that archaeology can no longer occur without communities. Yet, the biggest enemy to participation is when it does not produce satisfactory results for the different people involved and, as a result, the process gets standardized and becomes a product or image deepening existing inequalities and frustrations among human beings. Equally problematic is improvisation or archaeologists carrying out instinctive actions with people with no archaeological knowledge, however inevitable or necessary this may have been in particular contexts. These actions have not always been beneficial for the discipline or the communities involved, leading instead to manipulation or distortion of the reasons to justify archaeological activity from a scientific perspective. In other words, these unreflective actions and those where communities are not even involved in archaeology can be damaging. They may lead to legitimizing the widespread view of archaeological science as dogma or exclusivist by promising changes and benefits through participatory actions; changes that never become a reality or are not as extensive as promised. Self-critical attitudes, awareness of social and power imbalances, and training in techniques for participation are necessary as well as education and practice in conflict resolution and analysis when addressing disputes in the field of archaeology.
Summary and Future Directions In summary, we have only just started to explore the possibilities of participation through theoretical approaches, such as those from social archaeology or more practical ones coming from public and community archaeology. Given its infant status, more is to be done to research the possibilities and limits of advancing conflict resolution methods in the field of archaeology. Undoubtedly, participatory action research, a methodology developed in the 1960s, is still a challenge and, therefore, an opportunity, as particular examples in the field of community archaeology show (Pyburn, 2009). Participation has also been paradigmatic regarding the questions that archaeology has to raise. Yet a vague line has emerged between knowledge construction and instrumentalism or populism when adopting these processes. This epistemological conflict is not restricted to archaeology, but stems from the general crisis of how societies build content and satisfactory relationships in complex contexts. It is clear that political uses and abuses of power are the most identifiable conflicts, yet all disputes occurring on a daily basis are also forms of social fight, windows of opportunity for changing the organization of society if participation and conflict resolution methods are adopted and adapted, as the culture of peace points out. Through this perspective, participation and conflict resolution may help in turning archaeology into a positive force for communities in the 21st century. In a similar vein, the relevance of ecosystemic theories has been reinforced by the environmental crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. These theories put the emphasis on generating more inclusive models of governance, more democratic through participation. Archaeology can definitely play a role by exploring the governance models of past societies and putting ours in context, highlighting the potential for change over time. Archaeology needs to be inserted into the network of care and processes of fighting for environmental quality and overcoming the negative impacts of humans in our Anthropocene age. Additionally, taking into account the glocal context of contemporary societies, it is unavoidable that technology and the possibilities of public resources are important to retrieve common values and define shared social goals. Analyzing networks and virtual platforms built by all kinds of people and stakeholders in order to understand social perception can shed light on alternative models of creating archaeological interpretation and more sustainable participatory strategies, where knowledge and interests are exchanged. Finally, as previously stated, all the methodologies referenced in this entry for the field of archaeology or any other discipline require a previous and publicly stated definition of goals pursued. The key to success is to be capable of using the appropriate techniques to ensure their attainment and to avoid improvisation or the situation of pursuing participation for participation’s sake. The aim should be to reach a balance among the different dimensions making up cultural heritage (Castillo and Querol, 2014).
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See Also: Archaeological Heritage Values and Significance; Archaeology and Human Rights; Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Archaeology; Indigenous Archaeology.
References Alzate Sáez de Heredia, Ramón, Fernández Villanueva, Itziar, Merino Ortiz, Cristina, 2013. Desarrollo de la cultura de paz y la convivencia en el ámbito municipal: la mediación comunitaria. Politic. Soc. 50, 179–194. Bonney, Rick, Shirk, Jennifer, Phillips, Tina, Wiggins, Andrea, Ballard, Heidi, Miller-Rushing, Abraham, Parrish, Julia, 2014. Next Steps for Citizen Science. Strategic investments and coordination are needed for citizen science to reach its full potential. Science 343, 1436–1437. Castillo, Alicia (Ed.), 2012. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Best Practices in World Heritage: Archaeology/Actas del I Congreso Internacional de Buenas Prácticas en Patrimonio Mundial: Arqueología. Menorca, del 9 al 13 de abril. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid. Castillo, Alicia (Ed.), 2015. Proceedings of II International Conference on Best Practices in World Heritage: People and Communities. Mahón, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain. April 29 to May 2, 2015./Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Buenas Prácticas en Patrimonio Mundial: Personas y Comunidades. Del 29 de abril al 2 de Mayo, 2015. Mahón, Menorca. Islas Baleares. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid. Castillo, Alicia (Ed.), 2018. Proceedings of III International Conference on Best Practices in World Heritage. Universidad Complutense de Madrid/Actas del III Congreso Internacional de Buenas Prácticas en Patrimonio Mundial Acciones Integrales. Castillo, Alicia, Querol, María Ángeles, 2014. Archaeological dimension of world heritage: from prevention to social implications. In: Castillo, Alicia (Ed.), Archaeological Dimension of World Heritage: From Prevention to Social Implications. Springer, New York, pp. 1–11. Castillo, Alicia, Yáñez, Ana, Domínguez, Marta, Salto, Isabel, 2015. Citizenship and heritage commitment: looking for participatory methodologies adapted to the urban cultural heritage context. In: Proceedings 8th ICOMOS General Assembly and Symposium 2014. Heritage and Landscape as Human Values. ICOMOS, pp. 415–422. Corpas, Nekbet, 2020. Alternativas en resolución de conflictos en patrimonio arqueológico. El caso del expolio y el tráfico ilícito internacional. Revista d’Arqueologia de Ponent 30, 337–348. Corpas, Nekbet, 2021. El conflicto en la gestión del patrimonio arqueológico: casos en España y América Latina. PhD dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid. Corpas, Nekbet, Sánchez García, Daniel, Castilllo, Alicia, 2018. ALCALÁ PAST COMÚN. Construyendo un pasado común en Alcalá de Henares. In: Actas. Reunión de Arqueología Madrileña. Colegio Oficial de Doctores y Licenciados en Filosofía y Letras y Ciencias de la Comunidad de Madrid. Endere, María Luz, 2007. Management of Archaeological Sites and the Public in Argentina. British Archaeological Reports International Series 1708, Oxford. Fouseki, Kalliopi, 2015. Dispute Management in Heritage Conservation: The Case of in situ Museums. British Archaeological Reports International Series 2774, Oxford. Hodder, Ian, Hutson, Scott, 2003. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, third ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Innes, Judith E., Booher, David, 2008. Collaborative policymaking: governance through dialogue. In: Susskind, Lawrence E., Crump, Larry (Eds.), Multiparty Negotiation. Vol II: Theory and Practice of Public Dispute Resolution. SAGE, Los Angeles, pp. 92–114. Johnston, Harvey, 2014. The Willandra Lakes region world heritage area, new South Wales, Australia: land use planning and management of aboriginal and archaeological heritage. In: Castillo, Alicia (Ed.), Archaeological Dimension of World Heritage: From Prevention to Social Implications. Springer, Nueva York, pp. 39–55. Marshall, Yvonne, 2002. What is community archaeology? World Archaeol. 34, 211–219. Moore, Christopher W., 2014. The Mediation Process, third ed. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Myers, David, Nicole Smith, Stacie, Ostergren, Gail, 2009. Consensus Building, Negotiation and Conflict Resolution for Heritage Place Management. Proceedings of a Workshop Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute. The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles. Pyburn, Karen A., 2009. Practising archaeology d as if it really matters. Publ. Archaeol. 8, 161–175. Renfrew, Colin, Bahn, Paul, 1991. Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, first ed. Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. Richardson, Lorna Jane, Almansa-Sánchez, Jaime, 2015. Do you even know what public archaeology is? Trends, theory, practice, ethics. World Archaeol. 47, 194–211. Rubenstein, Richard E., 2003. Institutions. In: Cheldelin, Sandra, Druckman, Daniel, Fast, Larissa (Eds.), Conflict. From Analysis to Intervention. Continuum, London, pp. 168–188. Rubin, Jeffrey, Pruitt, Dean G., Kim, Sung Hee, 1994. Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate and Settlement. McGrew-Hill, New York. Schellenberg, James A., 1996. Conflict Resolution. Theory, Research and Practice. State University of New York Press, New York. Shelton, Anthony, 2013. Critical Museology. A manifesto. Museum Worlds. Advances in Research, vol. 1, 7–23, 1. Smith, Laurajane, 2006. Uses of Heritage. Routledge, London. Tilden, Freeman, 1957. Interpreting Our Heritage, first ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Tully, Gemma, Delgado Anés, Lara, Thomas, Suzie, Olivier, Adrian, Benetti, Francesca, Castillo Mna, Aliciea, Alexandra, Chavarria Arnau, Rizner, Mia, Möller, Katharina, Karl, Raimund, Matsuda, Akira, Civantos, Martín, María, José, Brogiolo, Gian Pietro, Nekbet, Corpas Cívicos, Ripanti, Francesco, Sarabia Bautista, Julia, Schivo, Sonia, 2022. Evaluating participatory practice in archaeology: proposal for a standardized approach. J. Community Archaeol. Herit. 9 (2), 103–119. Tunbridge, John E., Ashworth, Gregory J., 1996. Dissonant Heritage. The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Wiley, Chichester. UN, 1999. Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. A/RES/53/243, 6 October 1999. UNESCO, 2012. Roundtable of Santiago of Chile, 1972, vol. 2, 1973 Museum Magazine (volume XXV, number 3). Ibermuseums Program, the Unesco Publications department, the General Sub-directorate of State Museums of Spain and IBRAM. http://www.ibermuseos.org/en/resources/publications/mesa-redonda-de-santiago-de-chile-1972-vol-2/. UNSDG, 2022. Universal Values. Principle One: Human Rights Based Approach. UN Sustainable Development Group. https://unsdg.un.org/2030-agenda/universal-values/humanrights-based-approach. Viejo-Rose, D., 2007. Conflict and the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage. In Isar, Yudhishthir Raj, Anheier, Helmut. (Eds.), In: Conflicts and Tensions. Sage, London, pp. 102–116.
Relevant Websites UNESCO Sustainable Tourism Programme https://whc.unesco.org/en/tourism/.
Ethical Issues and Responsibilities Thomas F. King, SWCA Environmental Consultants, Silver Spring, MD, United States © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is a reproduction of [Thomas F. King, ETHICAL ISSUES AND RESPONSIBILITIES, Editor(s): Deborah M. Pearsall, Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Academic Press, 2008, Pages 1149–1155, ISBN 9780123739629, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012373962-9.00148-5].
Introduction The Core Ethic: Protecting, Obtaining, and Using Data The Ethics of Destroying Archaeological Sites The Ethics of Treating With “Looters” and “Traffickers” The Ethics of Relations With Indigenous, Descendant, and Protective Communities The Ethics of the Workplace and Society Conclusion Further Reading
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Glossary Descendant A person or group of people defined by their established or assumed genetic or cultural relationship to an ancestor or group of ancestors. Ethics Moral principles and values that guide the behavior of a group of people, in this case archaeologists. Ethics, code of A formal articulation of ethical standards adopted by an organizationdfor example, the code of ethics of the Association for Interplanetary Archaeology. Indigenous Native to an areadfor example, aboriginal Australians are indigenous to Australia. Looting Strictly speaking, taking something of value by force or violence. As used broadly by archaeologists, digging up archaeological sites or otherwise taking things from them for personal interest or gain, or for wanton pleasure, or even out of ignorance, and defacing or destroying archaeological sites without good reason, even if no taking of “loot” is involved. Trafficking Buying, selling, or assisting in the buying and selling of things in commerce; used by archaeologists with specific reference to artifacts and other archaeological material.
Abstract Ethics loom large in the practice of archaeology, though the logic underlying ethical precepts is more usually accepted implicitly than examined analytically. Our core ethic is to preserve information about the past that would otherwise be lost, to interpret the past accurately, and to use our information and interpretations to address questions and issues that are important to humankind. Some ethical prescriptions and proscriptions flow directly from this ethic. For example, forgery and the perpetuation of hoaxes are regarded as unethical, as are the failure to write up and publish the results of fieldwork, failure to share data, and failure to ensure that what one excavates is properly cared for. It follows that we favor the preservation of archaeological sites, and hence deplore their destruction. But the very practice of archaeology destroys sites; we have no way of pursuing our core ethic of retrieving and interpreting data without destroying them. This can lead to ethical quandaries about the circumstances under which we should, and should not dig at all. Because the destructiveness of digging is mitigated (in our eyes) only by the fact that it produces important information, it is regarded as highly unethical for archaeologists to assist?looters? who excavate sites in the interests of personal gain or private enjoyment. However, there are many reasons that?looters? loot; because they are poverty-stricken, because they view the artifacts they excavate as theirs by right, because they seek gain but do not view doing so as incompatible with archaeological interests. Some archaeologists (this writer among them) think it is possible to cooperate ethically with at least some kinds of?looter? creating relationships under which sites are excavated using archaeological methods but selected recovered objects can remain in private hands or enter the stream of commerce. Most archaeologists, however, regard this idea as anathema. Ethical questions also arise in relationships between archaeologists and communities who regard themselves as protectors of their ancestors? or all ancestors? bones and special places. The interests of such communities may be entirely inconsistent with the research interests of archaeologists, but whether out of empathetic desire or political and legal necessity, archaeologists the world over have developed ethical codes supporting collaboration with, and often acceding to, their wishes. Many of us square these new ethics with our central research ethic by believing (rightly, I think) that we gain more in terms of understanding and preservation of the past through partnerships with descendant communities than we would from running roughshod over their interests. One of the most interesting and problematical of ethical notions is that of responsibility to those who pay the bills. While it is easy enough to accept that one should try to give one?s institution or research foundation good value for money spent, things become
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Ethical Issues and Responsibilities trickier when one is working? as many if not most archaeologists do today? in assessing the environmental impacts of proposed land-use projects, and being paid by a project proponent. Few if any archaeologists would admit that contractual obligations to clients supersede ethical responsibilities, but in practice there are often conflicts between professional responsibility and client relations, which are no less serious for being in most cases unacknowledged. Whatever their actual beliefs and practices, archaeologists tend to regard and discuss ethics with great seriousness. Strangely however, archaeology can be remarkably unwilling to explore the theory upon which its canonical principles are based. And it can be quite unforgiving of those who deviate from those principles, expunging them from membership in professional organizations, refusing to allow them to present or publish the results of their work, threatening their employment. Anyone contemplating such a deviation, even with what may seem to be a pure heart and excellent justification, needs to tread with extreme caution, at risk of being branded ethically deficient.
Introduction Working as we do with finite and fragile resources, which often are of interest and value to both the general public and specific, sometimes competing, groups of people, archaeologists often wrestle with ethical questions. These questions are seldom simple or unambiguousdhowever much we might like them to be, or in some cases think that they are. The purpose of this article is to summarize major ethical issues that archaeologists confront, outline some of the ways archaeologists deal with them, and discuss some positive, negative, and ambiguous aspects of the answers given to ethical questions. Elsewhere in this encyclopedia, Don D. Fowler outlines the history of institutional approaches to archaeological ethics, including some of the laws, international agreements, and organizational codes developed to canonize ethical precepts.
The Core Ethic: Protecting, Obtaining, and Using Data A basic assumption underlying archaeological practice is that it is a good thing to do, that it is right and proper to perform archaeological research. But for what purpose? If pressed, most, if not all, archaeologists would say that we work to preserve information about the human past that would otherwise be lost, that we seek to bring that information back into the intellectual mainstream from which time has displaced itdthat is, to interpret the past accuratelydand that we try to use the information we recover, and our interpretation of it, to address questions and issues that are important to humankind. If this is our tripartite purpose, then our central ethical obligation must be to pursue it well, to achieve it to the best of our abilities. This core ethicdwhich in fact we are rarely called upon to articulate, but which remains an assumption underlying all our workdis the justification for doing archaeology and for the support it receives from the public and governments worldwide. One way or another, it informs and influences how we attend to all other ethical responsibilities. Some of our commonly recognized ethical prescriptions follow directly from the core principle. For instance, forging artifacts and assisting in the perpetuation of hoaxes are taken by archaeologists to be unethical. Why? Because such activities mislead, and can cause the past to be misinterpreted, violating our ethical responsibility to interpret the past accurately. For a similar reasondbecause our core ethics require that we make what we recover available for use in accurately understanding the pastdthe failure to write up and publish the results of a field project is almost universally regarded by archaeologists as an ethical failure. To a somewhat lesser degree it is regarded as at least questionable for an archaeologist not to share data with another researcher, particularly if one has delayed publication of one’s results for a long time. Similarly, it is regarded as ethically reprehensible not to see to it, to the extent one can, that the materials one takes out of the ground, and the documentary records that one creates in the process, are cared for properly, theoretically in perpetuity, usually by an appropriate museum or other curatorial facility. Of course, it is regarded as highly unethical to excavate an archaeological site without fully recording what one does, what one finds, and the spatial relationships among things found and observed. However, it is generally understood that an archaeologist may not be able to follow all these prescriptions in every case to the extent that all archaeologists might wish. No one faults an archaeologist who suffers a debilitating illness and cannot finish writing up an excavation. Nor is one faulted if one turns over artifacts and records to a curatorial facility that is subsequently bombed or looted, that burns down, or whose new management decides to throw out its archaeological collections to make room for Edwardian furniture or post-Impressionist artdthough in the latter case, if the archaeologist is aware of the institutional change, there is some ethical responsibility to try to get the archaeological collections moved to another facility. Finally, how much one can record during an excavation depends on whether one has plenty of time or is being rushed by forces of destruction; it also depends on what the forces of destruction are, the character of the site, the local sociopolitical situation, and so on. Although giving up one’s life to protect a site from vandals with AK-47s may be regarded as admirable, it is not generally held to be an ethical requirement.
The Ethics of Destroying Archaeological Sites It follows from the core principle that we favor the preservation of archaeological sites, and hence deplore their destruction. However, in point of fact we destroy sites ourselves, by excavating them, and here’s the quandary: we cannot adhere to our core
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ethic of retrieving and making good use of data without destroying them. This might not be the problem it is, if we could document everything we uncover in an excavation, but complete documentation is impossible. We cannot record every particle of soil and its relationships with every other particle, its chemical composition, and its physical structure. Every year, it seems, new analytic techniques are developed or new research questions posed that make us wish we had recorded something that went unrecorded in last year’s excavations. So most archaeologists acknowledge that the very conduct of archaeological research destroys sites and the data they contain. To contend with this uncomfortable truth, many of us try to conduct our research only in sites that are likely to be destroyed by other forces anywaydsites in the path of development, for example, or that are being eroded off sea cliffs. We sometimes are critical of colleagues who conduct excavations in sites that can be preserved, or who excavate in unnecessarily destructive ways. If an archaeologist strips away a 2000-year-old cultural stratum to get at one that is 4000 years old, and fails to make a reasonable effort to record the more recent stratum and its contents, his or her ethics are likely to be questioned. The vehemence with which we criticize such practices, howeverdparticularly the practice of excavating sites that can be preserved, such as those in protected areas like parksdwaxes and wanes through time. Back in 1974, William Lipe called eloquently on archaeologists in the United States to adopt a “conservation model” and emphasize site preservation. For a time manydperhaps mostdAmerican archaeologists followed Lipe’s advice; we tried to focus our attention only on threatened sites, and criticized those who dug sites that could be preserved. In recent years this ethic has eroded, in part because it can be hard to uphold the core ethic of learning and transmitting information about the past without excavating protected sites. Another reason the “conservation ethic” has eroded is disillusionment with our ability truly to protect any site over the long run. This decade’s open space all too readily becomes the next decade’s parking lot or housing tract. Illicit excavators can gain access to even the most remote sites, in the most protected locations. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and the massive erosion resulting from rising sea levels are mostly beyond human control, and warfare seems to be as well; the organized military forces of most countries theoretically adhere to the 1954 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, but compliance with the letter of this convention is sporadic at best, and compliance with its spirit is even less systematic. All these characteristics of the real world can wreak massive destruction, and do not respect the integrity of ostensibly protected archaeological sites. In the face of these complexities, few archaeological eyebrows are currently raised over the excavation of a site that theoretically can be protected, provided the excavation is well and carefully done. However, the pendulum may swing back at any time toward something like Lipe’s “conservation model”. Ethics are not immutable.
The Ethics of Treating With “Looters” and “Traffickers” Archaeologists use the term “looter” rather loosely, to mean not only people who dig into archaeological sites to acquire “loot” with which to enrich themselves, but also people who collect artifacts for their own enjoyment, people who wantonly vandalize archaeological sites, and people who pick or dig something up out of simple curiosity. Some archaeologists recognize that “looters” of such varied character have many reasons for digging, some of them not too different from those that motivate archaeologists themselves. Others, however, would condemn to purgatory or worse all nonprofessional excavators, and sometimes even collectors of artifacts from the ground surface. Archaeologists are similarly critical of people who sell or assist in the sale of artifactsdwho are seldom referred to simply as “buyers”, “sellers”, or “dealers” but by the pejorative term “traffickers”. The reason for such visceral reactions on the part of archaeologists is that “looting” is understood to be destructive of archaeological data present in sites, in artifacts, and particularly in the relationships among artifacts, sites, and site features like architecture and soil strata. A pot ripped out of its archaeological context may be beautiful on the shelf, but it has lost much of its ability to inform us about the past. “Trafficking” makes “looting” attractive to some people by creating a private market for excavated antiquities. An archaeologist who assists or otherwise deals positively with “looters” and “traffickers”, is regarded by most of his or her colleagues as unethical. Degrees of ethical violation are generally recognized. If an archaeologist helps an artifact dealer establish that a “looted” pot is genuine, in most archaeological communities that is regarded as bad, but not as bad as helping the dealer establish a monetary price for the pot, which in turn is not as bad as buying the pot from the dealer, which is less bad than selling the pot to the dealer. Worst of all is digging the pot up and selling it to the dealer. But if the pot or its contents are very, very important in terms of the information they represent, the core principle of recovering and using information may take precedence. If the pot contains papyri bearing some previously unknown ancient text, many archaeologists on balance will swallow hard and buy it. Selling it, however, is another matterdunless the buyer is a research or curatorial institution, in which case it may be acceptable for the archaeologist to recoup whatever he or she paid for the pot and its contents. There are, in other words, extenuating circumstances, but the extenuation extends to different lengths depending on the action taken. Some “looters” and “traffickers” are economically distressed residents of areas rich in ancient sites, driven by their poverty to dig up and sell artifacts. Some have the additional justification of viewing the artifacts as having been left to them by their ancestors. Although most archaeologists regard what such people do as reprehensible, most also have to acknowledge that the situation is a difficult one, in which ethical codes by themselves provide little guidance. Should we try to stop such “looting”? If so, are we not obligated to look for alternative ways for the erstwhile diggers to earn a living? Is this not at least a practical necessity, if we expect people to stop digging for profit? Is purchasing something from an impoverished community whose members dig up things
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left by their ancestors somehow less bad than buying something from a different kind of “looter”? What about trying to teach people to “loot” using archaeological methods? Where and how does one draw ethical lines? There are others classified by many archaeologists as “looters” and “traffickers” who seek archaeological cooperationdfor example, people who seek treasure buried or lost on land and under the sea. If a treasure hunter offers to fund an excavation, done using all relevant controls to assure the recovery and documentation of important data, in return for the right to keep or sell what is found, is it ethical for an archaeologist to accept the offer? Mainstream archaeological organizations, and most archaeologists, answer with a resounding “No.” When pressed for a rationale (something that is seldom done in polite archaeological company), many fall back on a simple statement of moralitydexcavating things for sale is simply “wrong”. If asked for a rationale less redolent with religiosity, the answer may be that in the final analysis no treasure hunter ever has, ever will, ever can excavate according to archaeological principles; in the end the fever to loot will win out. Or that even if an excavation is done properly, if the artifacts are dispersed through sale, they become unavailable for future study. Some treasure-seeking interests counter with proposals to turn over everything found to a museum, or even to create museums for everything found, except for items like coins and gold bars, which arguably have little research significance. While this sort of proposal softens the logical ground under archaeological opposition to cooperative endeavors, the hardcore moralism tends to remain. The codes of ethics of most archaeological organizations flatly forbid cooperation with those who would excavate archaeological material for sale. Finally, there are many people, nonarchaeologists in terms of professional training and academic degrees, who collect artifacts for reasons that they say are essentially the same as those that motivate archaeologists. We are fascinated by the past, they say; we want to learn about the past, and we do not want to see archaeological sites destroyed by development or agriculture or erosion, so we want to excavate them. The only difference between what we do and what you do, they go on, is that we keep what we find, or occasionally sell or exchange itdrather than putting it in a museum where we all know it has a good chance of being lost or tossed out in some change of institutional policy. Some say they would be happy to work to archaeological standards, if archaeologists would only help them and not insist that they give up their collections. There are some archaeologists (this author among them) who wonder if it is possible to achieve cooperation between archaeologists and at least some classes of “looter” and “trafficker”dcreating a relationship under which sites are excavated using archaeological methods, but selected recovered objects can remain in private hands or enter the stream of commerce rather than going to museums and research institutions. On the whole, such an idea is regarded as anathema by the mainstream of archaeology. There are certainly programs in which archaeologists work with people who collect artifacts, but almost invariably an agreement not to “traffick” is a precondition to participation in such a program. Often a participant is required to give up his or her private collection or at least refrain from digging to expand it. Very few archaeologists have gone to work for or with treasure recovery organizations, based on agreements under which the treasure seekers record and properly conserve archaeological data while recovering coins or bullion for sale. These archaeologists, however, are widely regarded by the mainstream as having sold their souls. It is not apparent that they, or a responsible private collector, actually violate archaeology’s core principle of protecting, recovering, and using data, but many archaeologists and archaeological organizations shun and discriminate against them. This is an unresolved issue that will probably gain more exposure as time goes by, particularly as treasure recovery companies gain expanded access to the deep oceans and other extreme environments using expensive high technology unavailable to ordinary archaeological researchers.
The Ethics of Relations With Indigenous, Descendant, and Protective Communities If I decide that I want to excavate your late grandmother to study her grave offerings, you will probably want to have something to say about it. If it is your great-great-great-great grandmother’s body I want to exhume, you may be less concerned, but this is not certain; you may feel just as strongly about your distant ancestors as you do about your proximate ones. Descendant communities typically want to exercise a considerable amount of control over their ancestors’ bones, artifacts, and places of residence, worship, and burial, and their interests may differ considerably from the information-driven interests of archaeologists. Descendant communities are not the only ones who may wish to protect the bones and relics of past societies from the attentions of archaeologists. Some communities are strongly protective of the dead on religious or other spiritual grounds, regardless of the putative ancestral relationships between the dead and any person living today. Such groups simply hold that the dead should not be disturbed, and to varying extents this belief may extend to the artifacts produced and used by the dead as well. Such protective interests may be just as deeply felt as those of people who trace their own lines of descent back to the people in the ground. There was a time when archaeologists could largely ignore the concerns of such communitiesdat least they could as long as those communities were indigenous groups, people of color, and other relatively powerless parties. Ignoring such concerns did not seem unethical because the core ethic of archaeologydobtaining data to satisfy human curiosity and bring the past back to lifedwas taken to be unequivocally good. Most archaeologists still feel that our motives in conducting research are essentially pure; we are hurt when descendant and protective communities call us ghouls and grave robbers, but that is what we are to them, and explaining the importance of our research has little impact on their perceptions. As colonial power structures have given way to postcolonial ones, hitherto powerless communitiesdboth those who have actually been colonies and those who simply feel colonized by virtue of being parts of a social and economic underclassdhave become increasingly critical of archaeology and archaeologists. Since such communities often arguably occupy the moral high ground, and because their causes can generate strong public and political support, archaeologists have had to find ways to accommodate and respect their interests.
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Some archaeologists and archaeological organizations try to distinguish between “real” descendantsdthat is, people who can demonstrate descent using sciences like genetics and anthropologydand people who merely think themselves descended from long-ago cultures, or feel that they are responsible for the well-being of the dead. The former, it is argued, are entitled to respect; the latter are not. This sort of science-based distinction is embedded in some legislation, like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the United States, which mandates the repatriation of bones and artifacts to descendants or otherwise “affiliated” groups, but only upon a showing of ethnic or cultural affiliation. This sort of distinction infuriates communities that regard science itself as a colonialist, imperialist activity; once again the dominant society is imposing its values on them. From the perspective of many indigenous communities, a distinction based on affiliation also misses the point. Many such groups feel strong responsibility for the dead, regardless of their relationships to anyone living today. It is, they feel, their responsibility to the dead themselves, or to spiritual powers, to ensure that the dead can continue their journey to the afterlife. Demanding that affiliation be demonstrated is doubly offensive to such groups. Not only does it impose the dominant society’s scientism on a community whose beliefs lie elsewhere, it also implies that one human being can “own” anotherda notion that carries widely troubling connotations. Archaeologistsdparticularly those trained in anthropologydcan empathize with such perceptions, but often have trouble embracing ethical codes based on such empathy. The core ethic of a descendant or spiritually protective community is usually entirely different from that of archaeology; the past is something to be protected, to be left alone, to be respected, not to be exhumed, scrutinized, and studied. Returning ancestral remains and artifacts to a nonscientific group usually makes them unavailable for research, and may even result in their destruction (from the archaeologist’s perspective). Collaborating with such a community when excavating an ancestral site usually places restrictions on what can be excavated, or on the kinds of analysis that can be performed. Nevertheless, whether out of empathetic desire or political and legal necessity, archaeologists the world over have developed ethical codes supporting collaboration with, and often acceding to the wishes of, descendant and protective communitiesdparticularly those indigenous to the area where an archaeologist works, such as American-Indians and Aboriginal-Australians, and those with access to local, national, or international political power. Many of us square these new ethics with our central research ethic by believing (rightly, I think) that we gain more in terms of understanding and preservation of the past through partnerships with such communities than we would from running roughshod over their interestsdeven if doing the latter were still legally and politically possible.
The Ethics of the Workplace and Society In recent years, whether out of choice or necessity, archaeologists have paid increasing attention to certain ethics that they share with other professionalsdscientists, engineers, teachers, cooksdand with society as a whole. It is unethical to plagiarize, of course, or to steal a colleague’s or student’s work. We have ethical responsibilities toward those who work with and for us. We should not exploit or abuse them; we should provide a living wage, decent living conditions, and reasonably safe workplaces. Less obviously, most of us recognize an obligation to help those we supervise learn from what they do, regardless of whether they are formally regarded as students. Particularly, those who work without or with little pay generally do so because they are interested in archaeology, and we are obligated to help them satisfy that interest. We have ethical duties to those who pay the bills, be they institutional employers, sponsor foundations or individuals, government agencies, or contractual clients. At the very least, we owe our employers and sponsors an honest day’s work and a product as close as possible to whatever it is they expect us to deliver. Beyond this, most of us recognize an obligation to be sensitive to the interests that have brought them to finance our workdfor example, the interest of a property developer required to fund an archaeological study before his or her development destroys a site, whose great desire is probably that we complete our work promptly and get out of the way. We have ethical responsibilities toward the world around us, and to its nonarchaeological resources. Those of us who work in environmental assessment and similar fields often find ourselves assigned responsibility for describing and evaluating aspects of the environment that are not archaeologicaldhistoric buildings, cultural landscapes, the traditional lifeways of local people. We have a duty to recognize that these places and things have value even though they may not be of archaeological interest. If we cannot ourselves represent that value adequately, we have a duty to make sure it is addressed by people better qualified to do so than we. All of us are responsible for taking care of the natural and human environments within which we workdfor not polluting a stream with dirt from our excavations, not digging up the habitat of an endangered species, and not undermining the historic building that stands on our excavation site. Among these external ethical precepts, one of the most interesting and problematical is the notion of responsibility to those who pay the bills. Recognizing and carrying out this responsibility is seldom a problem when the one doing the paying is one’s own museum or university, or a foundation that supplies research grants. We may be late with a report; we may not find what we and our supporters had hoped we would find, we may misspend our grant and flee the country, but these tend to be either minor problems or such obvious ethical failures that they raise few problems of interpretation. The ethic of “responsibility to financial supporters” becomes complicated when the financial supporter’s only interest is in getting the archaeology out of the way so he can proceed with his housing project or highway. Archaeologists today are routinely employed as members of teams doing environmental impact assessments in advance of construction and land use projects. In this context one’s financial support often comes from the party whose potential environmental impacts one is assessing. What are one’s responsibilities toward the financial supporterdthe clientdin such a case?
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It is easy to say that our responsibility is simply to do proper, honest archaeologydto ascertain what impacts the proposed project will have on archaeological sites and seek ways to preserve them. But the matter is not that simple. For one thing, there are many different ways to consider impacts. Will we seek only those sites that will be bulldozed to oblivion if the project is built, or will we also look for those that may be indirectly affected, by future erosion downstream, through looting by residents of the new housing project, through secondary development induced by the presence of the new motorway? When we find a site, we can evaluate its significance in a variety of different waysdsome narrow and more or less dismissive, others much broader and more inclusive. Which sort of evaluation scheme should we employ? As individuals and teams we may or may not individually be particularly well qualified to find or evaluate particular kinds of sites, in particular areas, but obtaining specialist advice may be costly to our client. Then there are the non-archaeological interestsdthe descendant community that thinks a place is terribly important even though we, as archaeologists, find nothing interesting about it; the religious group that ascribes spiritual significance to a place, the architectural historians who want to save old buildings and the community members who want to save their town. Doing proper archaeology may technically not include paying any attention whatever to such interests, and whether we do pay attention or not can have financial implications for our employer. It is safe to assume in most cases that the client would like us to do as little and find as little as possibledto look only at areas where direct destructive project impacts will occur, to evaluate sites as narrowly as possible, and to assign value solely on the basis of archaeological criteria, let other interests fend for themselves. Is it our ethical obligation to do our work in accordance with our client’s program and preference, or is this directly contrary to our other ethical responsibilities? Here again it is easy to say we should be broad, inclusive, and thorough in our study of a project’s impacts, and provide the client with objective, unbiased information whether he wants it or not. But just how broad an area or range of impacts should we consider? What range of interests should we include in our consideration? What is our definition of “thorough” in the case at handdor for that matter, our definition of “objective” and “unbiased”? And what do we do when our team leader says, or implies, that we are being unreasonable, costing the client unnecessary money, not giving him the results he wants, and that we may lose our jobs or our next contract as a result? On the other hand, at what point does the “thoroughness” of our research become exploitative of our client? These can be difficult questions, and archaeologists increasingly must grapple with them as we play our roles in the activities of government agencies, land developers, project proponents, and public-interest groups.
Conclusion One sees much articulation of ethical standards in the archaeological literature but little serious debate about such standards and their implications. It is generally accepted that such things as destroying archaeological sites and cooperating with “looters” and “traffickers” are wrong, and one must not do themdeven when doing so appears to be justified by archaeology’s core principle of preserving, recovering, and using information. We insist that we simultaneously give clients good value for the money they spend on our impact assessment work, and give maximum protection to both archaeological sites and other aspects of the human environment, but we seldom debate the complications that such balanced service creates. Ethical discussions both in print and at such events as the “ethics bowl” held annually by the Society for American Archaeology tend to assume the correctness of the standards promulgated by the various archaeological and cultural organizations, focusing on their application in particular situations. We tend to believe quite strongly that some things are ethical and that others are not, often without deeply exploring the logical underpinnings or practical results of our beliefs. While logic and practicality do underlie most of archaeology’s ethical positions, it is doubtful whether rigid and unquestioning adherence to them is always wise. For a discipline regarded by many of its practitioners as a science, however, archaeology can be remarkably unwilling to explore the theory upon which its canonical principles are based. It can be quite unforgiving of those who deviate from those principles, expunging them from membership in professional organizations, refusing to allow them to present or publish the results of their work, threatening their employment. Anyone contemplating such a deviation, even with what may seem to be a pure heart and excellent justification, needs to tread with extreme caution, at risk of being branded ethically deficient.
See Also: Repatriation of Human Remains; Restitution of Collections - An Appraisal.
Further Reading Green, E.L. (Ed.), 1984. Ethics and Values in Archaeology. Free Press, New York. King, T.F.A., 1937. Winged liberty head dime from Silver Spring, Maryland. In: Thinking About Cultural Resource Management: Eessays from the Edge. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, pp. 164–169. Layton, R. (Ed.), 1994. Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions. Routledge, London. Lipe, W.D., 1974. A conservation model for American archaeology. The Kiva 39 (1–2), 213–243. Lowenthal, D., 2005. Why sanctions seldom work: reflections on cultural property internationalism. Int. J. Cult. Property 12 (3), 393–424. Lynott, M., Wylie, A. (Eds.), 1995. Ethics in American Archaeology: Challenges for the 1990s. Society for American Archaeology, Washington DC. Scarre, C., Scarre, G. (Eds.), 2006. The Ethics of Archaeology: Philosophical Perspectives on Archaeological Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Shanks, H., 1999. How to stop looting: a modest proposal. Archaeological Odyssey, 2:04, September/October 1999. Biblical Archaeology Society, Washington DC. Vitelli, K.D. (Ed.), 1996. Archaeological Ethics. AltaMira, Walnut Creek, CA.
Archaeology and Human Rights Andre´s Alarco´n-Jime´nez, Departamento de Humanidades, Universidad el Bosque, Bogotá, Colombia © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues Summary and Future Directions References Relevant Websites
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The troubled relationship between topics such as cultural politics, public uses of the past, Human Rights and the different archaeological praxis is discussed. These topics are approached as an eclectic set and as a general framework to explore how Human Rights are affected by geopolitical and economic related warmongering. Heritage and its impact on populations world-wide in current times is examined.
Abstract This entry discusses the relationship between human rights and archaeology. We discuss that, although many researchers deal with this subject, human rights are not a research field by itself as part of the archaeologist’s training. It is, then, mainly an individual political stance that may be shared with other peers and coworkers. Some fields of research, such as communal archaeology or public archaeology, have taken political and ethical stances toward improving the public uses of the past. The relation between death, war and heritage is also discussed, as a fundamental concern of archaeology’s theory and praxis that seldom turns out to be helpful to the public’s concerns or needs. Because “culture” became a battleground, archaeology has played a pivotal role in defending cultural or identity politics worldwide, being for the benefit or detriment of human populations in the last 150 years.
Introduction Human rights is a framework and a set of topics, but not a specific field of research within archaeology, nor part of its formal training. Violence, war and the Cold War are events that define such a set of topics (Ghodsee, 2012; Gilman, 2003). Human rights, as a political stance or as the central discourse guiding an archaeologist’s activism practices, are, therefore, profoundly rooted in some of its member’s ethos and praxis, but not in the academic field. However, both human rights and archaeology concern the public’s use of the past. Therefore, this includes economic, religious, political, or cultural policies, among others, related to it. As such, we refer to the archaeological academic praxis and its products that may play a role, positive or negative, when (or if) circulating publicly, in the promotion of the research concerning human rights. They also may play a key role in improving, or at least having a meaningful positive impact on, the lives of current populations across the world. The interest in discussing human rights has greatly increased in the last 60 years. Human rights are entwined with different aspects of the archaeological praxis and with some of its members’ professional formation process, their interests, actions, and research and, therefore, are integrated within their professional and personal lives. From this point of view, different kinds of archaeological research activities deal with subjects closely related to “Human Rights”, such as violent deaths, places or buildings related to human cruelty episodes, well known or forgotten, the memories of minorities, oppressed peoples, but also gender studies, etc. Thus, approaching the archaeological record of events such as catastrophes derived from war or economic or sociopolitical conflicts from a human and humanitarian perspective creates and includes a human rights point of view. Nevertheless, archaeology is often less concerned with human rights and its different aftermaths, because it is indeed more focused on the protection and preservation of material culture than on the lives of peoples, communities or individuals that produce or have produced it (Silverman and Ruggles, 2007).
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Overview Archaeologists and communities have joined forces to help each other, increasingly so after the end of World War II. Communities reach out to archaeologists to use their tools to help them in their political and cultural struggles. For instance, when environmental, cultural, economic or entrepreneurial needs, among others, are afoot, archaeologists may lend some help by directly working to the communities’ benefit (Bethell and Roxborough, 1993). That is, communities may benefit from archaeological research and expertise if they become useful in any given situation. Archaeologists may also profit from these situations. Not only may they find support or an engaged public among the members of the community, but they may also find valuable insights and, in certain cases, even help them to improve their quality of life. Their research may reach the general public’s attention and, therefore, their work may have a positive impact on people’s lives. Academics play a significant and positive role when they lend their authority to marginalized communities, those robbed of their political powers, self-determination, and forcibly removed from their territories or homes, or constantly put aside, attacked or abused by others. Besides these public and political actions, archaeology is an essential tool for the documentation of human rights abuses, war crimes and other violent human actions aimed against human beings; actions that, among other results, are set to wipe out not only the lives of others but also remove their memories from the record. Archaeological methods are commonly used in forensic matters and, in violent countries, forensic anthropology is a field directly involved in documenting the practical effects of political, economical and religious violence perpetrated against human beings, but also manifesting itself in different architectural structures or urban or rural settings. Their work, as most research done by Truth Commissions or, as in the Colombian case, the “Centros de Memoria”, is strongly linked to and/or deeply rooted in human rights. The search for human beings that disappeared is one of the most important fields of research where archaeologists may be relevant, not only by finding remains, documenting and registering them in every detail for future legal and humanitarian purposes, such as transitional justice processes or human rights violations legal cases, but also by returning those remains to their families. Where possible, they may apply different techniques to reconstruct their individual features for identity and recognition purposes. A key example for this is the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, EAAF), a nongovernmental, not-for-profit, scientific organization that applies forensic sciencesdmainly forensic anthropology and archaeologydto the investigation of human rights violations in Argentina and worldwide. EAAF was established in 1984 to investigate the cases of at least 9000 disappeared people in Argentina under the military government that ruled from 1976 to 1983. Today, the team works in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. The “Human Rights” discourse, like many other modern political discourses, is heavily used and abused in the context of war. Any belligerent national force is using it as a public political strategy, to profit from human rights as their (self-proclaimed) creators, bearers and defenders, not only to win hearts and minds for themselves, but also to use them against its real or imagined enemies by damaging their public reputation and, thus, their geopolitical strategies and interests. Winning “hearts and minds” is a very popular war strategy: born during the Cold War, it is inextricably tied to the Cold War era cultural wars that were waged, silently, along with military deployments and armed interventionsdused both by the “heroes” and the “villains”dacross the world (Appy, 2000; Schofield and Cocroft, 2007; Wax, 2008). The protection of the environmental, cultural, archaeological and historical heritage forms an important part of those discourses and strategies and they were also aligned with specific economical models and theories, through the condemnation and marginalization of ‘politically’ charged theories and professionals (UNESCO, 1972). By promoting neutral and scientific interpretation models, they were often used to pacify the hearts and minds, both in individuals and in social and cultural organisms (Franco, 2002).
Key Issues To this date, the different types of relations established between archaeology, its subjects of study and its target public, are defined not by human rights, but by war and the rise of capitalism. Since the French Revolution, human rights are intertwined in the framework of the long process of transformation of the ancient imperial and colonial order, but also into neocolonial, global and multicultural socio-economic and cultural orders. These processes have continued and have been readapted to the latest geopolitical arrangements, throughout the past centuries and as currently taking place in 2022. Warmongering, as it usually happens with access to knowledge and enjoyment of the past, is set in motion by members of the current fields of power. Thus, the past, as represented by its material cultures, is defined by power, economy, religion and all sorts of sets of relations constructed inside a given world order, which itself defines which sort of objects may be protected and guarded against the destruction that is caused by the given order. The same power groups, in other instances, define also which parts of a city or a rural area may be protected from the destruction caused, for instance, by urban development. The public uses of the past differ profoundly from these perspectives, but they do not define the field of the archaeologist’s praxis and work. On rare occasions, cultures and people have been able to fight this situation, but since archaeology is more removed from them than the fields of history and historiography, it has been able to maintain its imagined frontiers and its firm grip on outsiders’ opinions and actions. From an economic point of view, the two most common products of an archaeologist’s work are printed texts and archaeological objects. Those two products, if normality ensues, will end up stocked in archives, libraries or museums. Public and community archaeology has been addressing these issues and has tried to increase and improve the relationship between the “manufacturers” of archaeology, i.e., the archaeologists and the general public. As often happens with relics, most of the time the general public cannot regard them, touch them or understand them outside the
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realm of the arcane and sacred universe of rules that constitutes the dominion of culture and heritage. Modern warmongering helped and developed from the same position of power that defined its violent praxis, also culture and heritage as subjects of international and national law, knowledge, socio-politics and the capitalist economy (Funari and Soares, 2019). The modern discourse of human rights, peace, civility and equality for all human beings, plays its role inside this hyperviolent human universe and has no power, beyond discourse, humorous situations and imagination, to overthrow or reverse this world order and its power dynamics. Archaeologists, institutions, and NGOs, among other organizations, from different parts of the world, have been struggling to turn culture and heritage into people’s communal property or, at least, a public attraction. However on the one hand, the “orange economy” where goods and services have value because they are the product of the ideas and expertise of their creators, its advocates and their policy of monetizing every human activity, and its eager agents have been replacing academics and academic research and productivity. On the other hand, current economic dynamics are making increasingly difficult not only access to education and basic health or sanitary services, but even reading, independent thinking, low-cost publications, etc. The reach of public archaeology and the human rights discourse and praxis is limited, and both cultural products are becoming increasingly luxury items. If we consider the study, protection and inclusion of any people’s cultural, tangible or intangible, historical or archaeological heritage a human right, then it is inevitable to talk about pacifism, war and development. Since WW I, as the New World arrived and destruction came on an unfathomable scale, the new international agencies got involved with culture, education and nature. Beyond the mere interest in ancient objects or cultures, the Great War brought into focus the permanence of human existence, diversity, and presence through its memories, and materialized through their craftsmanship. Since Habermas published his article on the public uses of the past, the human rights discussion became part of a widespread debate about the past itself as a right, a public property, and not a private matter for some. History, as in the case of Germany’s recent and earlier history, should be known by everybody and, therefore, publicly and openly debated because of its direct and indirect impacts on people’s lives, but not only on Germany’s citizens because Germany’s policies during the first half of the 20th century horribly afflicted most of the world nations and cultures (Habermas and Leaman, 1988). Nazism and other kinds of fascism used the past as a weapon, and historians and archaeologists played their part in that war. Not knowing and not discussing history, its stories and lessons, helps to prevent the discussion of a global calamity that, on the other hand, is closely related to modern human rights history. Far away from historiography or historians, this subject is, in archaeology and from a global perspective, a scarcely-chosen, rarely mentioned, research and/or discussion matter. However, it is, though peripherally or almost marginally, dealt with whenever archaeologists discuss endangered cultural artifacts, endangered cultures, public uses of the past, heritage politics or, among many other subjects, ideological issues related to dead people and their relation to living cultures. Human rights are far more recognized as a political philosophy that underpins the body of the many legal issues tied to archaeological praxis, than a conceptual framework or analytical tool (Funari and Alarcón-Jiménez, 2019). We may propose that, as proclaimed by a prevalent school of archaeology, since archaeological artifacts and archaeological records and sites do not bear ideological discourses (for instance, they do not hold “historical meaning” because of their material “nature”, as opposed to the subjective “nature” of history and its creators), human rights do not play a significant part in archaeological praxis nor in its theoretical core. It is more common to tie the idea of human rights to specific archaeologists whose minds and bodiesdof researchddeal with specific political issues as long as they are adequately funded, because there are no institutional, public or private known funds dedicated to promote the research subject of “Archaeology and Human Rights”. The history of human rights is the history of their demise, as in present times, by populist, military or racial/ethnically driven regimes spreading fast and steadily on a global scale since the early 20th century. Today, state power shares its domains with global corporations, through social networks, educational warfare and economic stimuli, but as unrelentingly inhuman as the modern populist state. Still, memories, histories and human rights are marginal, even characterized as “socialist” or “communist” propaganda, and dangerous subject matters to deal with, inside and outside Academia (Patterson, 1994). When first deployed in 18th century France as “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789”, be it by the violence and cruelty deployed by French colonial forces toward African and African American slaves and toward Native American, Asian or African peoples (Orser and Funari, 2001), or be it toward women, as the beheaded body of Madame Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), the French author who wrote the “Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne” can testify, human rights discourses have not been always openly embraced by everybody; including by archaeologists. The subject of human rights is discussed mainly concerning countries afflicted by war, internal and deathly ideological struggles, political violence, and democratic regimes or dictatorships publicly known to wage war on their citizens, as is the case of many Asian, African and Latin-American countries. In most regions, their populations have had to deal with difficult, if not unbearable life-threatening situations and conditions. Even those living indand subject todthe different colonial metropolitan territories have been subjected to their cruel regimes, even in relatively recent times. But former colonies turned into independent nations have been the main target of class, economic, racial or cultural warfare. These countries have been struggling persistently against the violence and forced forgetfulness imposed by their political regimes and cultural and educational systems. Among other tools, that is, among the many warfare strategies employed against different world populations, we found accounts of forcibly edited and/or suppressed historical narratives and communal memories: that is, people may not only disappear by physical means, but also by cultural and educational means. Archaeologists from former colonial powers, now the new economic, cultural or geopolitical powers, tend to travel around the world exploring and studying other peoples’ lives and stories, which they transform into academic outputs and products. They also
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collect artifacts and information about dead or living peoples that lived “abroad”, i.e., in countries other than the archaeologists’. While writing and imposing their own narratives over them, they also develop museums or similar institutions where these other peoples’ heritage will be not only not owned and managed by them, but shown and explained to them. Colonial or current colonialist centers tend also to supply their former colonies, or their current political allies or economical partners, with the tools to craft their own “cultures” and “memories”, generally not in their languages or words but those of the given power. Not only do they give them access to their educational systems, by providing them with scholarships or by not charging them full enrollment fees, but also they engage each student with their language, theoretical frameworks, research findings, political points of view, editorial industries policies and rules, etc. Many archaeologists born, raised and educated in these “foreign” countries, that is, the former colonies or third world countries, have found, most of the time, an open invitation to educate themselves and to do research. But, during the 20th century, most of their countries have been afflicted by war or violent political environments, such as Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Colombia (Funari and Ferreira, 2006). It is while undergoing violent political repression, mostly related to the geopolitical and economic situation, that colonial or economic or geopolitical powers reach out to young students from third world countries and invite them to become archaeologists, who then in turn fly to the former colonial centers to become Masters or PhDs (Funari et al., 2009). Their academic output and production tends to become the cornerstone of local archaeology students and educational policies. These same colonial centers tend to ignore research produced in a different language than their own, and also tend to punish third-world countries’ political regimes -many not so secretly imposed by them- on the account of their human rights violation scores. Many of these researchers and researches done by local or foreign archaeologists have been often executed under these regimes and, be it by fear, censorship or just plain scientific interest, they tend not to confront nor denounce the human rights violations being committed in the present. Many of them do not acknowledge such situations or do not seem to think of them as related to their professional work.
Summary and Future Directions We briefly discussed the relationship between human rights and archaeology. We tried to establish that human rights is a topic of discourse and a conceptual framework often related to the individual archaeologist, or small groups of archaeologists, but it is not a concern for the whole of this domain of knowledge. For archaeology, human rights seem to be related to the material record of the different aftermaths of violence across the world, but human rights are not always engaged in its teaching, prevention or condemnation of such violence. When proclaimed a science, many members of this field tend to evade, ignore or reject any political commitment. Still, they may even support not only the warmonger nations and their policies but proclaim the independence of archaeology from current affairs. In many afflicted nations, researchers have become aware of this situation and have begun to orientate their work, not only to dig into the current uses of the past but to turn them useful to communities across the world, by interacting and engaging actively with them.
See Also: Identity and Power; Indigenous Archaeology; Repatriation of Human Remains.
References Appy, Christian G. (Ed.), 2000. Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Mass. Bethell, Leslie, Roxborough, Ian (Eds.), 1993. Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Franco, Jean, 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., Ferreira, Lucio Menezes, 2006. A social history of Brazilian archaeology: a case study. Bull. Hist. Archaeol. 16, 18–27. Funari, Pedro, Zarankin, Andres, Salerno, Melisa (Eds.), 2009. Memories From Darkness: Archaeology of Repression and Resistance in Latin America. Springer, Cham. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., Alarcón-Jiménez, Andrés, 2019. Arqueología y Derechos Humanos. Chungara (Arica) 51, 125–128. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., Soares, Inês Virgínia Prado, 2019. Arqueologia e Direitos Humanos, uma Introdução. 1a edição. Appris, Paraná. Ghodsee, Kristen, 2012. The Cold War politicization of literacy: communism, UNESCO and the World Bank. Dipl. Hist. 36, 373–399. Gilman, Nils, 2003. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Habermas, Jürgen, Leaman, Jeremy, 1988. Concerning the public use of history. New Ger. Critiq. 44, 40–50. Orser Jr., Charles E., Funari, Pedro P.A., 2001. Archaeology and slave resistance and rebellion. World Archaeol. 33, 61–72. Patterson, Thomas C., 1994. Social archaeology in Latin America: an appreciation. Am. Antiq. 59, 531–537. Schofield, John, Cocroft, Wayne (Eds.), 2007. A Fearsome Heritage Diverse Legacies of the Cold War. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, Calif. Silverman, Helaine, Ruggles, D. Fairchild, 2007. Cultural Heritage and Human Rights. Springer, New York, NY. UNESCO, 1972. Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Wax, Dustin M. (Ed.), 2008. Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism, and the CIA. Pluto Press, London.
Relevant Websites https://en.comisionverdadcol-ca.org/. https://www.cultura.gob.ar/que-es-la-conadep-9904/. http://cnv.memoriasreveladas.gov.br/.
Repatriation of Human Remains Patricia Ayalaa,b and Jacinta Arthurc,d, *, a Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile; b Centro de Estudios Interculturales e IndígenasCIIR, Santiago, Chile; c Instituto de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Museo, Universidad Católica del Norte, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile; and d Ka Haka Hoki Mai Te Mana Tupuna | Programa de Repatriación Rapa Nui, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Chile © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Collecting, Museums, and Colonization The History of Repatriation Movements in North America and Oceania Repatriation and Restitution Movements in South America Key Issues International Legislation Toward a Political Ethic in the Treatment of Ancestors Summary and Future Directions References
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The repatriation, “redignification”, and reburial movement is the result of long and committed Indigenous activism. Repatriation is a matter of social justice through reparation, reconciliation, and healing. The restitution of Indigenous bodies is a step toward the reparation of historical injustices committed against Indigenous peoples and the systematic violation of their rights.
Abstract In this entry, we present an international overview of the Indigenous repatriation and restitution movements. We reflect on the historical and political processes that led to the establishment of collections of human bodies and material culture in museums and scientific institutions of the world’s major political and economic powers. Subsequently, we provide a historical review of Indigenous movements linked to the treatment of human bodies, which aims to demonstrate that their struggles, demands, and achievements are the result of a long process that began with European colonization. Finally, we address the legal and ethical progress on repatriation at an international level, highlighting existing shortcomings, as well as the steps that are taken to overcome them.
Introduction A central issue in the processes of recognizing the rights of Indigenous peoples is the appropriation and unequal treatment of the bodies of their ancestors. Acting upon this historical injustice, in recent decades, Indigenous nations around the world have been organized and mobilized for their right to decide the future of their ancestors and cultural materials removed from their original contexts. This Indigenous movement for social justice and human rights has translated into Indigenous claims for respect for dignity and restitution of the bodies and cultural heritage of ancestors, challenging the legality and ethics of museum collections. The repatriation movement is provoking important debates that are reverberating through scientific, Indigenous, policy-making, and museum/archival communities (Arthur, 2020). In so doing, it has motivated the promulgation of repatriation legislation in the United States and legal reforms and state declarations on the ethical treatment of Indigenous ancestors’ remains across continents. It has also triggered the establishment of international mechanisms regarding cultural property and the rights of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous rights to the repatriation of ancestors’ remains and cultural material is endorsed by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which establishes that states should facilitate repatriation processes through fair, transparent, and effective mechanisms developed in conjunction with the Indigenous peoples concerned. In this entry, we provide an international overview of Indigenous repatriation and restitution movements. A cross-cutting aspect of the different cases that we address and that we wish to highlight in this entry is that repatriation is not a matter of property. It is
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not about the restitution of “cultural property”, nor does it end with the return of the ancestors. It is not just a struggle for control over bodies, and it does not refer to a dispute between science and religion only or to a way of invalidating (though questioning, and deconstructing) scientific development. Repatriation is, above all, a matter of social justice through reparation, reconciliation, and healing. The restitution of Indigenous bodies is a step toward the reparation of historical injustices committed against Indigenous peoples and the systematic violation of their rights. We close this introduction by critically positioning ourselves within the repatriation debate. As non-Indigenous scholars, we acknowledge, first and foremost, that the movement for the repatriation, “redignification”, and reburial of ancestors comes after long and committed Indigenous activism and not from academic epiphanies (Lonetree, 2012; Arthur, 2020). As allied scholars, our position within the debate is not neutral. We consider the retention of ancestors in museums and other collecting institutions against the will of their descendants to be unethical, immoral, and a grave violation of the rights of Indigenous peoples. We recognize that we write about a deeply sensitive subject and empathize with that pain. With much respect, we write from Chile, where, although Indigenous peoples have struggled to care for their ancestors since colonization, repatriation has only recently become an issue in relevant policies. Undoubtedly, on the international scene, repatriation processes in Chile are marginal to the centers of production of this debate led by Anglo-Celtic countries. From this perspective, we contribute to this global movement from a southern perspective.
Overview Collecting, Museums, and Colonization According to Lonetree (2012), any reflection on decolonization necessarily involves talking about the hard truths of colonization. In this sense, it is important to mention that the history of Indigenous movements cannot be dissociated from the history of archaeology, anthropology, and museology; all fields of knowledge that benefited from the colonization of Indigenous peoples. The appropriation and scientific treatment of the bodies and human remains of Indigenous ancestors developed in parallel with the policies of domination, extermination, and assimilation of Indigenous peoples. The centrifugal movements of archaeological and anthropological collections speak to the epistemic, symbolic, and physical violence exercised by the colonizers while at the same time evidencing the political and economic connections of the colonies with their centers of power. In this context, thousands of human bodies were unearthed from their resting places and sent to museums around the world, where they were either put on display or stored in warehouses or laboratories for analysis and classification. European and American museums were filled with collections from different parts of the American continent, while national and regional museums in South America received numerous bodies and cultural items from Indigenous territories. There are now large collections of human bodies and remains stored in museums, universities, and research centers worldwide (Gänger, 2014; Turnbull, 2020). When perceptions of human diversity were deeply rooted in notions of biological determinism and racial value, scientific interpretations and practices were articulated with the colonial ideology and practices of the time. In these circumstances, colonialism facilitated the acquisition of Indigenous human remains, while their excavation, collection, analysis, and display supported and helped shape the colonial enterprise (Fforde, 2004). By delivering data for the description and categorization of racial diversity, the scientific analysis of Indigenous human remains aimed to demonstrate that human groups had different cultural, physical, and intellectual statuses and were thus subject to a natural hierarchy (Arthur, 2015). In this context, colonization was conceived as natural and even biologically necessary. Influenced by the treatment of human bodies in Western medicine, archaeology early turned them into objects of study. This colonizing logic was reproduced not only by removing Indigenous bodies from their graves but also by exhibiting, analyzing, and preserving them, for which, in many cases, they had to be dismembered. This colonial epistemology of fragmenting bodies and removing them from their territories of origin was accompanied by the fragmentation of collections within and between museums, which conserved and classified bodies and objects from the same site according to their “materiality”. Based on scientific power and authority, it has been considered that the excavation of cemeteries, classification, analysis, exhibition, and conservation of bodies and human remains should be accepted in favor of a history of humanity, without taking into account the consequences for the descendant communities or the colonial context in which these were produced. Furthermore, the appropriation and scientific treatment of bodies has been carried out without considering their link to contemporary Indigenous populations. While in colonial contexts, different beliefs about death were labeled as pagan, they are still considered mere superstitions. The imposition of scientific truth and values as universal has justified the dispossession of Indigenous territories and knowledge for the sake of human history, which has been exclusively constructed from a Western perspective. It has been precisely these colonizing scientific practices that, given their structural, physical, and epistemic violence, have influenced the conflicts between archaeologists, anthropologists, and Indigenous people. With the creation of nation-states, archaeology contributed to nationalist discourses either through its interpretations or by means of Indigenous bodies, monuments, or objects that allowed a construction of history through these new, imagined communities. The early enactment of laws reaffirmed state ownership of archaeological heritage, its safeguarding, protection and conservation, in parallel to patrimonializing Indigenous archaeological bodies and objects (Smith, 2007; Arthur and Ayala, 2020). At the same time, colonial devices were reproduced that supported the supremacy of Western culture and Western values over those of Indigenous peoples, who were considered part of the past or in the process of assimilation and extinction. In this view, Indigenous ancestral remains and objects were regarded as the property of the nation. For more than half a century, Indigenous peoples have questioned these archaeological and museological practices, the assumed universality of scientific values, and the appropriation of ancestral remains and objects that continue to be a part of communities and of cultural heritage.
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The History of Repatriation Movements in North America and Oceania The first documented claims for reburial occurred in the early 1960s, when Native Americans grouped under the American Indians Against Desecration began to demand the reburial of the bodies of their ancestors (Endere, 2000). Simultaneously, Aboriginal people protested against the excavation of their ancestors’ graves in Australia (Hubert, 1992; Fforde, 2004). In these countries, requests for repatriation and reburial increased in intensity in the 1970s and 1980s in an international context favorable to these demands, following UNESCO’s guidelines in 1970 to prohibit and prevent the illicit import, export, and transfer of ownership of cultural property. In these circumstances, and with the growing visibility of Indigenous mobilizations, native activists questioned and protested against the study of the bodies of their ancestors and the exhibition, storage, and conservation of their remains in museums. They demanded inclusion in museum debates and pressed for the repatriation of their ancestors’ remains, funerary goods, and objects of cultural heritage. They contested stereotypical displays of their histories and cultures, resisted curatorial authority and the imposition of Western perspectives, and challenged the legality of museum collections. The movement sought to reform the museum from within by integrating Indigenous people into museum professions and creating counter-hegemonic community museum projects and cultural centers. Their main objective was to raise awareness about the history of asymmetrical relationships between Indigenous peoples, science, and museums. These movements were accompanied and reinforced by an Indigenous critique in academic contexts. A central figure was the Lakota historian and activist Vine Deloria, who, in 1970, laid the groundwork for the critique of anthropology in his manifesto “Custer died for his sins” (Deloria, 1970). Although the archaeological establishment of the time rejected his harsh language and questioning of anthropology, the repercussions of his work were felt for years after in the change of relations between archaeologists and Indigenous people in the United States and the development of a series of professional codes of ethics (Biolsi and Zimmerman, 1997). The change was dramatic compared to the previous years that were characterized by conflict, confrontations, and disputes, seizure of museums and archaeological sites, Indigenous interventions in excavations, the prohibited entry of some archaeologists to sites, and the arrest of these professionals. In Canada, the repatriation movement gained traction in the 1960s when the Kwakiutl began to negotiate with the National Museum of Canada to return objects belonging to potlatch,1 a ceremony prohibited since 1885. In 1951, the anti-potlatch law was repealed, leading to the revival of the ceremony and requests for the return of ceremonial materials. In 1967, the Canadian Government determined that the return of such materials could take place when the native peoples had museums in which to house them. In 1979, the U’Mista Cultural Society of Vancouver and the Nuyumbalees Society on Quadra Island, Canada, opened their doors to the return of sacred potlatch items to their places of origin. One of the most active contemporary repatriation organizations is the Haida Nation Repatriation Committee, formed in the mid-1990s. In 1998, this Nation negotiated its first repatriation with the Royal British Columbia Museum, repatriating to date over 500 ancestors from the United States and the United Kingdom (Collison et al., 2019). As a consequence of First Nations’ activism, Canada has established codes of ethics to regulate the relationship between archaeologists and Indigenous people regarding the treatment of human bodies. In New Zealand, the Maori are working on protocols for the proper care of their ancestors deposited in museums and for their repatriation, parallel to the processes in the United States and Canada. From the early 1970s, former National Museum President, Maui Pomare, devoted much of his work to international repatriation. This work led to the creation of the Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Program (KARP). A precedent for this program was a seminar held at the National Museum, Wellington, in 1998. In partnership with community representatives, this seminar focused on the care and handling of human remains. In the following year, the Ministry of Maori Development hosted a second meeting, highlighting the imperative for Maori involvement in repatriation, the need for an organization to facilitate and lead repatriation processes, the requirement for Maori to develop their own management policy for the care of human remains and to decide their final resting places, the establishment of an interim repository for repatriated ancestors, and the need for the government to facilitate and fund repatriations. In 2003, Cabinet agreed that the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa would act on behalf of the government concerning repatriations. As an outcome of this agreement, the Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Program was established (Arthur, 2015). A milestone in the program occurred in 2014 when the Te Papa Museum achieved the return of 107 ancestral Maori and Moriori remains from the Natural History Museum in New York and the Charité Institution in Berlin. In Australia, there has been a significant formalization of the repatriation movement that Aboriginal communities initiated over the last 20 years, now involving museums and the government. The Australian Government Policy on Indigenous Repatriation was established in 2011 and supports the repatriation of Indigenous Australian ancestral remains from overseas collecting institutions and from collections within Australia. Further, the Australian Government created and funded the Indigenous Cultural Property Return Program, focusing on the collections of major museums. This program funds the Repatriation Unit of the National Museum of Australia to repatriate National Museum collections to Aboriginal communities and to coordinate processes on behalf of other museums in the country (Fforde et al., 2020). The New South Wales Government inaugurated a separate repatriation program for the return of collections held by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service. Several other Australian states have enacted legislation for the return of Indigenous human remains (Fforde, 2004; Hubert, 1992).
1 Ceremony practiced by the native peoples of the Pacific coast in both the United States and Canada. In general terms, it is a feast in which hierarchical relationships between groups are observed and reinforced by the exchange of gifts and other ceremonies. The host of the potlatch shows his wealth and importance by giving away his possessions. It could be said that this ceremony consists of exchanging gifts for prestige, which increases with the value of the goods distributed.
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Repatriation and Restitution Movements in South America In South America, Indigenous struggles for territory, cultural rights, and self-determination were not associated with demands for inclusion, non-excavation of cemeteries, non-exhibition, return, repatriation, restitution, and reburial of human bodies until the 1990s (Endere and Ayala, 2011). In some Southern Cone countries, such as Chile, Indigenous claims began in the framework of multicultural policies in the late 20th century and were accentuated during the 21st century. In other countries, such as Argentina, heritage demands developed in the context of intercultural policies that replaced, at least discursively, multiculturalism. There are also South American countries in which restitution requests and processes have been mainly led by national governmentsdthis is the case, for example, in Peru. The case of Argentina is particularly important in South America for being the first country where two special restitution laws, and later a general federal law, were enacted (Ametrano, 2015; Endere, 2020a). The first restitution claims in Argentina were made in the 1990s, linked to the remains of well-known caciques or chiefs captured during the “Conquest of the Desert”. Subsequently, restitution claims for “Indigenous people deprived of their identity” (Jofré, 2014) were included, such as bodies reified in museum inventories. To date, there have been several restitutions and reburials associated with Mapuche, Tehuelche, MapucheTehuelche, and Aché communities, which have requested returns from the Museum of La Plata, the Ethnographic Museum, municipalities, universities, and research centers (Ametrano, 2015; Rodríguez, 2013; Verdesio, 2011). As a result of these claims, several national museums removed bodies and human remains from their exhibits. The Ethnographic Museum of the University of Buenos Aires has played a leading role in this regard, standing out for the voluntary return in 2004 of a mummified head of a Ma ori warrior, part of its collections since 1910, to the Te Papa National Museum of New Zealand (Endere, 2020a). In Uruguay, the restitution from France in 2002 of the Vaimaca Pirú chief stands out, accomplished by the State. In this case, the initial claimants were members of an association of descendants of the Charrúa Nation, ADENCH. However, because of the failure of their efforts with the former Museum of Man in Paris, the Uruguayan State appropriated the process (Verdesio, 2011). The remains of the cacique were buried in the National Pantheon of the Central Cemetery, where other prominent figures of the Indigenous genocide rest. Chile, on the other hand, has no legal mechanisms to facilitate or regulate repatriation or reburial processes (Arthur and Ayala, 2020). In this country, the debate around these issues has developed in the context of disputes between the State, scientists, and Indigenous peoples. To date, the few cases of repatriation that have occurred have been driven mostly by foreign institutions. In 2007, the National Museum of the American Indian (United States) repatriated human remains to Atacameño and Aymara communities and organizations that reburied them. In 2010, the University of Zurich (Switzerland) returned five Kawésqar individuals to their communities, who were also reburied. In 2011, the Museum of Ethnography of Geneva (Switzerland) returned four individuals to the Miguel de Azapa Museum in Arica, two of whom were identified as Chinchorro mummies. A different case is that of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), where repatriations of ivi tupuna (ancestral remains) are conducted through a community-based program created in 2013 (Arthur, 2020). The Rapa Nui have so far completed repatriations and restitutions from museums and institutions in New Zealand and Chile and are in the process of formalizing a restitution from Norway (Arthur, 2018). Additionally, several repatriation requests are in place, which include three moai from museums in Chile and the UK and ancestral remains from various European museums. The request to the British Museum for the repatriation of moai Hoa Haka Nana ’Ia has attracted special attention. Although the initial claimant was the Rapa Nui Elders Council, the process is being taken up by the Chilean State in view of the British Museum’s repatriation policy. In response to the strong Indigenous activism regarding repatriation, the Chilean State has implemented a policy in recent years of transferring collections from the National Museum of Natural History to state museums located in Indigenous territories. In this context, the transfer of over 200 ivi tupuna and a moai to the Rapa Nui Museum in 2020 and 2022, respectively, stands out, as does the transfer of part of the Gusinde Collection from the same national museum to the Martin Gusinde Anthropological Museum in Puerto Williams, Chile, in 2020 and 2021. In Bolivia, repatriation is highlighted as a matter of national interest in the Cultural Heritage Law of 2014. Prior to this legislation, Quechua and Aymara-speaking communities and other organizations from Bolivia requested the Museo de la Plata to remove a human body from Tiwanaku from display in 2003, which was accomplished in 2006. Subsequently, restitution of these human remains was requested, a process that is continuing with the support of the Bolivian Government. In 2014, through the efforts of the Archaeology and Museums Unit (UDAM) of the Bolivian Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the “Illa del Ekeko” was repatriated from the Bern Museum in Switzerland. In 2017, archaeological pieces from Argentina and Germany were repatriated. In 2018, a Tiwanaku piece was repatriated from England. In 2019, a mummified body, apparently of Inca origin, was repatriated from Michigan State University in the United States. Both the objects and the repatriated body are in Bolivia’s National Museum of Archaeology.
Key Issues International Legislation The discussion surrounding the circulation of cultural property began to gain international attention in the 1960s, when nation states and Indigenous peoples became publicly concerned about the appropriation of their cultural heritage. In particular, they complained about the constant destruction of archaeological sites and the growing illegal market for art and cultural artifacts that together raised nationalist sensitivities about the loss and appropriation of cultural heritage (Prott, 2009). These concerns and the related public attention led to the enactment of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit
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Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (Paris, 1970). The treaty followed another precedent in the field, the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (The Hague, 1954). The adoption of the 1970 UNESCO Convention was the first legal response to the problem of the circulation of cultural property against the will of its creator communities and descendants. However, Indigenous claims for the appropriation and unequal treatment of their dead remained unanswered. Thus, the legal and political actions of the international community for the protection of cultural property were accompanied by strong Indigenous activism that sought to place the issue of repatriation and reburial on the world agenda. Disputes between Indigenous organizations and researchers over the ethical treatment, repatriation, and reburial of Indigenous ancestors first began at the First World Archaeological Congress (WAC) held in 1986 in Southampton, England. This discussion resulted in the first code of ethics on this matter, the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains, agreed during the 1989 WAC Inter-Congress in South Dakota, USA (Matunga, 1991; Zimmerman, 2002). The first body of law on repatriation was enacted that same year in the United States: the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA), which applies specifically to Smithsonian museums. A new law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, came into effect a year later and governed all federally funded museums and scientific institutions in the United States. NMAIA and NAGPRA constitute the first legislative effort by a nation state to respond to growing Indigenous demands for the repatriation of their ancestors’ remains, funerary objects, and ceremonial artifacts (Arthur, 2015). Notably, both laws are celebrated as exemplary human rights legislation (McKeown, 2013; Price, 1991; Riding In, 2005; Thornton, 2002; Trope and Echo-Hawk, 2000). Both NMAIA and NAGPRA were designed in the spirit of redressing historical inequities resulting from the legacy of collecting practices, the continued neglect of Indigenous religions and funerary rites, and the clear contradictions inherent in the treatment of Indigenous and non-Indigenous graves (Lonetree, 2012). These laws had a significant impact on the archaeological and museological work of excavation, display, analysis, and conservation of Indigenous bodies and human remains (Zimmerman, 2002). In Argentina, special restitution laws were enacted to address specific cases, which later led to the passing of a general federal law (Ametrano, 2015; Endere, 2000, 2020a). The Restitution Law (25.517/01) requires that museums make available to “Indigenous peoples, or the communities of belonging that claim them”, the human remains of aborigines that are part of their collections (art. 1). It also requires that “any scientific undertaking involving aboriginal communities, including their historical and cultural heritage, must have the express consent of the community concerned” (art. 3). However, this regulation did not establish the requirements to be met by communities in making their claims, the criteria to be followed by the museums in attending to such claims, nor the mechanisms through which to settle possible conflicts. On the other hand, the law requires the adhesion of the provinces to become applicable in their territories. Several years passed without the law being regulated in Argentina. However, in 2010, the government announced its regulation through Decree 701. The document establishes that the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs (INAI) “will be in charge of coordinating, articulating and assisting in the follow-up and study of compliance with the directives and actions provided for by Law 25.517”. This Institute is empowered to “carry out surveys tending to identify the mortal remains of aborigines that are part of museums and/or public or private collections and to promote their restitution”, coordinating its actions with the competent bodies in the matter, especially the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought. Likewise, the INAI may “request reports and issue opinions on scientific undertakings involving aboriginal communities, referred to in Key Issues section of Law 25.517”. It is worth noting that this decree authorizes research organizations in possession of the mortal remains under claim to request an extension of up to 12 months to return them. Restitution processes in Argentina have been characterized by their internal complexity, since, despite the existence of a federal law, provincial legislations have hindered its application or slowed down Indigenous claims due to the seeming impossibility of finding judicial or political tools to resolve the problems. The Huarpe people, for example, filed a repatriation request to the National University of San Juan over 10 years ago, which has not yet been completed. Despite the national legislation in force and the filing of a lawsuit with the National Ombudsman’s Office, the University practices where the bodies are housed and the provincial laws make it difficult to render the national restitution law valid. The Huarpe have therefore focused on political work to continue the restitution process and to generate protocols and discussions within their community regarding this and other issues (Jofré, 2014). In the Chilean case, the National Monuments Law 17.288 (1970) declares Indigenous cemeteries and human bodies in archaeological sites as the property of the nation. In this country, there is no law on repatriation and/or reburial of Indigenous bodies, except a guiding document of the National Monuments Council (Endere and Ayala, 2011). Therefore, a common denominator of the repatriation and/or reburial experiences has been the absence of mechanisms to facilitate these processes, as the Council has sought to regulate procedures, reaffirm national ownership of human remains, validate the scientific vision, and restrict Indigenous participation (Arthur, 2020; Ayala, 2020). In Bolivia, changes in the legislation related to cultural heritage have been made in the last 10 years. The new Cultural Heritage Law 530 was enacted in 2014 and Chapter III: Restitution of the Cultural Heritage of Bolivia, refers to the restitution and repatriation of Bolivian cultural heritage in Articles 44 and 45. The institution in charge of these processes concerning archaeological heritage is the National Archaeology Unit (UDAM), which has held the repatriated objects and bodies in the National Museum of Archaeology since 2014. The right of Indigenous peoples to respectful treatment and repatriation of their ancestors is now recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). This declaration recognizes the urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples based on its concern for the historical injustices that peoples have suffered
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from colonization. In its Article 11, on the right of peoples to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs, the declaration stipulates that:
States shall provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, established in conjunction with Indigenous Peoples, in respect of cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs (art. 11.2).
The declaration also recognizes the right of Indigenous peoples to “manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies” (Art. 12.1). To this end, the declaration mandates that “States shall endeavor to facilitate access to and/or repatriation of ceremonial objects and human remains in their possession through fair, transparent and effective mechanisms established in conjunction with the Indigenous Peoples concerned” (art. 12.2). The declarations approved by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly do not constitute binding norms. However, the dominant opinion affirms the obligatory nature of Human Rights Declarations indirectly, as the rights recognized in them represent “general principles of the law of civilized nations”. The 2007 declaration has been repeatedly cited by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as the basis for its decisions (Endere, 2020b).
Toward a Political Ethic in the Treatment of Ancestors Indigenous activism in repatriation and reburial has prompted the enactment of laws, international legal instruments, and disciplinary critical questions that have laid the foundations of recognition and respect for a renewed relationship between Indigenous peoples, scientists, museum professionals, and state officials. However, this process has not been without criticism or stances openly opposed to repatriation and reburial. For some, it is a dispute between science and religion; for others, it amounts to a purely political demand or matters of mere legality (Verdesio, 2011). Reducing repatriation and reburial to a conflict between science and religion certainly entails reproducing the colonial logic where the West was the font of reason and the rest of the world irrational and therefore open to conquest and domination (Arthur, 2015). Limiting Indigenous claims of repatriation and reburial to this logic is an effective political strategy, relying as it does on images, contexts, and interpretations that position repatriation activists as irrational creationists (Dumont, 2003). Against the argument that these are purely political claims without cultural substance, because of the difficulties of tracing a direct historical continuity between the claimants and the human remains and objects demanded, identity claims are indeed political and are constantly being re-signified (Smith, 2007). Alternatively, focusing this debate on a purely legal discussion impoverishes the analysis, since it consciously sidelines the cultural aspects of the issue (Rodríguez, 2013). According to Verdesio (2011:3), when an Indigenous community claims the remains of an ancestor, it is not a matter of beliefs but rather the exercise of a right that the rest of society has had and that they have not, i.e., to dispose of their dead in the way that the traditions, social, and cultural practices of the present demand. For this reason, Verdesio argues, no attention should be paid to positions that maintain that Indigenous people should be treated like the rest of the population. That is, that they should not be granted what opponents consider are special privileges (epistemic and juridical). It is precisely because Indigenous people have never been treated equally that legislation has to be enacted to prevent these injustices from recurring and to go some way to repair the damage caused. As Riding In (2005) explains, the current inequality of Indigenous peoples is a product of colonialism in its various forms. It derives from the colonial logic that attributes to the colonizers a consciousness of entitlement to everything, empowering them to deny the colonized the respect and rights that others enjoy (Riding In, 2005:53). Thus, the debate on the repatriation and reburial of Indigenous human bodies is not a conflict between science and religion; nor is it a mere political or legal issue. It is a problem with roots in colonialism, cross cut by cultural, political, and legal wrongs and claims. In this context, there are human groups that enjoy full rights over their dead and there are others to whom those rights have been systematically denied. Hamilakis’ (2007) definition of “the political ethic” is relevant to this discussion. According to this author, the political ethic is politically situated; it takes sides, recognizes the contingency and historicity of human action, understands the nexus linking knowledge and power, and molds specific “regimes of truth”. They are ethics that acknowledge the inequalities and asymmetries of power and adopt positions that align with certain interests and groups (Hamilakis, 2007: 25). In this context, this author draws attention to the need to re-examine the often-depoliticized ethical stances adopted by archaeologists and other relevant actors on different issues, for example, repatriation, reburial, the treatment of the dead, and Indigenous issues. During the last few years, ethical issues became a matter of regulation for professional organizations. The ethical debate was instrumentalized and professionalized through codes of ethics and laws and has become stagnant and depoliticized as a consequence. For Hamilakis (2007), these problems must be analyzed from the perspective of the political ethic, which constitutes the deepest and most-penetrating archaeological reflexivity. For this reason, it is worth asking to what extent the processes of repatriation and reburial fulfill the decolonizing purposes that Indigenous people expect; how are they contributing to redressing inequalities and social injustices; what is the degree of Indigenous participation; how are Indigenous epistemologies and values integrated into current legislation and codes of ethics. To answer these questions, we will briefly analyze current international law. American repatriation laws are, first and foremost, human rights legislation (Trope and Echo Hawk, 2000). NAGPRA, in particular, has been celebrated as an unprecedented gesture by
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a nation to begin to redress the history of genocide and violations committed against Native Americans and an opportunity for the scientific community to right the wrongs of the past. However, such a law did not come without heated debate, and it has not delivered the decolonizing effects that Native Americans had hoped. At the heart of this debate is the Indigenous critique of the nonrecognition of Native values and opinions about their past (Arthur, 2015). In this context, NAGPRA has certain fundamental shortcomings that prevent it from accurately recognizing and representing the rights and interests of Native American peoples. While the passage of this law marked a point in changing the relationships between these populations, museums, universities, and federal agencies, the decision-making and authoritative voice still rests on science and its experts, who often ignore Indigenous understandings, perceptions, and relationships concerning the materials subject to repatriation (Arthur, 2015). For example, the process for determining cultural affiliation of Indigenous bodies and remains is based primarily on scientific evidence. Although the statutes recognize oral traditions and ethnographic evidence as sources for determining this affiliation, the implementation of this law has shown that scientific evidence is given primacy over oral traditions and other forms of knowledge (Thomas, 2000:240). To these procedural problems is added that of the language of the law, since being articulated around a religious lexicon, NAGPRA is instrumental in the political strategy of scientists opposed to repatriation. By associating Indigenous peoples with irrational religion, this body of legislation clears the way for science to assume the culturally familiar voice of reason (Dumont, 2003; Arthur, 2015). Additionally, although US law acknowledges the sovereignty of federally recognized Indian tribes, it does not consider repatriation as a nation-to-nation agreement because those involved in the repatriation process are the Native American tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations on the one hand, and museums and federal agencies on the other, but not the federal government. Accordingly, native activists and intellectuals have challenged NAGPRA, asserting that they do not see their values and worldviews or their goal of decolonization reflected in the legislation (Riding In, 2005). Reflection on the decolonizing potential of repatriation leads us to question the degree of community autonomy and the level of intervention or appropriation of the state and its experts in these processes. We consider Endere’s (2000:5) words regarding the need to distinguish the demands of Indigenous communities directed to institutions in their countries, or to third nations, from the claims of national states about the restitution of cultural property that was the object of illicit trafficking or illegal appropriation during armed conflict, or the product of archaeological excavations and exportation of pieces in colonial contexts. In this sense, Simpson (1997) distinguishes between restitution and repatriation. While she uses the term restitution when dealing with stolen or illicitly appropriated objects in contravention of international laws and the UNESCO conventions of 1954 and 1970, she reserves the term repatriation for those materials that are legally possessed according to international standards, but which are claimed by their traditional owners or their descendants, defying national standards and museum policies, which uphold the legality of their rights over the collections (Simpson, 1997:5). For Endere (2000:6), the term “repatriation” also incorporates the idea of returning to the original people or communities what colonial powers or national states took away from them. These definitions allude to the importance of defining who presents the demands for devolution–the Indigenous communities, the state, or the experts–and why and how these processes are carried out. This discussion is especially important in the Southern Cone, where local logics and processes do not consider such conceptual differences. In some contexts, the concepts of repatriation and restitution are used interchangeably; in others, the term “repatriation” is used to refer to international processes, while “restitution” refers to recoveries within the national territory. In the Argentinian case, for example, Simpson’s (1997) definitions do not work, so that what in the North American context is called “repatriation” in Argentina is called “restitution” (Jofré, 2014), when the majority of these are requests made by Indigenous communities and organizations. According to Resolution No. 360/2012 of the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs (INAI), which created the National Program for the Identification and Restitution of Indigenous Human Remains,
it is understood as restitution of human remains the actions of material and symbolic nature that make possible the return of the remains, within the framework of recognition of the Indigenous right and the political, historical and cultural vindication, identity and respect towards the Original Peoples for the strengthening of their identities (Res. 360/2012, art. 2).
According to Endere (2000:15), the conceptual difference proposed by Simpson (1997) could make sense in the claims referring to human remains of well-known caciques in Argentine history. In the cases of the caciques Inakayal and Mariano Rosas, the requests for return were made prior to the enactment of the Restitution Law of 2001, meaning that special laws needed to be passed to remove these human remains from the national heritage. Initially, the restitution of Inakayal was requested through a bill presented by Senator Solari Irigoyen, who claimed this cacique was a national hero. Although his initiative was later supported by Indigenous representatives, Senator Irigoyen justified this process in the context of Indigenous claims in general and as a human rights issue in particular. On the other hand, the restitution of Mariano Rosas was initially claimed by a congressman at the request of an Indigenous descendant. In spite of the conflicts raised by this case, the request served as a trigger for the Rankülche community, a genealogist specialized in Rankülche lineages, and the provincial government to join forces to promote another successful project. The intervention of the state in these processes should not make Indigenous participation invisible. In effect, the claims for the restitution of human remains to the Museo de la Plata date back several decades, generated by the activism of prominent leaders, such as Lorenzo Cejas Pincén (Endere, 1998). Overall, the trends in Argentina point to the importance of distinguishing between restitution for returns from national museums to Indigenous communities in the country, and repatriation for returns from abroad to the
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national territory, as well as returns of remains from Argentine museums to foreign institutions with the endorsement of national authorities (Endere, 2020a). In Chile, on the other hand, both concepts are being used. Considering Simpson’s (1997) definitions, cases of restitution have been identified by the University of Zurich (2010) and the Museum of Ethnography of Switzerland (2011). In Rapa Nui, the concept of repatriation is used in the same terms as in the United States and New Zealand, and is linked to claims arising from and managed by the Indigenous communities themselves. A similar case is the repatriation carried out by the National Museum of the American Indian (2007), where the bodies were handed over and reburied by their communities of origin in the Atacameño and Aymara territory. In the Atacameño case, the word “return” is also used, since part of the collections claimed are still in the Museo de San Pedro de Atacama, located in their main town, meaning that they have not left their territory of origin. Likewise, they refer to the repatriation, return, or “redignification” (Cruz et al., 2020) of their ancestors, including collections recently identified in European and North American museums (Ayala et al., 2022).
Summary and Future Directions The appropriation of Indigenous human remains and objects provided the scientific means to demonstrate the racial superiority of the West and thus legitimize the dispossession of Indigenous lands and the genocide of their populations. The formation of the first national museums, where these collections were sent, contributed to these racial discourses by exhibiting a rhetoric of power that justified colonization as a biological necessity. For more than half a century, Indigenous peoples around the world have problematized the hegemonic relationships that facilitated the emergence of disciplines, such as archaeology, anthropology, and museology, and have questioned their power, authority, control, and treatment of their ancestors’ bodies and sacred objects. Scientific values, often defended as universal, have occupied a central place in this debate. The international trend shows disciplinary, legal, and ethical changes, as well as renewed relationships between archaeologists, museum professionals, and Indigenous people. However, it is still a marginal perspective in relation to mainstream archaeology and museology. Demands for repatriation and restitution in North America and Oceania as well as in South America are part of and the result of a long history of Indigenous activism for self-determination and cultural and territorial rights. In this sense, we agree with Riding In (2005) on the decolonizing potential of these demands, since, although they cannot reverse the effects of colonialism, they can advance toward reparation. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that the international debate on repatriation goes beyond an ethical problem referring to scientific practices; it is linked, above all, to an issue of justice, reparation, reconciliation, and healing for the consequences and trauma perpetrated on Indigenous peoples by colonization and nation states. In this context, a new deal with these populations necessarily involves recognizing the differential treatment they receive with respect to their dead.
See Also: Archaeology and Human Rights; Restitution of Collections: An Appraisal.
References Ametrano, Silvia, 2015. Los procesos de restitución en el Museo de la Plata. Revista Argentina de Antropología Biológica 17 (2), 1–13. Arthur, Jacinta, 2015. Reclaiming Mana. Repatriation in Rapa Nui. PhD Thesis. The University of California, United States of America. Arthur, Jacinta, 2018. Repatriación indígena en el Museo Rapa Nui. Subdirección de Investigación. Servicio Nacional del Patrimonio Cultural. Arthur, Jacinta, 2020. Repatriation in Rapa Nui, Ka Haka Hoki Mai Te Mana tupuna. In: Fforde, Cressida, McKeown, C. Timothy, Keeler, Honor (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation: Return, Reconcile, Renew. Routledge, London, pp. 220–237. Arthur, Jacinta, Ayala, Patricia (Eds.), 2020. El regreso de los ancestros: movimientos indígenas de repatriación y redignificación de los cuerpos. Línea Editorial del Servicio Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural de Chile, Santiago. Ayala, Patricia, 2020. The control of ancestors in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile. In: Fforde, Cressida, McKeown, C. Timothy, Keeler, Honnor (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation; Return, Reconcile, Renew. Routledge, London, pp. 208–219. Ayala, Patricia, Espíndola, Cristian, Aguilar, Carlos, Cárdenas, Ulises, 2022. Dónde están los abuelos o ancestros?, ¿Cuándo y por qué salieron de la tierra y del territorio atacameño?, ¿quién los sacó?, ¿cómo están ahora? Rev. Arqueol. Am. 40, 197–213. Biolsi, Thomas, Zimmerman, Larry, 1997. Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Collison, Nika Jisgang, Lucy Bell, Sdaahl K’awaas, Neel, Lou-ann, 2019. Indigenous Repatriation Handbook. Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria. Cruz, Jimena, Anza, Guadalupe, Cruz Salvatierra, Timoteo, Cruz López, Tomás, 2020. Hacia la re-dignificación de los “Gentiles”. In: Arthur, Jacinta, Ayala, Patricia (Eds.), El regreso de los ancestros: movimientos indígenas de repatriación y redignificación de los cuerpos. Línea Editorial del Servicio Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural, Santiago, pp. 77–98. Deloria, Vine, 1970. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Avon Books, New York. Dumont, Clayton W., 2003. The politics of scientific objections to repatriation. Wicazo Sa Rev. 18 (1), 109–128. Endere, María Luz, 1998. Collections of Indigenous Human Remains in Argentina: The Issue of Claiming a National Heritage. MA Thesis. University College, London, UK. Endere, María Luz, 2000. Patrimonios en disputa: acervos nacionales, investigación arqueológica y reclamos étnicos sobre restos humanos. Trab. Prehist. 57, 5–17. Endere, María Luz, 2020a. Restitution policies in Argentina: the role of the state, indigenous peoples, museums, and researchers. In: Fforde, Cressida, Keeler, H., McKeown, T. (Eds.), The Effects of Repatriation: Healing and Wellbeing. Springer, New York, pp. 188–207. Endere, María Luz, 2020b. Latin America: indigenous peoples’ rights. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. Endere, María Luz, Ayala, Patricia, 2011. Normativa legal, recaudos éticos y práctica arqueológica. Un estudio comparativo de Argentina y Chile. Chungará 44 (1), 39–58. Fforde, Cressida, 2004. Collecting the Dead. Archaeology and the Reburial Issue. Duckworth, London. Fforde, Cressida, McKeown, C. Timothy, Keeler, Honnor (Eds.), 2020. The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation: Return, Reconcile, Renew. Routledge, London. Gänger, Stephanie, 2014. Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Study of Pre-columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911. Oxford University Press, New York.
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Hamilakis, Yannis, 2007. From ethics to politics. In: Hamilakis, Yannis, Duke, Philip (Eds.), Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California, pp. 15–40. Hubert, Jane, 1992. Dry bones or living ancestors? Conflictive perceptions of life, death and the universe. Int. J. Cult. Property 1, 105–127. Jofré, Carina, 2014. The mark of the Indian still inhabits our body. In: Haber, Alejandro, Sheper, Nick (Eds.), After Ethics: Ancestral Voices and Post Disciplinary Worlds in Archaeology. Springer, New York, pp. 55–78. Lonetree, Amy, 2012. Decolonizing Museums. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. McKeown, Timothy, 2013. In the Smaller Scope of Conscience. The Struggle for National Repatriation Legislation, 1986–1990. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Matunga, Hirini, 1991. The Maori delegation to WAC 2: presentation and reports. World Archaeol. Bull. 5. Price, H. Marcus, 1991. Disputing the Dead. U.S. Laws on Aboriginal Remains and Grave Goods. University of Missouri Press, Columbia. Prott, Lyndel V. (Ed.), 2009. Witnesses to History. A Compendium of Documents and Writings on the Return of Cultural Objects. Unesco, París. Riding In, James, 2005. Decolonizing NAGPRA. In: Wilson, Waziyatawin Angela, Yellow Bird, Michael (Eds.), For Indigenous Eyes Only. A Decolonization Handbook. School of American Research, Santa Fe, pp. 53–66. Rodríguez, Mariela Eva, 2013. Cuando los muertos se vuelven objetos y las memorias bienes intangibles: tensiones entre leyes patrimoniales y derechos de los pueblos indígenas. In: Crespo, Carolina (Ed.), Tramas de diversidad: patrimonio y pueblos originarios. Antropofagia, Buenos Aires, pp. 67–100. Simpson, Moira, 1997. Museum and Repatriation. An Account of Contested Items in Museum Collections in the UK, With Comparative Material From Other Countries. The Museum Association, London. Smith, Laurajane, 2007. Empty gestures? Heritage and the politics of recognition. In: Silverman, Helaine, Ruggles, D. Fairchild (Eds.), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights. Springer, New York, pp. 159–171. Thomas, David, 2000. Skull Wars. Basic Books, New York. Thornton, Russell, 2002. Repatriation as healing the wounds of the trauma of history: cases of native Americans in the United States of America. In: Fforde, Cressida, Hubert, Jane, Turnbull, Paul (Eds.), The Dead and Their Possessions. Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice. Routledge, London, pp. 17–25. Trope, Jack F., Echo-Hawk, Walter R., 2000. The native American graves protection and repatriation act. Background and legislative history. In: Mihesuah, Devon A. (Ed.), Repatriation Reader. Who Owns American Indian Remains? University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, pp. 123–168. Turnbull, Paul, 2020. Collecting and colonial violence. In: Fforde, Cressida, McKeown, C. Timothy, Keeler, Honnor (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation: Return, Reconcile, Renew. Routledge, London, pp. 452–468. Verdesio, Gustavo, 2011. Entre las visiones patrimonialistas y los derechos humanos: Reflexiones sobre restitución y repatriación en Argentina y Uruguay. Corpus Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.4000/corpusarchivos.989. Zimmerman, Larry J., 2002. A decade after the Vermillion Accord: what has changed and what has not? In: Fforde, Cressida, Hubert, Jane, Turnbull, Paul (Eds.), The Dead and Their Possessions. Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice. Routledge, London, pp. 91–98.
Restitution of Collections - An Appraisal Alvaro Higueras, Independent Scholar, Yerevan, Armenia © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview The Historical Context for Dealing With Claims Defining Our Terms Key Issues Restitution and Repatriation in Real Life The Museums That Hold World Heritage (on a Disproportionate Scale) Restitution and Repatriation Today Extreme Opinions, None Very Practical What If the All-Must-Go-Back Opinion Prevails? Some Scenarios Which Illustrate Distinct Situations Two Opposite Strategies in Restitution/Repatriation NOSTOI Capolavori Ritrovati: Italy’s Strategic Repatriation Policy One Case of a Utopic Repatriation Policy: The Peruvian Strategy Summary and Future Directions Restitution/Repatriation: Political Whim, Academic Strategy or Identity-Bearing Process? Conclusion References
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Key Points
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Defining the concepts of restitution and repatriation of a collection. Describing the way collections have been assembled and stewarded: the history of the collections, which originate from looting, plundering, purchasing in black markets, or legal acquisitions, is essential to address issues of repatriation. Presenting case studies in the world of heritage stewardship that show diverse situations regarding claims to repatriate heritage. Explaining the conversations between claimants of heritage and stewards of heritage: the communication channels and discourse between both parties have changed dramatically and are leading to interesting outcomes. Thinking of restitution or repatriation endeavors as a solution, a challenge or a very difficult aim. Gauging today’s strategies of restitution or repatriation claims and future paths.
Glossary Collection A group of artifacts or artworks to be seen, studied, or kept together in private, public or restricted locations. Repatriation The act or process of restoring or returning human remains and objects, such as archaeological or historical artifacts, to their country of origin. Restitution The act or process of restoring to the rightful owner something that has been taken away, lost, or surrendered in a variety of situations, such as war, trafficking, looting, etc.
Abstract The theme of restitution and repatriation of collections is currently a very urgent topic in the world of heritage management. A great change has occurred in the museum world and in the social perception with regard to the appropriate home and ownership of cultural heritage. It is a dramatic change from the 20th century, when we all lived mesmerized by the wealth and breadth of the collections in large museums of Northern, former colonial countries, to the 21st century,
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when communities and countries are arguing that they wish to reclaim their heritage, often exiled by forceful means and by illegal trafficking.
Introduction The restitution of collections has become a very important and central activity in the world of museums and art today. Even if actual restitutions are not numerous yet, the topic is being discussed and debated at every level, be it political, academic, and, more importantly, and fittingly, in the museum arena. The debate of restitution of heritage has grown exponentially in the last two decades thanks to (1) new laws supporting the claims by heirs of family collections and paintings expropriated during recent wars (and resurfacing in museums and auction houses); (2) by a major law in the United States supporting the claims for repatriation by native populations; and, (3) the increasing relevance of the protests of countries which saw their heritage looted and robbed in the last 150 years, albeit not supported with systematic laws yet.
Overview The Historical Context for Dealing With Claims A turning point in addressing the trafficking of heritage (which fuels today’s restitution claims) is the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (following a 1954 post-war agreement which aimed at protecting heritage in times of wardan aim that has clearly not been accomplished). This document, ratified by 141 countries, criminalizes any acquisition of heritage trafficked after 1970 (Askerud and Clément, 2007). Any object trafficked before this year would not be covered, and any claimant would have to pursue other means to achieve restitution. This said, even heritage objects proven to have been trafficked after 1970 will face a difficult task in reaching restitution. In one particular case, Italy targeted 26 artifacts exported illegally from 1971 to 1996 by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Gill and Chippindale, 2007). The task was not made easier despite the existence of the 1970 document. We will return to this case below as we describe the highly effective Italian strategy to claim the repatriation of its heritage.
Defining Our Terms We start our exploration of this topic by defining the two terms in the title and one word in the subtitle. The concept of collection is clear as it is, in essence, what museums do: amass artifacts, register them, exhibit some, and store many more. The terms restitution and repatriation are not synonymous. Restitution is about an object or collection finding its way to its original owner. Repatriation is about an object or collection finding its way to its original place or country of origin (Roehrenbeck, 2010). In the broader world of indigenous cultural property (which would include prehistoric, historic and contemporaneous heritage) a very simple question has been prevalent: Who Owns Native Culture? (Brown, 2003). As indigenous societies are seen as rightful owners of designs, art, traditions and often techniques (as are their Western counterparts), they are also owners of their cultural heritage, much of which is in exile. Does the systematic shipping of totems from the Pacific Northwest of North America to museums of the world mean their indigenous groups have property all over the world? In this instance there is a caveat: the heritage of the Northwest societies and many others in the North American continent at the end of the 19th century was sold by the local populations. This heritage would therefore fall into the Western parameter of lawful property. There is a range of definitions, and more importantly, action strategies related to the terms restitution and repatriation. Losson (2022), in discussing Latin American cases avoids the latter. He uses the term return to describe an ad-hoc event, circumstantial and not constant; on the other hand, restitution embodies the systematic work by heritage professionals of scanning the heritage world, of artifacts in exhibits, and the obscure illegal markets for suspected cases of stolen, looted and illegally exported artifacts; it also involves distinct levels of cooperation between institutions. What about repatriation? As initially defined, this represents the process where an artifact returns to its original place, be it a country, region, city or village. However, some Latin American scholars (Arthur and Ayala, 2020) have used the term restitution when it comes to human remains returning to the homeland. The term “rematriation” in reference to a return to the motherland has also been used. In the end, it is about the aim to return the object or body to the original community, often in their ancestral lands. Such is the case of the human remains of ancestor Inakayal in Argentina in the 1970s, whose claim was initiated by a senator and then supported by the Tehuelche group and returned to its Patagonian lands (Endere, 2009). The natives of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have been extremely active, achieving the repatriation of skeletal remains from New Zealand museums in their first repatriation ever. They have expanded their scope to repatriate also exiled Moai. This very process occurs on a monumental scale in the United States with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). However, what happens when native populations in a country, for example Peru, are unaware of the issue, do not know what heritage they are missing or are not yet interested in laying claims to their exiled heritage (in their capital or abroad) (López, 2008)? This scenario is much more complex than what occurs today in some communities: their populations witness the excavation and discovery of a tomb in their lands and wishdsometimes with forceful attitudes-to keep the artifacts on display in their own community or region (Pabón Cadavid, 2018).
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Archaeologists have started to understand the community’s position, and in many cases the outcome is satisfying for the communities around the site: in Kuntur Wasi, Cajamarca (Peru), a small, well set museum, with adequate security, houses the heritage of several rich tombs. The tombs, with their corpses and offerings, are then not exiled to the national museum. No repatriation is needed here. It is very thought-provoking to associate the term repatriation with a process involving the indigenous communities, which are the creators and users of that heritage in times past, and its legitimate owners –if not its custodians (Nilsson Stutz, 2013). But it does leave out the genuine will of modern mestizo societies to repatriate a heritage that has transcended the sphere of its original indigenous groups and has acquired a larger identity. It may be that the sacred and ritual features of that heritage are lost or that the aim is not to rebury it in ancestral lands. Should that be a deterrent for modern societies to rebuild their connection with the heritage of their lands, as loose as it may be after centuries of colonial history? I believe the term repatriation should have a broad use. There are also cases, in the administrative sphere of ministries and institutes in charge of heritage where the terms are conflated and used interchangeably (Alva Guerrero, 2009). This obscures their task, resulting in a lack of systematic investigative work and strategies. These cases may rely more on ad-hoc situations popping up now and then or be restricted to highly political and public ones. Often, not much work goes into them, despite some countries having the mandated task to pursue investigative work into their exiled heritage because, by law, it should be repatriated. Losson (2022) believes that both strategies are, in essence, political. He is partly right in the sense that return, restitution and repatriation claims can create a high impact political discourse, but they are ephemeral in that realm. Yet often, the political discourse of returns seems to have dominated in the field, given that restitution and repatriation have rarely been planned as a strategy by heritage managers and museologists of the national systems and, to a lesser degree, by academics. A case in point to the politics involved: in February 2022 the president of the African Union called on European countries to return Africa’s artifacts in their possession. This political discourse is uttered at a time when many doors of dialog have already been opened, but also at a time when African museums would simply be overwhelmed if this happened in the next few years.
Key Issues Restitution and Repatriation in Real Life In the past, unrelated artifacts were more often restituted or repatriated in batches different from the original assemblages (which have often been dispersed through their history in exile). However, this pattern is changing as countries are claiming for collections of objects known to have been looted from precise locations, as in the case of the marbles of the Parthenon or the bronzes of Benin City palace. Museums have evolved in managing and using their collections, but often they have not stopped collecting. In earlier exhibits, museums aimed to describe the disconnected objects, often without a context (their origin in particulardoften unknown); in later times, they attempted to interpret the exhibits within a conceptual frame that consisted in a superficial narrative; in recent times, they are moving toward a more detailed, accurate historical context of the exhibits aimed at a more efficient public message; such new discourses convey information that resonates with the countries and populations from which the artifacts come. It is at this point that the discourses of museums and the claims of spoliated countries and populations confront each other. We may be tempted, by assessing the percentage of the collections which are exhibited (arguably less than 15% of their holdings, on average), to call what museums do as hoarding heritage, as their collections are continuously enhanced from a wide variety of sources. Hoarding by legal means and from legal sources is not a problem. It is the illegality of plundering and stealing (the methods used during colonial aggression) and looting and trafficking (the methods used today) which are at the root of extensive museum collections of American, Asian, European and African heritage.
The Museums That Hold World Heritage (on a Disproportionate Scale) The largest museums in the world have been trying to find arguments to justify their existence as hoarders of world heritage. Higgins (2022) reminds us of the position of Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, two decades ago, who described the role of the institution as a “universal” museum. He went further to offer a pompous metaphor of the mandate of this “universal” museum: “to shape the citizens of ‘That Great City, the World’” (MacGregor, 2012). Cuno (2008), also head of one such museum, repeats the claim with: “Antiquity belongs to the world”. These would be the museums self-anointed by their 2002 “Declaration” to be the showcase of humanity’s achievements. Curtis (2006) notes a paradox where universal museums want to have it both ways: while the heritage they hold was acquired in the illegal and legal markets as commodities (there are very few donations from the source countries), they have assumed the role of stewards and custodians of it for the benefit of society. However, as Higgins underlines, these museums rely on the rights accorded by property common law in their countries “to resist claims to remove items from their collections”. So, they claim to be the stewards of it as well as its owners. Finally, Higgins reminds us of what MacGregor said amid a drive to lend heritage of the British Museum in temporal exhibits in the origin countriesdnot to Greece though, she notes: “Repatriation is yesterday’s question”; however today it is the issue of the moment. The opposition to the mighty claim of the “universal museum” is strong, mostly due to the violent origin of the collections by force, discrimination and war (Abungu, 2008). On top of that, these museums, which are all extremely popular, have set a Western-centered agenda for their appreciation and laid them in a very shallow historical context which has obfuscated the stories behind each artifact in those collections. For example, an unnamed museum has scraped the colors painted over a gilded
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maskdessentially polished it- and removed any pendants or feathers that were left on it so as to reveal the “gold”dwhich is really gilded copper. The narrative of the role of “hidden” gold in a preindustrial society is replaced by the Western perspective of the attractive luminescence of the object.
Restitution and Repatriation Today In today’s context, the issue of restitution of heritage assets –that is, archaeological and historical artifacts housed in collections away from their original source– is at the forefront of the news and, in a few cases, has become the object of government policies. A potent and rare example is the United States’ Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which rules the return of artifacts and human remains from US museums to their original native groups. Important recent initiatives demonstrating the timeliness and fast pacing of restitution of heritage endeavors include the pledge by the Australian government of funds to allow the repatriation of aboriginal artifacts; the proposed return of a set of bronze artifacts from France to Benin and Senegal; and the publication of important documents that are directly aimed at addressing the crux of the repatriation issues, such as the potential role of museums (Hicks, 2020), a review of Latin American heritage return strategies (Losson, 2022), and government white papers as in Belgium (Restitution Belgium, 2021) and the Netherlands (2020), following the seminal French report (Sarr and Savoy, 2018). In the case of the French initiative, by 2022 France has repatriated the bronze artifacts, which were exhibited in Benin’s presidential palace at their return. This case was a state affair presented by the French president during an African visit in 2017. Emanuel Macron said: “Africa’s cultural heritage can no longer remain a prisoner of European museums”. The proposal was then sanctioned with the parliament approving a specific law for the 26 artifacts concerned, which were obtained by looting in war times 130 years ago. Therefore, the law is not an open-ended commitment to other repatriations by France, but it paves the way to build a relationship with African countries regarding the possibility of repatriating their exiled heritage in an expedient fashion. In contrast, the government of the Netherlands is pledging an unconditional repatriation flow of heritage. As part of this European proactive new scenario, Germany is planning to return in 2022 some 1000 bronze artifacts to Nigeria (where the looted palaces of Benin City were). Many world museums hold items of the Benin bronzes collection, which have become a banner in matters of restitution, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Nigeria. Several museums are repatriating these bronzes; but it is often done on a minor scale: the Metropolitan Museum is only returning three artifacts, while it possesses about 160 pieces from the original looting of Benin City in 1897. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, having determined all their 21 bronzes come from that very loot, will repatriate them. Its director Ngaire Blankenberg said: “We cannot build for the future without making our best effort at healing the wounds of the past.” Whether the repatriation of artifacts will actually contribute to heal those wounds is another matter, and should not be the concern of the museums that actually hold that exiled heritage. The Australian case related to Aboriginal heritage assets is also a state affair: the repatriation endeavor is funded by the taxpayer and includes artifacts from museums and private collectors in the country. In addition, in 2020, the government decided to go further and fund the process for repatriation of heritage that is found in overseas collections and museums. Finally, several books have been presenting distinct perspectives on the issue. A very interesting one is Hicks’ (2020) “The Brutish Museums”. Hicks argues that all heritage should be repatriated. As a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford his perspective would highly impact the museum. In recent times, museum members, albeit more administrative than scientific staff, have refused such conversations arguing for the importance of the universal or encyclopedic museum. Cuno (2008), who supports this latter concept, also thinks that “Archaeology must be shielded from nationalistic laws and politics”. He believes that a law that defends the heritage of a nation is nationalistic. It is understandable that the universal or encyclopedic museum may have a lot to lose in a new museum order.
Extreme Opinions, None Very Practical In contrasting these extreme approaches, All-must-go-back vs. We-showcase-universal-achievements, it may be easier to empathize more with the latter than the former. Yet, the flaws in the arguments invented and the positions taken by these latter museums make restitution and repatriation of part of their collections a must. Conversely, the arguments provided by actors from the ransacked countries are very relevant in the changed international museum (if not political) order of the 21st century. In this light, the French decision to address the issue on a case-by-case basis seems not only practical but favors that very same heritage as it returns gradually to its country of origin. However, this is a practical and useful process only if it is constant and well planned. Nonetheless, the spirit of this policy has fizzled out lately in France but has gained steam in other countries, regarding the Benin bronzes especially. Such would be the case with the Dutch government and its museums. An important African opinion comes from Felwine Sarr, who co-authored the report commissioned by the French government in 2017 precisely to guide France’s path toward normalizing restitution of heritage (and, more precisely, to identify which objects had been exiled from Africa from war lootingdthe report concludes that such was the case for 90,000 artifacts in France; Sarr and Savoy, 2018). Mr. Sarr believes restitution must happen, but only after “new relational ethics” are built between former colonies and metropolis, which require the recognition of the situations created by the abuse of heritage and peoples in the past and its consequences in today’s societies. Another African opinion by Ng’ang’a Nyokabi, a student from Kenya, is as direct as colonization was: “The way forward is and should only be restitution. Restitution of Africa’s artifacts without any form of negotiations”. While Hicks, Sarr and Nyokabi might agree, the first is undoubtedly in a minority today in his part of the world, and the latter is probably in the majority in their
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continent. But the opinion of the majority does not make such a radical plan adequate or advisable. Native populations will, as is well within their rights, favor such broad restitution of heritage. But this would create tremendous problems and their countries would be hit by a heritage tsunami, becoming recipients of hundreds of thousands of exiled artifacts if full restitution were the rule. In the realm of repatriation endeavors, the regions of the world that were subjected to heritage extraction are still not in the same wavelength. Some regions, such as Latin America, are lagging in conversations with the governments and institutions holding that heritage.
What If the All-Must-Go-Back Opinion Prevails? This is a crucial question since the other position is today the status quo. A heritage tsunami is not advisable. Indeed, dumping all portable (and perhaps monumental) heritage back to the countries of origin does not solve anything and instead puts that very same heritage in danger. The heritage in “northern” museums and collections was amassed during decades of greed for foreign art and, as such, should return in a gradual way. Indeed, the political, social and scientific need for repatriation and, as Sarr suggests, the awareness and understanding of why it must progress will also develop further in the following decades. This is the context in which all processes of restitution/repatriation and laws that govern them are taking place today. This said, the discussion of this topic is uneven around the world, with much discussion on the fate of African heritage but surprisingly little on the Latin American front. While all repatriations are restitutions, often restitutions will not qualify as repatriation. The crux of the issue resides in the process by which situations for repatriations and restitutions occur: court rulings, confiscations at airports or harbors, countries’ requests, museums willing to restitute or repatriate, or, in the great majority of cases, museums that are reticent to recognize the shady origins of some items in their collections (which are often built by artifacts looted in times of war; confiscated in times of colonization; and illegally exported in times of peace). Be it as it may, most cases end up in the court of law in the countries where the collections have been exiled. These court procedures do not usually bode well for the claiming countries deprived of their heritage. It has been more effective for individuals claiming property stolen in times of war –mostly from wars in Europe, where records might exist to prove property ownership decades later. Lawyers, judges, courts, and current laws in the countries where most collections and collectors exist (interested in collecting heritage objects from other countries and not their own) have had the upper hand and favored a status quo situation (i.e., collectors keep on collecting world heritage) and, consequently, obstruct most repatriation and restitution requests (Vrdoljak, 2008). Moreover, collectors have indeed been hailed as potential solvers of heritage crises in war situations (Boardman, 2012). A court case has to be blatantly clear, always with the appropriate paperwork (proof of ownership; object registration; photographs of the object in its original place; criminal file; the presence of a lawyer specialized in art and cultural property law), for restitution or repatriation to proceed and a museum to lose one or several items. Alternatively, a country has to be sufficiently convinced of the merits of its case and its prerogatives to wield “patrimonial sovereignty”: a sovereign country should decide what penalties to impose to the flagrant museums refusing the request. Lowenthal (2005) thinks otherwise as he sees sanctions as not effective deterrents. Imagine if researchers from the institution concerned need to enter that very country for study and the country bared their entrance. Could you imagine an institution whose researchers study ancient Roman art and Renaissance art but are not able to enter Italy, for example? There is no predefined model for proceeding with restitution or repatriation cases, more so when there is no consensus on the legitimate reasons to proceed, and the custodians of the heritage keep acting as owners of it. Again, court cases or direct links with the museums do not lead to many positive outcomes. This has led countries to seek alternative strategies in their quests and disputes (Shehade et al., 2016). One very basic, simple way of addressing the issue is by disrupting auctions of African, Asian and Latin American heritage. This is mostly a publicity stunt because hardly ever is such an auction stopped. This is not a viable strategy. The only way to obtain a swift repatriation of illicitly trafficked objects is if they are stopped and confiscated at the airportsdand bilateral agreements exist to expedite this action. Once the loot is in the dealer’s stores, museum vaults and collector’s rooms, the task is dire. Indeed, of these three, the museums are the more cautious. That was the case with the “Lydian Hoard” kept in the vaults of the Metropolitan Museum for about 15 years before they thought it was safe to exhibit it. Turkey immediately claimed the objects had been looted in the 1960s. Turkey lost all court cases in the US, but in 1993 the museum decided to repatriate the hoard. If the artifacts are “stolen” and exported illegally from Turkey, Peru or any other country, the difficult thing is to prove the crime to the degree required by US Courts. However, in most cases, the claims for repatriation are more revelatory in the realm of national and international cultural politics. This is because the strategies managed by specialists for the repatriation of artifacts and the museum situations in the countries or regions that would receive the heritage back are hardly prepared for the tsunami of artifacts that could potentially be repatriated. The numbers of exiled items housed in museums of “Northern” and ex-colonial countries are counted in the millions.
Some Scenarios Which Illustrate Distinct Situations To illustrate the variation in restitution/repatriation cases, let us review seven scenarios. The documentation published for each of these scenarios is very variable and includes court rulings, news feeds, books and even films. In the reference section, the resources available online and in traditional sources are listed.
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Scenario 1. Rome 1943. Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader of Italy, gifts to Germany a large Roman statue of Dionysus (originally headless but fitted with another ancient head). The statue was moved to Germany in 1944. Scenario 2. Peru 1913. Hiram Bingham reveals to the Western world the existence of Machu Picchu in National Geographic Magazine. After clearing a dense forest cover, Bingham will conduct two seasons of archaeological excavations, and 40,000 artifacts (complete pots, sherds and human skeletal remains) will be taken to the Peabody Museum at Yale University in the United States. Scenario 3. Gothenburg 2011. The National Museum of World Culture opens an exhibit showing more than fifty very fine Paracas textiles from the deserts of Peru. The exhibit is called “A Stolen World: The Paracas Collection”. The Peruvian government immediately requests the repatriation of the collection. Scenario 4. Athens and London 1801–1816. The metopes of the Parthenon and sculptures of other temples are removed from the Acropolis with the consent of the Ottoman governor. The sculptures are bought by the British Museum and have been on display ever since. Scenario 5. Vienna 1990–1998. The Belvedere Museum holds five paintings by Gustav Klimt, which Maria Altmann, a US citizen, argues belonged to her family, the Bauer-Bloch. The paintings had been looted by the Nazis from their Viennese home and ended up in custody at the Belvedere. She starts proceedings against the Austrian government, as the Belvedere collection belongs to the state. Scenario 6. Ankara 2018. The Turkish government believes the monuments housed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, especially the Altar, should be returned to their original spot, from which they were removed by 1886. On the other hand, the Lebanese government believes the so-called “Alexander” sarcophagus housed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum should be returned to Sidon, where it was unearthed in 1887. Scenario 7. Peru 2015. Archaeologist Alva (2001), the researcher who stopped the looting and confronted the looters (and villagers) of the site of Sipán, started tracing the path of looted objects from the site. His aim is to repatriate as many artifacts as possible to exhibit in the National Museum Royal Tombs of Sipán, along with the 14 tombs he excavated at the site. His work and commitment marked a watershed in the study of ancient societies. For the first time in history, archaeologists working in Peru had the upper hand over the looters of heritage. There are of course, many more scenarios of important cases of restitution or repatriation. In the meantime, these seven cases are snippets of different exemplary situations. In our first scenario, the statue of Dionysus was returned only in 1991 and is now in the National Roman Museum in Rome. Details of the process, as is common, have not been revealed. In our second scenario, the excavated artifacts from Machu Picchu were returned to Peru in 2013 after a couple of years of wrangling between Yale University and the Peruvian government (McIntosh, 2006; Mould, 2003). Peru had forgotten the circumstances by which the artifacts left the country until Yale organized a large exhibit with the artifacts. A 1913 agreement was recovered, which had been signed by Yale and Peru at the time of Bingham. It allowed the lot to stay at Yale for 18 months and then return to Peru. A century had passed; Yale did not acknowledge the terms and forced Peru to head to the courts. Yale finally decided to allow the repatriation of the artifacts and financed a new museum in Cusco to house them. The reasons behind Yale’s changing attitude are unknown, but it came after a final round of negotiations before starting a trial. In the third scenario, the city council of Gothenburg, the owner of the museum and of part of the collections, complied with the Peruvian government’s request for the repatriation of the collection. A set of Paracas textiles, with the artifacts owned by the city, was repatriated to Peru by 2021 and waits to be exhibited on a permanent basis. Another set remained in the museum. In the fourth scenario, the British Museum still possesses the Parthenon marbles, and it actually proudly writes that it “houses 15 metopes, 17 pedimental figures and 75 m of the original frieze”. That is to say, the museum possesses one sixth of the metopes and one third of the frieze of the monument (Angouri et al., 2017). In the eighties, when Melina Mercouri, the minister of culture, spearheaded Greek repatriation claims, the answer by Britain was that there was no proper museum where to house them in the much polluted city of Athensdpollution which was affecting the Parthenon temple itself. Today, Athens has the outstanding Acropolis Museum. It houses the original metopes of the frieze set up with gaps waiting for the repatriation of the exiled ones from the Elgin loot (three are housed in the Vatican Museums, one in Palermo, among others). Now the British Museum argues that as a steward of the legacies of world civilizations and its universal heritage, it serves the purpose of showing it to the world. But things surely change with time: in 1986, Boris Johnson, as a student, welcomed Mercouri at the Oxford Union by saying “This house believes that the Elgin marbles must be returned to Athens.” In late 2021, while still Prime Minister, he thought otherwise. Heritage is indeed highly politicized, and political stances shift often. In February 2022, the archaeological museum of Palermo sent back to Greece a piece of a foot from the frieze. In return, Greece lent to the museum a statue of Athena. This is not a new modus operandi since Italy had used it in the Nostoi case of 2007 with US museums (see below). Greek officials expressed hope that this strategy may be used to have the marbles back from the British Museum. In the fifth scenario, the Altmann restitution is a very important case (and precedent) in the realm of restitution procedures. The Austrian government had been reticent to consider this process until it passed a restitution law in 1998, which paved way for the paintings to move to New York. However, this was preceded by the involvement of the US Supreme Court, which agreed that Ms Altmann could sue the Austrian Gallery, and then there were arbitration procedures in Austria. This case shows the complexity and the intricacies of the legal paths.
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The sixth scenario is a case of finding the trail of looted artifacts illegally exported from Peru in the aftermath of a big looting event at Sipán, Northern Peru, while the archaeologists were unveiling the splendors of Moche tombs after expelling the looters. Some important artifacts, the first and best looted at Sipán, were held by the collector/trafficker in Lima. As in the case of Machu Picchu, National Geographic Magazine was the first to present this heritage to the world, showing also the looted artifacts held privately (which had to be registered in the National Registry of Heritage). Oddly, Alva, or the government for that matter, could not get the looted artifacts held in the country but could attempt to do so abroad with the help of INTERPOL and other international agents in this task. Peru and Alva were able to obtain the repatriation of several objects after identifying their whereabouts. Finally, the seventh scenario, which has not been resolved, presents an interesting problem. A German archaeological team removed a complete Classical Greek temple from Pergamon, at the time part of the Ottoman Empire. Then an Ottoman archaeological team removed from one of its provinces an extraordinary sarcophagus and moved it to Istanbul, then the capital of the empire. Later, after World War I, that province was separated from the new Turkey and became an independent country, Lebanon. Turkey, which wants the temple back from Germany, has refused to grant Lebanon the repatriation of the sarcophagus. This is a complex case, more so because of the territorial changes in the region in the early 20th century.
Two Opposite Strategies in Restitution/Repatriation NOSTOI Capolavori Ritrovati: Italy’s Strategic Repatriation Policy NOSTOI, “Return of the Greeks”, is the name given by Italy to the collection of 68 “Recovered Masterworks” repatriated in 2007 from four American institutions: the J. Paul Getty Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Princeton University Museum of Art. This case is a clear example of the complexity of achieving successfully a restitution case (Godart and De Caro, 2007). The process was started by the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, and it was finished by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Carabinieri, the police arm of the Italian military, has a department dedicated to investigating cases of illicit traffic of heritage artifacts. Their work starts with the investigation of looting events in the country, research into the illegal networks of looters, traffickers, and collectors; links with Interpol and other agencies; and the creation of the database “Leonardo” fed with information on stolen artifacts. There is a constant advisory through several networks, such as the European PSYCHE (Protection System for Cultural Heritage), INTERPOL (International Criminal Police Organization) and ICOM (the International Council of Museums) Red lists. Their achievements are widely recognized: since the creation of the department in 1969 until 2016, they have recovered 750,000 works of art; 1,158,000 archaeological artifacts; confiscated 272,000 fake artifacts; charged 35,000 persons; and secured the conviction of 1200 people. The work of the Carabinieri is at the core of successful restitution processes in Italy. This is a country that has decided not to pursue a broad and indiscriminate return of its cultural heritage. This means that important examples of Italian heritage may be displayed and owned in museums across the world. Such is the case with the Metropolitan Museum, which holds Roman murals from the villa at Boscoreale, a town near Pompey. This mural is a drop in the vast and valuable expanses of Italian heritage stewarded abroad. However, Italy has concentrated on pursuing cases for which it can actually gather information, build proof, and then aim at a successful resolution. In addition, Italy seems convinced to impose the rules (and sanctions) and exercise its patrimonial sovereignty on institutions which hold Italian heritage, especially the ones with illegally acquired heritage – as established by the research of the Carabinieri heritage taskforce.
One Case of a Utopic Repatriation Policy: The Peruvian Strategy Peru has important challenges to address in the future if it aims to accomplish any of its repatriation wishes. In many ways, its strategy is diametrically opposite to the Italian one, as it is still searching a strategy for the repatriation of heritage, let alone for its documentation. Any current action in that realm is a rather haphazard effort prompted by circumstantial events or occasional exposure of outstanding cases. So today, Peru’s strategy is limited to request and repatriate the obvious cases: those of artifacts stopped by customs. The tally of artifacts recovered between 2007 and 2012, is a total of 2736 from a dozen countries; few have been exhibited to the public. Without any doubt, the most important case, as detailed above, is the batch of textiles voluntarily surrendered by Sweden in 2010. Any litigation is deemed costly, ineffective and unwinnable; this is due to the lack of information and research to support its cases. Repatriation or not, promotion or not, it is telling that such an important country in the realm of heritage as Peru has not yet started considering these issues. There are several options at their disposal, which imply more or less work, but a clear stance on a strategy would go a long way to acknowledge the importance it gives its heritage.
Summary and Future Directions Restitution/Repatriation: Political Whim, Academic Strategy or Identity-Bearing Process? A successful restitution/repatriation crusade would create a heritage tsunami that museums in the origin countries would not be able to handle. Researchers have proposed a variety of options: create networks of licit movement of heritage alongside the thriving illicit ones (Coggins, 1995; Dietrich, 2002); a practice of leasing heritagedmuch as in temporary exhibits (Beltrametti, 2013); the creation by each country of virtual networks with “appropriation” strategiesdfor example, using at will images, 3D reproductions and
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information of the exiled artifacts (Higueras 2020). This latter strategy is ideal for purposes of global heritage promotion. In general, when possible, the ideal approach is to establish mutually-beneficial agreements and new ways to settle disputes (Chechi, 2014; Cornu and Renold, 2010; Falkoff, 2007). Yet, we have seen that there is strong opposition to the above suggestions by museums that sure want to continue “keeping their marbles”, as Jenkins titles her book (2016). There is also the fear of future emptied museums (Reppas, 2007). Losson (2021) manifests the premonition of a “Pandora Box” as such process moves forward. Restitution and repatriation might indeed start an array of unforeseen problems at both ends of the possible transfers of heritage. Some of them will surely be surprising, such as I imagine when the search in museum storage rooms reveals non-cataloged artifacts. However, there will also be wonder at the opening of new exhibits, with the collections that are repatriated set in new rooms and new museums in the origin countries, as was the case of the artifacts which form the Nostoi collection repatriated to Italy. The custodian museums of the world will not be emptied in this process. They should not. But they will lose key artifacts which represent significant examples of the societal evolution in their origin countries, such as the bronzes that decorated the most important palace in Benin. There are many examples of looted and exiled artifacts that could be repatriated to reunite with pieces excavated by archaeologists in the last decades, or that could return to their original spot in the still standing monuments, recreating, therefore more valuable and meaningful heritage context. The friezes of the Parthenon are the best, but not unique, examples of this latter case.
Conclusion Repatriation is, first and foremost, a political move: the spoiled countries claim their heritage back, reversing the trends set by colonial power relations and the free ride given to illegal (or legal in many cases) traffickers (Shehade and Fouseki, 2016). This said, not pursuing a repatriation strategy is also an option for a country that is not worried about its exiled heritage, has made closure with its colonized past, or believes that the presence of its heritage in world museums is something that could be advantageous. However, if the initial political motives launch a serious process of repatriation, its culmination should be a just and satisfying result in the cultural arena. As the potential return of a fraction of the exiled heritage to the country or region of origin is successful, a whole new set of challenges is evident to cultural heritage managers, which are often not foreseen. At some point, the implementation of sound policies in favor of heritage should leave place to the realities of the fragility of the items and their costly conservation. Indeed, many countries may not be prepared to conserve in adequate ways their repatriated heritage, even if the collections are not too large, let alone all of them.
See Also: Looting and Illicit Trafficking of Archaeological Heritage; Repatriation of Human Remains.
References Abungu, George H.O., 2008. “Universal museums”: new contestations, new controversies. In: Mille, Gabriel, Dahl, Jens (Eds.), Utimut: Past Heritage, Future Partnerships, Discussions on Repatriation in the 21st Century. The Greenland National Museum & Archives; International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen, pp. 32–42. Alva, Walter, 2001. The destruction, looting and traffic of the archaeological heritage of Peru. In: Brodie, Neil, Doole, Jennifer, Renfrew, Colin (Eds.), Trade in Illicit Antiquities: The Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage. McDonald Institute, Cambridge, pp. 89–96. Alva Guerrero, Blanca, 2009. Repatriation of cultural properties: the Peruvian experience. Mus. Int. 61, 145–149. Angouri, Jo, Paraskevaidi, Marina, Ruth, Wodak, 2017. Discourses of cultural heritage in times of crisis: the case of the Parthenon marbles. J. Socioling. 21, 208–237. Arthur Jacinta, de la Maza, Patricia, Ayala Rocabado (Eds.), 2020. El Regreso de los Ancestros: Movimientos Indígenas de Repatriación y Redignificación de los Cuerpos Cultura y Patrimonio. Ediciones Subdirección de Investigación, Santiago, Chile. Askerud, Pernille, Clément, Étienne (Eds.), 2007. Preventing the Illicit Traffic in Cultural Property: A Resource Handbook for the Implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention. UNESCO, Paris. Beltrametti, Silvia, 2013. Museum strategies: leasing antiquities. Columbia J. Law Arts 36, 203–260. Boardman, John, 2012. Archaeologists, collectors, and museums. In: Cuno, James (Ed.), Whose Culture?: The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, pp. 107–123. Brown, Michael F., 2003. Who Owns Native Culture? Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Chechi, Alessandro, 2014. The Settlement of International Cultural Heritage Disputes. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Coggins, Clemency C., 1995. A licit international traffic in ancient art: let there be light! Int. J. Cult. Property 4, 61–80. Cornu, Marie, Renold, Marc-Andr, 2010. New developments in the restitution of cultural property: alternative means of dispute resolution. Int. J. Cult. Property 17, 1–31. Cuno, James, 2008. Antiquity belongs to the world. Chron. High. Educ. 54, 6–10. Curtis, Neil G.W., 2006. Universal museums, museum objects and repatriation: the tangled stories of things. Mus. Manag. Curatorsh. 21, 117–127. Dietrich, Reinhard, 2002. Cultural property on the movedlegally, illegally. Int. J. Cult. Property 11, 294–304. Endere, Maria Luz, 2009. The return of Inakayal to Patagonia. In: Prott, Lyndel (Ed.), Witnesses to History: A Compendium of Documents and Writings on the Return of Cultural Objects. UNESCO, Paris, pp. 283–287. Falkoff, Stacey, 2007. Mutually-beneficial repatriation agreements: returning cultural patrimony, perpetuating the illicit antiquities market. J. Law Pol. 16, 265–304. Gill, David, Chippindale, Christopher, 2007. From Malibu to Rome: further developments on the return of antiquities. Int. J. Cult. Property 14, 205–240. Godart, Louis, De Caro, Stefano (Eds.), 2007. Nostoi: Capolavori Ritrovati. Segretariato generale della Presidenza della Repubblica, Roma. Hicks, Dan, 2020. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Pluto Press, London. Higgins, Charlotte, 2022. The Parthenon marbles belong in Greecedso why is restitution so hard to swallow? Guardian, London.
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Higueras, Álvaro, 2020. La tipología Teutona inspira una estrategia al servicio del patrimonio: el valor de lo virtual en la apreciación del patrimonio peruano exiliado. In: VegaCenteno, Rafael, Dulanto, Jalh (Eds.), Los Desafíos del Tiempo, el Espacio y la Memoria: Ensayos en homenaje a Peter Kaulicke. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, Lima, pp. 35–65. Jenkins, Tiffany, 2016. Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums-and Why They Should Stay There. Oxford University Press, Oxford. López Caballero, Paula, 2008. Which heritage for which heirs? The Pre-columbian past and the colonial legacy in the national history of Mexico. Soc. Anthropol. 16, 329–345. Losson, Pierre, 2021. Opening Pandora’s box: will the return of cultural heritage objects to their country of origin empty Western museums? J. Arts Manag. Law Soc. 51, 379–392. Losson, Pierre, 2022. The Return of Cultural Heritage to Latin America. Routledge, London. Lowenthal, David, 2005. Why sanctions seldom work: reflections on cultural property. Int. J. Cult. Property 12, 393–423. MacGregor, Neil, 2012. To shape the citizens of “that great city, the world”. In: Cuno, James (Ed.), Whose Culture?: The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, pp. 39–54. McIntosh, Molly L., 2006. Exploring Machu Picchu: an analysis of the legal and ethical issues surrounding the repatriation of cultural property. Duke J. Comp. Int. Law 17, 199–221. Mould de Pease, Mariana, 2003. Machu Picchu y el Código de Ética de la Sociedadde Arqueología Americana: Una Invitación al Diálog o Intercultural. Concejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima. Netherlands Advisory on Colonial Collections and Recognition of Injustice, 2020. Report on National Policy Framework for Colonial Collections: “Recognition of Injustice and Willingness to Rectify It”. Nilsson Stutz, Liv, 2013. Claims to the past. a critical view of the arguments driving repatriation of cultural heritage and their role in contemporary identity politics. J. Interv. Statebuilding 7, 170–195. Pabón Cadavid, Jhonny Antonio, 2018. Participación de comunidades y el camino hacia un Derecho Humano al Patrimonio Cultural. Estudios Constitucionales 16, 89–116. Reppas, Michael J., 2007. Empty international museums’ trophy cases of their looted treasures and return stolen property to the countries of origin and the rightful heirs of those wrongfully dispossessed. Denver J. Int. Law Pol. 36, 93–123. Restitution Belgium, 2021. Ethical Principles for the Management and Restitution of Colonial Collections in Belgium. Roehrenbeck, Carol A., 2010. Repatriation of cultural property-who owns the past? An introduction to approaches and to selected statutory instruments. Int. J. Leg. Inf. 38, 185–200. Sarr, Felwine, Savoy, Bénédicte, 2018. The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics. Ministère de la Culture, Paris. Shehade, Maria, Fouseki, Kalliopi, 2016. The politics of culture and the culture of politics: examining the role of politics and diplomacy in cultural property disputes. Int. J. Cult. Property 23, 357–383. Shehade, Maria, Fouseki, Kalliopi, Tubb, Kathryn W., 2016. Alternative dispute resolution in cultural property disputes: merging theory and practice. Int. J. Cult. Property 23, 343–355. Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa, 2008. International Law, Museums and the Return of Cultural Objects. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Looting and Illicit Trafficking of Archaeological Heritage Ignacio Rodrı´guez Temin˜oa and Ana Ya´n˜ez Vegab, a Nemesis, Association for the Research and Defense of Cultural Heritage Against Looting and Illicit Trafficking, Seville, Spain; and b Department of Administrative Law, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, Madrid, Spain © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview (With Special Focus on International Cultural Heritage Law from 1945) Key Issues Summary and Future Directions References
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Key Points
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Offer a current vision of the field of looting and illicit trafficking of archaeological heritage and highlight the link between them. Provide a critical perspective on the illicit trafficking of antiquities. Establish the various connotations between long-distance and short-distance looting. Highlight the different circumstances in the countries of origin of archaeological heritage and the countries of destination. Envision future challenges in the fight against illicit trafficking of archaeological heritage.
Abstract After defining what is considered looting and illicit trafficking of archaeological heritage, this entry develops the cause-effect link between looting and illicit trafficking, reviews the current international regulations on the subject, and presents the state of the art of research on the major issues, as well as on the most important gaps that should be filled either by more research or by a change of approach.
Introduction Archaeological looting is a kind of damage to archaeological heritage consisting of the loss of archaeological objects and their intrinsic information caused by the theft of removable items whether from museums, other institutions or directly from monuments, as well as the removal of soil for the retrieval of artifacts without following any archaeological methodology. While theft (the illicit appropriation of goods) has clearly legal connotations, the antisocial content of the removal of archaeological items from the ground without any archaeological methodology also has grave implications as it results in the loss of contextual information. Whenever this intentional loss happens, it is a case of looting. It does not matter if the activity is lawful or not. This consideration is important because, in some countries, the use of metal detectors on archaeological sites located on private land with the consent of the landowner is legal. However, having the landowner’s permission does not prevent looting when archaeological entities are found and extracted without following the necessary archaeological methodology. This confusion between ontological content and legal requirements causes some authors (Mackenzie et al., 2020) not to consider all removal of archaeological objects without the proper methodology as looting. The main objective of looting is to supply the antiquities black market or the private collections of prospectors. In the latter case, it is often referred to as low-end looting (Hollowell-Zimmer, 2003). Therefore, there is a cause-effect relationship between the illicit trafficking of antiquities and looting (Brodie and Yates, 2019; Mackenzie et al., 2020). While there is no single definition of the term illicit trafficking of antiquities, adapting the World Trade Organization’s definition of illicit trafficking (Díaz-Cediel et al., 2017), for this entry illicit trafficking refers to any commercial operation related to archaeological heritage assets, as defined in both national and international law, carried out in clear violation of the rules protecting these assets. Likewise, it also includes any conduct intended to facilitate such commercial practices. Although illicit trafficking is usually referred to as a transnational crime (Brodie and Yates, 2019; Mackenzie et al., 2020), in practice, this definition should cover two different areas where it takes place: one long-distance and the other short-distance. Each has specific connotations. The former involves trafficking in high-value items, is usually transnational and requires the
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involvement of organized crime, while the latter is domestic, does not require criminal organizations, is frequently associated with the use of metal detectors and uses the Internet to carry out sales and purchases, at least in Western countries. Extensive media coverage of recent episodes of war and riots in Middle Eastern and North African countries has to a large degree monopolized the attention and resources of the international community and obscured the problem of archaeological heritage looting and the illicit trade it fuels in other areas, such as Europe. The general dynamic of the illicit trade leads to the migration of these artifacts from countries with fragile social and economic infrastructures to more prosperous Western countries, as well as certain Persian Gulf countries. Obviously, many looted archaeological artifacts are also being trafficked within Europe (Rodríguez Temiño, 2012; Hardy, 2018, 2020; Balcells, 2018; Brodie and Yates, 2019).
Overview (With Special Focus on International Cultural Heritage Law from 1945) Nowadays, practically all countries have laws protecting historical heritage. These laws pertain both to movable and immovable archaeological assets. Fortunately, there are updated databases, such as UNESCO’s (https://en.unesco.org/cultnatlaws/), where all the laws related to the cultural heritage of each country are listed. There are also recent regional studies on this subject (Francioni and Vrdoljak, 2020). For that reason, we will not focus on national laws in this entry. Nevertheless, we do need to recognize, at this point, the importance of the ever increasing involvement of states in the process of controlling the recovery of archaeological remains, as well as governmental participation in the determination of the ownership of the objects once removed from the ground (Gerstenblith, 2020). Forty years ago, many jurists trained in the Common Law disdained this aspect of archaeological excavations. In their opinion, the most important thing was just to know what to do in such cases. On the contrary, in Mediterranean countries, such as Spain, the usefulness of this precept was defended to ensure the protection of hidden archaeological heritage. Based on its ownership rights, a foreign State, for example, may act as a private litigant and bring a civil replevin suit in order to recover stolen antiquities through the intervention of US or United Kingdom courts. This requires the claimant to prove that the asset came from its territory, and at a time when its claim of ownership was in force (Forrest, 2010; Gordley, 2013). In this section, we will describe the main norms of international law within the purview of the protection of archaeological heritage and against both looting and illicit trade. National and international laws are mutually reinforcing. At the international level, legal actions usually depend on the legal processes of national jurisdictions for their effectiveness. The idea of treating cultural heritage (inclusive of archaeological heritage) as the common legacy of humankind dates back to the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954 Hague Convention). The Convention prohibits the destruction of cultural property during armed conflicts and during periods of military occupation. The 1954 Hague Convention declares that States Parties must prohibit, prevent and, if necessary, put an end to any form of theft, pillage or misappropriation of cultural property. The Convention regulates the issue of restitution through the 1954 First Protocol. In 1999, the 1954 Hague Convention system was completed with the adoption of the Second Protocol. This Protocol extended the scope of the regime to non-international armed conflicts; it introduced a new system of enhanced protection; and established individual criminal responsibility for grave breaches. The 1954 Hague Convention puts special emphasis on the necessity for prior training of the armed forces personnel on this matter. Despite having expert units in their armies, the US and UK did not follow this mandate in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This caused significant damage to Iraqi cultural institutions and sites (Stone and Farchakh Bajjaly, 2008). These actions provoked a wide international outcry. After all, these were the armies of developed and democratic nations, from which it is expected to behave in accordance with the laws of war and the international legal order. Despite its importance and specificity, the 1954 Hague Convention is often set aside for the purposes of war crimes under international criminal laws when the properties concerned are present on the World Heritage List, as was the case in the trials arising from the bombing of the Old City of Dubrovnik in the 1990s, and from the destruction of mausoleums and historical manuscripts in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012 (Vrdoljak and Meskell, 2020). Nevertheless, the 1954 Hague Convention and its two Protocols remain nowadays as the main international legal instrument for the protection of cultural property in times of war. Indeed, the United Nations have expressed their willingness to be guided by this framework, as with respect to peacekeeping operations. The post-World War II explosion of clandestine excavations for illicit trade prompted a number of international organizations to develop recommendations specifically dedicated to raising awareness of the need to restrict the acquisition of goods from illegal excavations by museums and collectors. The Council of Europe promoted the European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (1969) and further on the Recommendation 921 (1981) on Metal Detectors and Archaeology, as the Committee on Culture and Education considered that the use of metal detectors by the general public poses a direct threat to archaeological heritage in that it inevitably destroys that very heritage. In 1992, the European Council revised the 1969 European Convention in order to update the mechanisms to better address the problem of archaeological heritage conservation in development projects. The European Convention for the Protection of Archaeological Heritage (Revised), or Malta Convention, was signed in Valletta, Malta. Although the Malta Convention focused on the conservation and enhancement of archaeological heritage, one of the objectives was dealing with illicit excavations and the increased use of metal detectors in archaeology. In this regard, it is well known that during the preparatory work, most countries insisted that a provision should be included to prohibit the unlicensed use of metal detectors. However, the UK representative convinced the rest of the participants that any such
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article would prevent the UK from signing the Convention. So, the final text ended up not including a strong article, but a rather watered down paragraph which says what the standard should be, but does not actually oblige state parties to do anything. The implementation of the Malta Convention in this area has not resulted in a single model of action to address the unlicensed use of metal detectors but in two different (and contradictory) models: the first is the protectionist model, which is followed by countries where the use of detection devices is considered propitious to looting. Consequently, it is either directly prohibited or, at least, subject to prior authorization (Rodríguez Temiño et al., 2019; Yañez, 2016). On the other hand, in countries and regions where the permissive model is the rule, a more pragmatic stance has been adopted. The use of metal detection devices is permitted with the idea of encouraging a voluntary participation by detectorists in uploading information about their findings to online databases (Dobat et al., 2020). However, despite the fact that it is considered an illegal practice, the vast majority of countries do not have a defined policy on the use of metal detection devices. Obviously, inaction encourages archaeologically damaging activity and promotes a sense of impunity in the perpetrators for this illicit activity. The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property may rightly be regarded as a fundamental step toward international cooperation in combating the illicit trafficking of antiquities. The States Parties to the 1970 UNESCO Convention recognize that the illicit trade of cultural property is one of the main causes of the impoverishment of the cultural heritage of the countries of origin of such property and that international cooperation constitutes one of the most effective means of protecting the cultural property of each country against all dangers arising therefrom. The 1970 Convention prohibits the importation of cultural property stolen from a museum or a public religious or secular monument or similar institution in another State Party after the entry into force of the Convention, provided that such property is documented as belonging to the inventory of that institution. The Convention also encourages appropriate measures to be taken to recover and return any cultural property imported after going into effect. However, the requesting State shall pay just compensation to an innocent purchaser or to a person having valid title to such property. The 1970 UNESCO Convention does not provide sufficient protection for looted archaeological objects against illicit trafficking. Indeed, the mechanisms of the 1970 UNESCO Convention are limited in scope, in the sense that contracting parties are only obliged to prohibit the import of cultural property removed from a museum, public monument or similar institution, which has been duly included in an inventory prior to illicit export. As a consequence, any undiscovered or unexcavated items are excluded from the protection of the Convention (Deloitte, 2017). The main codes of ethics, which affect museums from Western and North American countries, have adopted the date of 1970 as the threshold beyond which due diligence must be used to verify the certain and licit origin of acquired pieces, in application of Articles 7 and 21 of the 1970 UNESCO Convention. This tacit agreement has likewise been followed, practically without debate. The advocates of this date argue that objects that entered museum institutions prior to it should be safe from claims. Contrary to what is usually assumed, the 1970 UNESCO Convention does not aim to assign any particular date. According to the Operational Guidelines, which interpret the meaning of the Convention, the non-retroactivity of international laws does not mean that the Convention seeks to legitimize earlier illicit transactions, or to limit the adoption of other legal instruments to enable the restitution or return of objects acquired prior to that date. The moral obligation to return the objects has not diminished; a separate issue is whether the willingness to fulfill it still exists, and so is the idea that 1970 should be adopted as the limit for the return of the artifacts. At the same time, we should openly acknowledge the fact that self-interest is involved in the process. The dispute between the United Kingdom and Greece over the Parthenon Marbles inevitably comes up in this controversy (Robertson, 2019). The protection of underwater archaeological heritage has been particularly affected by the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (Montego Bay 1982) (UNCLOS III). While there is agreement that the archaeological heritage existing in both inland waters and territorial waters is subject to the sovereignty of the coastal country, the problem begins in the contiguous zone, where the scope of the powers of the coastal states is debated, whether under the legal figure of sovereignty or jurisdiction. The archaeological and historical heritage is among the elements under discussion in these zones. Although UNCLOS III establishes a generic obligation of protection and international cooperation to ensure the safeguarding of underwater archaeological heritage, it does not go much deeper into these principles (Scovazzi, 2003). The final text is rather unsatisfactory, but possibly better than nothing. The 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, which entered into force in January 2009, is the most comprehensive normative instrument of international law in existence (Aznar Gómez, 2004). In general terms, it could be said that the 2001 UNESCO Convention represents the application of the guiding principles relating to the protection of archaeological heritage on land to the submerged. However, it has important shortcomings regarding its relationship with UNCLOS III, whose dictates it has not been able to overcome. Possibly the most valued part of the 2001 UNESCO Convention are the technical criteria contained in the Annex. The problem for an effective protection of underwater cultural heritage derives in part from the fragmented and incomplete legal system to which these assets are subject, which includes both public and private international law norms, as well as the national norms of the coastal country or the flag country of the vessel. For countries with a positive law dedicated to maritime salvage, and integrated within the system of Roman-Germanic law, known as Civil Law, there is a separation between ship salvage and wreck recovery. However, the orientation of the legislation of the Common Law countries, and in particular the USA and the United Kingdom, have united both in the admiralty laws. The law of the sea and admiralty law both recognize the sovereign immunity of warships. The recognition of the immunity of sunken governmental vessels would automatically exclude the jurisdiction of states other than the flag state with respect to these vessels. This argument concerning the sovereign immunity of warships was the key point in the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes case. The Tampa District Court recognized the immunity of the Spanish ship on the
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basis of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the High Seas and the 1902 U. S. Friendship Agreement with Spain providing for mutual recognition of the immunity of sunken warships (Aznar Gómez, 2004; Vigni, 2013). Motivated by the difficulties that have marked the UNESCO Convention (when at the negotiation stage, in the matter of adapting national domestic legislation, and subsequently at the point of concrete application of its provisions), the courts were given the task of formulating an instrument that more effectively allows illegally exported or stolen items to be returned to their original owners. Specifically, the UNIDROIT Convention applies to claims of international character and deals with both theft and illicit exportation. As far as theft is concerned, the UNIDROIT Convention sets forth an outright obligation of restitution of stolen objects, even if they are recovered in those systems of law that protect the good faith possessor. Any claim for restitution must be made within specific time limits. Upon recovery of the claimed artifact, the Convention entitles the bona fide purchaser to a “fair and reasonable compensation” if it is proved that he “exercised due diligence when acquiring the object”. As for illegal exportation, the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention provides that a “State may request the court or other competent authority of another Contracting State to order the return of a cultural object illegally exported from the territory of the requesting State”. Therefore, the UNIDROIT Convention is based on the premise that the law of the country of origin is the controlling law. However, the UNIDROIT Convention is part of private (rather than public) international law and thus seems primarily concerned with creating a mechanism for the restitution of such objects, rather than the basis for a criminal prosecution (Chechi, 2013). Among the countries of origin, one of the most rejected conventions is UNIDROIT mainly because it lacks retroactive effect and provides for a very short statute of limitations. These states fear that their adherence to the UNIDROIT convention will be interpreted as an approval of previous looting or a refusal to reclaim looted and illicitly traded pieces before the convention came into force (Fraoua, 2009). There is a certain hypocritical behavior in requiring source countries to “put their house in order” beforehand, i.e. to adhere to both the 1970 UNESCO Convention and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention (Shyllon, 2012). However, it is accepted that Western countries do not allow criminal treatment of illicit trafficking cases, only a strictly civil consideration. If it is proven that the objects have been illicitly excavated and smuggled out of the country, they are returned (in the best case scenario), but without criminal consequences. In this sense, many Latin American countries are reluctant to pay for an asset they consider their own, despite the fact that, as is the case of Peru, Bolivia or Ecuador, they have ratified the UNIDROIT Convention. These States, together with Colombia, as members of the Andean Community of Nations, are governed by Decision 588 on the Protection and Recovery of Cultural Heritage Assets of the member countries of that Community, which in practice reverses the burden of proof of ownership attributing it to the possessor, otherwise it will be understood that it belongs to the state from which the property has been exported (Roma Valdés, 2017). Although it is not a single regulatory text, we would expand this list to include the set of norms for combating the illicit trafficking of cultural objects applicable in EU countries. European authorities continue to use civil measures to sanction illegal flows of cultural objects. The competent authorities of Member States into which cultural objects unlawfully removed from another Member State are introduced are required to order their return on the grounds of breach of the rules for the protection thereof. This initiative was formalized in the adoption of Council Directive 93/7/EEC of 1993, amended by Directives 96/100/EC and 2001/38/EC of the European Parliament and the Council, and repealed and replaced by Directive 2014/60/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 2014 on the return of cultural objects unlawfully removed from the territory of a Member State and amending Regulation (EU) No 1024/2012 (Recast). We also highlight Regulation (EU) 2019/880 of the European Parliament and of the Council of April 17, 2019 on the introduction and the import of cultural goods. We would underscore the traditional orientation of international and European regulations toward private law instruments, i.e. toward the return or restitution of the object, rather than toward criminal law, which is reserved for sanctions in the anomalous cases of armed conflict (and not always as has been explained). However, this does not mean that the civil approach represented by the Paris and Rome laws has been truly effective. On the contrary, it is widely recognized in the literature that this panoply of regulations falls short (Gerstenblith, 2003; Manacorda, 2011; Mackenzie, 2011). The traditional rejection of a criminal law approach explains why the European Convention on Infringements of Cultural Property, opened for signature at Delphi in 1985, has not played a significant role; it has failed to attract enough signatories to enter into force. However, in the last 10 years, Western markets experienced a large increase in the number of looted and stolen antiquities, especially from important sites in war-affected MENA countries in connection with the breakdown of law and order in these countries. Non-state armed groups and terrorist organizations were involved in the destruction and looting of ancient sites to finance their belligerent operations (Clooney Foundation for Justice, 2022). This appears to be the case of Operation Harmakhis in which two Spanish suspected traffickers are being investigated by the Spanish police for the alleged crimes of financing terrorism, membership of a criminal organization, trade in stolen goods, smuggling and forgery of documents in connection with the trafficking of antiquities from several cities in ancient Cyrenaica (Libya). Taking into account these facts, the Council of Europe decided to prepare a new criminal law convention to combat trafficking in cultural property and fill the gaps in the existing international legal framework, the 2017 Nicosia Convention on Offenses related to Cultural Property. The Convention, which is the only international treaty specifically addressing the criminalization of illicit trafficking in cultural property, establishes a number of criminal offenses, including theft; illicit excavation, import and export; and illegal acquisition and placing on the market. It also criminalizes the forgery of documents and the destruction of or damage to cultural property when committed intentionally.
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Key Issues This section will be devoted to presenting the state of the art of academic research on the major issues involved in these phenomena as well as on the main gaps that should be filled either by more research or by a change of approach. The volume of illicitly trafficked archaeological property and the amount of money flowing through these channels has become a matter of great concern (Mackenzie and Green, 2009; Brodie and Yates, 2019), primarily from a criminological research point of view. In our opinion these aspects of the issue are of limited practical use. Indeed, the discrepancy of concepts and jurisdictions makes it practically impossible to reach agreement on which elements should be quantified. As a result, all attempts to quantify these phenomena result in calling for further efforts to move in that direction. We consider that it would be necessary to change the focus of the problem; the focus should be on determining what is actually being done to optimize the efficacy of the fight against looting and illegal trafficking of antiquities. The international experience in combating crime in different criminal fields shows that this is the most effective way forward. For example, the fight against international money laundering. In this area of international crime, after years of discussing the volume of money internationally laundered, the debate focused on assessing how each country was fighting it. An intergovernmental body, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), was created to ensure a global response to the problem and to promote legislative reforms. Indeed, this is exactly what is missing in this field. There is no international body dedicated to assessing (more than mere compliance with legal norms) (Armbrüster et al., 2011) the relevance, efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of the set of activities carried out against archaeological looting and illicit trafficking of such assets. This type of evaluation has only been commissioned on an ad hoc basis (Deloitte, 2017), but not on a regular basis. In the case of artifacts lacking an archaeological autopsy, there is certain disparity in the terminology used to refer to the unknown origin of the piece. The most common are “provenience” (i.e. the site or stratigraphic location), and “provenance” or the list of successive owners. Chippindale and Gill (2000) changed “provenance” to “collecting history.” While in some cases, such as Operation Harmakhis, provenance can be established beyond doubt based on the stylistic characteristics of the objects, obtaining a precise insight into provenance is generally much more difficult (Mackenzie and Green, 2009). Through the itinerary followed by the piece since its extraction from the ground, it usually acquires a history of possessors that allows the laundering of its illicit origin (Tijhuis, 2011). Once this laundering is done, the piece can enter the legal market and be acquired by a buyer who is satisfied with little explanations. The existence of timelines, such as that of 1970, from which many countries (generally the recipient countries) consider any object to be legal, favors this laundering process. The necessary documentary inquiry to establish the provenience and collecting history should not be considered, as it currently is, the sole and indispensable evidence for determining these data for archaeological pieces that appeared on the market or were seized in police operations. The seizure by the Italian police of the Medici archive, as a result of the operation of the same name (Watson and Todeschini, 2006), provided valuable information to claim pieces from museums and private collections. However, this approach has proven ineffective in cases of new pieces placed on the market, usually from war-torn Middle Eastern countries, especially Syria. Furthermore, Tsirogiannis (2016) has demonstrated that the mere presence of photographs in files seized by the Italian police from intermediaries and traffickers, in the first decade of this century, can lead to errors in the attribution of both provenience and provenance. Both police and academic research has been focusing on various areas to determine the provenance of objects appearing on the market. For example, satellite imagery is being used to monitor areas of illicit excavation in countries in the MENA region, such as Syria where due to conflict or general insecurity issues, direct inspection is almost impossible. Besides, there is a growing interest in understanding the reasons for looting in both conflict and non-conflict zones. In this sense, we are trying to differentiate between subsistence and culturally motivated excavations (Endere and Bonnin, 2020) and those that are intended to feed the illicit antiquities trade. On the other hand, various agencies of transnational institutions have developed databases of stolen objects in order to facilitate their location and prevent their bona fide sale. These are the cases of the International Council of Museums’ Red Lists; ARCHAEO, which is an electronic information exchange platform developed by the Western European Regional Intelligence Liaison Office of the World Customs Organization; and the inventory of Stolen Works of Art developed by INTERPOL, among others (Deloitte, 2017). Unfortunately, all of these databases only work for stolen property, i.e. previously known items, but do not work for new illegally excavated archaeological objects. The lack of research initiatives to achieve methodologies based on natural sciences that allow us to know approximately the date of appearance of a buried archaeological property and its provenance, at least in regional terms, is frustrating. Undoubtedly, the most experimental and novel challenge will be to test the time elapsed since the appearance of an object. While it is not easy to establish one or more techniques that will give the desired results, the most promising method to date seems to be the study of the evolution of the colonies of microorganisms that live around buried objects, which change when affected by sunlight after hundreds of years adapted to a dark environment. For now, experimental trials are underway to define which methodologies could be more accurate for the establishment of a “time curve”, which would allow to establish a “clock” and to be able to date approximately the moment of appearance of that object (Rodríguez Temiño et al., 2018). With a scientific proof of the date of appearance, documentary falsifications of its collecting history would be more difficult. Attention should also be paid to an international phenomenon that has been growing in recent years, especially with regard to the international traffic of works of art and antiques. We are referring to the creation of customs zones, usually in the airport area, specially equipped to house objects of high economic value. These are known as free ports and open customs warehouses. The first free port that was conditioned to fulfill this new mission of housing works of art and objects of great economic value has been that
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of Geneva in Switzerland, but one of these large free ports has also opened in Singapore and recently in the airport area of Luxembourg. It is estimated that the Geneva free port houses between 1.2 and 1.3 million works of art, without knowing specifically how many of them are archaeological goods illicitly excavated. These long-term deposits are used both to evade taxes and to launder assets of illicit origin. Although this situation is well known, little or nothing has been done to regulate these deposits or to subject them to regular inspection. Archaeological looting is a global challenge. No country is free from the looting of archaeological heritage. However, in addition to Mediterranean countries, the illegal excavation of archaeological objects in the countries of the global south seems to be more dramatic than in northern countries, as demonstrated by major police operations carried out by European police forces, such as Operations Pandora and Athena. These police operations, conducted on a regular basis since 2016, have shown that the use of metal detecting devices is widespread, as demonstrated by police operations carried out in Spain (Rodríguez Temiño, 2012). Although there is a strong controversy about the extent to which all users of metal detecting devices can or cannot be considered as looters (Rodríguez Temiño, 2016; Deckers et al., 2018), there is little doubt about the existence of groups of professional looters. These make regular trips into the field, which they plan carefully, choosing where exactly to go to and gathering information about the place. They use mid- to top-of-the-range metal detectors, occasionally modified to achieve greater detection depth along with other more aggressive methods of excavation such as bulldozers or even dynamite. Professional looters generally work alone, like the person arrested as part of Operation, or in small groups of three or four people (Balcells, 2018). Those who act alone use online auction portals such as eBay to contact possible buyers. Nevertheless, flexible networks are also common, where members communicate via the Internet and mobile phones. The aim of these organizations is to bring together different specialists: on the one hand the looters themselves, and on the other hand intermediaries and traders. Occasionally organized groups appear which add looting and the illicit trade of antiquities to other criminal activities, using the purchase of archaeological objects as a way of laundering money (Mackenzie, 2011). Despite the recognized importance of looting, the response given by the administrations responsible for heritage preservation, as well as for the investigation of crimes against archaeological heritage is uneven. Regardless of the greater or lesser disposition of each country, there is little doubt about the need to act forcefully against looters (Yáñez, 2018). In Spain, the regular enforcement of relevant policies has led to both a decline in the number of detector users freely seeking archaeological remains at archaeological sites and a proliferation of detector users on beaches. It has also encouraged the integration of detectorists in archaeological research teams (Rodríguez Temiño et al., 2019). This model emphasizes demand management, based on the understanding that archaeological heritage is a finite, non-renewable resource. It thus stands in contrast to other models that aim to manage supply. On the receiving side, the collecting of antique masterpieces was stimulated in the 1960s and 1970s by two simultaneous phenomena: the celebrity of collectors and the transformation of museums into spectacles, especially through major exhibitions that brought together pieces from various parts of the world for the first time (Gill and Chippindale, 1993). Today, the acquisitive dynamics of museums, including the acquisition of works of murky origins, continues apace, at least in a certain type of institution that is among the world leaders. These practices have been reinforced by claims that seek to minimize the impact caused in the countries of origin of acquired works in favor of seemingly superior motives (Cuno, 2008). This greatly hampers the practical implementation of solutions aimed at controlling the illicit trafficking of archaeological objects. Rather than coercive measures, the main tools to guide the behavior of institutions, companies and professionals involved or related to the licit trade of archaeological goods are codes of ethics and catalogs of good practices. It is painfully obvious that commitments to ensure that acquisitions comply with these codes of ethics are voluntary. In any case, there is no higher authority to enforce compliance or impose consequences for non-compliance. No museum, for example, has ever been asked to leave any organization for not adhering to its code of ethics regarding the acquisition of unknown origin objects (Gerstenblith, 2003). Moreover, the codes themselves tend to be couched in ambiguous terms, with numerous phrases that lend themselves to vague interpretations, such as the concept of “due diligence” that acquirers are supposed to exercise as evidence of their good faith. When the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) Guidelines, which include approximately 167 of the largest museums in the US, have to refer to the possible origin country of an illegally removed object, they use the term “probable country of modern discovery.” They thus avoid explicitly acknowledging the country’s ownership rights, in line with the thesis of some antirepatriation authors (Merryman, 1994; Cuno, 2008). Even if there are repatriations of archaeological property looted and illicitly removed from the countries of origin and there are political commitments to return the gained property during colonial occupation, these are always voluntary actions that face much opposition within the recipient countries themselves (although not everywhere; see for example the work carried out by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office at https://www.manhattanda.org/). In a way, the illicit trafficking of antiquities reflects the economic and social inequalities that characterize the international framework. There is a kind of revictimization of the countries that have been plundered, since most regulations favor the recipients over the legitimate possessors.
Summary and Future Directions After this analysis, the main conclusions that we present are the following: – The need to explore more strongly the criminal as well as the civil area in cases of illicit trafficking of archaeological heritage. – The opportunity to change the focus of research in this field, with emphasis on establishing what is actually being done to optimize the effectiveness of the fight against this issue, rather than on its quantification.
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– The possibility of exploring Forensic Archaeometry as a field of research to determine the approximate date of appearance of an archaeological artifact and its provenience. – The necessity of a decisive response from Public Administration to looting carried out with metal detectors and in cases in which museums operate in an irregular way.
See Also: Forgeries and Archaeology; The UNESCO 1972 Convention and Archaeology.
References Armbrüster, Christian, Beauvais, Pacal, Chedouki, Jihane, Cornu, Marie, Fortis, Élisabeth, Frigo, Manglio, Fromageau, Jerôme, Maget-dominice, Antoinette, Negri, Vicent, Renold, Marc-André, Wallaert, Catherine, 2011. Study on Preventing and Fighting Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Goods in the European Union. Final Report. European Union, Brussels. Aznar Gómez, Mariano, 2004. La protección internacional del patrimonio cultural subacuático con especial referencia al caso de España. Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia. Balcells Magrans, Marc, 2018. Contemporary Archaeological Looting: A Criminological Analysis of Italian Tomb Robbers. PhD dissertation, City University of New York. Brodie, Neil, Yates, Donna, 2019. Characteristics, Criminal Justice Responses and an Analysis of the Applicability of Technologies in the Combat against the Trade. Final report. European Union, Luxembourg. Chechi, Alessandro, 2013. Plurality and coordination of dispute settlement methods in the field of cultural heritage. In: Francioni, Francesco, Gordley, James (Eds.), Enforcing International Cultural Heritage Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 177–205. Chippindale, Christopher, Gill, David W.J., 2000. Material consequences of contemporary classical collecting. Am. J. Archaeol. 104, 463–511. Clooney Foundation for Justice, 2022. The docket: conflict antiquities. In: The Need for Prosecuting Participants in the Illegal Antiquities Trade for Complicity in International Crimes and Terrorism Financing. Available at https://indd.adobe.com/view/publication/0b3b3d50-50b5-48f3-9ae0-5b1844ddaa9f/l64q/publication-web-resources/pdf/Antiquities_ Report.pdf. Cuno, James B., 2008. Who Owns Antiquity?: Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage. Princenton University Press, Princenton, NJ. Deckers, Pieterjan, Dobat, Andrés, Ferguson, Natasha, Heeren, Stijn, Lewis, Michael, Thomas, Suzie, 2018. The complexities of metal detecting policy and practice: a response to samuel Hardy, “quantitative analysis of open-source data on metal detecting for cultural property” (Cogent Social Sciences 3, 2017). Open Archaeol. 4, 322–333. Deloitte, 2017. DG TAXUD. Fighting Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Goods: Analysis of Customs Issues in the EU. Final report. European Union, Brussels. Available at https://doi.org/10. 2778/110271 KP-04-16-296-EN-C. Díaz-Cediel, Santiago, Pak, Hyomin, Prasetyo, Erwin, 2017. Illicit Trade and the World Trade Organizaion: Raising Awareness, Identifying Limitations and Building Strategies. Available at https://tradelab.legal.io/guide/5942ae1fe93c1b021a000f89/IllicitþTradeþandþtheþWorldþTradeþOrganizaionþRaisingþawarenessþidentifyingþlimitationsþand þbuildingþstrategies. Dobat, Andrés, Deckers, Pieterjan, Heeren, Stijn, Lewis, Michael, Thomas, Suzie, Wessman, Anna, 2020. Towards a cooperative approach to Hobby metal detecting: the European Public Finds Recording Network (EPFRN) vision statement. Eur. J. Archaeol. 23, 272–292. Endere, María Luz, Bonnin, Mirta, 2020. Actores sociales, derechos, roles e intereses involucrados en la concepción y el manejo del patrimonio arqueológico argentino. Prácticas históricas de coleccionismo y desafíos actuales. Revista d’Arqueologia de Ponent 30, 241–253. Forrest, Craig, 2010. International Law and the Protection of Cultural Heritage. Routledge, London. Francioni, Francesco, Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa (Eds.), 2020. The Oxford Handbook of International Cultural Heritage Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Fraoua, Ridha, 2009. Prévention et lutte contre le trafic illicite de biens culturels. Atelier régional Beyrouth, Liban, 9–11 novembre 2009. Unesco and Euromed. Rapport de synthèse. Available at http://www.euromedheritage.net/euroshared/doc/Rapport%20de%20synth%C3%A8se%20Atelier%20de%20Beyrouth.pdf. Gerstenblith, Patty, 2003. Acquisition and deacquisition of museum collections and the fiduciary obligations of museums to the public. Cardozo J. Int. Comp. L. 11, 409–465. Gerstenblith, Patty, 2020. Theft and illegal excavation: legal principles for protection of the archaeological heritage. In: Francioni, Francesco, Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Cultural Heritage Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 200–226. Gill, David W.J., Chippindale, Christopher, 1993. Material and intellectual consequences of esteem for Cycladic figures. Am. J. Archaeol. 97, 601–659. Gordley, James, 2013. The enforcement of foreign law reclaiming one nation’s cultural heritage in another nation’s courts. In: Francioni, Francesco, Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Cultural Heritage Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 110–124. Hardy, Samuel, 2018. Metal-detecting for cultural objects until “there is nothing left”: the potential and limits of digital data, netnographic data and market data for open-source analysis. Arts 7, 40. Hardy, Samuel, 2020. Treasure-hunters “even from Sweden”, organised criminals and “lawless” police in the Eastern Mediterranean: online social organization of looting and trafficking of antiquities from Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. Revista d’Arqueologia de Ponent 30, 215–240. Hollowell-Zimmer, Julie, 2003. Digging in the dirtdethics and “low end looting”. In: Zimmerman, Larry, Vitelli, Karen, Hollowell-Zimmer, Julie (Eds.), Ethical Issues in Archaeology. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek (CA), pp. 45–56. Mackenzie, Simon, 2011. The market as criminal and criminals in the market: reducing opportunities for organised crime in the international antiquities market. In: Manacorda, Stefano, Chappell, Duncan (Eds.), Crime in the Art and Antiquities World: Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Property. Springer, London, pp. 69–86. Mackenzie, Simon, Green, Penny (Eds.), 2009. Criminology and Archaeology. Studies in Looted Antiquities. Hart Publishing, Portland, OR. Mackenzie, Simon, Brodie, Neil, Yates, Donna, Tsirogiannis, Christos, 2020. Trafficking Culture. New Directions in Researching the Global Market in Illicit Antiquities. Routledge, London. Manacorda, Stefano, 2011. Criminal law protection of cultural heritage: an international perspective. In: Manacorda, Stefano, Chappell, Duncan (Eds.), Crime in the Art and Antiquities World: Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Property. Springer, London, pp. 17–48. Merryman, James H., 1994. The nation and the object. Int. J. Cult. Property 3, 61–76. Robertson, Geoffrey, 2019. Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasures. Biteback Publishing Ltd, London. Rodríguez Temiño, Ignacio, 2012. “Indianas jones” sin futuro. La lucha contra el expolio del patrimonio arqueológico. JAS Arqueología SLU, Madrid. Rodríguez Temiño, Ignacio, 2016. Rational grounds for dialogue between archaeologists and metal detectorists in Spain. Open Archaeol. 2, 150–159. Rodríguez Temiño, Ignacio, Yáñez, Ana, Jorge-Villar, Susana, Reyes Mateo, Álvaro, Rufino Rus, Javier, Salas Álvarez, Jesús, Berdonces, Lavín, Carmen, Ana, 2018. Forensic archaeometry applied to antiquities trafficking: the beginnings of an investigation at the frontiers of knowledge. Arts 7, 98. Rodríguez Temiño, Ignacio, Yáñez, Ana, Ortiz Sánchez, Mónica, 2019. Archaeological heritage and metal detectors: should we be managing supply or demand? In: Campbell, Stuart, White, Liz, Thomas, Suzie (Eds.), Competing Values in Archaeological Heritage. Springer, Cham, pp. 139–153. Roma Valdés, Antonio, 2017. La protección penal del patrimonio cultural en Iberoamérica. In: Guisasola Lerma, Cristina (Ed.), Expolio de bienes culturales. Instrumentos legales frente al mismo. Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, pp. 285–306.
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Scovazzi, Tulio, 2003. A contradictory and counterproductive regime. In: Garabello, Roberto, Scovazzi, Tulio (Eds.), The Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. Before and after the 2001. Brill, Leiden, pp. 3–18. Shyllon, Folarin, 2012. Implementation of the 1970 UNESCO convention by African states: the failure to grasp the nettle. In: Second Meeting of States Parties to the 1970 Convention. UNESCO, Paris. https://en.unesco.org/events/second-meeting-states-parties-1970-convention. Stone, Peter, Bajjaly, Farchakh, Joanne (Eds.), 2008. The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq. Boydell & Brewer Ltd, Woodbridge. Tijhuis, Edgar, 2011. The trafficking problem: a criminological perspective. In: Manacorda, Stefano, Chappell, Duncan (Eds.), Crime in the Art and Antiquities World: Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Property. Springer, London, pp. 87–98. Tsirogiannis, Christos, 2016. False closure? Known unknowns in repatriated antiquities cases. Int. J. Cult. Property 23, 407–431. Vigni, Patrizia, 2013. The enforcement of underwater cultural heritage by courts. In: Francioni, Francesco, Gordley, James (Eds.), Enforcing International Cultural Heritage Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 125–149. Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa, Meskell, Lynn, 2020. Intellectual cooperation organisation, UNESCO, and the culture conventions. In: Francioni, Francesco, Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Cultural Heritage Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 13–43. Watson, Peter, Todeschini, Cecilia, 2006. The Medici Conspiracy. The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums. PublicAffairs, New York. Yáñez, Ana, 2016. Illegal detectorism and archaeological heritage: criminal and administrative punitive systems in Spain. Open Archaeol. 2, 417–425. Yáñez, Ana, 2018. Patrimonio Arqueológico y Derecho sancionador. Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia.
The UNESCO 1972 Convention and Archaeology Claudia Bastantea,b, a University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom; and b Diplomatic Service of the Republic of Peru, Peruvian University of Applied Sciences, Lima, Peru © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview: The Development of “Heritage” Key Issues: The Understanding of Archaeology in the Context of the Convention and Foreign Policy The Developing World and Regionalism Reasons Behind the Presentation of Nominations to be Included in the List The Politization of the Decision-Making Process The Implementation Phase: “What Happens Next” Summary and Future Directions References
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In order to contextualize the topic, the development of the definition of “heritage” will be provided. The case of archaeology in the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage governance system will be the main focus of this work. Because of surrounding controversies, the reasons behind the nomination of a site, the politicization of the decision-making process and the implementation process after the inscription will be discussed. With the presentation of some relevant cases, this work will exemplify the role of archaeology in politics.
Abstract This entry aims to provide some reflections from my experience as a professional archaeologist and professional diplomat specialized in multilateralism of the politics and processes surrounding archaeology in the governance system established by the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, with an emphasis on the developing world. The processes regarding the presentation of a nomination file, the decision-making process and the implementation phase will be important parts of the analysis to exemplify the role of archaeology in the politics of this multilateral scenario.
Introduction The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (hereafter The Convention) is one of the most important multilateral international instruments regarding the protection of tangible heritage, despite focusing on immovable heritage. Since the 1980s the governance system of The Convention has been questioned, along with the use of The Convention itself. Some sort of expectation vs reality alert arose among academic circles and Government professionals regarding the real “use” of The Convention, in contrast with its foundational spirit and objectives. Such a context has allowed having an open and enriching discussion around the development of Cultural International Law, its relationship with national law and the understanding that in international relations, everything is set in a highly political environment, even heritage and archaeology. Discussions ranging from idealism to instrumentalism have gained ground in the political and academic literature related to The Convention and its governance system, calling the attention of archaeologists and other social scientists, and diplomats. Archaeological sites are a very important group within the World Heritage List (from now on, The List), especially for developing countries, which represent most of the world’s countries. Research debates the reasons for the increasing number of inscriptions and the politization of the decision-making process. Also, in the implementation phase, “what happens next” is a somehow relegated topic that can lead to the arousal of conflict situations. All these matters can challenge the role of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and cross the fine line of national sovereignty.
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Overview: The Development of “Heritage” Researchers agree that there is no definite agreement on one single definition of heritage, as it has been perceived differently and aimed at a variety of political and social ends, used to refer to different “things” (buildings, artifacts, natural places, etc.), often presented as an ambiguous term that can be perceived in several ways in distinct parts of the world (Carman et al., 2009; Harrison, 2012). However, there is agreement about its modern Western nature. Heritage has its roots in the ideas of the Enlightenment, developed during the 19th century in the context of the Industrial Revolution and new discoveries in biological sciences, anthropology and archaeology; and “institutionalized” during the 20th century and the new millennium in international organizations, such as UNESCO (Carman et al., 2009; Harrison, 2020; Lowenthal, 2005). In the context of the end of World War II, international organizations, such as UNESCO, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) or the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and the Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) were created to focus on securing heritage and its preservation (Lowenthal, 2015). However, the “official” definition of heritage embodied in these organizations is a point of debate. Harrison explains that there is an “official” term of heritage, the “operational” contemporary definition of heritage, which has its roots in the Euro-American practices of the mid-nineteenth century: a series of mechanisms by which objects, buildings and landscapes are set apart from the “everyday” and conserved for their aesthetic, historical, scientific, social or recreational values (Harrison, 2012). Likewise, Smith (2006) notes the assumption that “heritage” can be identified as “old” monumental and aesthetically good-looking places, sites, buildings and artifacts. These definitions set up heritage as tangible “things”. It is difficult to find a critical approach to this perspective in the literature prior to the 1980s. Monuments and buildings needed to be preserved as a signal of identity, a past cherished to exalt the present, which spread throughout the world, in independent nations but also in the former European colonial realms, which were transitioning to becoming independent states (Harrison, 2012). This vision of heritage related to conservation was the base for The Convention, which mentions that natural and cultural heritage is threatened by a series of factors, such as natural decay and changing social and economic conditions (UNESCO, 1972). The preamble of The Convention states that for a number of reasons the protection of natural and cultural heritage often stays incomplete at the national level. Article 5 of The Convention recognizes the responsibility of each country over the protection and conservation of their national heritage but, always caring for the national sovereignty of State Parties, recognizes heritage as “world heritage” (UNESCO, 1972). Then, it is not just about cultural or natural heritage at the national level but the introduction of world heritage. According to UNESCO, world heritage is “.the designation for places on Earth that are of outstanding universal value to humanity and, as such, have been inscribed on the World Heritage List to be protected for future generations to appreciate and enjoy” (UNESCO, 2022a,b). But what is considered an outstanding universal value (OUV)? The Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of The Convention defines OUV as “. cultural and/or natural significance which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity” and present the criteria for establishing OUV (World Heritage Committee, 2019). It is important to highlight the inclusion of natural heritage under the umbrella of “heritage”. Even though human activity has reshaped the elements of nature, both types of heritage are considered differently. Industrialization and urbanization during the 19th century were the two major factors that urged for the conservation of natural resources and, as with cultural heritage, the focus in Europe and the United States was on protection, with some differences in the approach in both sides of the Atlantic (Lowenthal, 2005). ICOMOS (2020) defines “cultural heritage” as monuments, groups of buildings and sites. Regarding “natural world heritage”, IUCN (2020) defines it as the most significant protected areas on Earth, which supply life-supporting benefits to millions of people and are under increasing pressure from climate change, infrastructure development, mining, poaching and other threats. It must be understood that the 1970s was quite a unique period: environmental issues, an economic crisis which spread almost throughout the world, threats of resource exhaustion and a nuclear Armageddon. Within this context, looking at the past might bring some sort of solution (Lowenthal, 2015). With the development of the academic practice of Heritage Studies in the 1980s, the challenge to the official discourse increased. Smith (2006) challenges what she calls the “Authorized Heritage Discourse” (AHD) set up by experts in the field and organizations such as UNESCO. The author considers that heritage is not a “thing” and proposes a notion of heritage as a cultural process, which includes the relationship of heritage with experience, identity, intangibility, memory, place, and dissonance. Smith also considers the existence of an “unofficial” term of heritage, which includes practices not recognized by official forms of legislation, by official organizations like UNESCO or even by the States themselves. It represents unofficial heritage that is excluded from larger protection schemes (Cameron, 2020). According to Smith (2006) The Convention is part of that AHD and had been criticized, especially by non-Western nations and commentators. However, it would have been important to clarify what the author meant by “non-Western”: Is this a former colonial territory or a developing country? For instance, my country, Peru, used to be the core of the Spanish colonial territories in South America. It later became an independent republic with a mixed and indigenous population. While indigenous communities from the Andean or Amazon regions still live under traditional and ancestral principles, something different happens in the cities. Therefore, can one country be considered Western and non-Western at the same time?
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The response of UNESCO to criticisms concerning The Convention was the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003, which is an attempt to promote new and non-Western ways of understanding heritage, although Smith questions whether it has succeeded in such an endeavor (Smith, 2006). The 2003 Convention is meant to complement The Convention. Its main goal is to safeguard the uses, representations, expressions, knowledge and techniques that communities, groups and, sometimes, individuals, recognize as part of their cultural heritage. It can be manifested through oral traditions and expressions, spectacles of art, social uses, rituals, festive acts, knowledges and uses related to the nature, the universe and traditional craft techniques (UNESCO, n.d.). This discussion, however, is not so well-known within diplomatic circles. Why are the people in charge of foreign policy, which includes participation in UNESCO, not fully aware of this? This will be addressed in the upcoming paragraphs.
Key Issues: The Understanding of Archaeology in the Context of the Convention and Foreign Policy When talking to my archaeologist colleagues, it seems difficult for them to understand how archaeological sites and their nature fit in the middle of political negotiations. On the other hand, my diplomat colleagues with no social science or culture-based academic or professional background tend to consider archaeological sites as foreign policy tools, and they do not necessarily consider their intrinsic value. This is something that seems to be a general issue in diplomacy. Luke and Kersel (2013) mention that one of the reasons why cultural diplomacy is relegated within the international agenda compared to other matters is because politicians and diplomats consider cultural diplomacy as a lesser tool of diplomacy and foreign policy. But what do I mean by “value”? It refers to the OUV but also to the regard that countries confer on heritage. Let us take as an example Law 28,296 (General Law of the Nation’s Cultural Heritage of Peru), Article 1, which defines cultural heritage as “. any manifestation of human activitydtangible or intangibledthat, due to its importance, value and paleontological, archaeological, architectural, historical, artistic, military, social, anthropological, traditional, religious, ethnological, scientific, technological or intellectual significance, is expressly declared as such or on which there is a legal presumption” (Ley 28296, 2004). Article 4 of this Law declares the “. social interest and public necessity of the identification, generation of cadaster, delimitation, cadastral updating, registration, inventory, declaration, protection, restoration, research, conservation, enhancement and dissemination of the Cultural Heritage of the Nation and its restitution in relevant cases” (Ley 28296, 2004). It can be inferred from these articles that cultural heritage has an intrinsic nature that generates the need to investigate, protect and preserve it. It is the vision of some archaeologists who, going to extremes, even see the enhancement of archaeological sites for social use or tourism as negative. Some of them think that it is impossible to consider an archaeological site as a “resource”. When taking the matter of archaeological heritage to the international arena, the idealist vision of archaeological sites as almost untouchable holy settings seems to be blurred by the instrumentalist perspective of those who are in charge of the implementation of the foreign policy of a country, my other colleagues: diplomats. From my conversation with them, they seem to ignore or put that intrinsic value of archaeological sites behind, or do not fully embrace it. Cultural heritage is generally considered a tool of diplomacy, and the way cultural diplomacy has been inculcated in diplomatic academies and schools could be the reason for such a perception. A wider discussion would be necessary to address the matter of cultural diplomacy and its relationship with other definitions, such as soft power, which is not the objective of this work. However, it is important to address some aspects. Cultural diplomacy is mostly regarded as part of a country’s soft power. According to Nye (2004), soft power is a form of power defined as the ability to obtain what is wanted by means of attraction and without coercion or retribution. It has three sources: the culture of a country, its ideals or political values, and its foreign policy. When these are reaffirmed by others, then soft power works. The study of the University of West Scotland on how the British Council could evaluate arts and soft power identified that the vagueness of the latterdwhether the absence of clear objectives or the existence of too general objectivesdhas restricted its effectiveness (Thomas, 2018). Incidentally, the study of King’s College London in the United Nations (UN) headquarters in Geneva showed that, as it happens in the academic world, diplomats could not establish the difference between cultural diplomacy and soft power (Doeser and Nisbett, 2017). Then, there is a need to bring both perspectives, the idealist and the instrumentalist, together and work in a complementary scheme. The inclusion of social sciences professionals in the diplomatic services and the convergence of diplomats and social science practitioners, archaeologists and anthropologists, among others, could create this complementary perspective.
The Developing World and Regionalism Since the adoption of The Convention, The List gained fame. Developed countries established the trend (Rodwell, 2012), but their developing counterparts were not left apart. The decolonization process in Africa and Asia became a reality, mainly since the 1950s. The other part of the developing world, Latin America and the Caribbean had already started and almost finished their decolonization process in the 19th century (except for Saint Kitts and Nevisdwhich became independent in 1983). Their presence in international organizations and, especially, in the United Nations System, became the way for these new states to build their foreign policy. This was not a phenomenon restricted to UNESCO, but common to most of the UN System and other organizations.
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But what does it mean to be a “developing country”? According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), there are no established criteria for the segregation between developing and developed countries in the UN System. The separation comes from the level of development of the economy.1 The developing economies broadly include Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia (without Israel, Japan, and the Republic of Korea), and Oceania (without Australia and New Zealand). The developed economies broadly include North America and Europe, Israel, Japan and the Republic of Korea, as well as Australia and New Zealand (UNCTAD, 2022). There are further divisions. Most developing countries are gathered within the Group of the 77 (G77) þ China.2 Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa get together in the BRICS, a group first proposed by Goldman Sachs without South Africa (Goldman Sachs, 2022), which tends to align positions when regional considerations are not necessarily involved. The latter is particularly important. Positions in commissions and committees in the UN System are distributed by geographical representation. Therefore, it is important to get the support of your region to avoid internal competition. In such a case, where regional support is key, for instance, if Brazil were opting for one of the regional seats in the World Heritage Committee (from now on The Committee), it would be more important to get the agreement of the Group of Latin America and the Caribbean (GRULAC) than of South Africa. They are also important because of their number. From the 194 State Parties to The Convention, 134 are part of the G77 þ China. Therefore, their support and role are becoming more relevant, especially when it comes to universal vote.
Reasons Behind the Presentation of Nominations to be Included in the List Some researchers have addressed the politization of the decision-making process and the environment, in general, surrounding The Convention and argue that the goals of The Convention have lost their primary meaning (Bertacchini et al., 2017; Meskell, 2015). The Convention’s objectives and spirit are summarized in its preamble, which, as previously mentioned, are aimed at the preservation and conservation of heritage. However, the politization of the decision-making process and the reasons behind the presentation of nominations seem to have detracted or deviated from the purpose of The List. Labadi found out that “conservation” is the third most mentioned value in World Heritage nomination dossiers. This aspect “. contributes to creating an image of the nation based on positive ideas of grandeur, continuity, coherence and stability” (Labadi, 2005, p. 281). I want to mention a case from Peru, the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu. By 1983, when it was inscribed, this property was already an internationally renowned archaeological site and according to the opinion of some specialists in Heritage Studies (Helle Jørgensen, 2021, personal communication), it was already a famous destination before having the label of UNESCO. It was the card of prestige that Peru played, not only the prestige of the label of UNESCO, but also the prestige of the Peruvian Diplomatic Service. From 1981 to 1992, Peruvian ambassador Javier Perez de Cuellar became the first and only person from the Americas ever to assume the role of Secretary-General of the UN, which could be considered the most important position in any international organization. Also, during the 20th century, the Peruvian Diplomatic Service developed expertise in multilateral affairs. Incidentally, Peru ratified The Convention in 1982 and from its 13 properties inscribed in The List, 7 were included in the 1980s. The latter was the decade of the initial implementation of The Convention, but it was also a particularly complicated period for Peru, as it was for most Latin American and Caribbean countries. Political events, economic distress and high levels of debt were the reasons why this decade was called la década perdida (the lost decade) for this part of the Americas (Ocampo et al., 2014). National politics and government decisions, on the one hand, played a role in the international negative image of Peru and other countries of the region, while their multilateral activity and, in this case, the adherence to the principles of The Convention, on the other hand, balanced that image to a more positive side. Bertacchini et al. (2017) provide an insight into the reasons behind nominations. The authors highlight that countries benefit in different ways from having properties on The List, such as attracting international cooperation for the conservation of sites or promoting them as tourist destinations. This is true, especially for developing countries, where national funding for the conservation and research of archaeological sites is limited. Preah Vihear is an example of how politics can play behind the reasons to present a nomination. This case has been widely studied by Meskell, who addresses the border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia in which this site was involved, as well as the nomination of the site by Cambodia, which increased the levels of conflict (Meskell, 2016). With an example from the developed side, Askew, citing Turtine, presents the case of Sweden’s nomination of Karlskrona in 1998, pointing out that financial income from tourism and the enhancement of national status were behind Sweden’s motivation to present this nomination file (Askew, 2010). Keough (2011) proposes that an action which could improve the nomination process could be to include an extra layer of review before a government sends a nomination file, which seems a valid procedure, even though that is what ICOMOS, ICCROM and IUCN are supposed to do, after UNESCO receives the file. The problem is that The Committee sometimes, without any technical insight, discards the recommendations of these advising organizations (Meskell, 2012). This should be a strong point of work.
1 Development is defined by the UN as “.a multidimensional undertaking to achieve a higher quality of life for all people. Economic development, social development and environmental protection are interdependent and mutually reinforcing components of sustainable development” (United Nations, 2021). 2 The Group of the 77 was founded on June 15, 1964 by 77 developing countries at the first session of the UNCTAD. Currently it includes 133 countries plus China (134); their aim is to promote their collective economic interests, enhance their group negotiation capacity in the UN and promote south-south cooperation. When Mexico was incorporated in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1994, it abandoned the G77 þ China (Group of 77 plus China, n.d.).
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The Politization of the Decision-Making Process Despite controversy, the decision-making process regarding The Convention and The List is not different from any other in the UN System. The political lobby causes certain controversy due to its unregulated and undefined nature. However, lobbying is not illegal either in national law or in international law. From my experience in foreign policy and multilateralism, lobbying is one of the ways to promote a country’s interests and is not unusual at all by practitioners. In international trade, Conferences of the Parts negotiations, promoting candidatures, etc., it is a widespread practice that countries use in multilateral affairs. Putting rules to that practice could be considered trespassing the thin line of sovereignty. A different story would be if that lobbying turned into bribery, evidently. Another practice is the exchange of votes. This is one of the most common practices in multilateralism. Country A decides to support the candidature of country B to a determined commission, in exchange for country B’s support of the candidature of country A to another determined committee. All countries’ votes are equal. One country, one vote. It would be impossible for a sovereign nation to accept that an organization, country or person could put rules to the way it determines its vote. It is a political decision made within the limits of legality. Of course, this is not what Lockwood (2013) defines as “international vote-buying” (where a country offers a material benefitdmostly moneydto other countries for their vote), neither does it refer to what Eldar (2008) defines as “vote buying” (any conditioning of value on voting for a particular outcome, except logrollingdwhich is the exchange of votes that I am referring to). Therefore, the decision-making process within UNESCO and The Convention governance system is political, as in every instance of the UN System. However, it is true that some countries can have a power of influence over others. Economies in transition, such as China and Russia, hold an undeniable political and economic influence over determining regions and countries that could play a significant role in voting or choosing candidates. In the developed world, the United States have a similar relevant role, which includes regional influence. However, developing economies in transition and their influence are gaining ground in The Convention governance system (Bertacchini et al., 2017). It is also true that it is not 1945 anymore. The spirit of the UN System was very related to the reality of a post-war world, where the death of millions of civilians, the destruction of cities and monuments in Europe, Asia and Africa, and the weakening of the world’s economy reshaped the conception and vision of international relations and the world order. Many would agree that, nowadays, the role of the UN is sort of assistentialist and has left behind its mission of securing peace, as the preamble of the Charter of the UN states (Bertrand, 1995). According to the current situation and distribution of power, many countries claim that the organization needs a reengineering, which includes UNESCO. However, the latter is composed of its Member States, and so is The Committee. The bureaucracy of UNESCO has no decision-making power. Therefore, all changes must come from the Member States and getting the agreement of all of them is not an easy endeavor, as Rodwell recognizes (2012). Therefore, the political nature of the UN System and its decision-making process makes it difficult to generate any significant change, as Member States have the last word on these matters.
The Implementation Phase: “What Happens Next” After the inscription of a site in The List, the situation is not less complicated. As of 2022, there are 1154 properties inscribed in The List. Of these, 897 are cultural heritage and 39 mixed (the latter include cultural and natural heritage). Regionally, Europe and North America have 545 of the total number of properties, followed by Asia and the Pacific with 277, Latin America and the Caribbean with 146, Africa with 98 and the Arab States with 88 (UNESCO, 2022a,b). What about archaeological sites? For instance, let us focus on the G77 þ China, which gathers most of the regional groups with the exception of Europe and North America. I know this group very well as I am from one of those countries, and therefore, I am closer to its negotiation context. Many controversial cases related to The Convention come from these countries. The G77 þ China represents more than half of the State Parties to The Convention. Altogether, these countries have 502 properties inscribed in the World Heritage List. Among them, more than 280 are archaeological sites or have archaeological foundations constructed or used by indigenous societies. For this count, I am not considering purely colonial sites. If we include Mexico, which is not part of the G77 þ China (see footnote 2), the number of indigenous archaeological sites would increase. Then, most of the sites inscribed by developing countries are archaeological in nature. I am by no means trying to provide a definition of “archaeological site”, but I am merely referring to those sites with native or indigenous occupation before the arrival of colonial and imperialist powers. Some of them are still in use. Even some of the colonial or Historic Centers inscribed in The List have a native and indigenous base. In such a way, archaeological sites become a foreign policy tool and a means of recognition. A perfect example of such a place is the City of Cusco, Peru, where the colonial and republican structures overlay the Inca architecture. The City of Cusco is one of the most important foci of tourism in Peru. It is the reunion place for those who visit another World Heritage Site in the area, the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, a site of mixed cultural and natural heritage. The “what happens next” is mainly related to the national implementation of The Convention and The Committee Decisions. Labadi (2005) stressed that there is a gap between these Decisions and their implementation at the national level, having a minor impact.
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Carrying capacity and tourism are issues that cause concern in UNESCO regarding national implementation of The Convention and The Committee Decisions. Comer argues that the acceptance of public interest and involvement in archaeological sites has predisposed most archaeologists to view tourism in a favorable light (Comer, 2012). I argue that this might be true in the United States, but from the experience of my country, where the perspective and vision of archaeology are still mostly conservative in many universities, such an openness to tourism is still challenged by many archaeologists. One case in Peru where carrying capacity has been in the middle of the storm is the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu. The World Heritage Center had expressed concern regarding this matter, which became public through the national and international media, especially when the news of the beginning of the construction of the new International Airport in ChincherodCusco was released by the press.3 State Parties must present to The Committee a state of conservation report periodically, which Peru did. However, as it is evident from The Committee Decisions, the latter considered that what the country had done was insufficient and/or the carrying capacity was still an issue that needed to be addressed.4 Another famous case is Petra, in Jordan. This site was included in The List in 1985. Crowding issues are considered one of the factors that affect most of the site and also the tourist experience. This has led to problems in carrying capacity and visitor management in Petra (Comer, 2012; Alazaizeh et al., 2016). Sites in conflict contexts represent another challenge to national implementation. I will take an example from Peru again. The Sacred City of Caral is said to represent the most ancient civilization in the Americas. However, it is of public knowledge that the project director, Dr. Ruth Shady, has received death threats from land traffickers. This is not a recent situation but dates from before the nomination of the site (BBC News Mundo, 2021; La República, 2021). It was a very well-known situation among the archaeological circles in Peru. At that time, I was working for the National Institute of Culture, later named the Ministry of Culture, as a field archaeologist in the Area of Research and Cadaster, and the situation of conflict between the project, landowners, land traffickers and illegal inhabitants was not only of public knowledge but also known to the Culture national authorities. How come ICOMOS did not consider this situation as an issue to be analyzed in the nomination file? Moreover, in the evaluation report, ICOMOS states that “At present, there appear to be few development pressures as most of the inhabitants of the Supe Valley, and the small agricultural villages in which they live, do not pose an immediate threat to Caral and other archaeological sites within the valley, except for relatively rare cases of occupation of some of the cultivation terraces near the archaeological sites. The rare cases of occupation are now being handled by the Peruvian authorities, and in the case of illegal occupation of state lands, court action is possible” (ICOMOS International, 2009, p. 269). It might be said that the inscription of Caral would help to ease the conflict and reinforce its protection. However, this does not seem to be the case. As for last year, Dr. Ruth Shady was still receiving death threats. Another site that has been addressed by literature is the previously mentioned Preah Vihear, which was in the middle of a territorial dispute between Thailand and Cambodia (Meskell, 2016). It should be remembered that The Committee Decisions are recommendations, therefore not binding decisions. This is important because there is no mechanism that makes a State Party compulsorily comply with The Committee Decisions. One country might say that it is doing its best to comply with The Convention. The only method that The Committee can use to change the course of action is to recommend the inscription of a property in the List of World Heritage in Danger or even delist a property. For a country such as, for instance, the United Kingdom, delisting might not be such a big deal. After recommending a change of action in the United Kingdom’s plan for the Mercantile Maritime City of Liverpool without any result, The Committee delisted this property in 2021. The United Kingdom is a permanent member of the Security Council, a member of the G7, with an established position and role in international politics. The delisting might not cause damage. However, for a developing country which is not even a regional power, such an event could represent serious damage to its image and open scrutiny. I have been the witness of multilateral negotiations where developed countries demanded developing countries to explain the reasons for their actions (being a minority and having a not very popular opinion of a draft Decision), while in another negotiation room, those same developed countries were taking the exact same path as the questioned developing countries. Keough (2011) proposes that, for countries that fail to implement The Convention or The Committee Decisions, UNESCO could cut their access to funds. This is somehow complicated, as State Members pay their quotas, which are partly used for UNESCO’s funds; also, when referring to sanctions, there is hardly any case in the UN system and its negotiations where sanctions have been applied, not even in such a critical case as the non-compliance with the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC). There are currently three delisted sites. It might not be a big number, but two of those sites belong to developed countries (United Kingdom and Germany) and are cultural heritage sites. The third site, in Oman, is a natural area. The story is different for sites in danger. There are 52 properties in this list. Of these, 47 are in countries of the G77 þ China (another 1 of them is in Mexico, so it can be considered that 48 are in the developing world). Of the 52 sites in danger, 36 are cultural heritage. Chan Chan, in Peru, has been in this list since its inscription in 1986. It was the capital city of the Chimu Kingdom and the largest pre-Hispanic city built of mudbrick in the Americas. Its material, mudbrick, made this site extremely vulnerable to weather conditions. Even though Peru has worked out this situation, the presence of farmers in Chan Chan’s buffer zone is the reason why this site is still on this list. Protecting the site is not an easy endeavor, as I have witnessed as Chief of the UNESCO
3 Tourists visiting Cusco and Machu Picchu traveling to Peru by plane have to arrive at Jorge Chavez International Airport in Callao. A new international airport in Chinchero could lead to more tourists arriving in Cusco and, hence, in Machu Picchu, as the objective of most tourists that arrive in Peru is visiting these World Heritage Sites. Therefore, the number of tourists visiting them could increase, exceeding their carrying capacity. 4 For The Committee Decisions on Machu Picchu: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/274/documents/.
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Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Peru. Different national actors and economic factors make it difficult to find a solution to this matter, as there are several families which need to be relocated. It is a social issue that needs to be addressed with diligence and care. The Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls is another site with different conflicting aspects. It was inscribed in 1981 and the next year entered the List of World Heritage in Danger. It remains there so far. Everyone is aware of the situation of the political division of the city and the symbol it represents for Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In 2016 The Committee made a very risky move. Decision 40 COM 7A.13 expressed the concern of The Committee regarding the illegal archaeological excavations by the Israeli occupation authorities and the damage caused by Israeli security forces in 2014 to the historic gates and windows of the Qibli Mosque inside Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram Al-Sharif (Muslim holy place and part of the World Heritage property). The response from Israel was to cut-off cooperation with UNESCO. All following Committee Decisions regarding this site regret “.the failure of the Israeli occupying authorities to cease the persistent excavations, tunneling, works, projects and other illegal practices in East Jerusalem, particularly in and around the Old City of Jerusalem, which are illegal under international law and reiterates its request to Israel, the occupying Power, to prohibit all violations which are not in conformity with the provisions of the relevant UNESCO conventions, resolutions and decisions”.5
Summary and Future Directions Archaeology has a very important role in the governance system of The Convention. I am not referring to the other UNESCO conventions where archaeology is also involved because that would be a much larger discussion. Archaeological sites represent a very important group in The List. However, they also represent a challenge to manage. Their conservation is one of those challenges. Climate change and weather oscillation can cause damage to structures. Conservation and preservation imply a big investment. Some countries consider that having a site on The List could open the doors for international cooperation and funding. Therefore, for archaeological sites, physical conservation is relevant in the state of conservation reports. This is why it is important for national institutions in charge of foreign policy to get together and work with archaeologists, architects and other specialists to have a real approach to the condition and opportunities in a site. It is true that national culture institutions are in charge of this task, but from my own experience, these two types of national institutions (foreign affairs and cultural) hardly work together on these issues. The technical focal point transmits the information to the political institution, the latter to the Permanent Representations at UNESCO, and that is, in general, the working cycle, with little communication between the parties involved. Ministries and secretariats of Foreign Affairs could benefit from the expertise of the specialists by working together and sharing knowledge. I previously mentioned the study published by Doeser and Nisbett (2017) that showed the lack of knowledge of diplomats regarding some basic definitions such as soft power. The deviation in the use of culture and the reasons behind the performance of a country in UNESCO may come from this lack of knowledge. Recently, UNESCO approved the UNESCO Chair in “Diplomacy and Cultural Management” at the Diplomatic Academy of Peru. This is certainly a big step toward enhancing diplomats’ knowledge of cultural affairs. On the other hand, archaeologists could learn from diplomats about the characteristics and difficulties of the international system. The complementation of both perspectives could deliver a better understanding of the use of culture in foreign affairs. From my undergraduate experience, archaeology students, at least in Peru, do not learn about these issues. This is very important as many archaeologists will not choose a research path. Therefore, undergraduate students should be prepared for different paths of work. Luke and Kersel (2013) present an interesting approach to the work of archaeologists in the United States Department of State. I find it very enriching because, for instance, in my country, the only archaeologists working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are a fellow archaeologist in charge of repatriation coordination, who is not a diplomat, and myself (a diplomat). These authors use Nye’s concept of “smart power” (the combination of hard and soft power for a winning strategy) instead of soft power to refer to archaeology and cultural diplomacy. They propose a comprehensive use of archaeology as a tool of diplomacy. This is where we should get to at the national level. From their perspective, archaeology and archaeologists could have an important role in building foreign relations. One of their points is the presence of archaeologists in long-term projects in different parts of the world. While this could work for the United States because of the magnitude of their research around the world, for most developing countries, it will not because they only work at the national level. However, getting in touch with foreign archaeologists working in these developing countries is an opportunity for capacity building, transfer of financial resources (as those foreign archaeologists and institutions are investing in research and conservation of archaeological sites) and the construction of a network, which is highly valued in the current state of globalization (Luke and Kersel, 2013). Meskell (2018) traces the role of archaeology in international affairs to the times of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the UN, and discusses the replacement of archaeology as an intellectual discipline and field practice by a preoccupation for monumentality after the 1960s. This is important because research should go hand-in-hand with preservation. What is an archaeological site 5
For The Committee Decisions on The Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/148/documents/.
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without the knowledge of its origins, occupation, and the people who built it and lived there? The disassociation of archaeology and international cultural governance is a common feature not only at the national but also at the international level. The existence of UNESCO and its role is of the highest relevance but I argue that there are needed changes. While writing this entry, the MONDIACULTdUNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development was taking place in Mexico, where some voices seemed to challenge the current business as usual context of the organization. Regarding the three steps that I considered in The List system, the reasons for a nomination, the decision-making process and the “what happens next”, there are some final points I would like to address. First, regarding the content, quality and congruence of a nomination file, it would be difficult to put limits on State Parties before presenting the files, because of the reasons I previously mentioned. However, ICOMOS has national commissions, which could offer extra support for national authorities. For instance, during the most difficult months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with quarantine and closure of museums, archaeological and historical sites, and the spaces of creative industries, ICOMOS Spain developed recommendations for the reopening of these cultural places (ICOMOS España, 2022). Second, the disagreement between UNESCO’s advisory bodies and The Committee should be addressed urgently. The political mechanism of The Convention indeed has the last word regarding the decision-making process, but the technical advisory bodies have enough expertise to make proper recommendations. When the reason for dismissing the recommendation is not technical, further analysis of the decision of The Committee should take place. Third, national implementation of The Committee decisions is a challenge. The lack of a procedure for mandatory implementation or penalties has led to the situation presented by Labadi (2005), where these Decisions seem to have little impact at the national level. As Rodwell presents, there have been attempts to complement and improve different aspects of The Convention governance system and procedures (Rodwell, 2012). Also, Lostal recognizes the contribution of The Convention to the development of Cultural International Law (Lostal, 2017). The bureaucracy of UNESCO has no decision-making power, but it should play a conciliatory role. There are many excellent professionals in UNESCO, including archaeologists, who could make a more significant contribution to improving the organization and its procedures. Changes in the decision-making process or the overseeing of national implementation will be difficult to achieve as an initiative from its Member States. I remember during a class in the Diplomatic Academy when a teacher asked the students what would be needed to change the world order. One student said: a new World War. And indeed, from the examples of the past, catastrophic war contexts were the catalytic elements that led to changes in the balance of power. Let us not get to that situation to achieve the needed changes.
See Also: Archaeological Heritage Management; Looting and Illicit Trafficking of Archaeological Heritage; Preventive Archaeology - Cultural Heritage and Land Planning.
References Alazaizeh, Mohammad M., Hallo, Jeffrey C., Backman, Sheila J., Norman, William C., Vogel, Melissa A., 2016. Crowding standards at Petra Archaeological Park: a comparative study of McKercher’s five types of heritage tourists. J. Herit. Tourism 11, 364–381. Askew, Mark, 2010. The magic list of global status: UNESCO, World Heritage and the agendas of the states. In: Labadi, Sophia, Long, Colin (Eds.), Heritage and Globalisation. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 19–44. BBC News Mundo, 2021. Ruth Shady: la denuncia de amenazas de muerte de la arqueóloga peruana, la guardiana de la ciudad más antigua de América. Bertacchini, Enrico, Liuzza, Claudia, Meskell, Lynn, 2017. Shifting the balance of power in the UNESCO World Heritage Committee: an empirical assessment. Int. J. Cult. Pol. 23, 331–351. Bertrand, Maurice, 1995. The UN as an organization. A critique of its functioning. Eur. J. Int. Law 6, 349–359. Cameron, Christina, 2020. The UNESCO imprimatur: creating global (in)significance. Int. J. Herit. Stud. 26, 845–856. Carman, John, Stig, Sørensen, Marie, Louise, 2009. Heritage studies. An outline. In: Carman, John, Stig Sørensen, Marie Louise (Eds.), Heritage Studies. Methods and Approaches. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 11–28. Comer, Douglas, 2012. Tourism and Archaeological Heritage Management at Petra: Driver to Development or Destruction? Springer, New York. Doeser, James, Nisbett, Melissa, 2017. The Art of Soft Power. King’s College London, London. Eldar, Ofer, 2008. Vote-trading in international institutions. Eur. J. Int. Law 19, 3–41. Goldman Sachs, 2022. With GS Research Report, “BRICs” are Born. Group of 77 plus China, n.d. About the Group of 77. (Online). Harrison, Rodney, 2012. Heritage: Critical Approaches. Routledge, London. Harrison, Rodney, 2020. Heritage as future-making practices. In: Harrison, Rodney, DeSilvey, Caitlin, Holtorf, Cornelius, Macdonald, Sharon, Bartolini, Nadia, Breithoff, Esther, Fredheim, Harald, Lyons, Antony, May, Sarah, Morgan, Jennie, Penrose, Sefryn (Eds.), Heritage Futures. Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Studies. UCL Press, London, pp. 20–50. ICOMOS España, 2022. ¿Qué estamos haciendo desde ICOMOS España?. ICOMOS International, 2009. The Sacred City of Caral-Supe (Peru) No 1269. Advisory Body Evaluation s.l.: s.n. ICOMOS International, 2020. Glossary. IUCN, 2020. Natural World Heritage. Keough, Elizabeth B., 2011. Heritage in Peril: a critique of UNESCO’s world heritage program. Wash. Univ. Global Stud. Law Rev. 10, 593–615. La República, 2021. Ruth Shady: No puedo acudir a Caral por amenazas de muerte de traficantes de tierras. Labadi, Sophia, 2005. Questioning the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention: A Value-Based Analysis of Purposefully Sampled Nomination Dossiers. PhD dissertation, University of London.
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Ley 28296, 2004. Ley General del Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación s.l.:s.n. Lockwood, Natalie J., 2013. International vote buying. Harv. Int. Law J. 54, 99–156. Lostal, Marina, 2017. International Cultural Heritage law in Armed Conflict. Case-Studies of Syria, Libya, Mali, the Invasion of Iraq, and the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lowenthal, David, 2005. Natural and cultural heritage. Int. J. Herit. Stud. 11, 81–92. Lowenthal, David, 2015. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Luke, Christina, Kersel, Morgan M., 2013. U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology. Routledge, New York. Meskell, Lynn, 2012. The rush to inscribe: reflections on the 35th session of the world heritage committee, UNESCO, Paris, 2011. J. Field Archaeol. 37, 145–151. Meskell, Lynn, 2015. Transacting UNESCO World Heritage: gifts and exchanges on a global stage. Soc. Anthropol. 23, 3–21. Meskell, Lynn, 2016. World heritage and WikiLeaks. Territory, trade, and temples on the Thai-Cambodian border. Curr. Anthropol. 57, 72–95. Meskell, Lynn, 2018. A Future in Ruins. UNESCO, World Heritage and the Dream of Peace. Oxford University Press, New York. Nye, Joseph, 2004. Soft Power. The Means to Success in World Politics. Public Affairs, New York. Ocampo, Jose Antonio, Stallings, Barbara, Bustillo, Ines, Belloso, Helvia, Frenkel, Roberto, 2014. La crisis latinoamericana de la deuda desde la perspectiva histórica. CEPAL, Santiago de Chile. Rodwell, Dennis, 2012. The UNESCO world heritage convention, 1972–2012: reflections and directions. Hist. Environ. 3, 64–85. Smith, Laurajane, 2006. Uses of Heritage. Routledge, Abingdon. Thomas, Ian, 2018. Center on Public Diplomacy. UNCTAD, 2022. Country Classification. UNESCO, 1972. Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. UNESCO, 2022a. What is World Heritage?. UNESCO, 2022b. World Heritage List Statistics. UNESCO, n.d. Working Towards a Convention. United Nations, 2021. Development. World Heritage Committee, 2019. Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention.
Archaeological Heritage Management Maria A´ngeles Querol, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction What is Archaeological Heritage? Overview and Key Issues Knowledge Planning Monitoring Dissemination Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Archaeological heritage definition: Western construct resulting from Archaeology. Materials normally hidden in need of special management systems. Definition of management: Actions aimed at safeguarding and disseminating archaeological assets. Knowledge: Monitoring of excavations, Rescue Archaeology and Professional Archaeology. Planning: Relationship between Archaeological heritage and land planning. Birth of Preventive Archaeology of Planning. Monitoring: To fight against plunder and illicit trade; more recently, against terrorism. Dissemination: To put archaeological assets as well as their management systems at public’s disposal. It deals with the challenge of new technologies and significant changes in their contents and discourses.
Abstract After defining Archaeological heritage as a product of the discipline of Archaeology, this work addresses the characteristics of the four areas of its management cycle. Knowledge is the first one. As archaeological excavations are the classic system of knowledge production, the main systems for monitoring excavations are then explained with a brief history of the management models employed to protect archaeological sites from construction works. The section on Planning, the second area, pays particular attention to the relationship between protecting archaeological sites and land planning. This relationship, along the increase in use of Environmental Assessments, has led to a new model of management, Preventive Archaeology of Planning. The main goal of this model is to keep archaeological sites intact for the future, not excavate them. The third area is Monitoring. In addition to monitoring the conditions imposed by the administration on archaeological excavations, the government faces the difficult task of dealing with illicit traffic, market and plunder of archaeological materials. This responsibility has become even more difficult in the last few decades due to the use of Archaeological heritage as a terrorist weapon and to the plunder of archaeological sites and museums as a finance means for buying armament. Dissemination is the most classic area of managing Archaeological heritage. It faces significant challenges such as an increase in use of remote systems, videogames and films dealing with more or less archaeological topics. These films and videogames tend to treat archaeological materials as elements to destroy or as mere resources to make money. Additionally, Archaeological heritage management, its history and systems are topics barely addressed in studies about Archaeology except for a few specialized master’s degrees.
Introduction Archaeological heritage is part of Cultural heritage. Both concepts belong to that almost infinite multitude of creations, ideas, invents and principles typical of the West. Archaeology and the value of antiquities are a construction of the capitalist and individualist world that, at least since the 16th century started to expand over the globe in an almost destructive manner. In the European sphere and a great part of the American one, Archaeological heritage is interesting, sometimes it is surprising and almost always it creates a sense of pride, particularly so when it corresponds to some augmentative expressions such as “the biggest”,
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“the oldest”, “the most original” or “the most beautiful”. Yet, there have been and still are societies and cultures where all of this matters very little. These societies and cultures look at archaeological teams who travel to work in their lands, with the gaze of otherness. This is the reason why we should not forget the context we are moving in, particularly when we use words such as “universal” or “global”. In this entry two Western concepts will be addressed: Archaeological heritage and its management. Their relationship is a rather modern product and it is subject to huge variations, even within our own field. As a case in point, most countries have one law to protect Cultural heritage, but others, such as Germany or Spain, or even the United States, do not. More specifically, there are 18 different laws on Cultural heritage in Spain: one for each of the 17 Autonomous Communities or regions, and one more at the State level. Thereby, there are also 18 different laws regulating archaeological excavations, so the management models are not the same among different sites, and archaeological teams face different requirements according to the region they are working in. Trying to overcome all these differences, I will start with defining Archaeological heritage to address then the characteristics of its management.
What is Archaeological Heritage? The Council of Europe’s “European Convention for the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage” (Council of Europe, 1992) defines it as “remains and objects and any other traces of mankind from past epochs the preservation and study of which help to retrace the history of mankind and its relation with the natural environment; for which excavations or discoveries and other methods of research into mankind and the related environment are the main sources of information”. In this definition, which has been more or less copied by current laws, it is clear that the key words are “excavations” or “discoveries”. In other words, Archaeological heritage includes the objects that have to be “found” because they are partly or completely hidden and, in many cases, have to be “excavated” because they are buried. This quality makes Archaeological heritage something unique and special within the context of cultural assets. Generally speaking, it is unseen and sometimes is unexpected, hidden, buried. Therefore, protection and management-systems for Archaeological heritage differ significantly from those required to protect, for example, a castle or the way popular pottery is made. Modern management of Archaeological heritage must be based mostly on prevention rather than conservation. Leaving aside some exceptions, the search, discovery and excavation of archaeological heritage take place in a special way, based on observation and recording of objects in their geological contexts. This special way can be learned by studying Archaeology. As a result, Archaeology makes Archaeological heritage. In many countries archaeological sites, whether unearthed or not, and materials derived from excavations and accidental discoveries are public property. In other words, they are excluded from private traffic. Their ownership rests in public administrations, which are responsible for their guardianship so as to ensure that Archaeological heritage really fulfills its “public” role and purpose. Regardless of their location in private land, these archaeological materials are public assets and they belong to society; as a result, any intervention in Archaeological heritage must be authorized by the appropriate administration, which will impose different conditions. In short, Archaeological heritage is the set of movable and immovable assets of the Cultural heritage for whose study, knowledge or investigation the archaeological methodology is used. This methodology is based mainly on prospecting work, discoveries, stratigraphy and excavations. Furthermore, they are assets that no longer have a use in today’s society; they belong to ancient human groups who made them, used them and then discarded them. Therefore, in many cases, they are “rubbish”; of course in others, they are palaces (Querol, 2020).
Overview and Key Issues To manage is a common verb that means to carry out an action in an organized way. If the intended action is to ensure that archaeological assets play a role in society, so it appreciates and values them, then the management cycle must address four areas at least: knowledge (to know what you have or what you suspect you have); planning (prior design of the phases of the management cycle); monitoring (to ensure that requirements are followed) and dissemination (to make available the results of this management to society). Of course, one should add assessment (to analyze the results obtained in order to make adjustments, if required) as well as conflict resolution for disputes involving archaeological assets. Yet, since these two latter areas are scarcely developed, we can barely talk about them (e.g., Myers et al., 2016). I consider it important to clearly distinguish between management and intervention. If we imagine the activities carried out in the four areas already mentioned, none of them affects cultural assets; in other words, they do not manipulate them, do not alter them physically, do not touch them directly. Management, therefore, is not directly related to those other activities which actually touch and alter heritage assets -sometimes very importantly- such as to rehabilitate historical buildings, or to restore art works such as paintings, sculptures, ancient textiles or pottery, etc., to prospect or to carry out archaeological excavations. All those activities that do alter and manipulate, in a good or bad way, heritage assets, are interventions. Of course, interventions have to be managed; in other words, they have to be acknowledged, planned, controlled, disseminated and assessed, but they demand a particular academic knowledge (Archaeology, Architecture, Restoration, etc.), and particular procedures.
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I will briefly explain each of these areas, but I will develop in more detail the first two, knowledge and planning, because they are, in my opinion, those in need of investigation and change.
Knowledge This is the most important and developed area of the cycle because it includes classic activities such as excavation or prospection: to discover Archaeological heritage, investigate it or simply preserve it are complex and specialized actions that are modified every day and get adapted to new technologies. During the entire history of archaeological science, at least since the end of the XIX century, the main goal has been to excavate new archaeological sites so as to increase both historical-anthropological knowledge and museum and collection’s riches. The formula “trading destruction for knowledge” was widely accepted and, according to it, the appropriate administrations focused on monitoring archaeological interventions so that materials and knowledge obtained fulfilled their mission of educating, informing and attracting through publications and expositions. Before developing this section, I would like to remind that we are dealing with fragile, unique and endangered assets. As such, no intervention in Archaeological heritage must be done without sufficient justification, equipment and budget. Modern archaeology, like science, demands original, innovative and proactive approaches and objectives. Responsibility over this must fall on the people who set out and lead archaeological activities, but obviously this responsibility falls also on administrations, which should protect unique and endangered specimens, and on the academia, which should support selected projects. In our regions, to carry out any intervention in Archaeological heritage, an authorization of the appropriate administration, be it at regional or state level, is necessary. Both the procedure to request those authorizations and the demands raised if authorized are complex. We can summarize these demands in five points: 1 The interventions or actions considered by each appropriate administration -normally the administration of Culture- that require a permission. Prospecting works and excavations are interventions that must be authorized, but other activities also require authorization, such as material analyses, monitoring of construction works affecting Archaeological heritage, archaeological survey, reproductions of rock art, etc. 2 The conditions that must be fulfilled by the person who requests permission. Meeting such conditions has been a continuous struggle, at least in countries such as Spain, where a graduate degree of Archaeology or specialized master’s degree in this topic does not exist or has not existed until very recently. Aside from appropriate training, the conditions set out are related to the existence of interdisciplinary teams, adequate equipment or specific finance. 3 The information the request must include: in addition to the personal data of the applicant, the authorization of the land owners where the intervention is going to occur and the data of the archaeological site itself, the administrations also demand a detailed project description including the CV of both the manager of the excavation and the rest of the team members, and a budget. The project information required is different depending on whether the activity is preventive or a rescue one, or whether the activity is part of a research program or an emergency one. 4 The conditions that must be fulfilled by the person granted permission. There is normally a long list of conditions, ranging from personally leading the intervention, communicating its dates of beginning and end, handing over the archaeological materials already registered, etc. 5 The requirements related to the submission of reports and statements. Generally speaking, reports are short documents with conclusions and key data, submitted after completing the intervention, while statements are the complete and final work that, in most cases, is the only thing left from an excavated archaeological site. During the last decades, new management systems for interventions are forcing administrations to modify at least part of that scheme by clearly separating the demands imposed to long-term archaeological excavations motivated by investigation, with classic budgets, and to interventions that are motivated by activities of land planning or the existence of construction works. By their own nature, rescue or preventive interventions face fewer requirements, so there are many excavations whose results are not published beyond a short report. This obviously entails the loss of both the archaeological site and knowledge about it. Over the last three or four decades the classic model of excavating to investigate has gone through several changes: on the one hand, society -appropriate administrations in particular- has realized that Archaeological heritage is not infinite; on the other, society has also become aware that its conservation is endangered by significant earthworks provoked by modern construction works, particularly those of a very large scale. Approximately since the 80s, many countries have taken steps so before construction works have taken place in a land where the presence of archaeological materials is suspected, archaeological excavations are carried out in order to preserve the knowledge of those archaeological sites. Before the birth of this Rescue Archaeology, if a construction or earthwork unearthed some monumental or outstanding archaeological remain then staff from state or regional museums were normally in charge of rescuing it, always behind construction machines. At the time, Archaeology was far from being a commercial activity and it was not socially considered as a profession, but rather as a hobby particularly for the wealthy ones. However, between the 70s and 80s a series of changes took place: public works and earthworks multiplied and the damage they caused widened both horizontally and vertically, primarily in urban contexts. At the same time, new and larger generations of people trained in Archaeology started to gather and create professional associations to foster the professional consideration of the archaeological practice, while the appropriate administrations increased the number of posts associated with Cultural heritage management in general, and Archaeological heritage in particular. In some laws an interesting novelty was included: the developer
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of the construction works was forced to fund studies on the archaeological value of the land where the work was going to take place every time that the existence of archaeological remains was suspected. This study had to take place prior to officially granting permission to construct. Drawing on the archaeological study, the administration would set the conditions for the construction permission. Still in the 80s and in this context of changes, the EU grew and the practice of Environmental Assessments spread. In these assessments archaeological teams were hired to carry out prospect works in the targeted lands and, if needed, to carry out rescue excavations before construction works affected the archaeological sites. Although the administrations hurried up to compile records and geographical catalogs of archaeological sites to know what they have or even what they suspect they have, the fast increase of public and private works was too strong to deal with it in advance. There were progressively more archaeological teams being contracted and more archaeological sites being destroyed, many of them with prior excavations. Museum storage rooms were increasingly filling up. There was barely time or budget to restore, exhibit or publish the materials, with few exceptions. Archaeological companies started to appear in many countries during these decades. Archaeology became a liberal profession under pressure from both the administration giving authorizations and setting conditions, and the construction companies that paid for the works and wanted quick solutions. Members of this new profession started to get together, to publish ethical codes and fight for their rights. What could not be seen at this point was that all these initiatives were useless if the appropriate administration did not have the capacity to modify land planning, halt construction works, avoid them or, simply, compensate the loss of construction space available due to conservation in situ of archaeological sites. Little by little it became increasingly clear that the protection of the land where archaeological sites are located had to occur way before the construction works were approved. With the arrival of the new millennium the need to change the management model was imposing itself, especially since the destruction of archaeological sites seemed unstoppable. It is in this context when what is nowadays known as Preventive Archaeology of Land Planning spread, defined as the set of activities aimed at avoiding or minimizing the damage of public or private works on Archaeological heritage. These are purely administrative activities in theory, but (both construction or archaeological) companies are also involved and, of course, society as a whole must also be involved as well given a role as the end recipient of this endeavor. The history of Preventive Archaeology of Land Planning has just started, and both its present and future are based on the experience achieved during previous stages (Martínez-Díaz and Castillo, 2007; Querol and Castillo, 2013; Castillo and Querol, 2014; Querol, 2020). Given that the goal of this new model is to conserve archaeological sites without excavation, at least two results are achieved: 1 Archaeological sites are conserved and future generations have something to investigate. 2 Strategies for archaeological research can be considered according to a set of existing, preserved and known archaeological sites, and not according to what public or private works hopelessly impose. This new perspective has significantly changed both the archaeological science and the type of work to be carried out by the people responsible for Archaeological heritage; a work centered on identifying, valuing and conserving archaeological sites under risk of destruction. This perspective will change even more so in the future. This new perspective is also influencing the protection tools used by administrations, and this new situation suggests a different context for the relationships between Archaeology and Archaeological heritage. A new context to which changes in university education have a lot to contribute, as does the development of professionalism in Archaeology and the experience of managers of this special and difficult heritage. Given its relationship with planning, I will describe in more detail the strategies of this new management model in the next section.
Planning This area of Archaeological heritage management is significantly wide. Drawing on the principle that nothing should be done without previous planning (a law, a government budget distribution, an excavation, an exhibition, a publication, etc.) the issues to deal with would be many. Here I am going to focus on the close relationship between land planning and protection of archaeological sites. This relationship has given rise to the management model already presented as Preventive Archaeology of Planning. We can find a direct allusion to it in the Charter for the Protection and Management of the Archaeological Heritage issued by ICOMOS in 1990 when it states that policies for protecting Archaeological heritage must be systematically integrated in those of development and land planning. Then, the Valetta Convention, already mentioned, particularly developed this section and stated the need that “. archaeologists participate in planning policies designed to ensure well-balanced strategies for the protection, conservation and enhancement of sites of archaeological interest and in the various stages of development schemes; to ensure that archaeologists, town and regional planners systematically consult one another in order to permit the modification of development plans likely to have adverse effects on the archaeological heritage and the allocation of sufficient time and resources for an appropriate scientific study to be made of the site and for its findings to be published” (art. 5.i–ii). Generally speaking, current laws include the obligation to report on the state of cultural assets, whether archaeological or not, when processing any land planning that affects them. The main goal would be to inscribe the archaeological sites already recorded or suspected with the legal figures of land planning, with particular measures of protection. This goal is difficult to achieve mainly because of problems of coordination among administrations. Additionally, so-called protection measures tend to be limited to excavations or to “free up plots”, so the destruction pace continues unrelenting.
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As has been already mentioned, the Preventive Archaeology of Planning emerges in this context. Its main goal is to conserve archaeological sites without excavation while being compatible with the existence of construction works. This seemingly simple goal cannot be fulfilled with just the tools defined in the laws on Cultural or Historical heritage or just with the experience of the administrations of Culture. Instead, it is challenging because of the obvious unequal weight, in terms of social consideration, between the conservation of an archaeological site and the construction of, for example, another motorway. To choose the path that makes both activities compatible, first, one must count on society and then liaize with other administrations unaffiliated with the one of Culture, particularly those on which construction works and land planning depend. This new Preventive Archaeology has two different procedures. On the one hand, those directly related with Land planning that consider “Reserve zones” and “Caution Areas”. These procedures are called first phase procedures. On the other hand, there are those related with construction projects, called second phase procedures. These include archaeological survey, if needed, excavations as well as activities to preserve archaeological remains within the particular construction project affecting them. When the government of a territory wants to carry out new land planning or to modify previous plans, it is forced to carry out an Environmental Assessment including a report for the administration in charge of Cultural heritage. In turn, this administration has to take advantage of this opportunity to upgrade its archaeological data and the geographical catalog of archaeological sites of that territory. This catalog has to clearly include “Reserve zones”dthe archaeological sites more or less known but considered as highly important and therefore untouchabledand “Caution Areas”darchaeological sites known or suspected that, despite being less relevant than the previous ones, deserve a special treatment before a construction work affecting them gets approved. The activities of the second phase procedure are directly related with construction projects or earthworks. Such activities cannot take place in areas defined as “Reserve zones”. Before a construction project that may affect a Caution Area gets approved, as part of the required Environmental Assessment, the developer has to hire an archaeological team to carry out different studies aimed at assessing the existence and relevance of the remains. These are mainly exploration works that include archaeological survey because a more specific assessment of the characteristics, extent, etc., of the remains is needed. Drawing on the results of this assessment, the administration will decide whether the construction work can be done as projected or, on the contrary, it is necessary to respect the archaeological remains avoiding any intervention on them or adjusting the project. With this new type of management of Archaeological heritage there is a new age where the main principle is not to excavate or destroy, just preserve. This demands new training and a new attitude of archaeological teams, particularly in the professional realm, with an important development of non-destructive systems of valuing and prospection. It also demands the coordination of administrations in charge of Cultural heritage, Land planning or Urbanism and Environment.
Monitoring Two of the biggest risks of destruction of archaeological assets are plunder-excavations without authorization and illicit traffic. Significant effort and budget for Archaeological heritage is devoted to this context, where there are several international documents worth mentioning but also various levels of compliance. First, it must be reminded that each country tends to consider as non-exportable a large number of assets inscribed, listed or under special protection. In the countries where Archaeological heritage is public property, these assets are, by definition, nonexportable. In 1995 a new version of a UNESCO’s old document, dated in 1970, was signed with the name “UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects” centered on requirements and protocols for the restitution or return of stolen objects, including archaeological materials from non-authorized excavations or plunder. These principles were not signed by all countries and did not really limit the illicit market of cultural assets. The EU took a significant step in 1993 when internal borders were removed and, due to the initiative of several Mediterranean countries, which are wealthier in terms of archaeological materials than Nordic ones, free transit of particular assets and goods, including archaeological ones, was restricted with the “Directive on the return of cultural objects unlawfully removed from the territory of a Member State”. These states are legitimized to make a claim of restitution from the holders of the materials. The judge will order the return of the asset to the claimant state whenever it is proved that, first, it is a heritage asset and, second, it has been illegally removed from the country of origin. In terms of this Directive, cultural objects are all those objects of archaeological character regardless of their value and over a 100 years old. Despite this important effort, archaeological assets are still subject to piracy, destruction and the illicit market. It should be noted that the objects can only be returned if there is an inventory or record where they are inscribed. This, evidently, does not happen when the assets have been illegally excavated from archaeological sites, as they are unknown. Plunder and destruction of archaeological sites have increased significantly in this century due to the destructive action of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. The looting of the National Museum of Iraq in 2003 revealed the inefficacy of international accords. Yet, new recommendations and provisions were still being written and issued while the destruction of archaeological sites included in the World Heritage List, such as Aleppo, continued. The West was and is poorly prepared to face deliberate and systematic destruction of highly important cultural assets, a destruction motivated by the desire to weaken nationalist feelings and to promote a united Islamic community. Beyond these political intentions there are also economic ones, in other words, to plunder archaeological sites and museums to illicitly export the objects in order to sell them in the international art market and self-finance terrorist activities. Although along this story, which has not finished yet and might never do, the prominence of UNESCO is evident through its conventions and recommendations, its power is limited considering the fragility of archaeological assets, which have become victims and weapons. Their destruction breaks the memory of the past and threatens the future of communities.
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Dissemination Considering that the real value of Cultural heritage lays on its social impact and that there cannot be public interest in what is unknown, divulgation, outreach or education on various aspects of Archaeology and Archaeological heritage are key. Traditionally the unique, beautiful and valuable objects have been exhibited both live and remotely, as are the most appreciated constructions, hoping that their beauty or uniqueness could speak for itself. However, the present Western society demands anthropological discourses to understand the use and role of those objects and constructions. This phenomenon has turned the activity of dissemination or divulgation into a difficult, complex and politicized one. Additionally, in the last decades the systems of dissemination have multiplied significantly, particularly so by means of images. Archaeological museums, as key vehicles of dissemination, are being replaced by more instant, personal and remote means. The images of archaeological assets that these means offer tend not to be the most appropriate from an academic point of view, therefore they sometimes become enemies of Archaeological heritage, looted and loudly destroyed both by Indiana Jones and videogames such as Iris, Civilization VI or WoW. Taking into account this context, I would like to highlight the difference between the dissemination or divulgation of remains (their beauty, technical characteristics, etc., which is the classic topic of museums), and dissemination or divulgation of the heritage dimension of the archaeological assets (their protection, conservation and, in many cases, the systems to inscribe and designate them, the monitoring of excavations or exports, etc). This last aspect is barely present in the traditional channels (books, articles) and in museums, films, videogames or literature itself. Generally, it is necessary to attend specialized masters courses to find information about these issues. This means that lay people, even university educated, have few opportunities to access such information. This situation is detrimental for the survival of Archaeological heritage, so new generations will have to face the challenge of changing it.
Summary and Future Directions After several decades of initiatives for Cultural heritage management in the Western world, it is time to analyze the results and reconsider the different models in use. Nowadays, ideas and parallel public policies regarding archaeological sites (environmental assessments, land planning and sustainable tourism) are more important than increasing budgets. According to this observation and the points already raised in this entry, I would like to focus on five particular proposals. 1. Count on citizen participation. It is no longer attainable to work in policy-making in Archaeological heritage (in fact, in Cultural heritage as a whole) turning a blind eye to participation. Citizens must be the force warranting an appropriate selection and maintenance of the archaeological sites that are publicly accessible, both existing and those to be discovered in the future. Citizens themselves have to intervene proactively in managing the resources within the context of environmental use and management where archaeological sites are located. Local administrations are the closest to citizens, and this requires them to assume responsibilities and to commit to carry them out. 2. Modify the public policy model regarding Archaeological heritage management based on the existence of “urgencies” and “savages”. The appropriate administrations, regardless of their rank, must assume the principles of the Preventive Archaeology of Planning here discussed. These take advantage of compulsory land planning and environmental assessments in order to create Reserve Zones and Caution Areas in the cities and countryside. 3. Design a reasonable structure, agreed by different states and regions, for archaeological sites publicly accessible. Regarding these sites, in the 90s there were numerous initiatives, frequently repeated, that did not continue over time, thereby disappointing communities or groups who had put their faith in them to generate revenues. 4. Promote the need to collaborate in managing Archaeological heritage in universities and research centers, particularly in designing and putting into practice different systems to evaluate initiatives and conflict management. 5. Introduce an appropriate concept of Cultural heritage and, within it, of Archaeology and Archaeological heritage, in compulsory education.
See Also: Archaeological Heritage Values and Significance; Archaeological Sites and Archaeological Site Parks in China; Economics and Archaeological Heritage; Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management; Preventive Archaeology - Cultural Heritage and Land Planning.
References Castillo, Alicia, Querol, M. Ángeles, 2014. Archaeological dimension of world heritage: from prevention to social implications. In: Castillo, A. (Ed.), Archaeological Dimension of World Heritage. From Prevention to Social Implications. Springer, Berlin, pp. 1–11. Council of Europe, 1992. European Convention for the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage.
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Martínez-Díaz, Belén, Castillo, Alicia, 2007. Preventive archaeology in Spain. In: European Preventive Archaeology. Papers of the EPAC Meeting 2004. Council of Europe, Vilnius, pp. 187–208. Myers, David, Smith, Stacie Nicole, Ostergren, Gail. (Eds.), 2016. Consensus building, negotiation, and conflict resolution for heritage place management. Proceedings of Workshop Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute. Los Angeles, California. 1–3 December 2009. The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles. Querol, M. Ángeles, 2020. Manual de Gestión del Patrimonio Cultural, second ed. Akal, Madrid. Querol, M. Ángeles, Castillo, Alicia, 2013. Arqueología Preventiva y Patrimonio Mundial. El ejemplo español como base para el cambio en el ejercicio de la gestión arqueológica. In: Castillo (Ed.), Actas del Primer Congreso Internacional de Buenas Prácticas en Patrimonio Mundial: Arqueología. JAS Arqueología S.L.U., pp. 51–66.
Further Reading Carman, John, 2002. Archaeology & Heritage. An Introduction. Continuum, London. Harrison, Rodney, 2012. Heritage. Critical Approaches. Routledge, New York. Smith, Laurajane, Waterson, Emma, 2013. Heritage, Communities and Archaeology. Bloomsbury, London.
Preventive Archaeology - Cultural Heritage and Land Planning Laura Brum Bulantia and Camila Gianotti Garcı´ab, a Departamento Interdisciplinario de Sistemas Costeros y Marinos, Centro Universitario Regional del Este, Universidad de la República, Uruguay; and b Departamento de Sistemas Agrarios y Paisajes Culturales, Laboratorio de Arqueología del Paisaje y Patrimonio, Centro Universitario Regional del Este, Universidad de la República, Uruguay © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Origin, Development and Current Context of Preventive Archaeology and Heritage Management in Latin America Key Issues Summary and Future Directions References
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This entry provides a review of the origins of preventive archaeology. It presents the current development of commercial archaeology, and the challenges and discussions in this field. It unfolds a critical analysis of cultural resource management and land planning in the context of the polluter pays principle. It contains an overview of current trends and debates in Latin American archaeology.
Abstract Preventive archaeology has been established as one of the most important fields within archaeology, representing about 90% of activities and data production. This new professional field has fostered the overall growth of archaeology, whose opening to the markets has brought several problems and new opportunities, as discussed throughout this entry. Selected trajectories of preventive archaeology are reviewed over three decades to identify the main contributions of this field, as well as key topics of discussion and criticism. The analysis is conducted considering its development in different geographical contexts, specifically between the northern hemisphere (Europe and Anglo-Saxon North America) and Latin America.
Introduction Preventive archaeology is a field within archaeology developed to mitigate and prevent the destruction of archaeological records during territorial and economic developments. It aims to identify, locate, record, value and evaluate archaeological sites and remains, procuring their conservation and protection through methods and techniques of archaeology. Its implementation is linked to the application of the polluter pays principle, which began to prevail in environmental management in the US in the 1970s, and which subsequently transferred to Europe and materialized in the Malta or La Valetta Convention of 1992 (Demoule, 2012). Preventive archaeology operations are usually prescribed and controlled by state authorities. Since its beginnings in the late 1970s, preventive archaeology (PA) has been established as one of the most important fields within archaeology, representing about 90% of activities and data production (sites located, objects recovered) (Gnecco and Schmit Dias, 2015). Its boom, also referred to as the “gold rush” (Aitchison, 2009), is the result of the liberalization of the state and the privatization of activities linked to cultural heritage management, and the exponential growth in territorial and economic development projects. PA has emerged as a prolific field of work but also as a debate arena: one of the most heated discussions focuses on ethics as an element in tension when attempting to articulate research and conservation principles with market demands and laws of supply and demand. Its accelerated growth has posed further problems for practitioners and for cultural resource management and heritage administration. In Europe, after the 2008 crisis, several countries saw a dramatic decline in activity and employment (Schlanger y Aitchison, 2010; Parga Dans, 2019). Meanwhile, Africa lacks legislation and instruments to prevent and mitigate the impacts of an exponentially increasing number of development projects (Arazi, 2009). In Latin America, the debate points to the model of development that is being implanted on the continent, its consequences on local populations and the role of PA in land liberation which deepens the exploitation of natural resources as well as the oppression and displacement of indigenous peoples, following a colonialist model (Curtoni, 2015).
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Overview Preventive archaeology (PA) is a field of archaeology which aims to prevent and/or mitigate the impact of land development, construction and other development projects on archaeological cultural heritage. The term originated in France in the late 1970s (Demoule, 2012) and is integrated into the field of cultural resource management (CRM). It includes legal, administrative and research activities, looking to assess the impact of human works and interventions that may affect the preservation of archaeological remains. These interventions and pressures include diverse human uses and activities such as the construction of roadworks, pipelines, dams, ports, intensive agriculture, urban development, mega-mining and tourism, as well as impacts linked to climate change and coastal erosion. PA is part of a process in which archaeological research articulates with various stakeholders (both public and private) within a specific legal framework that regulates every phase of the process. Archaeological work is oriented to prevent the destruction of archaeological remains and sites through identification, location, recording, and assessment. It employs methods and techniques of archaeology to preserve and conserve archaeological records considered as finite, non-renewable resources. The word preventive emerged in substitution of others such as salvage, rescue, or emergency archaeology and, unlike these, it refers to a stage prior to the execution of the projected interventions. Depending on the region, PA is also called contract archaeology, commercial archaeology or public archaeology, while some authors suggest that the term archaeological impact assessment would be more appropriate (D’Andrea, 2013). The preventive approach applied to CRM is a process that can be traced back through the 20th century. The 1931 Athens Conference organized by the International Museum Office in the interwar period laid the foundations for international cooperation to safeguard the artistic and archaeological heritage of mankind. There was a turning point in the evolution of the preventive approach at the end of World War II along with the creation of multilateral bodies, international conventions and agreements for the protection of human heritage (Demoule, 2012),1 in particular UNESCO (United Nations for Education, Science and Culture Organization) created in 1945, the ICOM (International Council of Museums) in 1946–47, and ICOMOS (International Council of Museums and Sites) in 1965. These actions focused on post-war reconstruction and laid the foundations for a multilateral policy to repair the damage to cultural heritage resulting from war and armed conflicts. It was in this historical context that the terms salvage or archaeological rescue emerged, referring to actions of recovery and conservation of cultural heritage after the impact of war. The first world economies began to grow following the post-war reconstruction process, showing an increase in the number of development projects and consolidating welfare states. However, such economic growth took place amid the fragile equilibrium of the Cold War and within a context of growing scientific and public awareness of environmental (socio-ecological) issues (Carson, 1962). These issues became part of the global political agenda and were materialized in the form of international documents and agreements to preserve the environment (United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm 1972: Stockholm Declaration and Plan of Action for the Human Environment) as well as the world’s natural and cultural heritage (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization General Conference in Paris 1972: Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage). The promise of unlimited development and progress as a goal of humanity gradually led to the formal enunciation of the limits of the Earth and limits of development at the World Commission on Environment and Development meeting in 1983 with its report “Our Common Future” (Bruntland, 1987). The internalization of the environmental crisis in public policy design had an effect on heritage management: notions of scarcity, non-renewable resources, solidarity or sustainability, among others, reached the field of CRM (Cantar et al., 2021). The environmental management model developed in the US since the enactment of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) and National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in the late 60s went along those lines. The model establishes standards and methods (such as Environmental Impact Assessment) that were applied progressively by global institutions such as the World Bank, gaining worldwide scope (Goldman, 2005). In Europe, until the 1980s, CRM and nature conservation were generally centralized in state institutions. However, these functions gradually migrated to the private sector after the liberalization process of European countries. PA constituted one of the main strategies of the CRM liberalization model: it was based on the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) established by the OECD in the 1970s as a way of allocating costs to control pollution, and it became a global guiding principle for environmental policies. According to the PPP, the developer (promoting agent) of a project or intervention, whether public or private, should be economically responsible for the preventive measures in terms of the environmental damage resulting from such a project. With the ratification of the European Convention on the Protection of Archaeological Heritage (known as the Malta or La Valetta Convention, 1992), the EU initiated a continental process of instrumentation of this CRM model (Demoule, 2012). This model spread across the rest of the world, mainly through international funding and cooperation agencies. PA’s expansion and growth situates it as one of the main archaeological activities, accounting for almost 90% of all archaeological activity in Europe (Demoule, 2016) and Canada (Hutchings and La Salle, 2015), while it represents a growing activity in Latin America (Gnecco and Schmit Dias, 2015) and has an uneven development in Africa (Arazi, 2009). These transformations in CRM systems and the development of PA called for changes in archaeological academic training. Universities were compelled to reform their curricula in favor of a professional-technical profile to provide a labor insertion in
1 Among these multilateral agreements, in addition to the Athens Conference of 1931, there appeared: the Hague Convention (for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict) of 1954, the New Delhi Chart (Recommendations on International Principles Applicable to Archaeological Excavations) of 1956, the Venice Charter (International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites) of 1964, and the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage of 1972.
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new areas (the private sector and the world of business). Archaeology was no longer an activity which pertained exclusively to academic and management environments (e.g. universities, museums, heritage offices), but it began to integrate into the business world. These transformations have become subjects of debate and discussion while PA continues consolidating worldwide, creating new scenarios for archaeological practice and heritage management. Even though there are a number of cross-cutting issues which result from the worldwide expansion of PA, others are considered more situated and may vary according to the socio-historical trajectories and the economic and political context of each country or region. These issues can be located in the following axes: - Methodological: techniques and methods, preservation and conservation strategies. - Legal-administrative: status and ownership of archaeological remains, regulatory frameworks, control and monitoring mechanisms, protocols, guardianship, information management and archives. - Ethics: codes of ethics, professional standards, cultural rights, contact with societal groups, including ethnic groups, racial groups and traditional peoples, among others. - Information: public access to information, dissemination of results, management of files and acquisitions, data availability, publication and peer-to-peer communication. - Epistemological-ontological: mercantilization of archaeology, privatization of heritage research and CRM, colonialism and advancement of capitalism. Several other elements emerge from the debate and comprise the inability to prevent impacts in a set of interventions that escape controls, generating unsupervised destruction. Such is the case of agricultural expansion, unsupervised development projects, armed conflicts, and the systematic looting of archaeological sites (Demoule, 2016). This author points out that the increase in commercial archaeological activity hinders the elaboration of national scientific agendas with a proactive perspective on how research is conducted and how the discipline is developed and socialized.
Origin, Development and Current Context of Preventive Archaeology and Heritage Management in Latin America At the end of the Cold War, the global expansion of neoliberalism had no obstacles, especially in developing or emerging countries (Gnecco and Schmit Dias, 2015). Latin American economies, which heavily relied on other economies since colonial times, were affected after the war: declining exports, currency devaluation, and growing debt with international credit agencies (Martínez Rangel and Reyes Garmendia, 2012). The installation of dictatorial governments throughout the subcontinent since the 1970s was accompanied by liberal economic measures and some protectionist policies. The democratic governments that emerged after the 1980s inherited economies in crisis in an unfavorable international context. They had to negotiate debt with international agencies for their economic recovery. The access to credits was conditioned on the enforcement of a set of reforms determined by the Washington Consensus in 1989 (Martínez Rangel and Reyes Garmendia, 2012). Those international financial agencies have been involved in a greening process since the 1970s (as mentioned above), including an environmental dimension in their agendas and financial instruments. That strategy was developed in the context of growing public awareness of the environmental crisis and the degradation of natural resources (a crisis to which they partly contributed by promoting, until then, unlimited development) (Goldman, 2005). International funding agencies played a key role, preparing the ground for the neo-liberalization process of the weakened statesdformerly regarded as welfare statesdleft by dictatorial regimes in the region. The 1990s constituted an era of privatizations and the enforcement of management standards, including the training of administrative technicians and new legal frameworks following the environmental and development guidelines promoted by the World Bank and the IMF worldwide (Goldman, 2005). These actions drastically changed regulatory frameworks and public policies for environmental and heritage management, incorporating tools such as environmental impact assessment (EIA) and the PPP in legal instruments, which were essential to establishing PA in the region. Reviewing the origins and development of PA and CRM in South America leads inevitably to considering a decolonial perspective and doing a world-systems analysis (Mignolo, 2000). Particularly relevant to this perspective have been the historical processes of the last 200 years that have led to policies of extermination of indigenous communities, the consolidation of nation states and the historical narratives of “whitewashing”. In this process, cultural heritage has served as a device to build nation-states. The emergence of academic archaeology and an authorized heritage discourse enabled an episteme of rupture and discontinuity with the indigenous world, which was relegated to a fossilized, quasi mythical uncivilized past. The gradual introduction of all these issues on the agenda of human rights in the region also constitutes an aspect relevant to this perspective. As noted earlier, the genesis of CRM and PA in Latin America is linked to the neo-liberalization processes which took place during the 70s and the 80s, as well as to a context of military dictatorships that flogged several countries in the region. The liberalization of economies had consequences in archaeological practice, instrumentalizing the connections between archaeology and public policies of nation states, enabling large extractivist infrastructure and development projects. These projects materialized in territories inhabited by different rural and indigenous communities in countries like Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, deepening the historical process of exploitation, extractivism and dispossession that reinforced colonial relations in new projects and models, perpetuating inequalities all across the continent. The new legal instruments developed for environmental protection, land use and urban planning framed not only the region’s political agendas during the 80s and 90s but the very origins of the Latin American PA. These legal frameworks have a positivist substratum and were adapted from European normative models that hierarchized scientific knowledge and science over other
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possible ontologies inhabiting the territories (Rodriguez, 2013; Ayala, 2017). Consequently, in the Latin American context, PA and environmental and cultural resource management internalized the epistemic stance of the temporal rupture between an indigenous past, relegated to a sort of “pre-history”, and “history”, assuming that present indigenous peoples or communities had no linkages with pre-colonial times. The pre-historic, pre-Hispanic and pre-colonial categories have deep evolutionary biases, and they were institutionalized in world archaeology, circumscribing indigenous peoples to temporalities which are remote and distant from the present (Eremites, 2015), denying them the possibility of having their own “history”. This process of alienation has had epistemological consequences in the legal frameworks and the definitions of what is considered “archaeological” and how it must be managed. This epistemic and legal perspective is rooted in Latin American archaeologies and in their practice, validating scientific discourses of whitewashing, making asymmetries even more profound and condoning the abuses and omissions carried out by states and science against different ethnic and racial groups, traditional peoples, and minorities, among others. Traditionally, Latin American states have had the exclusive domain and jurisdiction over archaeological heritage, with professional archaeologists being the only ones authorized by law to deal with national heritage. This means an absolute exclusion of those who actually produced that heritage or their current descendants (Endere, 2021). Academically, this process is seen as a device for the “archaeologization” of indigenous peoples (Rodriguez, 2013). However, in the last decades, indigenous peoples have risen as new political subjects in the context of ethnic reemergence processes worldwide, particularly in Latin America (Chile, Argentina and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and Uruguay). These ethnic groups are increasingly receiving public attention as they contribute to challenging old institutionalism, resulting in some legal frameworks being reviewed (Endere, 2020). Their claims include the acknowledgment of their rights by other social actorsdbesides states and scientistsd, particularly in terms of how cultural heritage, territories and resources are used, enjoyed and controlled. These topics have delineated political and academic agendas and, to some extent, the legal and jurisprudence changes of recent years (Rodriguez, 2013; Ayala, 2017). This process takes place in a scenario of increasing mobilizations against the advance of extractivist projects, the displacement of local populations (peasants, indigenous peoples), and the faster degradation, consumption and destruction of territories and resources, which has impacted societies and ecosystems and contributed to perpetuating colonial and predatory relations and forms of production (Svampa, 2019). In this context, critical heritage studies in Latin America have become more prolific, consolidating as a relevant and productive field which has brought along new perspectives to analyze the diverse challenges to CRM in Latin American countries and other issues related to PA, global models and local consequences. This critical perspective is mainly framed within a historical critique of the colonial imprint of archaeology on the continent (Sheperd et al., 2016; Londoño, 2020) and has its roots in social archaeology (Tantalean and Aguilar, 2012). It has also been influenced by other currents of thought in Latin American critical studies: decolonization (Mignolo, 2000), feminism (Lugones, 2010) and post-development (Escobar, 2015). These critical views combine to transform how expert archaeological knowledge is constructed by science and academia and to produce knowledge which contributes to emancipating instead of oppressing peoples who have been historically colonized by the Western world. Critical heritage studies also highlight the role of PA in the regional processes of ecological and social pauperization, facing the advance of neoextractivism (Svampa, 2019),2 whose tangible consequences are severely compromising any kind of sustainability in these nations.
Key Issues A review of papers and diverse publications concerning PA over the last three decades allows us to identify several topics of discussion and to organize such discussion according to the convergence or difference of those issues, considering the factor of geographical location, specifically between the Northern hemisphere (Europe and Anglo-Saxon North America) and Latin America. Since the ratification of the Malta Convention in 1992, there has been an exponential growth of preventive archaeology in Europe. This has happened both in Western and Eastern Europe, despite the diverse socio-political and economic contexts and the different trajectories and models in terms of the role of the state in CRM (Demoule, 2012). One of the most significant achievements of this model is the incorporation of archaeology into land use and urban planning and the adoption of the PPP in heritage and environmental management. That growth had a direct impact on increasing archaeological activity, the labor market, and research activities associated with the private sector (Aitchison, 2009). This development, also referred to as “private” or “commercial archaeology”, has been subjected to criticism and comparisons from the field of academic archaeology. According to Hamilakis, criticism from academia led to division and conflicts that divert the debate and invisibilize the internal asymmetries in commercial archaeology. It also hinders the dialog between academics and professionals, as well as the possibilities of a critical-political analysis of the working system that commoditizes archaeology, which cannot be done from inside the market (Hamilakis, 2015, p. 279). Working conditions is yet another topic of debate. Some authors argue that the liberalization of archaeology entailed problems such as the instability of new labor sources and precarious working conditions (Almansa, 2020; Parga Dans and Alonso, 2020). These conditions include low salaries in general (but also compared to other professional fields), temporary or seasonal contracts,
2 “Contemporary neo-extractivism can be characterized as a development model based on the overexploitation of natural goods, which are increasingly scarce and largely non-renewable, as well as on the expansion of the frontiers of exploitation into territories previously considered unproductive from the point of view of capital” (Svampa, 2019, p. 22). It includes activities ranging from mega-mining, hydrocarbon exploitation, agribusiness, forestry, and large-scale fisheries, among others.
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schedule flexibility and high mobility requirements, all of which hinder the projection of a career and the professional growth of its practitioners (Zorzin, 2015). The consequences of archaeology opening to the market were analyzed in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, which exposed the vulnerability of the sector, its heavy dependence on macroeconomic conditions for private and public development projects, and the demand for these services (Schlanger and Aitchison, 2010; Zorzin, 2015). Gender gap issues do not abound in PA literature, which is perhaps consistent with how underdeveloped this topic is in archaeology, a historically masculinized discipline (see Gero, 1985; Mary et al., 2019). The works of Bitelli et al. (2013) show how difficult it is for women to access leading roles and to be paid accordingly in the PA sector in Italy, and Gutierrez and Alonso (2018) present the case of commercial archaeology in Madrid, with persistent asymmetries in the distribution of roles and in remunerations between men and women. The quality of research in PA is a subject of debate. Those who defend commercial archaeology claim that increasing activity has raised the standards of research and improved its outcomes, arguing that the market is willing to pay for the best quality products. Conversely, critics argue that those are naïve arguments and that the market has operated by homogenizing and standardizing products (Hamilakis, 2015), privileging price and time over quality in the context of market competition: low cost, fast results. Another key discussion is about the increasing production of archaeological data, which has grown exponentially with PA. Commercial archaeology has collected more archaeological data than ever before in the discipline, fostering public awareness and outreach, according to some authors (Demoule, 2012). Other authors criticize what is done with those data: how it is managed, where it is stored, and how its access is guaranteed. Transparency and accessibility are some of the main issues, along with standardized and updated procedures (including codes of ethics and good practices regarding data), especially referring to information accessibility or open data (D’Andrea, 2013). Vast amounts of data are said to be handled poorly or in a fragmented manner (Dapaepe and Salas, 2013), which in many cases does not translate into well-structured synthetical reports, research or analyses but instead becomes a “reactive project-by-project” accumulation of data. Others point out the lack of publishing and that unpublished data culminate in gray reports and literature of difficult access (Hamilakis, 2015). The risk of archaeological companies going bankrupt or closing emerges as another issue, which demands legal tools to secure data files and archaeological records (Olivier, 2019). Finally, the overproduction of archaeological data, as well as the reduction of budgets and public services for CRM control, exceeds the capacity to monitor PA projects and impacts quality control. The development of preventive, private and commercial archaeology has promoted professional associativity, showing an increased number of associations seeking to participate in market regulations and to negotiate collectively with clients and administrations (Demoule, 2012; Almansa, 2020). Professional associations also focus on the discussion and agreement of codes of ethics and on developing tools to improve working conditions (collective agreements, mobility, working hours, rewards and wages). Some conflicts emerge when trying to reconcile scientific research ethics and a free market (Torija, 2019). The first issue is based on the principles of conservation, the care of the common good (considering heritage as something public), and the quality of methods and techniques aiming at excellence. Conversely, free market principles prioritize economic gain, minimizing expenditures and investments to optimize profits. To some authors, these differences make research and business incompatible and create tension between their practitioners (Zorzin, 2015). Ethically speaking, there is a discussion on training demands for commercial archaeology. Labor market demands have had an impact on university curricula: some authors have pointed out that archaeology studies are becoming instrumentalized, homogenizing skills and promoting a mechanical transfer instead of a reflective, critical, explanatory type of education (Hamilakis, 2015, p. 728). On the other hand, there are those who understand that current graduate and post-graduate academic programs do not teach managerial competencies or the practical and legal aspects of CRM (Parga Dans and Alonso, 2020). The ideological dimension is yet another subject of debate. Critics of this new model argue that the development of commercial archaeology is part of privatization in a context of neo-liberalization of the discipline and of CRM, with a decreasing role of the state in controlling and managing cultural assets and common goods. There are also authors who address the proletarianization of archaeology, which is possible amid the privatization of heritage with the growing neo-liberalization of cultural heritage management policies. Archaeologies in this new scenario began to lose control and autonomy over their production, relegating archaeological labor to a technical, mechanized, quasi-Fordian operation. This affects data interpretation and analysis, which is supposed to be archaeology’s main contribution to knowledge. Consequently, archaeology is alienated (Zorzin, 2015). This commoditized archaeology has been labeled as whitewashed (King, 2009), digwashed (Greenberg, 2020), greenwashed, or ethicwashed (Zorzin, 2015). Latin American critical debates refer to PA as a functional appendix of the growing neoliberal development model based on neoextractivism in the region. We can identify different notions of heritage within PA in South America. As part of archaeological heritage management, heritage is linked to the idea of resources for development or cultural capital. Others consider heritage as a device for state control that violates the human rights of minorities (Crespo, 2020). Besides the class conflict linked to the proletarianization and pauperization of archaeological work (within the framework of private activity and the reduced role of the State), Latin American critics include other dimensions that intersect the analysis and emerging issues related to the historical relations of colonial exploitation and the extractivist model that persist in the region (de Alpoim et al., 2021). Since the 1990s, the Anglo-Saxon ethical turn reached Latin America, having an impact on the regulation and codification of archaeological practices and the establishment of duties and obligations related to the profession, colleagues, citizens, heritage, publishing, and local communities. However, the social and political interest of local communities and ethnic groups was not considered and is not sufficiently contemplated in the codes of ethics, which only declare the intention to promote positive interaction and respect for their concerns, customs, beliefs and values (Curtoni, 2015). The ethical dimension is a critical issue highlighted by PA critics (ibidem): it comprises
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the territorial disputes involving indigenous peoples and the process of violence and dispossession that underlies development projects that demand archaeological services. This takes place within a historical context where indigenous people from across the continent have fought for their human rights and to achieve social and environmental justice. In this scenario, PA often legitimizes private and state interests in disputed indigenous territories. It also promotes the dispossession, fragmentation and disappearance of cultural materialities: these are “relics” that in some way refresh the rhetoric of the disappearance of these peoples. Thus, PA itself is seen as an extractivist activity that, camouflaged in protection and preservation criteria, reproduces new forms of violence. As in Europe, the exponential growth of commercial archaeology precipitated the configuration of new professional scenarios in archaeology without having properly discussed their requirements and consequences. Some of the main issues related to a significant increase in the precarious hiring of independent archaeologists and anthropologists, the state’s appropriation of heritagization, the administrative reconfiguration of CRM, and distancing universities in producing critical knowledge on these issues (Zanettini, 2009; Jofré, 2017). In countries like Brazil, by the year 2000, PA had come to account for 95% of all archaeological authorization procedures carried out by the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (Zanettini, 2009; Tega, 2012). In this context, numerous archaeology university courses were created to meet market demands (Eremites, 2015). Another topic of discussion refers to the growing number of isolated archaeological studies as well as to lower scientific quality standards, the lack of publications and of public access to technical reports, and the production of innumerable archaeological collections which do not have a clear purpose and are difficult to preserve, among other aspects (Ayala, 2015; Eremites, 2015; Jofré, 2017). Much of PA is currently being transformed into projects of destruction and deterritorialization of archaeological materiality (Ayala, 2017), which is precisely what a PA should avoid, prevent, or mitigate. Unlike in Europe, one of the strongest criticisms among Latin American authors refers to PA as a tool for neo-extractivism, causing a sustained human rights violation of indigenous and rural communities (Crespo, 2020). PA has deepened the notion of indigenous and African-American groups as a matter which concerns exclusively the state and academia, undermining their right to self-determination, to express their opinions and to participate and decide on their territories, resources and ancestors. Although most Latin American countries ratified international declarations of human rights for indigenous peoples, some problems in their implementation persist. Even though these agreements oblige companies and states to conduct free and informed consultations with indigenous people before executing projects in their territories (Eremites, 2015; Jofré, 2017), the full exercise of their rights is not guaranteed. This represents an urgency to review how regulations on the rights of indigenous peoples are implemented (ILO Convention 169), an issue to which PA is not alien, or rather, of which it is a significant part.
Summary and Future Directions Preventive archaeology is a field that has fostered the growth of archaeology in a way no one had ever imagined. Opening archaeology to the market has created several new problems and opportunities, which have been reviewed throughout this article. The development of PA across different regions has not been homogeneous. Multiple convergences are observed, which are generally explained by their link with the global expansion of neoliberal models. However, the historical, social, and political conditions of the different continents have resulted in particularities in terms of how this professional field has developed regionally. On the one hand, PA has brought along new opportunities and growth for a profession which was previously circumscribed to the academic field: this has called for transformations in academic training, leading to growing archaeological data collection processes, a larger labor market, and increasing professional associations to influence the relationship with the market and administrations. The 2008 economic crisis was a turning point in the global perspective of PA. The reduction of commercial activity and its repercussions in the academic field were plausible, showing a qualitative and quantitative decrease in work and revealing the flaws of the model. All these transformations have confronted archaeology with new challenges and ethical, practical, and epistemological dilemmas whose consequences must be addressed: the proletarianization of archaeological work; precarious working conditions; poorer quality standards; access and management issues regarding collected data; and the instrumentalization of training to the detriment of a reflective, critical and explanatory education. On the other hand, the emergence of this new professional field in Latin America was so abrupt that the socioeconomic, political and cultural realities of the continent were not considered at the time of planning its development. The model implemented had been created for other contexts and ended up legitimizing private and state interests over indigenous territories, leading to a new form of territorial dispossession. The crisis notably exposed the vulnerability and risk to which PA is exposed, revealing various causes which were sometimes regarded as circumstantial or structural (linked to the management model in which PA is inserted), while others were seen as superstructural (ideological) causes. Different points of view and trends have been identified in terms of how to overcome the crisis. Soft positions understand that the goals of archaeology should be to conserve, protect and learn. In this way, PPP is suggested as a model of sustainable development,3 which means preventive archaeology not only does not represent a conflict but it contributes to sustainability. These positions maintain that archaeological ethics can remain separate from business ethics and from “business 3 “The polluter is paying, this is sustainable development and the archaeologists are working in the interests of the archaeological resource (and subsequently the greater public) by helping the client to minimize their actions’ impact upon the archaeology. By subscribing to shared and enforced codes of ethics, archaeologists become able to resolve these dilemmas for the common good, both of the archaeological profession and of the historic environment.” (Aitchison, 2007:121).
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trouble” by protecting archaeological resources (ibidem). It is argued that the recovery of PA depends on economic recovery, creating more and better codes of ethics and controls (such as ethics committees), making improvements in legislation and keeping a balance between conservation, protection and knowledge (Vandevelde and Pasquini, 2019). Intermediate positions demand a PA with a strong public component, bridging the gap between commercial archaeology and public archaeology (Barreiro et al., 2018). These proposals highlight community participation and the strengthening of the state’s role in management control and monitoring (CRM). In this sense, it is necessary to see archaeology once again as a social science, which requires a stronger commitment between knowledge production (science) and heritage praxis (heritagization) in a plural perspective, considering the public condition of the archaeological heritage (“public turn”) (Criado-Boado et al., 2015). Finally, harder positions demand a profound review of archaeology’s epistemological fundamentals, mainly in terms of its condition as a tool of the colonial episteme and also in its role as a facilitator of the neoliberal advance, particularly in the Global South (neo-extractivism, looting, etc.). In this direction, some currents propose a change toward an archaeology of degrowth (Zorzin, 2021) or an anti-discipline (Haber, 2013). Regardless of positions, there seems to be no doubt that archaeology has been affected by the crisis, be it economic and cyclical (Schlenger and Aitchison, 2010), structural (Zorzin, 2021), or the sum of intersecting components such as climate, race, sexual harassment, colonialism and Covid-19 (d’Alpoim Guedes et al., 2021). All of this mainly concerns PA, the branch of archaeology which is most linked to developmentalism, being the subject of proposals that demand a greater commitment from practitioners and from the discipline itself to the problematics of society and its time (Chirikure, 2021). These discussions, which affect some of the epistemological and ethical pillars of archaeology, are having direct repercussions on interpretive frameworks, on the ways of producing and reproducing knowledge, on professional training, and on the articulation with society through CRM models.
See Also: Archaeological Heritage Management; Archaeological Sites and Archaeological Site Parks in China; Heritage and Sustainability; The UNESCO 1972 Convention and Archaeology.
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Haber, Alejandro, 2013. Anatomía disciplinaria y arqueología indisciplinada. Arqueología 19 (3), 53–60. Hamilakis, Yannis, 2015. Archaeology and the logic of capital: pulling the emergency break. Int. J. Hist. Archaeol. 19 (4), 721–735. Hutchings, Richard, La Salle, Marina, 2015. Archaeology as disaster capitalism. Int. J. Hist. Archaeol. 19 (4), 699–720. Jofré, Carina, 2017. Arqueología de contrato, megaminería y patrimonialización en Argentina. In: Gnecco, Cristóbal, Schmidt Dias, Adriana (Eds.), Crítica a la razón arqueológica. Arqueología y capitalismo. Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, pp. 123–141. King, Thomas, 2009. Our unprotected heritage: whitewashing the destruction of our cultural and natural environment. Routledge, New York. Londoño, Wilhelm, 2020. La arqueología latinoamericana en la ruta de la decolonialidad. Boletín Antropológico 38 (100), 286–313. Lugones, María, 2010. Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia 25 (4), 742–759. Martínez Rangel, Rubí, Reyes Garmendia, Ernesto Soto, 2012. El Consenso de Washington: la instauración de las políticas neoliberales en América Latina. Política y cultura (37), 35–64. Mary, Laura, Pasquini, Béline, Vandevelde, Ségolène, 2019. Le sexisme en archéologie, ça n’existe pas. Can. J. Bioeth./Revue canadienne de bioéthique 2 (3), 215–242. Mignolo, Walter, 2000. La colonialidad a lo largo ya lo ancho: el hemisferio Occidental en el horizonte colonial de la modernidad. In: Lander, E. (Ed.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires, pp. 55–86. Olivier, Laurent, 2019. Cómo aprendí la ley del Mercado. In: Resco, Pablo Aparicio (Ed.), Arqueología Y Neoliberalismo. JAS Arqueología Editorial, Madrid, pp. 243–258. Parga Dans, Eva, 2019. Heritage in danger. The collapse of commercial archaeology in Spain. Archaeol. Dialogues 26 (2), 111–122. Parga Dans, Eva, Alonso González, Pablo, 2020. The unethical enterprise of the past: lessons from the collapse of archaeological heritage management in Spain. J. Bus. Ethics 172, 447–461. Rodríguez, Mariela, 2013. Cuando los muertos se vuelven objetos y las memorias bienes intangibles: Tensiones entre leyes patrimoniales y derechos de los pueblos indígenas. In: Crespo, Carolina (Ed.), Tramas de la diversidad. Patrimonio y pueblos originarios. Antropofagia, Buenos Aires, pp. 67–100. Schlanger, Nathan, Aitchison, Kenneth (Eds.), 2010. Archaeology and the Global Economic Crisis. Multiple Impacts, Possible Solutions. Culture Lab Editions, Belgium. Shepherd, Nick, Gnecco, Cristobal, Haber, Alejandro, 2016. Arqueología y decolonialidad. Ediciones del Siglo, Buenos Aires. Svampa, Maristella, 2019. Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina: conflictos socioambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias. Bielefeld University Press, Bielefeld. Tega, Gloria, 2012. Arqueologia no Brasil eo Panorama Atual: os números de 11 anos de divulgação na Folha de São Paulo. Arqueologia Pública (5), 14–27. Tantaleán, Henry, Aguilar, Miguel, 2012. La arqueología social Latinoamericana: de la teoría a la praxis. Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Bogotá. Torija, Alicia, 2019. Ni ética ni excelencia. El naufragio de la arqueología neoliberal en España. In: Resco, Pablo Aparicio (Ed.), Arqueología y neoliberalismo. JAS Arqueología Editorial, Madrid, pp. 71–84. Vandevelde, Segolène, Pasquini, Béline, 2019. A Need for Ethics in Archaeology? Can. J. Bioeth. 2 (3), 1–8. Zanettini, Paulo Eduardo, 2009. Projetar o Futuro para a Arqueologia Brasileira: um desafio de todos. Revista Americana 27, 71–87. Zorzin, Nicolas, 2015. Dystopian archaeologies: the implementation of the logic of capital in heritage management. Int. J. Hist. Archaeol. 19, 791–809. Zorzin, Nicolas, 2021. Is archaeology conceivable within the degrowth movement? Archaeol. Dialogues 28 (1), 1–16.
Heritage and Sustainability Maria Luz Enderea, Nahir Meline Cantarb, and Marı´a Laura Zulaicab, a Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (UNCPBA), Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Instituto INCUAPA (UE CONICET-UNCPBA) - PATRIMONIA, Olavarría, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and b CONICET - Instituto del Hábitat y del Ambiente, Facultad de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Diseño, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview - Historical Evolution of the Link Between Sustainability and Cultural Heritage Key Issues Incorporation of Culture Into the Sustainable Development Objectives Alternative Perspectives Concerning Sustainable Development Sustainability Assessment Methodology Sustainability Under Scrutiny Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References Relevant Websites
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The definitions of sustainability and sustainable development provide a clue to understanding ecological, social, economic and political objectives to consider in heritage management. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) were defined by the 2030 Agenda. Although none of the SDGs focuses exclusively on culture, despite efforts of international organizations to include culture as a fourth pillar, the 2030 Agenda makes several references to cultural aspects. The historical evolution of the incorporation of sustainability in cultural heritage management shows how the notion of sustainability has gained increasing importance in cultural heritage issues. Over time, the importance assigned to the different pillars of sustainability has varied, although all these pillars are present in heritage issues. Alternative perspectives concerning sustainability demonstrate the existence of emerging views and perspectives that reinterpret traditional notions of both sustainable development and sustainability. The development of sustainability assessment methodology is a crucial tool for progress toward the SDGs based on multidimensional indicators. In this framework, the adoption of sustainability indicators applicable to cultural assets may be a powerful mechanism for evaluating heritage management processes.
Abstract Ongoing territorial transformations and their socio-political impacts have become one of the main threats to cultural heritage safeguarding. As a result, sustainability has become a growing issue for cultural heritage. This entry presents an overview of the historical relationship between cultural heritage and sustainability and its current critical challenges. Sustainability occupies a leading role in international meetings and organizational agendas, while researchers are actively searching for methodologies for its implementation.
Introduction The growing territorial transformations and their impacts in the world, mainly since the beginning of the industrial revolution, are evident in many aspects, including the rapid and uncontrolled growth of cities; the deterioration and socioeconomic fragmentation of urban and rural areas; the decrease in the quality of life of local communities, and the recognition of environmental limits (ONUHABITAT, 2017). These processes have demanded the elaboration of strategies and new approaches aimed at achieving sustainable development. Although the first notions of sustainable development were outlined around the 1970s, they have evolved significantly and became powerfully relevant from 1987 onwards. At the time, sustainable development was defined as the “development that meets
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the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987:41). This definition was adopted within a report created at the United Nations’ request to establish a global agenda for change. In this sense, sustainable development supposes a gradual and direct change (Gallopín et al., 2014). However, it maintains its conceptualization of unlimited economic growth, which is, in fact, a fallacy (Rivera-Hernández et al., 2017). The limitations concerning the concept of development -understood as economic growth-can be overcome with sustainability, which focuses on a more balanced relationship between peoples and communities with their social and environmental surroundings (Gudynas, 2004). On the other hand, sustainability “is a term that denotes the capacity of a system, situation or condition to persist over time” (Gallopín et al., 2014:301). It is based on an idea and an ethic of the common good, which implies a comprehensive vision that includes not only economic factors but also moral and cultural ones. Cultural heritage does not escape from the impacts of the above-mentioned territorial transformations, currently posing one of the main threats to its safeguarding. For this reason, it is necessary to address heritage management from a sustainability perspective. It has been pointed out that the notion of sustainability is based on the recognition that natural and cultural resources are nonrenewable. Therefore, it is necessary to generate development strategies that are compatible with their long-term preservation. In this sense, the concept of sustainability is at the heart of the concept of heritage, as both incorporate the notion of intergenerational equality in managing resources (Labadi and Logan, 2016). Currently, the link between cultural heritage and the different dimensions of sustainability occupies a central place in the heritage agenda of national and international organizations as well as researchers worldwide. In order to explore the link between cultural heritage and sustainability, this entry is divided into three sections. The first describes the historical evolution of incorporating sustainability in cultural heritage and analyses the different dimensions (environmental, economic, socio-cultural and political) of sustainability and its relationship with cultural heritage. In the second, the current debates around the implementation strategies of this perspective are analyzed. Finally, in the third, emerging trends are described.
Overview - Historical Evolution of the Link Between Sustainability and Cultural Heritage The incorporation of the perspective of sustainability in cultural heritage studies has been gradual until recent times when it has become very intense. This evolution can be observed in the charters, principles and recommendations issued by specialized international organizations such as UNESCO and ICOMOS (see Cantar et al., 2021). The most outstanding are mentioned below, especially those linked to archaeological heritage. At the beginning of the 1960s, the idea of sustainable development began to be outlined in safeguarding heritage. A first landmark can be identified in the Venice Charter adopted by ICOMOS in 1964, in which development models were questioned, and conservation was seen as an alternative for protecting and safeguarding monuments and their surroundings. Although this Charter did not mention the economic, social or ecological context that affects the safeguarding of cultural assets, it highlighted the importance of the link between a monument and the place of its location (art. 6 and 7). However, Labadi and Logan (2016:3) point out that pioneering ideas on the relationship between urban heritage, development and sustainability emerged earlier and were carried out in 1915 by Patrick Geddes. For this author, “before any development could take place, the city as a whole needed to be understood through surveys and mapping of its economic, social and cultural functions” and be integrated into the urban ecosystem. He considered that local communities, and their appropriation of places, should be at the heart of urban heritage and its planning, an association set aside in the Venice Charter. In the 1970s, the unstable context was identified as a threat, especially in economic policies that adversely affected the environment and cultural heritage. The need to articulate measures that promote development based on planning and territorial ordering was raised. In this sense, the prevailing principles were not focused on stopping development but instead on reorienting it by incorporating an ecologically and environmentally balanced perspective and seeking a growth process that was more aware of the relation with the environment. This concern is reflected in the World Heritage Convention adopted by UNESCO in 1972, which states that heritage is threatened by traditional causes of deterioration but mainly by economic and social development. It proposes, among other safeguard actions, “to adopt a general policy which aims to give the cultural and natural heritage a function in the life of the community and to integrate the protection of that heritage into a comprehensive planning program” (art. 5. a). Later, in the Recommendation concerning the Safeguarding and Contemporary Role of Historic Areas by UNESCO in 1976, the growing concern for the social context and the need for community participation is evidenced. This recommendation establishes that it is “essential to maintaining appropriate existing functions” and that “these functions should answer the social, cultural and economic needs of the inhabitants without harming the specific nature of the area concerned” (IV.33). It points out that, concerning safeguard plans, the authorities should take the initiative to organize the consultation and participation of the interested population (IV.17.c), promoting the collaboration of individuals and private associations (III. 7). Toward the 1980s, the concept of sustainable development focused on revising the objectives of economic and social development around the protection of a specific territorial context. This idea was reflected in the ICOMOS Charter for the Conservation of Historic Towns and Urban Areas of 1987, which states that “the conservation of historic towns and other historic urban areas should be an integral part of coherent policies of economic and social development and of urban and regional planning at every level” (Principle 1). The Charter reinforces the importance of the participation and commitment of local inhabitants to achieve the
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conservation of their places, highlighting that “the conservation of historic towns and urban areas concerns their residents first of all” (Principle 3). In the 1990s, the concept of sustainable development was viewed from a multidimensional perspective. In this context, community participation became relevant in the sustainability-heritage relationship based on the appreciation of local identities and native populations. This idea is part of the discussion initiated with the Burra Charter adopted by ICOMOS Australia in 1979, which focused on the cultural significance of places for past, present and future generations as a critical issue to consider in heritage conservation. This trend was consolidated in the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity, which recognizes the importance of cultural diversity in evaluating heritage significance, placing the cultural context at the center of the heritage scene. The ICOMOS Charter for the Protection and Management of Archaeological Heritage elaborated in 1990 was an important milestone during this period. The Charter highlights the notion of sustainability, including various dimensions to guarantee protection and reduce environmental and cultural impacts. It also adopts a comprehensive perspective, stating that “policies for the protection of the archaeological heritage should constitute an integral component of policies relating to land use, development, and planning as well as of cultural, environmental and educational policies” (art. 2). It proposes the active participation of communities in heritage conservation plans, mainly when indigenous people are involved, which “must be based upon access to the knowledge necessary for decision-making” (art. 2). Its art. 6 introduces the political dimension of sustainability by highlighting the importance of integrating indigenous communities in heritage management. Aligned with these principles of political sustainability, which involve community participation, is also the ICOMOS Charter on the Protection and Management of Underwater Cultural Heritage (art. 14). It is only since 1999 that the relationship between sustainability and heritage became explicit in the documents produced by international organizations linked to cultural heritage, in which the exclusion of culture from the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) adopted in the year 2000 was questioned. The need to sustainably manage the relationship between heritage sites and tourism was emphasized. The 1999 ICOMOS Cultural Tourism Charter Managing Tourism at Places of Cultural Significance states that: “Tourism development and infrastructure projects should take account of the esthetic, social and cultural dimensions, natural and cultural landscapes, bio-diversity characteristics and the broader visual context of heritage places” (2.5). Community participation as an essential condition to achieve sustainability goals became a recurring theme in the documents analyzed. For example, the ICOMOS Charter on the Built Vernacular Heritage establishes that “governments and responsible authorities must recognize the right of all communities to maintain their living traditions, to protect these through all available legislative, administrative and financial means and to hand them down to future generations” (point 3). It is worth noting that, in the conception of sustainability of this charter, the bases of intragenerational and intergenerational solidarity are present while emphasizing the importance of adopting measures and practices in the interests of the communities. In 2002, the Budapest Declaration made by UNESCO in 2002 was drawn up on the 30th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention. This document became a milestone by establishing the direct link between heritage and sustainability and highlighting the need to ensure that the convention “applies to heritage in all its diversity, as an instrument for the sustainable development of all societies through dialog and mutual understanding” (point 1). Likewise, it proposes the maintenance of balance between heritage, sustainability and development, incorporating heritage into social and economic development. The 2008 ICOMOS Charter on Cultural Routes became another expression of the same trend, highlighting the importance of the routes with touristic activity and sustainable development (point 4). This charter indicates that management should be based on the understanding of the routes’ meaning, which implies a harmonious development of all the activities and transversal coordination that guarantees the conjunction of policies related to the protection, use and conservation of the land planning, sustainable development and tourism (point 5). This management should be accompanied by the stimulation of social awareness and the participation of its inhabitants (point 6). At this stage, consideration of the socio-cultural dimension of sustainability was strengthened, as it was reflected in the Xi’an Declaration on the Conservation of the Setting of Heritage Structures, Sites and Areas adopted by ICOMOS in 2005. This document prescribes that planning instruments and practices for conservation and sustainable management of the environment must be adapted to local and cultural particularities. Likewise, it recommends that “qualitative and quantifiable indicators should be developed to assess the contribution of the setting to the significance of a heritage structure, site or area” (point 11). Such indicators should consider the material aspects and other dimensions of an economic, social and cultural nature (point 5). In 2008, the ICOMOS Charter on the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites expressed similar principles by promoting the public’s physical and intellectual access, participation and social inclusion through interpretations appropriate to the context in which the cultural assets are inserted. The importance of participation as part of socio-cultural sustainability was also highlighted in the UNESCO conventions. Indeed, the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003 commits each State Party to ensure the broadest possible participation of communities, groups and, where appropriate, individuals that create, maintain and transmit such heritage and to involve them actively in their management (art. 15). Similarly, the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions of 2005 emphasizes the need to incorporate culture as a strategic element in development policies in the fight against poverty and in achieving sustainability. This document, which is part of the criticism of the exclusion of culture in the MDGs, highlights that “protection, promotion and maintenance of cultural diversity are an essential requirement for sustainable development for the benefit of present and future generations” (Principle 6).
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In the 2010s, environmental problems of international scope and their links with safeguarding heritage were explicitly recognized. Culture began to be valued as an engine of sustainable development. From then on, regional and international meetings in which the heritage-sustainability binomial was addressed multiplied. This heritage-sustainability articulation was treated both in the ICOMOS and UNESCO documents. Thus, the concept of sustainability was internalized in heritage management by addressing it from a comprehensive perspective. The cultural dimension of sustainability acquired a preponderant role as a means to achieve sustainable development goals, while environmental concerns on a global scale were incorporated into heritage debates. In 2011, The Paris Declaration on heritage as a driver of development was drawn up by ICOMOS, whose central axis was the inclusion of culture in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This declaration proposes to measure the effects of globalization on communities and heritage and to identify the actions necessary to protect heritage along with its economic, social and cultural values for the benefit of communities and visitors. Starting from considering heritage as a transcendental resource, although fragile and non-renewable (as indicated in the Charter for the Protection and Management of the Archaeological Heritage of 1990), the challenge of positioning culture as a critical pillar of sustainable development is acknowledged. Along the same lines, the Valletta Principles for the Safeguarding and Management of Historic Cities, Towns and Urban Areas adopted by ICOMOS in 2011 and the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape stand out with their aim of achieving overall sustainable development. In 2012, the 40th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention meeting was held in Kyoto to address the theme “World Heritage and Sustainable Development: the role of local communities”. The concept of heritage was re-assumed as fundamental to sustainable development since it results from the dynamics and continuous interaction between communities and their environment. In this regard, the document states that “only through strengthened relationships between people and heritage, based on respect for cultural and biological diversity as a whole, integrating both tangible and intangible aspects and geared toward sustainable development, will the ’future we want’ become attainable”. For this purpose, the need for a multidisciplinary approach to heritage conservation, integrating the social, economic and environmental dimensions, with particular attention to vulnerable groups, was recommended. In line with the recognition of the environmental problems facing mankind, the Hangzhou Declaration Placing Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development Policies of 2013 alleges that “in the face of mounting challenges such as population growth, urbanization, environmental degradation, disasters, climate change, increasing inequalities and persisting poverty, there is an urgent need for new approaches, to be defined and measured in a way which accounts for the broader picture of human progress and which emphasize harmony among peoples and between humans and nature, equity, dignity, well-being and sustainability.” From this perspective, the Declaration confirms (a) the role played by culture as a system of values and as a resource and engine of sustainable development; (b) the need to learn from the experiences of previous generations; (c) recognition of culture as part of common goods, as well as a source of creativity, and (d) the contribution of culture as the capital of knowledge and a sector of activity for inclusive social, cultural and economic development. It also recognizes the non-existence of a single solution for all cases. It advocates an open, changing conception of culture framed within an approach based on rights and respect for diversity since different cultural perspectives will lead to different development paths. In light of this, the Declaration recommended that a specific goal focused on culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development be included as part of the United Nations (UN) development program after 2015. Said goal should refer to heritage, diversity, creativity and the transmission of knowledge and contain objectives and indicators that relate culture to all dimensions of sustainable development. Finally, starting in 2015, a new stage began, characterized by an even closer link between sustainability and heritage. Policies, objectives and goals were redefined based on the incorporation of culture in the international agenda within the framework of the SDOs, as a result of multiple regional and international meetings. In this context, the 2014 ICOMOS Declaration of the principles and recommendations on the value of cultural heritage and landscapes for promoting peaceful and democratic societies, also known as the Florence Declaration, seeks to promote harmonious and intercultural sustainable development with the ability to place people at the center of the cultural debate and of expressing diversity through heritage and landscape values. Faced with the need to implement good practices in heritage management that contribute to social welfare, based on measurable evidence, the experts who attended the NARA þ 20 meeting organized by ICOMOS Japan in 2014 identified five priority areas of action, with the fifth being the role of cultural heritage in sustainable development. The 2030 Agenda approved by the UN in 2015 opened new channels to incorporate culture in the social and economic inclusion strategies of the States, as well as in environmental sustainability policies, strengthening the role of culture as a transversal and fundamental resource and a tool to achieve the transformative ideal (UNESCO, 2018). Within this framework, UNESCO increased the inclusion of the notion of sustainable development in guidelines, policies and strategies. Currently, sustainability is approached from different angles and integrated into different pillars, although a consensus has not yet been reached on the number and type of these pillars. The 1992 Earth Summit adopted three pillars: economic, social and environmental. The peace and security pillars were recently added (Labadi, 2017). Also, as mentioned, international organizations have been trying to introduce culture as another pillar. The identified pillars are in continuous dialectical tension, influenced by the importance assigned by different philosophical perspectives concerning each component (García Fernández and Vaca García, 2018). The ecological or environmental pillar is linked with the preservation of the integrity of natural processes and biodiversity and the access and use of natural resources (Guimarães, 2003). In addition, unlike other pillars with more significant repercussions at the local level, the ecological pillar has had more impact at the international level because environmental problems influence all ecosystems (Guimarães, 2003). Regarding cultural heritage, this pillar is usually studied regarding its direct impacts (e.g.,
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modifications in materials, climatic events) and indirect impacts (e.g., events that generate the displacement of communities and changes in ancestral activities) (Shirvani Dastgerd et al., 2019). The economic pillar refers to economic growth to improve people’s quality of life. For cultural heritage, the investments destined for the protection of heritage and the generation of surplus value have been analyzed, stimulating economic development due to the value consumers assign to the heritage processes (Throsby, 2002; Licciardi and Amirtahmasebi, 2012). The consensus among researchers breaks down when the social, political and cultural pillars are analyzed. This conceptual vagueness depends on how culture is perceived; it is considered a factor that cuts across all pillars or as an independent pillar. The social pillar is linked to better conditions of human well-being and quality of life, including access to health and education, reduction of economic inequalities, justice, gender equality and a sense of place, among others. Some authors also include participation among the critical dimensions of the social pillar (Guimarães, 2003; García and Priotto, 2008; Axelsson et al., 2013; Ribeiro da Costa, 2018; Petti et al., 2020). The political pillar is related to democratization processes and other actions, such as strengthening social and community organizations, distributing information, and increasing participation in decision-making (Guimarães, 2003; García and Priotto, 2008). Finally, the cultural pillar refers to the conservation of the system of values, practices and symbols of identity, considering its evolution and permanent updating, diversity, creativity and innovation (Guimarães, 2003; García and Priotto, 2008; Molina Neira, 2018; Ribeiro da Costa, 2018). It has been pointed out that this pillar “links past and present in the artificial and natural physical space, generating a dynamic that characterizes the solution of problems, ways of life, art, knowledge, tangible and intangible heritage, and especially the identity that they form altogether (which is) a legacy that is expected to reach the future” (Molina Neira, 2018:6). Despite the diversity of classifications, it is worth noting that all of them operate in a complementary and interrelated way.
Key Issues Now that the perspective of sustainability has been introduced in understanding cultural heritage and its multiple pillars have been analyzed, the main issues surrounding this relationship are described in this section.
Incorporation of Culture Into the Sustainable Development Objectives In 2015, the 2030 Agenda was drafted, containing 17 goals and 169 targets to reduce poverty and advance health and wellbeing for mankind by 2030. Although none of the SDGs focuses exclusively on culture, despite efforts of international organizations to include culture as a fourth pillar (as previously mentioned), the 2030 Agenda includes several references to cultural aspects. The most direct one is SDO 11, “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, whose aim (target 11.4) is to “strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage”. According to the purpose of this target, the preservation of cultural heritage should be considered a priority topic in public policy management. In this context, evaluating cultural heritage management is a critical issue in its sustainability. Nevertheless, there are two primary debates surrounding this point. On the one hand, the need to develop a common framework of indexes and indicators, their respective methodologies and the parameters for data collection (Petti et al., 2020). On the other hand, the SDOs have been criticized as they establish quantitative targets to be applied at a national level that do not always reflect the realities of all territories. Furthermore, culture in general and cultural heritage in particular is integrated into goal 4.7, which seeks to ensure that all students acquire the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to promote sustainable development through education for the appreciation of cultural diversity and the contribution of culture to sustainable development.1 Cultural heritage is also considered in: (a) target 8.3 concerning the promotion of development-oriented policies that support productive activities, the creation of decent jobs, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro, small and mediumsized enterprises, including through access to financial services; (b) target 8.8 that seeks to protect labor rights and promote a safe and secure work environment for all workers, including migrants, in particular women migrants and those in precarious employment, and (c) target 12.b oriented to develop and apply instruments to monitor the effects on sustainable development to achieve sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products.
Alternative Perspectives Concerning Sustainable Development As a result of the criticism concerning developmental extractive models, new views and philosophical perspectives have emerged, mainly from Latin America, that reinterpret both sustainable development and sustainability. In Ecuador and Bolivia, the Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir (BV) and the Suma Qamaña or Vivir Bien (VB) - translated as Good Livinghave emerged as alternative philosophies to the hegemonic model by promoting sustainability in the relationship of society with nature, seeking a new development model (Lajo, 2010). In its first formal expressions, the BV or VB crystallized in the new political constitutions of Ecuador (approved in 2008) and Bolivia (approved in 2009). These amendments meant a substantial change in 1 In this context, a declaration between UNESCO and the UNWTO called the Muscat Declaration on Tourism and Culture “Promoting sustainable development” was signed in 2017.
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legislation due to new political conditions, active citizen movements and the growing indigenous role (Gudynas, 2011). Buen Vivir has been declared as Latin American sustainability since it pursues the same socio-cultural purposes as sustainability (CEPAL-FILAC, 2020). Álvarez González (2013) highlights that Sumak Kawsay or BV is a new paradigm confronting neo-colonial development. This concept can be understood “as a platform, a common space where different ontologies can coexist and from where to build an interculturality that aims to generate alternatives to development” (Endere and Zulaica, 2015:265). Its strength lies in the fact that it emerged from the rereading of the cosmology of the ancestral peoples. It takes into account the ethical principles of the ancient Andean culture as well as the contemporary contributions of certain critical intellectual perspectives (Vanhulst and Beiling, 2012). Likewise, Gudynas (2011) highlights that Buen Vivir is a dynamic concept under construction. Thus, the Buen Vivir approach must adapt to the environmental and socio-cultural particularities of different contexts. The notion of Buen Vivir had a significant impact on the development of public policies in some Latin American countries as an alternative to the traditional idea of development that articulates politics, economy, social issues, culture, and environment (Manosalvas, 2014). However, criticism has also been expressed concerning BV (Escobar, 2011; Stefanoni, 2011; Sánchez Parga, 2014). Critics focused mainly on the absence of operational criteria to define the specific practices that could be identified and promoted as genuine examples of it. The lack of criteria can lead to a misunderstood belief that any Andean tradition manifesting as BV practices must be maintained and respected without delving into the sustainability of the individual or collective well-being. It should be noted that the Buen Vivir paradigm implies profound changes in the conception of development. These changes go beyond corrections, adjustments, or proposing alternatives, as is the case of sustainable development, which advances the concept of economic development but does not incorporate profound changes in the way of seeing reality (Gudynas, 2011). The Buen Vivir approach does not debate the search for sustainability but redefines it from the voice of native peoples. Thus, far from postulating “no development”, it provides a different vision of the economy, politics, social relations and the preservation of life on the planet, and promotes the community and sustainable search for collective happiness and an improvement of quality of lifebased on values. We could state that “the principles of ’Buen Vivir’ became part of a broad spectrum of positions that refer to the discourse of sustainable development” (CELAC-FILAC, 2020:25) and postulate sustainability in its multiple dimensions.
Sustainability Assessment Methodology Sustainability assessment is increasingly recognized as an essential tool for progress toward the SDGs. Among the main applications of this assessment, Dizdaroglu (2015) highlights (1) its contribution to strategic planning and decision-making for governments, international and non-governmental organizations; (2) the information provided to analyze, evaluate and monitor impacts; (3) the ease of communicating aspects concerning sustainability; (4) the ability to raise awareness of sustainable development issues. Mori and Christodoulou (2012) mentioned that the main objective of sustainability assessment is to provide decision-makers with an assessment of global and local systems that express the nature and social integration in the short and long term to define actions in order to achieve a sustainable society. In this sense, various tools to assess sustainability, including indicators and indices, play a crucial role in diagnosing progress toward sustainable development. The efforts of national and international organizations to develop models of indicators and indices to assess and measure the dimensions of sustainable development received a significant boost after the adoption of Agenda 21 at the Earth Summit in 1992. Chapter 40 of this Agenda specifically requests countries and international governmental and non-governmental organizations to adopt sustainability indicators applicable to different areas and territorial scales. From the operational point of view, an indicator is a variable that describes the characteristics of the state of a system through observed or estimated data. An index is a quantitative aggregation of many indicators that provides a simplified, coherent and multidimensional view of a system (Mayer, 2008). In conceptual terms, the indicators can help learn, understand and structure the definition of policies and the interpretation of trends to find solutions to critical problems that affect sustainability. Traditionally, sustainability indicators are divided into two opposing groups: those focused on a “technical” or “expert-oriented” approach and those that take a “participatory” or “citizen-oriented” approach (Holden, 2013). However, several authors (Reed et al., 2006; Rametsteiner et al., 2011) have recently argued for the convergence of these two approaches. In this context, selecting relevant indicators from different approaches is essential to monitor the implementation of sustainability policies linked to cultural heritage and provide the necessary feedback to achieve sustainable development objectives. In these two-way relationships, heritage can also be considered an instrument or “engine” to achieve sustainable development. Managing cultural heritage can guide decisions toward sustainable practices based on integrating technical approaches but also in a participatory way. In this sense, it is the communities themselves who define sustainability objectives. Therefore, they should be included in the evaluation processes, participating in developing criteria, variables and indicators to guarantee continuity.
Sustainability Under Scrutiny One of the biggest criticisms of the concept of sustainability is its theoretical vagueness. In addition, from a factual point of view, many “green” policies are often applied under the sustainability slogan. In reality, some of the policies only propose small changes without questioning the production and consumption system, which is unsustainable for society and the environment (Gallopín et al., 2014:300).
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In direct reference to the cultural heritage field, the consolidated discourse on the importance of sustainability that emerges from the above documents has not received equivalent attention in management practice. In this regard, Labadi and Logan (2016) consider that none of the proposed activities and strategies was accompanied by substantial efforts to transform the World Heritage Convention into a tool for sustainable development (see also Ripp and Rodwell, 2015).
Summary and Future Directions As the concept of heritage has evolved from the traditional idea of a monument to a comprehensive vision of the cultural landscape, the search for sustainability must be oriented toward proposals to address the threats it faces. This vision implies adopting a broad perspective that considers multiple dimensions of sustainability (Cantar and Endere, 2019), that is, not only the environmental and economic aspects but also the political and sociocultural ones (Petti et al., 2020). The resources crisis generated by the war in Eastern Europe in 2022 highlights once again the fragility of alternative production processes aimed at sustainable development. In this framework, more significant challenges are presented for redefining the SDG goals and, in this context, those linked to culture and cultural heritage. On the other hand, climate change processes are generating growing impacts on heritage conservation, particularly for archaeological assets located in vulnerable areas. Another no less important issue is the role of communities in decision-making processes. Although depending on the circumstances in each part of the world, the participation of citizens and the empowerment of previously disenfranchized communities is frequently recommended, even though its implementation still represents a significant challenge. All these issues mean that the idea of sustainability -in its different dimensions-outlined from theoretical perspectives can only be partially achieved in practice since its accomplishment is conditioned upon multiple contextual circumstances. In this framework, some emerging trends and challenges can be identified. First is the need to enhance the integration of cultural heritage into the SDGs agenda. Second, considering that the SDGs are oriented to large-scale goals, it is important for targets and methodologies to be adapted in order to operate at a local scale. The third is the need to develop methodologies to build reliable quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate the sustainability of cultural heritage. Concerning the first challenge, governmental agencies must make significant efforts to integrate heritage policies into SDGs targets. The possible levels or degrees of sustainability must be analyzed in a spatial and temporal context in which the interactions between human and environmental systems have to be defined (Dizdaroglu, 2015). In this sense, “it is not possible to rely on a single set of universally valid rules, but rather there is a need to put forward choices suited to each particular circumstance and context” (Gallopín et al., 2014:300). The building of indices and indicators has been proposed as an effective tool for evaluating and monitoring the sustainability of governmental policies at different territorial scales. These tools allow the identification of difficulties and promote lines of action based on the systematic information obtained, which is helpful for decision-making and management processes as well as for analyzing the progress of public policies through time (Quiroga Martínez, 2007; UNESCO, 2014; Labadi et al., 2021). Experience has demonstrated that current development policies are not sustainable since their grave consequences are evident and threaten the planet. The need to search for alternative proposals is crucial, and there is an urgent need for comprehensive answers. At the beginning of the twentieth-century cultural heritage had to be protected from urban development, natural resources exploitation and armed conflicts. Nowadays, climate change has been added to this complex list. However, unlike in the last century, there has been a rich theoretical development and extensive international experience dealing with heritage safeguarding. Hopefully, this will contribute to finding ways to face current challenges.
Acknowledgments This paper is the result of research conducted within the framework of Program PATRIMONIA, UE INCUAPA CONICET-UNICEN. Research Funding was provided by CONICET (PIP Project 736/2021).
See Also: Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Archaeology; Economics and Archaeological Heritage; Funding in Archaeology: Public, Private and InBetween; Preventive Archaeology - Cultural Heritage and Land Planning.
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Dizdaroglu, Didem, 2015. Developing micro-level urban ecosystem indicators for sustainability assessment. Environ. Impact Assess. Rev. 54, 119–124. Endere, Maria Luz, Zulaica, Maria Laura, 2015. Sustentabilidad socio-cultural y buen vivir en sitios patrimoniales: evaluación del caso Agua Blanca, Ecuador. Ambiente Sociedade 18, 265–290. Escobar, Arturo, 2011. ¿Pachamámicos versus modérnicos? Tabula Rasa 15, 265–273. Gallopín, Gilberto, Jiménez Herrero, Luis, M., Rocuts, Asthriessl, 2014. Conceptual frameworks and visual interpretations of sustainability. Int. J. Sustain. Dev. 17, 298–326. García, Daniela, Priotto, Guillermo, 2008. La sustentabilidad como discurso ideológico. Secretaría de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sustentable, Buenos Aires. García Fernández, Estrellita, Vaca García, Agustín, 2018. De cultura, modernidad y sostenibilidad. In: García, Fernández, Estrellita, García, Vaca, Agustín (Eds.), Sostenibilidad ¿Un extraño a la modernidad? Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, pp. 5–19. Gudynas, Eduardo, 2004. Ecología, economía y ética del Desarrollo Sustentable. Coscoroba Ediciones, Montevideo. Gudynas, Eduardo, 2011. Buen vivir: Germinando alternativas al desarrollo. América Latina en Movimiento 462, 1–20. Guimarães, Roberto, 2003. Tierra de sombras: desafíos de la sustentabilidad y del desarrollo territorial y local ante la globalización corporativa. CEPAL, Santiago de Chile. Holden, Meg, 2013. Sustainability indicator systems within urban governance: usability analysis of sustainability indicator systems as boundary objects. Ecol. Indicat. 32, 89–96. Labadi, Sophia, 2017. World heritage and sustainable development: international discourses and local impacts. In: Gould, Peter G., Pyburn, K. Anne (Eds.), Collision or Collaboration: Archaeology Encounters Economic Development. Springer, Cham, pp. 45–60. Labadi, Sophia, Logan, Williams, 2016. Approaches to urban heritage, development and sustainability. In: Labadi, Sophia, Logan, William (Eds.), Urban Heritage, Development and Sustainability. Routledge, London and New York, pp. 1–20. Labadi, Sophia, Giliberto, Francesca, Rosetti, Ilaria, Shethabi, Linda, Yildirim, Ege, 2021. Heritage and the Sustainable Development Goals: Policy Guidelines for Heritage and Development Actors. ICOMOS, Paris. Lajo, Javier, 2010. Sumaq kawsay-ninchik o Nuestro vivir bien. Revista de la Integración, Políticas culturales en la Región Andina 5, 112–125. Licciardi, Guido, Amirtahmasebi, Rana, 2012. The Economics of Uniqueness: Investing in Historic City Cores and Cultural Heritage Assets for Sustainable Development. World Bank, Washington. Manosalvas, Margarita, 2014. Buen vivir o sumak kawsay: en busca de nuevos referenciales para la acción pública en Ecuador. Íconos. Rev. Cien. Soc. 18, 101–121. Mayer, Audrey L., 2008. Strengths and weaknesses of common sustainability indices for multidimensional systems. Environ. Int. 34, 277–291. Molina Neira, Bárbara A., 2018. La incorporación de la cultura y el patrimonio en el Desarrollo sostenible: desafíos y posibilidades. Humanidades 8, 51–82. Mori, Koichiro, Christodoulou, Aris, 2012. Review of sustainability indices and indicators: towards a new City Sustainability Index (CSI). Environ. Impact Assess. Rev. 32, 94–106. ONU HABITAT, 2017. Nueva Agenda Urbana. UN, Washington. Petti, Luigi, Trillo, Claudia, Ncube Makore, Busisiwe, 2020. Cultural heritage and sustainable development targets: a possible harmonization? Insights from the European perspective. Sustainability 12, 1–24. Quiroga Martínez, Rayén, 2007. Indicadores de sostenibilidad ambiental y de desarrollo sostenible: avances y perspectivas para América Latina y el Caribe. CEPAL, Santiago de Chile. Rametsteiner, Ewald, Pülzl, Helga, Alkan-Olsson, Johanna, Frederiksen, Pia, 2011. Sustainability indicator developmentdscience or political negotiation? Ecol. Indicat. 11, 61–70. Reed, Mark S., Fraser, Evan D.G., Dougill, Andrew J., 2006. An adaptive learning process for developing and applying sustainability indicators with local communities. Ecol. Econ. 59, 406–418. Ribeiro da Costa, Francisco A., 2018. La sostenibilidad del carácter cultural de una comunidad. Criterios de diseño urbano. In: García Fernández, Estrellita, García Vaca, Agustín (Eds.), Sostenibilidad ¿Un extraño a la modernidad? Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, pp. 138–169. Ripp, Matthias, Rodwell, Dennis, 2015. La geografía del patrimonio urbano. El entorno histórico: política y práctica 6, 240–276. Rivera-Hernández, Jaime E., Blanco Orozco, Napoleón V., Alcántara-Salinas, Graciela, Houbron, Erik P., Pérez-Sato, Juan A., 2017. ¿Desarrollo sostenible o sustentable? La controversia de un concepto. Posgrado y Sociedad 15, 57–67. Sánchez Parga, José, 2014. Alternativas virtuales vs cambios reales. Derechos de la Naturaleza, Buen Vivir, Economía Solidaria. Editorial CAAP, Quito. Shirvani Dastgerd, Ahmadreza, Sargolini, Massimo, Pierantoni, Ilenia, 2019. Climate change challenges to existing cultural heritage policy. Sustainability 11, 5227. Stefanoni, Pablo, 2011. ¿A dónde nos lleva el pachamamismo? Indianismo y pachamamismo. Tabula Rasa 15, 261–264. Throsby, David, 2002. Cultural capital and sustainability concepts in the economics of cultural heritage. In: de la Torre, Marta (Ed.), Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage: Research Report. The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, pp. 109–117. UNESCO, 2014. Indicadores UNESCO de cultura para el desarrollo. Manual Metodológico. UNESCO, París. UNESCO, 2018. La cultura para la Agenda 2030. UNESCO, Paris. Vanhulst, Julien, Beling, Adrian E., 2012. El discurso del buen vivir: sustentabilidad “made in Latinoamérica”. Nadir 4, 1–11. WCED, 1987. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future. UN, Washington.
Relevant Websites ICOMOS Charters Adopted by the General Assembly: www.icomos.org/en/resources/charters-and-texts. SDGs 2030: https://sdgs.un.org/goals. UNESCO Legal Instruments: http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID¼13649&URL_DO¼DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION¼-471.html.
Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management Manuel de la Calle Vaquero and Maria Garcı´a-Hernandez, Department of Geography, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Cultural Tourism, Heritage Tourism and Archaeological Tourism Key Issues Heritagization and Touristization Processes Visitor Management Summary and Future Directions Emerging Research and Management Trends Conclusions References
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To introduce a series of primary and commonly managed concepts used in tourism studies such us tourist destination, tourist attractions, types of tourism, tourist motivations, etc. To reflect on the significance and scope of phenomena such as cultural tourism, heritage tourism and archaeological tourism. To differentiate levels of cultural motivation and depth in the heritage experience within the tourist visit to the heritage sites. To present the objectives and basic instruments that exist for tourism planning and the management of heritage sites. To summarize the type of interventions carried out on the remnants of the past within a context of increasing heritagization and touristization. To contemplate the current lines of research, which form part of the medium-term research agenda. To provide a series of references in the subject area, drawn from academic studies and the international tourism and/or heritage organizations.
Abstract Heritage tourism consists of visits to places that embody the past or/and to places related to intangible heritage manifestations. It forms part of cultural tourism and includes more specific types of tourism, such as archaeological tourism or archaeotourism. It is a very popular tourist activity among both tourists who are genuinely interested in culture and also those who seek a more superficial experience. Currently, one of the principal tasks of heritage management is to adapt the sites for public visits and to ensure the conditions necessary for an optimum tourist-heritage experience. This management faces different problems depending on the site’s attractiveness to tourists, with some heritage sites becoming icons of mass cultural tourism.
Introduction Tourism is one of the phenomena that define our times. It has become a right and every year a growing number of people temporarily migrate during their holiday periods. The tourism industry generates hundreds of thousands of jobs distributed among the accommodation, transport, restaurant and catering sectors and a wide range of supporting activities. Local communities and countries compete to become successful tourist destinations, associating tourism growth with socioeconomic development. Historical heritage is of vital importance in contemporary tourism. Every year, in their trips, millions of people visit places they associate with the past. These can be humble cave shelters, colossal pyramids, small rural settlements or magnificent historical cities. Movable heritage may be contemplated in situ or in museums that store collections of varying importance. Intangible heritage can be contemplated, but it is also possible to make the visit more participative and even a more profound personal experience. Broadly speaking, heritage tourism is associated with visiting places of the past. Beyond the in situ contact with the manifestations of this past, there may be different levels of cultural motivation for the trips. The visit can provide different levels of depth to the heritage
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experience. In any case, the visit takes place within a recreational context, which is the reason why most tourists visit the heritage sites. Archaeological tourism or archaeotourism is a specific type of heritage tourism. It is principally focused on the visit to archaeological sites and museums, although it contemplates other manifestations depending on the archaeological practice of each country. The adaptation of these places for visits from the public constitutes an important component of heritage management, although only a small part of the archaeological heritage attracts tourists. Exceptionally, the arrival of visitors takes on the size and significance of mass tourism, with problems of overtourism, which can threaten the preservation of the archaeological sites. In order to address these aspects, this encyclopedia entry is organized into five sections. This first section introduces the theme. The next section reflects on the concepts of cultural tourism, heritage tourism and archaeological tourism. The third section addresses the adaptation of the archaeological heritage sites for visits by the public, with particular reference to the management of visitor flows. The fourth section introduces the topics on which current research in the tourism and heritage field is focused. Finally, some conclusions are presented.
Overview Cultural Tourism, Heritage Tourism and Archaeological Tourism Many of the visitors to archaeological heritage sites do not live in the immediate environment of these sites. Therefore, these visits constitute cultural tourism, a kind of tourism that includes all of the displacements related in one way or another to culture. According to a definition adopted by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO 2017), cultural tourism implies “a type of tourism activity in which the visitor’s essential motivation is to learn, discover, experience and consume the tangible and intangible cultural attractions/products in a tourism destination. These attractions/products relate to a set of distinctive material, intellectual, spiritual and emotional features of a society that encompasses arts and architecture, historical and cultural heritage, culinary heritage, literature, music, creative industries and the living cultures with their lifestyles, value systems, beliefs and traditions”. This definition is recent, as it was officially adopted in the 22nd session of the UMWTO General Assembly and is the result of decades of reflection from different disciplinary fields (anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, cultural studies and also archaeology). In fact, there is a rich debate on the concept, significance and scope of cultural tourism which is still inconclusive (see Hughes, 1996; du Cros and McKercher, 2020; Richards, 1996, 2003). Tourism is, above all, a type of trip or a displacement of people who spend a certain amount of time in a place other than their usual environment. This place is the tourist destination, a complex geographical space that implies a grouping of resources, services and products, and activities and experiences. The destination functions on different scales and many agents operate within it. It also has an immaterial dimension, with an image and identity based on its principal territorial characteristics. The central component of the destinations is the tourism resources, which are transformed into attractions and integrated into the tourism products. There are different types of resources, with the cultural manifestations having particular prominence (Jansen-Verbeke et al., 2008). Three levels can be differentiated by the importance of these manifestations within the tourist attraction of the destination: culture as the principal component of the attraction, culture as a complementary attraction (on the same level as other factors of attraction) and culture as a secondary attraction. This importance is derived both from the capacity and/or uniqueness of the culture of the place and the existence of other attractions within the destination (natural areas, beaches, etc.). Furthermore, there are many destinations with no relevant cultural attractions. Culture as an object of tourism interest takes many forms, enabling us to differentiate between different types of cultural tourism. In a first approach, we can distinguish between arts tourism, heritage tourism and place-specific tourism (Ashworth, 1995). Arts tourism is related to contemporary cultural production such as the performing and visual arts, contemporary architecture, literature, etc. It also includes culture associated with the creative industries (fashion design, graphic design, film, media and entertainment, etc.). Heritage tourism is based on cultural heritage related to artifacts of the past. Place-specific tourism implies an approach to culture such as the set of values, attitudes and behavior of a community. This idea is based on a type of tourist displacement in which the attraction factor is the specific identity of each place, that is, a defined atmosphere in terms of lifestyle. In turn, the arts and historical heritage collaborate in the formation of this identity. In some sense, it may correspond to the more general formulas of urban tourism, rural tourism and community tourism. In a more detailed approach, each cultural manifestation can underpin the development of a specific type of tourism; creative tourism, culinary (or gastronomic) tourism, ethnotourism, festival tourism, film tourism, language/idiomatic tourism, music tourism, street art tourism, etc. The boundaries between these tourism types are very blurred. In some cases, they respond to marketing strategies to generate products with defined profiles. In others, they respond to disciplinary interests to defend a specific field of study. Heritage tourism forms part of the traditional nucleus of cultural tourism. It is one of the oldest and most popular forms of tourism and is based on the use of either tangible or intangible historical and heritage resources; objects, places, customs, events, characters, etc. As an activity, it is essentially associated with visiting relevant heritage sites. For a long time, these visits were concentrated on iconic, constructed and tangible elements that alluded to a glorious past: temples, castles, palaces, historic centers, etc. The branding of cultural heritage with national and international trademarks such as UNESCO World Heritage has contributed appreciably to lopsided measures of heritage tourism and its over-emphasis on iconic and exceptional places (Timothy, 2018). More recently, with the extension of the heritage corpus, the visits also include manifestations of industrial heritage, the vernacular heritage of ordinary people or intangible heritage.
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As a field of academic reflection, the research on heritage tourism is fairly recent. The first studies were carried out in the 1980s and the academic production increased significantly in the 1990s, when the first relevant reference works were published (Prentice, 1993; Boniface and Fowler, 1993, etc.). During these years, a descriptive approach was predominant, based on case studies. As indicated by Timothy (2018, p. 178), “from the supply perspective, researchers spent much effort defining heritage resources, their scales, locations and market reach, and identifying simplistic typologies”. The research on demand has been limited to describing demographic profiles, behaviors, satisfaction, expenditures and intent to return. As part of a natural maturing process, from the turn of the century more attention has been given to conceptual and theoretical issues. The academic production in these topics has grown significantly with a considerable increase in manuals (Timothy and Boyd, 2003; Timothy, 2011; etc.) and compendiums (Alvarez et al., 2016; Arnold et al., 2014; etc.) and contributions in scientific journals in the fields of heritage, tourism, urban planning, etc. A good indicator of the maturity reached by these studies is the publication from 2006 of the Journal of Heritage Tourism, with special issues on topics such as dark tourism, indigenous heritage, authenticity, urban heritage, technology and digital experiences, climate change or heritage cuisines, always in relation to tourism. Archaeological tourism or archaeotourism is a type of heritage tourism based on visits to places of archaeological heritage. The boundaries of this heritage are imprecise. In our case we have opted for a limited approach, focused on visits to archaeological sites and museums. Visiting places with remnants of the past was a feature of the beginnings of tourism, when travelers of the Grand Tour visited the ruins of Italy, Greece and Egypt. As well as visiting the sites, the tourists also acquired pieces, giving rise to important collections that are currently exhibited in museums. During the 19th century, romantic travelers were attracted to archaeology, sometimes as a way to trace the historical origin of the nations. The interest in these types of remains spread worldwide, with travelers and tourists preferring the heritagization of the remnants of the ancient civilizations of America and Asia, with approaches dominated by Eurocentric and colonial perspectives. During the second half of the 19th century, in Europe, the archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum were musealized and opened to the public. The interest of the emerging cultural administration in bringing citizens into contact with the remains of the past coincided with the cultural motivations of many of the tourists, keen to contemplate the ruins of a mythical past that formed the basis of a nation or the monumental and exotic remnants of foreign civilizations. An incipient tourism industry enabled these tourist flows to be channeled, providing comfortable transport, acceptable accommodation and friendly and competent guides. Tourist guides and organized package tours emerged. One hundred years later, visiting archaeological sites is one of the most popular heritage tourism activities. Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many places received millions of visitors: The Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum received 9 million visitors in 2019, Pompeii 3.5, Angkor 2.2, Stonehenge 1.6, Machu Pichu 1.5, Petra 1.2, etc. In general, the highest visitor figures correspond to the sites close to the most populated areas and/or important tourist territories even though this importance was not derived from cultural tourism. However, the proportion of foreign visitors is usually higher in developing countries. The tourism image of countries such as Egypt, Peru or Cambodia is based on their archaeological heritage. However, the visitors’ interest is mainly focused on the remains of monumental archaeology which represents a very small proportion of the sites adapted for visits by the public. The case of Mexico is revealing. The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has provided data for 176 archaeological sites open to the public. Of the 176, seven received more than half a million visits in 2019: Teotihuacán (3.5), Chichén Itzá (2.4), Tulum (1.9), Palenque (0.82), Cobá (0.75), Cholula (0.63) and Monte Albán (0.52). Together, they concentrated 65.88% of the visits to the INAH sites. At the other end of the scale, 80 archaeological sites recorded less than 10,000 visits per year. These were primarily places receiving mostly local visitors, often organized by schools and other educational centers. Museums represent an additional component of archaeological tourism. With the exception of site museums, they enable visitors to discover the past through pieces extracted from their original locations. In fact, many of the most important collections are derived from imperialist and colonial practices or from the formation of large national museums in the capitals of different countries. These museums attract the majority of the visits as they are museums specialized in archaeology or museums with a broader range of content: in 2019, the Louvre in Paris received 10 million visitors, the British Museum in London received 6.2, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City received 3 million and the National Archaeological Museum of Athens received 0.6 million, a figure that is substantially lower than the number of visits made to the Acropolis (3.6) and the Acropolis museum (1.7). Similarly to the case of archaeological sites, in addition to the large museums attracting international tourists, there are also museums that attract a more regional and local audience, associated with proximity tourism. Within the definitions of cultural tourism (Richards, 2003), archaeological tourism as visits to archaeological sites and museums falls within the category of operational definitions based on supply. This approach is ideal when contemplating heritage management and visitor management, but it is necessary to consider complementary aspects such as the motivations of the visit and the tourist-heritage experience. Both dimensions have been extensively addressed in the literature on cultural and heritage tourism. One of the principal motivations for tourists to engage in heritage tourism is the search for contact with the past; a past which is recognized as either one’s own or foreign. This search is made within a recreational and leisure context. It is also based on all the components of the tourism industry: transport, accommodation, restaurants, souvenir shops, guides, etc., which can be sold as individual services or as a tourism package. Heritage motivation can be addressed from the issuing markets or the tourist destinations where the heritage sites are located. In this respect, Ashworth and Turnbridge (1990) refer to the “intentional” cultural tourist, that is, the visitor drawn to the different cultural attractions at a destination; and the “incidental” cultural tourist, whose primary motivation for traveling is not the cultural elements themselves, which merely constitute complementary attractions. In accordance with the classic model proposed by Silberberg (1995), heritage, and more specifically archaeological heritage, can be the principal motive of the trip or visit; a complementary motivation to others of similar importance (visiting family, etc.); an additional motive, secondary to other more relevant motives; or accidental, in the sense that it was not an important factor of the trip but once in
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the destination, the visitors participate in activities related to the contemplation of the heritage. The grading of the cultural interest within the trip forms the basis of many classifications of cultural tourists, but also the specific object of interest (Richards, 1996; Stebbins, 1996), which may be culture in a broad sense or only certain aspects of its manifestations. Some authors reduce heritage tourism to those visitors exclusively motivated by heritage. However, these tourists represent a small part of the visitors to archaeological sites and museums. In recent decades, an increase in overall interest in culture and heritage has been recorded. This has given rise to a genuine increase in tourism motivated by heritage, but particularly an increase in visitors who consume heritage and archaeology in their trips but whose motivation and interest in manifestations of the past is fairly superficial. Heritage sites have become mass tourism places and the monumental remains of the past have become additional resources on which to base the tourism development of urban destinations and even regions associated with sun and beach tourism. The other dimension to consider is related to the tourist-heritage experience of the visit. McKercher (2002) classifies cultural tourists in accordance with the weight of the cultural motivation and the depth of the cultural experience obtained in the visit. In principle, the greater the weight of the cultural motivation, the more profound the experience. However, this author also identifies a “serendipitous cultural tourist”: tourists with a low cultural motivation who obtain a profound cultural experience. Galí-Espelt (2012) addresses the study of the experience based on the number of cultural activities undertaken in the destination. Motivations, experience and behavior in the destination are influenced by personal characteristics, site attributes, awareness and perceptions. In this respect, Poria et al. (2003) refer to a “personal heritage”, with tourists who have a strong emotional connection with the sites they visit because they recognize this heritage as their own.
Key Issues Heritagization and Touristization Processes The relationship between tourism and heritage, between tourism and archaeological heritage, is particularly interesting from the point of view of the management of cultural properties (their tourism activation and visitor management). From a diachronic perspective, the heritagization processes, through which the material remains of the past have been classified into different heritage categories, have brought these elements into contact with society. As well as being open to the local community, the archaeological sites also began to arouse interest in contexts of tourist displacements. Nevertheless, these processes did/do not always continue this time logic. In some cases, the prior tourist gaze (Urry, 1990) stimulated the heritagization of particular places, favoring the recovery and opening to the public of archaeological remains by the governments concerned and their appreciation and recognition by the local population. In any case, the interest to visit archaeological heritage elements has triggering processes of touristization of this heritage, although at different paces and intensities depending on the places, monumentality or state of conservation of the remains. The touristization processes, understood as the tourist activation processes of the heritage, respond to different but, in general, converging interests. Many actors had or have an interest in converting archaeological heritage elements into tourist attractions. The local community, the tourism industry, cultural administration and even the archaeological profession seek to attract visitors to the archaeological sites. The local community sees this heritage as a key part of its identity (the legacy inherited from their ancestors with which they identify) but also as a possible resource for local development. The tourism industry (the providers of tourism services) regards it as raw material for its business. Cultural managers consider that the public visits form part of their objective of cultural dissemination: a means through which to educate about the culture of the site, its history or the heritage itself and its historicalartistic values. Archaeologists are also interested in the tourist adaptation of the archaeological remains (sites and museums). For them, this heritage constitutes a way to disseminate the results of their research and their activities as professionals. It is also a way to fulfill the social commitment of the profession in favor of the communities surrounding the sites. This interest of archaeologists in tourism is framed within the evolutionary process experienced by the discipline which has been changing over the last 40 years, as has the consideration of the object of study (material remains of the past). This is not always a linear process, and different stages can be distinguished. In the first stage, archaeology, understood as an auxiliary science of history, was exclusively dedicated to the study of the past (historical research based on the tangible remains of past cultures). In the second phase, the discipline began to show an interest in the management of archaeological remains as heritage. The object of study is no longer simply a “source of information” but a heritage object that needs to be protected (legally) and managed as such (Querol, 2010). Finally, the need to actively conserve archaeological heritage, which goes beyond passive legal protection, gave rise to a third stage in which archaeologists identified the need to intervene in this heritage. Intervention is contemplated from two points of view: physical recovery (consolidation of ruins, fencing, restoration .) and adaptation for the visit (musealization, interpretation, communication, marketing, management of the in situ visits, etc.). Fig. 1 summarizes this reflection in relation to the evolution of the tourism activation processes of archaeological heritage in the region of Madrid (Spain) in the year 2011 (Troitiño Vinuesa et al., 2011).
Visitor Management Within a context where there is a clear interest in implementing the tourist activation of the archaeological heritage, the management of the tourist visit constitutes a highly important issue for the cultural administration. In keeping with the doctrine of international organizations such as the World Heritage Center (WHC), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) or
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Fig. 1 Process of enhancing archaeological heritagedRegion of Madrid (Spain). Source: Own elaboration Published in Troitiño Vinuesa, M. A.; Calle Vaquero, M.; García Hernández, M.; Troitiño Torralba, L. (2011). La Funcionalidad Turística del Patrimonio Cultural (B.I.C.) de la Comunidad de Madrid y Estrategias de Actuación. Dirección General de Turismo de la Comunidad de Madrid. DL.: M-1097-2011.
the World Tourism Organization (WTO), the tourism management of archaeological heritage sites must have two primary objectives: (1) To guarantee the conservation of the heritage element; and (2) To promote the socioeconomic dynamism of the place (in line with the sustainable development of tourism). Any policy strategy that defines the heritage tourism management of each site should ideally take into account these two objectives, although adapted to different contexts. As previously indicated, an overall view of the tourism use of archaeological heritage reveals the existence of two opposing situations that, a priori, pose highly different management challenges. On the one hand, there are a small number of archaeological heritage sites that have constituted tourist attractions for many years and receive a high number of visits. These places have problems of tourist carrying capacity and are faced with the challenge of the sustainable management of overtourism (Enseñat-Soberanis et al., 2019). On the other hand, there are many archaeological sites adapted for public visits but which receive very few visitors. These places face the challenge of obtaining and maintaining a minimum volume of resources that guarantee their conservation and opening to the public. These are two contrasting situations with different management strategies, although with common objectives: to conserve the heritage and guarantee sustainable tourism development whereby the heritage tourism activity constitutes a resource for the local population but does not destroy the resources on which it is based. The instruments used to fulfill these management objectives and to plan and execute the intervention in the archaeological heritage vary according to the legal, political and administrative contexts of each country. Some authors consider that the planning tools for heritage tourism (and therefore archaeological heritage) are not considered in an integrated way in the technical manuals (Viñals, 2021). However, the academic literature frequently refers to case studies. There are many publications on (best) tourism planning and management practices that mention the development and application of specific tools (inventories of attractions, urban plans, etc.). Other studies have been conducted on tourism carrying capacity, analysis of the impacts on resources, visitors’ studies, etc. There are also reflections on the tourism management of heritage made by international organizations and trade associations. The first general reflections in this respect were made by ICOMOS which, in the different editions of the Cultural Tourism Charter (1976, 1999, 2021) explicitly mentions aspects related to the management of the tourism use of cultural sites, particularly emphasizing the conservation of cultural heritage, the quality of the visitor’s experience and the involvement of the local communities in the sustainable management and planning of the sites so that they can directly benefit from the tourism activity. These documents also warn about the negative, harmful and destructive effects of the mass and even uncontrolled use of the monuments
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and sites and, therefore, their necessary management. These considerations are also included in other documentation which, particularly from the 1990s, has been generated by the ICOMOS but also organizations such as the UNESCO. Furthermore, over time, the understanding of heritage management, which for a long time had been exclusively understood as the management of the object, expanded to include the management of the flow of visitors. This more comprehensive approach can be found in reference works such as Guidelines for the Management of World Cultural Heritage Sites (Feilden and Jokilehto, 1998), Tourism at World Heritage Cultural Sites: The Site Managers Handbook (Garfield, 1994) and Managing Tourism at World Heritage Sites: a Practical Manual for World Heritage Site Managers (Pedersen, 2002). As well as including the considerations of the cultural tourism committee of ICOMOS, they are backed by UNESCO and UNWTO. This collaboration, with different implications concerning the management of the sites, has also been manifested in the World Conferences on Tourism and Culture held to date: 2015 in Siem Reap, 2017 in Muscat, 2018 in Istanbul and 2019 in Kyoto. On the other hand, it is worth mentioning the opinion of disciplinary associations such as the Archaeological Institute of America. In its Guide to Best Practices for Archaeological Tourism (Archaeological Institute of AmericadAIA, 2021), aimed at tour operators and site managers, it urges them to reflect on the management of archaeological sites that affect three areas: the conditions of the site (opening hours, accessibility, carrying capacity, safety, visitor services), interpretation (guides, museum, interpretation center, information and support material for the visitor, signs) and community involvement (identification of stakeholders interested in the conservation of the site, participation in the local community, etc.). These documents pay particular attention to the following aspects: (1) The need to set clear management objectives (related to sustainability, the conservation of the heritage and the quality of the experience of the visit); (2) The need to make plans (documents to guide the interventions proposed in a determined time horizon); (3) The relevance of undertaking studies that substantiate the strategies contained in the plans and, therefore, decision-making processes (studies on carrying capacity, monitoring the state of conservation of the property, visitor studies, impact assessment); and (4) Governance (that is, the relationship between the administrative and government structures and the role of the different stakeholders in its management, with particular attention on the local communities or hosts). The types of planning instruments developed in the archaeological heritage sites vary depending on the national contexts, as already mentioned. In any case, the reflections of the academic literature and the recommendations of different cultural institutions and associations urge the managers of the sites to design management plans. Supported with auxiliary planning instruments (reports, studies), these documents should contain a clear and sustainable strategy for managing the different aspects of the asset, including the management of the visit and the visitors. In situ, we can find different levels of development of this planning. The sites included in the World Heritage List of UNESCO are required to have elaborate Management Plans. The UNESCO understands this plan as a piece of the management system of the site: “a tool which determines and establishes the appropriate strategy, objectives, actions and implementation structures to manage and, where appropriate, develop cultural heritage in an effective and sustainable way so that its values are retained for present and future use. The plan balances and coordinates the cultural heritage needs with the needs of the ‘users’ of the heritage and the responsible governmental and/or private/community bodies” (UNESCO, 2013). In Spain, the Instituto de Patrimonio Cultural promotes the elaboration of so-called Master Plans, which are included in some regional legislations. The master plans are “documents elaborated in an interdisciplinary way in order to obtain the greatest and best knowledge possible about an asset or group of assets of Cultural Heritage, considering all of the possible standpoints, to adequately substantiate and organize the actions that have to be carried out for their best conservation and restoration”. They emerged within the context of architectural intervention, on which there has been an overemphasis in this definition. However, over time, it has been reformulated and extended to include aspects related to the comprehensive management of the properties (and therefore also its tourism dimension). In other places, there are planning instruments in heritage sites which, with another name (public use plans in North America or Australia, for example), contain the know-how of other traditions or approaches of more long-term intervention. Furthermore, we should also refer to the existence of smaller-scale plans which focus on more specific aspects of management: interpretation programs, marketing plans, etc. However, beyond the specific considerations, the analysis of the planning documents highlights the existence of two types of interventions related to the tourism management of archaeological heritage. First, a broad range of interventions related to the heritage object and second those related to the management of the subject consuming this heritage (the visitors). The tourism management of the object (the site or archaeological museum) involves interventions of different scopes, but the majority are related to three aspects:
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The improvement of the conditions of physical accessibility to the place: parking, accesses and itineraries adapted to people with disabilities. The improvement of the heritage presentation: musealization of the remains, creation of site museums, audiovisual rooms, exhibitions. The provision of services related to the development of the visit: toilets, cloakrooms, welcome spaces, shops, etc.
On the whole, these interventions are fundamental for the development of the tourist visit, as they are the elements that enable the physical reception of the visitors after the recovery, restoration and consolidation of the archaeological remains have been completed. On the other hand, the interventions focusing on the subject (the visitor) are related to two aspects:
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The design of the supply of the visit: itineraries, types of visits, opening hours, prices, etc. The management of visitors: capacity and flow regulation, advance booking systems, the temporal and spatial distribution of the flow, ticket sales, marketing and communication (Website, social networks), special educational programmes and cultural activities such as historical stagings.
In those sites with a higher volume of visitors, particularly in places suffering from tourism pressure, the correct approach and development of this second type of actions is fundamental to guarantee the sustainable management of the tourism activity. Controlling the capacity in accordance with the carrying capacity of the site, and the design of itineraries and visits that enable the temporal and spatial distribution of the flow of visitors are essential to minimize the negative impacts of overtourism.
Summary and Future Directions Emerging Research and Management Trends The current lines of research on heritage tourism are framed within more general reflections on cultural tourism (Richards, 2018, 2021; UNWTO, 2018a,b), which are based on both tourism and heritage studies (Timothy, 2014, 2018; Gravari-Barbas, 2020). On a theoretical level, the limitations of the dichotomous approaches of supply and demand, production and consumption are acknowledged. As proposed by Richards (2018, p. 19), “in the future, much more effort should be applied to studying the practices of cultural tourism, which form a system that includes the materials that provide the basis of the cultural tourism practice (e.g., tangible and intangible heritage, contemporary culture and creativity), the meanings that people attach to these practices (e.g., learning, identity, narrative and storytelling) and the competences that are developed through them (e.g., ways of ‘doing’ cultural tourism, reading and interpreting cultural heritage)”. All of these elements are mutually dependent. Within this framework, it is necessary to continue researching the motivations of the visit, the behavioral patterns in the places visited, the personal experience of the heritage, etc. Visitor studies constitute essential instruments and include qualitative and quantitative techniques (Galí-Espelt, 2012). However, going beyond descriptive studies, it is appropriate to identify determining factors and elaborate segmentation models to use in heritage management broadly. On a more theoretical level, it strengthens the academic debate on the concepts of heritage contestation, authenticity and nostalgia. It is also important to continue assessing the effective contribution of heritage tourism to the development and, specifically, the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals. Organizations such as the European Commission (2019), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and DevelopmentdOECD (2008) and the United Nations World Tourism OrganizationdUNWTO (2018a,b) defend this contribution, but it is necessary to break down the effects in accordance with scales. Concerning the places of archaeological heritage, are the efforts to adapt them for public visits proportional to the benefits derived from the presence of visitors? Does the message regarding the importance of the site and the need to preserve it reach the visitors? With respect to the communities that live in the vicinity of these places, does tourism constitute a real improvement in their living conditions? Does the arrival of foreign visitors favor the growth of conservationist attitudes? Apparently, a good part of the economic benefits generated by heritage tourism is diluted on a regional, national and international scale, with transport and intermediary companies capturing a significant part of the tourist expenditure. In this respect, it is important to continue researching the transfer mechanisms through which the local communities constitute the principal beneficiaries of the tourist flows. Within this context, working with the stakeholders who operate on different scales is fundamental. Throughout the world, many cultural managers work on enhancing the tourism value of heritage and many governments and local communities attempt to convert this heritage into a driver of development. However, the tourist gaze continues to be focused on a series of more monumental archaeological elements. The literature identifies impacts derived from tourism in emblematic sites such as Angkor (Miura, 2006), Machu Picchu (Figueroa, 2018), Petra (Comer, 2012) or Pompeii (Osanna and Rinaldi, 2018). Recently, the problems associated with mass tourism have been referred to as “overtourism” (UNWTO, 2018a,b), which connects with an older line of study on tourism sustainability, particularly the considerations regarding carrying capacity (Wall, 2020). Whether it is a new phenomenon or simply a new term for a phenomenon that has been known and studied since the 1970s (Capocchi et al., 2020), the reflections on overtourism have spread to heritage places (Adie et al., 2020; Hugo, 2020; Peters et al., 2018) and were presented in the UNWTO/UNESCO World Conference on Tourism and Culture, held in December 2019, just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. For a long time, the problems associated with excess tourist pressure in these spaces were addressed in terms of congestion (UNWTO, 2004) and overcrowding (Donaire et al., 2020), with negative effects on the conditions of the physical conservation of the assets and the quality of the experience of the visitor. In contrast to these traditional approaches, addressing overtourism involves acknowledging: (1) The responsibility of tourism, as congestion and overcrowding are primarily caused by the growth in the flow of tourists and day-trippers and much less by the affluence of the residents; (2) The multifaceted nature of tourism pressure, which is due to different causes, which has many affects and can be addressed in different ways; (3) The complexity of the spatial relationships in play: between parts of the attraction with different levels of tourism use, between the attraction and the destination, between the destination and the issuing markets; and (4) The plurality of stakeholders and the complexity of the relationships between them, with actors with different interests operating on different scales. All of this enriches the debate on the management of heritage assets in contexts of overtourism and positions the influences and results of this management beyond the specific limits of the attractions.
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From a tourism perspective, the extension of the heritage focus also represents a challenge for the coming years. Due to its characteristics, archaeological heritage is particularly complex for non-expert visitors, requiring a greater effort of communication by the cultural and tourism mediators. This effort will have to be increased with the incorporation into the tourism market of “dissonant heritage” in order to prevent the absolute trivialization from the standpoint of others. The presentation of types of the archaeological heritage associated with cave shelters also requires a supplementary effort otherwise these sites will merely constitute landscape/ territorial elements. In this respect, it is important to assess the role of the World Heritage declarations and their consequences on the development of the communities surrounding the sites based on the growth of the tourism activity (Vecco and Caust, 2020). Ultimately, the mass emergence of information and communication technologies on all levels will also affect heritage tourism and the management of the visit. However, these effects are still to be seen. Determining these effects is proving to be particularly difficult, given the speed of technological change and the social practices associated with it. The new digital tourists obtain information about places of interest through social networks; on their trips they use the services of different platform businesses (Uber, Airbnb, Civitatis, etc.); and narrate their visits in real time in their digital communities. Within tourism and heritage research, the digital recording of activities enables a different approach to be made in the space-time monitoring of the visits and even the relationship of the visitors with the places they visit (Cuomo et al., 2021; Martínez-Hernández et al., 2021). On a management level, these technologies can help to obtain better knowledge aimed at managing visitor flows but also enable new forms of presentation and even the creation of digital replicas of the most overcrowded places.
Conclusions One of the most important and consolidated types of cultural tourism is heritage tourism. Visits to places that embody the past (archaeological sites and museums among them) have been popular activities since the “Grand Tour” and in some places have reached mass tourism levels. The growing heritagization of the remains of the past has favored the development of heritage tourism but the tourist gaze has led also to the patrimonialization of manifestations that have become local references and attractions for foreign visitors. Contemporary management of heritage properties necessarily includes their adaptation for visits: on the one hand, the creation of an infrastructure that enables the access and visit of the tourists; on the other hand, a communication program that supports the discourse that the heritage managers seek to transmit. As indicated in previous sections, the visitors to the heritage sites may have different levels of cultural motivation. For many, these sites represent a marginal component of their travel. However, it is the responsibility of the entities that manage the sites to provide the best conditions so that the visitors can obtain an enriching and satisfying experience while always safeguarding the heritage. This responsibility is emphasized by organizations such as the World Heritage Center in its Sustainable Tourism Program and ICOMOS in the successive versions of the Cultural Tourism Charter. We should also take into account that many people only visit heritage sites during their tourist trips and this is an occasion which should not be wasted. On the other hand, these concerns must go hand in hand with the search for co-governance models that take into account the role of local communities. Finding formulas to guarantee their participation in the management of heritage tourism associated with archaeological resources is key to guaranteeing the distribution of the economic benefits that this activity can generate, and to avoid dispossession processes related to the perception of loss of control over cultural assets that may have a sense of identity for residents. Although there is a great disparity in territorial situations and socioeconomic contexts, the involvement of the local community in decision-making processes is a key issue in the management of archaeological heritage in the 21st century.
See Also: Archaeological Heritage and Museum Interpretation; Archaeological Heritage Management; Archaeological Heritage Values and Significance; Archaeological Sites and Archaeological Site Parks in China.
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Archaeological Sites and Archaeological Site Parks in China Weihong Liua and Jinpeng Dub, a Department of Cultural Heritage, Northwest University, Xi’an, China; and b Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview: Archaeological Site Protection in China Key Issues: Protection and Display of Archaeological Sites in China Protection Policies for Archaeological Sites The Protection and Management System of Archaeological Sites Display and Utilization of Archaeological Sites Construction of Archaeological Site Parks in China The Concept of Archaeological Site Park Construction Archaeological Work at the Archaeological Site Park Archaeological Site Park Planning Operation and Management of Archaeological Site Parks Summary and Future Directions Further Reading
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The development history of Chinese archaeological site parks is outlined; The management system for archaeological sites in China includes both developer-driven and research excavations; The concept of the construction of archaeological site parks is described.
Glossary Archaeological site All remains of ancient human activities and the movable and immovable cultural relics and organic remains associated with them Archaeological site park A specific cultural and public leisure space with an archaeological site and its environment as the main body, which has scientific, educational, recreational and other functions, and has exemplary significance in archaeological site protection, display and public recreation Cultural heritage protection unit A protection and management system established by the Chinese government to protect the immovable cultural relics, which are mainly divided into major sites to be protected for their historical and cultural value at the national, provincial, and municipal or county level Large-scale archaeological site Large archaeological sites, such as large ancient settlements, ancient city sites, ancient palaces, and ancient tombs that are characterized by their large scale, significant value and far-reaching impact Protection zone Various areas designated for the protection and management of archaeological sites, generally including areas for protection and for controlled construction Site display The exhibition or display of the natural and human environment within the archaeological site, mainly the site itself Site interpretation Various activities aimed at raising public awareness and increasing public understanding of archaeological sites Site museum An archaeological site as a significant spatial unit, serving as a conservation institutions, information medium and communication channel for the promotion of public and cultural resources of society System of “Four Measures” The four basic measuresdprotection and management institutions, areas of protection, special funds, and management personneldto protect China’s immovable cultural heritage, adopted by the administration of provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities, cities and counties directly under the leadership of the Chinese Central Government. In this process, administrators of all levels shall respectively delimit the necessary areas of protection, put up signs
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and notices, and establish records and files for the historical and cultural sites protected at the corresponding levels, and, in light of different circumstances, shall establish special sections or assign full-time personnel to be responsible for the control over these sites
Abstract Archaeological sites document the origin and evolution of the Chinese nation and civilization. Their development has to be seen within the evolution of Chinese archaeology, and its role within larger political and social developments in China. Archaeological site parks are an increasingly popular concept proposed in the process of conserving Chinese archaeological sites, providing a model of sustainable management for international heritage conservation, and for the communication of archaeology and human development to the general public.
Introduction Archaeological sites cover all the remains of ancient human activities and the movable and immovable cultural relics associated with them, which mainly denotes ancient settlements, ancient cemeteries, etc. This entry focuses geographically on China, where archaeological sites embody the origin and development of the Chinese nation and Chinese civilization, while being precious, irreplaceable cultural treasures that belong to all mankind. The archaeological site park is a specific cultural and public leisure space centered on an important archaeological site and its background environment, with heritage protection, scientific research promotion, educational and recreational functions. The archaeological site park is a new concept proposed by China in the process of protecting large-scale archaeological sites, integrating archaeological site protection, utilization and development, thus achieving a harmonious win-win situation between archaeological site protection and utilization, urban and rural construction, and improvement of people’s livelihood.
Overview: Archaeological Site Protection in China As of 2021, there are 766,722 immovable cultural relics registered in China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan in China), of which archaeological sites account for about 43%. Of these, 5058 are important historical and cultural sites under
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Number of China’s major historical and cultural sites protected at the national level. Source: author.
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Major historical and cultural sites protected at the national level in China per resource type. Source: author.
national protection, of which archaeological sites account for about 32%. Scattered throughout the country, archaeological sites include sites of ancient settlements, ancient capital cities, ancient tombs, ancient park gardens, and other remains of human activity (Figs. 1 and 2). China has a long tradition in the protection of ancient relics for the purposes of “respecting the ancestors and worshiping the gods”, consolidating the ruling order, maintaining feudal rituals, advocating civic education, and demonstrating governmental achievements. However, archaeological site protection in the modern sense in China commenced with the introduction of modern Western archaeology and heritage protection concepts and methods in the late Qing Dynasty (1636–1912) and early Republic of China (1912–1949). Eventually, the Western principles merged with China’s national tradition, opening up a new path of archaeological site protection with Chinese characteristics. This process can be divided into four stages: Germination Stage (from the late 19th century to the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949): It refers to the time period from the end of the Qing Dynasty to the founding of the People’s Republic of China, when modern Western archaeology and heritage protection concepts and methods, along with Western learning, were introduced into China, and archaeological site protection in China began to develop. The formal identification of the Yangshao Culture, initiated by the Swedish archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson in 1921 when the Yangshao Village Site in Mianchi County, Henan Province, was excavated, is considered to be the birth of modern Chinese archaeology. After that, Chinese scholars took the lead in the archaeological investigations and excavations in the ruins of Yin, Chengziya, Yanxiadu and Liangzhu. Since then, China began to attach great importance to the protection and management of archaeological sites by way of formulating and implementing relevant laws and regulations for the protection of cultural heritage. Foundation Period (1949–1978): It is the period between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and its reform and opening up in 1978. During this stage, in view of the contradiction between industrial and agricultural production and the protection of archaeological sites in the development of China into an industrialized socialist society, and on the basis of learning from the Soviet Union’s experience in protecting cultural relics, the guiding principle of “two-emphases and twobenefits” to protect archaeological sites was formalized. This principle placed emphasis on the protection of archaeological sites and excavation of representative archaeological sites, for the benefit of national construction and the conservation of cultural relics. The policy of archaeological site protection was implemented, the system of cultural heritage protection units was established, and the cultural heritage protection and management system of hierarchical and territorial management was formed. In terms of the protection of archaeological sites, through the excavation of Zhoukoudian, also known as the Peking Man site, Banpo near Xi’an, the type site of the Neolithic Yangshao Culture, and the Tang Dynasty Xingqing Palace in Shaanxi Province, the protection model of “site museum” and “site park” was explored and practiced. Transition and Exploration Period (1979–1999): During the period of reform and opening up under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the policy of “effective protection, rational utilization, and enhanced management” of cultural remains was formulated. This was based on the experience of international heritage organizations, European countries and the United States in protecting cultural
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heritage, and taking into account the current situation of China’s economy and society. In the meantime, explorations were made to include archaeological sites as important tourism resources into the construction and development of scenic spots. Innovation and Development Period (2000–ongoing): Upon learning Western concepts and methods of heritage protection and summarizing the practical experience gained since the foundation of the Peoples Republic of China, the policy of “giving priority to the protection of cultural relics, attaching primary importance to their rescue, making rational use of them and strengthening management over them” was formed and embedded in the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC 18th National Congress) in 2012, the CPC Central Committee and the state leaders, headed by Xi Jinping, have attached great importance to the protection and utilization of cultural relics. The introduction of the concept of “protection and rational utilization” provided the guideline for the protection and utilization of archaeological sites in the new era. At the same time, tremendous efforts have been made in exploring and implementing the “Large-scale Archaeological Site Protection Action” and establishing protection concepts such as “National Archaeological Site Park” and “National Cultural Park”, which have effectively promoted the protection of archaeological sites in the new era. After decades of exploration and development, remarkable achievements have been made in the protection and development of Chinese archaeological sites, which can be attributed to the distinct features of Chinese archaeological sites: national ownership, government leadership, participation of all people, protection-first principles, considering the interests of all parties, diversified protection methods, and the unity of centralization and territorial management. Against the background of present-day urbanization and quick development of modernization in China, the protection of China’s archaeological sites is facing the pressing contradiction between finite resource supply and increasing demand. The main problems with archaeological site conservation include: the contradiction between large-scale urban and rural development and infrastructure construction, and site protection; the everincreasing public demand for spiritual life; the need for building a harmonious society; the requirement of sustainable development of archaeology for the protection of site resources; the exploration of archaeological site protection models in the new era, etc. These problems are not only obstacles to archaeological site protection, but also the driving force for its development, which will promote the continuous deepening of archaeological site protection in China (Fig. 3).
Key Issues: Protection and Display of Archaeological Sites in China Preserving and protecting large archaeological sites is a priority, because large sites are national strategic resource assets with invaluable historical and cultural memory. Protecting large sites entails either their investigation, prospection and excavation in a wellorganized way in accordance with archaeological laws, or their burial and preservation so as to leave them intact to future generations.
Protection Policies for Archaeological Sites At the early stage of the People’s Republic of China, facing the reality of abundant cultural relics, heavy capital construction tasks and insufficient archaeological staff, the policies of “protecting and excavating the major sites” and “for the benefit of capital construction, as well as for the protection of cultural relics” were formulated to coordinate archaeological excavation work and capital construction. The period of reform and opening up and the development of tourism based on the exploration of the economic and social role of archaeological sites, saw the emergence of the principles of “giving priority to the protection of cultural relics, attaching primary importance to their rescue” and “effective protection, rational utilization, and enhanced management”. These
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Archaeological excavation at the Neolithic Shimao site in Shaanxi and its surroundings. Source: author.
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were put forward and embedded in the Notice on Further Strengthening the Work on Cultural Relics (1987) and the National Conference on Cultural Relics Work in 1992 and 1995. At the dawn of the 21st century, and with the establishment of the socialist market economy, the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics was comprehensively revised in 2002. The aforementioned guidelines and principles were established in the form of laws “giving priority to the protection of cultural relics, attaching primary importance to their rescue, making rational use of them and tightening control over them”. After the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the focus on “rational utilization” was changed into “reasonable and appropriate utilization”, in order “to coordinate the protection of cultural relics and economic and social development, to promote the protection and utilization of heritage, to develop while protecting and to protect while developing”. And ultimately formed the new era cultural relic protection work policy of “protection first, strengthening management, excavating value, effectively utilizing, and making cultural relics live”. In other words, more emphasis has been laid on the “rational use, heritage promotion and innovative development” of archaeological site protection. Guided by these policies, the protection of archaeological sites in China has undergone a transformation from passive salvage protection to active preventive protection, from unitary site protection to combining protection with utilization, and from government’s dependence on laws and regulations to mobilizing active participation of social forces.
The Protection and Management System of Archaeological Sites Since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, China’s cultural heritage protection and management system has been constantly developed and improved, and a unique dual-track, multi-level and multi-area management and protection system has been established, with the cultural heritage protection unit system and the world heritage protection system as the core. One of the most distinctive features of this system is the cultural heritage protection unit and the hierarchical and territorial management based on it. The system of cultural heritage protection unit is a system with Chinese characteristics, which originated from the serious situation of immovable cultural heritage protection, particularly for large-scale archaeological sites, in the early days of the People’s Republic of China. It mainly includes systems for grading, cultural heritage identification, the “four measures”, protection planning and so on. Cultural heritage protection units can be divided into major sites to be protected for their historical and cultural value at the national level, at the provincial level, and at the municipal or county level, respectively. The system of cultural heritage identification is mainly an administrative act of confirming important archaeological sites as cultural relics and assign them as cultural heritage protection units according to their values on the basis of investigation and records. The “four measures” system is the basis for the protection of archaeological sites. It mainly includes delimiting the necessary areas of protection, putting up signs and notices, and establishing records and files for the historical and cultural sites protected at the corresponding levels, and shall, in the light of the given circumstances, establish special organs or assign full-time personnel to be responsible for the control over these sites. The protection planning system realizes its goal of systematic protection and management of archaeological sites mainly through the compilation of general protection planning, archaeological park planning, protection, display, environmental remediation and other specially designed schemes. The dual-track parallel hierarchical and territorial management system is constructed in accordance with the practical needs of the system of cultural heritage protection units. This system and mechanism is guided for the professional work by the cultural heritage departments, and for its administration by the hierarchical leadership of the local (provincial, municipal and county) governments. The main features of this hierarchical territorial management lie in government leadership, integration of cultural heritage departments and governments at all levels, hierarchical management and territorial responsibility. The modes of this system have evolved with China’s economical and social development, the reform of its administrative system, and the establishment of the national key cultural relics protection system. This includes three stages, beginning with the centralization under the territorial management from the early days of the People’s Republic of China to the reform and opening up period. From the reform and opening up to the end of the 1990s, there was a high degree of decentralization of the territorial management based on the reform of the fiscal system. Finally, in the 21st century the strengthened supervision at the territorial level in the context of “decentralize, manage and serve” emerged. In the new era, with the implementation of the “decentralize, manage and serve” policy, the relatively greater autonomy of local heritage conservation management and utilization helps to carry out the conservation and utilization of heritage through a variety of approaches. However, the devolved hierarchical territorial management has weakened direct management of the national cultural relics administrative departments over local cultural relics. The contradiction between the rapid economic and social development and protection of the archaeological sites is increasingly sharp, and in light of the fact that archaeological sites cannot give full play to their economic benefits, it will be difficult for local governments to pay much attention to the protection of the archaeological sites in view of developmental and financial pressures.
Display and Utilization of Archaeological Sites Site display is an indispensable part of site protection, and an important way and means to promote the heritage value of a site. The purpose of site display is to enhance the readability and appreciation of the site, attract the public to visit it, and realize the inheritance and promotion of the value of the site. Only through a scientific and reasonable display of a site can the public better understand the site, participate in the protection of the site, and promote its comprehensive protection. The objects used in the display of Chinese archaeological sites have undergone a transformation from the main part of the site to the entirety of the site itself and its environment. It is generally believed that four categories of objects are displayed in archaeological site parks: the physical remains of
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Physical remains
Objects on display at archaeological sites
Natural environment and landscape
core
topography, hydrology, vegetation and historical environment of the site area
Geographical context
settlements, roads, fields, historic buildings, urban and rural scenery of the site area
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Tangible cultural landscape
Intangible cultural landscape
culture context
the historical culture, site spirit, folk customs and so on carried and inherited by the site
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Objects on display at archaeological sites. Source: author.
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Visual reconstruction of the Late Neolithic archaeological site of Liangzhu City, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Source: author.
the site and its attached connotations, its natural environment, the tangible historical and cultural context, and its spirit, i.e., the intangible aspects (Figs. 4 and 5). The display of archaeological sites should emphasize the authenticity and integrity of site information, attach importance to the effectiveness and inclusiveness of site information dissemination, take into account reasonable demands of stakeholders, stimulate the vitality of sites within contemporary society, and promote the sustainable development of site protection and environment. At the same time, in line with the progress of archaeological work and the sustainability of archaeological site protection, archaeological site display should also be dynamic and appropriate. The interpretation and display of archaeological sites need to be constantly adjusted and improved with the further development of archaeology and related scientific researches, and the future requirements for the development of the archaeological sites. The methods of archaeological site display mainly include protection display, visual reconstructions, geographical context reinforcement, landscape art, context extension, and cultural displays (Fig. 6). At present, the protection display method is the dominant one for Chinese archaeological sites, which mainly consists of the open-air original state display, a simulated restoration display of the core site, the in situ simulation restoration display, signage, museum displays, and the archaeological excavation site display. Visual reconstruction method refers to the display of an enhanced artistic impression of the site by using protective and reversible materials to represent the overall outline of the site, after taking protection measures for the main body of the architectural site that has fully disappeared or partially destroyed. Geographical context reinforcement refers to highlighting and strengthening the natural geographical features closely connected with the site, to reinforce the idea of the unity of nature and man in the site. The use of landscape art refers to the artistic recreation of the site itself and the surrounding natural environment in combination with traditional logo display, forming earth art works to shape the entire site landscape system. Context extension is used to extend the existing context or value of resources in the site area according to time, space and other indicators, to enrich the value
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Method of archaeological site presentation. Source: author.
connotation of the site, display objects and add to the visitors’ experience. Cultural display finally refers to the wider cultural connotation of the site, its cultural landscape, etc., including history and culture, legends, folk tales, rural settlements, and rural and historical buildings. With the rapid development of big data and artificial intelligence, the application of artificial intelligence in site display should be strengthened.
Construction of Archaeological Site Parks in China The archaeological site park is a positive attempt to combine the conservation practice of China’s large-scale archaeological sites with the conservation concept of international and domestic cultural heritage (Fig. 7). In the 20th century, archaeological site parks took shape in the USA and Japan. In 1918, the US incorporated the prehistoric architectural site of Casa Grande in Arizona into the US national park management system for protection, which became the first US national park with archaeological sites as its core. In the 1960s, Japan, faced with the destruction of sites by urban construction, began to pay attention to the display and utilization of sites, and successively established large archaeological site parks. These include Omuro Park as a national natural monument and place of the traditional mountain burning festival, Yoshinogari Historical Park on the southern island of Kyushu protecting a 2000-year old large settlement, Asuka Park for the imperial capital of Japan during the mid-1st millennium CE in Nara Prefecture, and other. China’s conservation of large-scale archaeological sites in the form of parks can be traced back to the Luoyang Wangcheng Park, established in 1955 in the Great Plains at the site of the earliest of the great ancient capitals of China, and Xi’an Xingqinggong Park at the site of the before-mentioned Tang dynasty palace, established in 1958. In 1983, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China approved the Beijing Urban Construction Master Plan, which explicitly proposed the construction of the Yuanmingyuan Site as a site park to preserve the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, destroyed and looted in 1860 by European forces. In 1987, the Yinxu Museum was built in Anyang City, Henan Province, with the ruins of Yin, the last capital of the Shang Dynasty and another UNESCO World Heritage Site as the main body, expanding the traditional museum display method to on-site displays. In the same year, the archaeological community put forward the idea of building the “Erlitou Bronze Kingdom Capital Museum”, which became an official proposal for the delegates of the first session of the 7th National People’s Congress in 1988. In 1999, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage approved the construction of China’s first archaeological site park on the archaeological excavation site of the earliest Shang Dynasty capital “Yanshi City of Shang Dynasty Northeast Corner
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Fig. 7 Daming Palace National Heritage Park, preserving the imperial residence of the Tang emperors, near today’s Xi’an in Shaanxi Province. Source: author.
Archaeological Site Park”, followed by the construction of the Yanshi of Shang Dynasty Palace City Site Park. This ushered in the first archaeological site park construction under the auspices of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, led by archaeologists. In the 21st century, in order to eliminate the contradiction between site protection and urban development, the academic community has introduced the new concepts of “large-scale archaeological site protection and display park” and “archaeological site park” in order to strengthen the protection of large-scale sites through utilization. Based on previous practices, in 2009 the State Administration of Cultural Heritage of China promulgated the Measures for the Management of National Archaeological Site Parks (provisional regulations) and the Rules for the Evaluation of National Archaeological Site Parks (provisional regulations), and began to put the construction of national archaeological site parks into practice. By 2022, China has announced that 55 national archaeological site parks in three batches have been constructed, while 80 other sites have been approved for the construction of national archaeological site parks. The 55 existing national archaeological site parks are located in 20 provinces and municipalities, ranging in time from the Paleolithic Age and the Neolithic Age, to the dynasties of Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Wei, Jin, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing. They involve eight major types, namely cave sites, settlement sites, urban sites, building sites, garden sites, engineering sites, handicraft sites, and tombs (Fig. 8). The construction of archaeological site parks is a new idea and concept in the field of cultural heritage, put forward by Chinese governments at all levels and after active explorations, and is an important move for China to build a harmonious society and the common spiritual home for the Chinese nation. The achievements of the construction of Chinese archaeological site parks can be attributed to scientific guidance, solid archaeological work, scientific planning, reasonable exhibition and utilization, and feasible management and operation mechanism.
Fig. 8
Aerial view of the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor National Heritage Park, Lintong, Xi’an. Source: author.
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The Concept of Archaeological Site Park Construction The concept of constructing archaeological site parks functions as the guideline for archaeological site park construction, operation and management. The construction of archaeological site parks in China has always been guided by the concept of “conservation first, people centeredness, and integration of conservation, utilization and development”. Firstly, the construction of the archaeological site parks establishes the concept of giving priority to protection, taking the safety of the heritage site as the bottom line of the construction of the archaeological site park. It displays and utilizes the site, carrying forward its heritage on the premise that the safety of the site itself and its environment can be ensured. Secondly, the construction of archaeological site parks establishes the concept of meeting people’s requirement for a better life. It always adheres to the line that heritage protection is for the people, and relies on the people, and the fruits of protection are shared by the people. Thirdly, with the bottom line of ensuring the safety of the sites, the construction of archaeological site parks integrates the utilization of site resources with regional economic and social development and the improvement of people’s livelihood. It aims to provide a beautiful environment for public recreation and experience, and to promote the inheritance of values. By taking the display and utilization of sites as a means, and archaeological scientific research as a guarantee for development, the construction of archaeological site parks will play an important role in promoting the sustainable development of these archaeological sites, providing public cultural services and meeting people’s needs for a spiritual and cultural life.
Archaeological Work at the Archaeological Site Park In-depth archaeological work is the foundation for the construction of archaeological site parks. Archaeological sites are where archaeological site parks are based, and they are the foundation for the growth and development of archaeological site parks. Archaeological site parks provide not only resources and environment for site protection and utilization, but also strong support for sustainable development of the site. The scientific basis for the construction of an archaeological site park comes entirely from archaeological excavations and research, while the continuous development of the site park depends on the constant flow of new discoveries and objects for display from the archaeological work. Therefore, archaeological research provides solid support for the establishment of a sustainable management structure of archaeological site parks, and archaeological research plans are an important part of management planning. The construction of archaeological site parks relies first on archaeological work to provide relevant scientific information, including the scope, connotation, layout, age and nature of the site, etc., and to provide relics and artifacts for display. After the completion of an archaeological site park, displays of the archaeological excavation site are needed, and new display points may be added in order to continuously enrich and diversify the display items of the archaeological site park. Archaeological work should continue to promote the sustainable development of the display of the archaeological site park. At the same time, the construction of the site park also provides a broader space and a platform for exchange and display of archaeological discoveries, and promotes the transformation and application of archaeological achievements. Therefore, archaeological work should continue throughout the construction and development of archaeological site parks, which form scientific research bases of archaeology, and should facilitate and support archaeological work and scientific research. Archaeological work should also provide academic support for the construction of archaeological site parks, and when archaeological work is carried out, it should ensure adequate protection of on-site archaeological remains and provide clear and understandable interpretations to the public.
Archaeological Site Park Planning Archaeological site park planning is a comprehensive management and policy for systematically coordinating the protection and utilization of archaeological site parks, which guarantees the scientific and implementable construction of site parks in terms of function positioning, archaeological plans, spatial layout, display zoning and management and operation; it is characterized by systemic integrity, comprehensive coordination, development guidance and control of implementation. The objectives of archaeological site park planning include the site system and its protection, utilization, management and development within the scope of archaeological site park planning, which determines the vision, structure system, content, and action plan of the overall coordination of the planning. The archaeological site park is actually a higher-level pursuit of the display and utilization of the site on the basis of the conservation of the site. Therefore, the archaeological site park planning should focus on “protection, display and sharing” of the site, which is complementary to the conservation planning of “protection and management” and the archaeological work plan of “discovery and research”. However, the planning and design of archaeological site parks should adhere to the concept of “protection”, and the planning and design of various facilities must take into account the need for protection, rather than simply applying the standards of urban and rural planning or landscape construction. Currently, the requirements for the content and depth of archaeological site park planning are mainly based on the “Requirements for National Archaeological Site Park Planning (for Trial Implementation)” (2012) promulgated by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage of China. It regulates the planning of site parks, including national archaeological site parks, from planning orientation, organization units and planning content. Planning must be based on cultural relics protection planning, conform to the principles and requirements of display planning in cultural relics protection, and coordinate with local economic and social development planning, and overall land use planning. However, archaeological site park planning in the future should break away
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from the traditional spatial planning framework, and improve the comprehensive positioning, business planning, operation and business models, planning linkup and other aspects to guide the future construction and operation of archaeological site parks.
Operation and Management of Archaeological Site Parks An operation and management system in keeping with the characteristics of archaeological site parks ensures the development of archaeological site parks. How to operate and manage the archaeological site park is a new subject for the traditional cultural museum management structure, because its multiple functions result in differences in management system, staff composition, funding sources, and allocation of rights and responsibilities between the archaeological site park and the traditional cultural administration system. At present, the system of cultural relics protection units is adopted in the operation and management of archaeological site parks, which generally relies on local cultural relics departments for business management, lacking the concept of market operation. In terms of operation and management, the archaeological site park has not yet spawned an operation and management system in conformity with its own characteristics and needs. In the future, a system and mechanism with such functions as conservation, utilization, communication, education, operation and management should be established in the operation and management of archaeological site parks, and due attention should be given to such important activities as presentation and utilization, cultural communication and public service from the beginning of planning and construction of archaeological site parks.
Summary and Future Directions The development of and achievements in China’s conservation of archaeological sites have proved that the advanced conservation concept is the guideline to a healthy development of the conservation of archaeological sites. Archaeological development is its theoretical cornerstone, serving the national and public demand is the source of its power, and a perfect legal system is the fundamental guarantee for its protection. The archaeological site park is not only a new method to protect archaeological sites, but also an important means to interpret and exhibit archaeological sites to the public. China’s practice of archaeological site parks provides a model of sustainable management for archaeological sites worldwide, in relation to the conservation, utilization, inheritance and promotion of cultural relics. In the future, the protection and development of archaeological site parks in China should pay close attention to the following aspects: First, clarifying the positioning and strengthening the attributes of a national cultural identity. In view of the distinctive resource values of archaeological site parks, it is imperative to realize the status of the archaeological site park as a carrier of the origin and development of Chinese civilization. This requires to gradually develop the overall image of the national archaeological site parks, and to systematically and comprehensively show the historical and cultural values of Chinese civilization and the spiritual pursuit of the Chinese nation. Second, specifying the theme and improving operation and management abilities. The implementation of China’s archaeological site parks has proved that they are an important means to effectively protect and exhibit archaeological sites; however, due to the influence of traditional concepts and mechanisms, there are still some deficiencies in value interpretation and display, promotion and marketing, education and recreation, and market-oriented operation. In the future, it is necessary to specify the theme and direction of each archaeological site park, build core attractions based on the essence and value of the archaeological site, and organize thematic education and recreation activities. It is also important to promote market-oriented operation and management of archaeological site parks, and continuously improve the levels of protection, management and public cultural service they receive and provide. Thirdly, improving the ability to interpret and display archaeological sites. The historical and cultural information and values contained in the site need to be transmitted to the public through appropriate means of interpretation and display. Archaeological research is the driving force behind the sustainable development of archaeological site parks, and is the basis for the interpretation and display of archaeological sites. Therefore, based on archaeological research, and guided by the value promotion and market demand, we should dig deeper to interpret the value of archaeological sites, strengthen the interpretation and display of archaeological sites, and enrich the content and means of display, to increase the attractiveness of archaeological site parks. Fourth, adhering to public welfare and giving assistance to community development. The public welfare nature of archaeological sites presupposes that archaeological site parks should conscientiously assume the responsibilities of social and public services to satisfy people’s demand for a good and happy life. Apart from appropriate protection and utilization, operation and management, education and recreation, archaeological site parks should also pay special attention to the driving effect of their development on the improvement of local communities and people’s livelihood, serve national strategies more comprehensively and deeply, and gradually blaze a road of cultural heritage protection and utilization with Chinese characteristics.
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See Also: Archaeological Heritage and Museum Interpretation; Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management; Preservation of Archaeological Remains in Situ.
Further Reading An, Lei, 2015. Practical Manual of National Archaeological Site Parks. Cultural Relics Publishing House, Beijing. Du, Jinpeng, 2010. Conservation of great archaeological sites and construction of archaeological site parks. South. Cult. 01, 9–12. Du, Jinpeng, 2017. Scientific Research of Cultural Heritage. Science Press, Beijing. Huijun, Zhao, Doyon, Luc, 2021. A century of archaeological heritage protection and exhibition in China. Hist. Environ. 12, 146–163. Liu, Weihong, 2013. The research on the design methods of Complex Site exhibition. Areal Res. Dev. 02, 171–176. Liu, Weihong, 2020. Research on Theories and Methods of Conservation of Large-Scale Archaeological Sites in China. Science Press, Beijing. Liu, Weihong, 2022. Conservation planning for Large-Scale Archaeological Sites: subjects, mission, and content. South. Cult. 01, 16–22. National Cultural Heritage Administration of the People’s Republic of China, 2018. Report on the Development of National Archaeological Site Parks. Chinese People’s Government. Shan, Jixiang, 2010. Exploration and practice of large-scale archaeological site parks. China Cult. Heritage Sci. Res. 01, 2–12. Wang, Xinwen, Fu, Xiaomeng, Zhang, Pei, 2019. Research progress and trend of archaeological site parks. Chinese Landscape Arch. 07, 93–96.
Economics and Archaeological Heritage Ilde Rizzoa and Luis Cesar Herrero Prietob, a University of Catania, Catania, Italy; and b University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Background Definitions Economic Effects Key Issues The Role of Government: Normative and Positive Issues Sustainability Measuring Values and Assessment of Archaeological Heritage: Theoretical and Empirical Issues The Role of Technologies International Cooperation Summary and Future Directions References
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Key Points
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Cultural heritage has positive effects on society’s well-being, which cannot be fully provided through the market, and public action is needed to avoid their under-provision. Archaeological heritage constitutes a unique and irreproducible asset with an endowment nature, embracing excavated and non-yet-discovered heritage and is, therefore, subject to conditions of sustainability and uncertainty. Heritage’s public decision-making process is characterized by marked information asymmetry as the specific expertise involved enhances the role of experts. The long-term sustainability of heritage depends on its capability to provide benefits to society, and the definition of priorities between conflicting values is a challenging issue. Valuation methods are needed in the heritage field as a decision-making tool to inform policy decisions and to make heritage institutions accountable. The multifaceted nature of heritage calls for a multidisciplinary perspective and makes the assessment of the value of cultural heritage a challenging issue. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) affects heritage demand and supply. New formulas of international cooperation appear in relation to the possibilities of restitution or shared use of archaeological heritage between countries.
Abstract The aim of this entry is to present the main topics of economic analysis and policy of archaeological heritage. Attention is paid to the role of heritage in society’s well-being; the value components and allocation are explored in depth, as well as the criteria for public intervention to protect and valorize the archaeological heritage and the relevance of information in the heritage decision-making process. Further issues regarding the challenges of sustainability and the impact of technological change are also investigated. Finally, recent formulas of international cooperation addressing archaeological heritage as global common good are examined.
Introduction Cultural heritage is a complex and multifaceted concept, which has evolved through time, experiencing a typological-thematic extension, a change in the selection criteria and a shift in its recognition from a normative approach to a flexible value-based approach, thus moving from the object’s intrinsic quality to the society’s recognition of its (aesthetic, historic, scientific, social, symbolic) values (Vecco, 2010). Heritage issues have both a transnational and a national dimension, the former being demonstrated by the role of supranational institutions providing an endless list of Charters, Conventions, etc., the progressive enlargement
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of the World Heritage List, the growing controversial debate about heritage restitution (Frey and Briviba, 2022) and the broad international cooperation to prevent the illicit trade of antiquities (Demas and Agnew, 2013). At the national level, the local dimension is particularly relevant, with heritage being place-bound (Ashworth, 2013) and closely linked with regional/local communities. The awareness that heritage has multidimensional features, can be a valuable tool for sustainable development and that the economic approach has an increasing role in the heritage field is widespread (CHCfE Consortium, 2015). The importance of considering economic issues together with traditional concerns of conservation and research appears increasingly acknowledged in the archaeological community (Gould and Burtenshaw, 2014) though still with some resistance. This entry aims at highlighting some positive and normative economic issues involved in cultural heritage preservation and valorization, with a focus on archaeological heritage, which has the peculiar feature of including excavated and not yet discovered heritage, with both an immovable dimensiondas it is the case of archaeological sitesdand a movable one –artefacts, objects and highly heterogeneous materials found during excavation and requiring interpretation. Building on the extant cultural economics literature, attention is paid to the role of heritage in society’s well-being, the motivations of government intervention and its extent and modes of operation, the relevance of information in the heritage decisionmaking process, the challenges of valuation and sustainability, the impact of technologies and the new ways of international cooperation.
Overview Background The interest of economists in the arts is not new. From the late 16th century up to the middle of the 20th century, economists have considered the complex effects of the arts on society and the arguments for public support from different perspectives (Goodwin, 2006). In the sixties, the interest of economists in the “arts” led to the discipline, which is now labeled as “cultural economics”, which has, through time, enlarged its scope, moving from the core subjects, such as heritage, visual arts and performing arts, to include cultural and creative industries. Indeed, since the first article raised interest in built cultural heritage as an economic issue (Peacock, 1978), the interest in heritage topics has flourished, with books, articles, chapters/entries of handbooks and collections of papers. However, overall, alongside the enlargement of the scope of cultural economics, heritage has received less attention than other topics. The economic investigation of the field of archaeology is also rather neglected, notwithstanding the relevance of archaeological heritage for the community culture and identity and the interesting economic implications. As bibliometric evidence shows, in a Scopus search for the last twenty years (2000–2022) only 46 papers meet the keywords “Economics” and “Archaeological heritage”, with “Economics” as the subject area playing a marginal role (3.4%) with respect to “Social Sciences” (26.1%) and “Humanities” (13.6%). A much greater number of papers (396) match the keywords “Economics” and “Archaeology”, however, with the same negligible position of “Economics” (3.2%). Interestingly, when “Economics” is substituted by “Tourism”, more documents (661) are found, with the subject area “Management and Business” accounting for 11.4% and “Economics” still with an almost insignificant role (3.4%). Though great caution is needed, the above tentative findings, far from being conclusive, suggest a limited if not scarce attention of cultural economics literature to archaeological heritage.
Definitions Cultural heritage is included in most definitions of cultural and creative industries provided at the academic level (Throsby, 2008) and by international institutions (Unesco, 2013). Within this broad framework, heritage activities, though having limited turnover, are acknowledged to play a prominent role in producing cultural content and providing inputs for cultural and creative industries. Through time economists have provided different definitions of heritage which are useful to capture the complexity of such a concept and the variety of its effects: “social construction whose boundaries are unstable and blurred” (Benhamou, 2020: 279); “heterogeneous set of goods that, in the course of time and in a process of historicization, comes to be recognised as the conveyor of specific cultural traditions” (Guerzoni, 1997: 107); “intangible service increasing the utility of consumers, in which historic buildings and artifacts are inputs” (Peacock, 1994: 7); “cultural capital”, i.e., “an asset which embodies, stores or gives rise to cultural value in addition to whatever economic value it may possess (Throsby, 2003: 167). Peacock’s definition emphasizes the role of cultural consumers in fostering their own utility and somehow anticipates the wide range of possibilities of combining heritage inputs generated by technology. In the widely quoted and accepted Throsby’s definition, cultural capital refers to both tangible (heritage buildings, locations and sites) and intangible (music, literature, inherited traditions, values, and beliefs which constitute the culture of a community) heritage that generates a flow of capital services for final consumption or to produce further cultural goods and services, in combination with other inputs (Throsby, 2003). In other words, heritage goods and services can be both final and intermediate goods. So, for instance, archaeological heritage may be combined with labor and other inputs to provide consumption experiences for visitors to sites and museums or for attendees of performing arts in ancient theaters, and also stimulate various forms of creativity in cultural and creative industries such as publishing, broadcasting, movies or handicrafts, leading to further capital formation.
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Economic Effects Economics investigates several aspects of the production and consumption of heritage goods and services, at an individual as well as at an aggregate level; of course, it is not entitled to define what “heritage” is but it can highlight how heritage interacts with the economy and what the implications of individual and/or collective decisions are for social welfare. A basic principle is that the production of heritage goods and services, as any other good and service in the economy, produces benefits but has an opportunity cost since it implies the use of resources (labor, capital and other inputs) which have other uses. Economics can be a helpful tool to improve resource allocation, the central question being how to allocate scarce resources to satisfy unlimited needs. Most heritage goods and services are carried out through non-market systems and may be provided free of charge or with a price which does not cover the cost of production. For instance, the entrance to an archaeological site or a museum may be free, but the cost of supplying this service must be financed by a funding body; when heritage activities are supplied or financed by the government, the cost is borne by taxpayers raising distributional issues as well as policy implications (Towse and Navarrete Hernandez, 2020). In the economic and political debate, the positive effects of cultural heritage activities on society’s well-being are widely acknowledged and include several dimensions: they contribute to education and to the transmission of knowledge to the future generation, improve the quality of the urban environment, foster national prestige, promote social inclusion and strengthen national and local identities as well as the formation of social capital. Moreover, heritage is also widely acknowledged as a “resource” for local economic development, with its effects on tourism being considered a major driver and, recently, with increasing attention to the role of creativity and territorial identitydexpressed as trust, openness, and tolerancedas a catalyzer of heritage effects on development (Cerisola and Panzera, 2022). The economic dimensions of heritage and its links with economic development, however, generate conflicting visions among archaeologists, with many considering a contentious relationship between the two, because of the risk of commodification, destroying heritage authenticity (Gould and Burtenshaw, 2014). The features of heritagedquality or locationdproduce different economic effects. For instance, on the one hand, “superstar” heritage, such as the one included in the World Heritage List, because of its claimed greater touristic attractiveness, produces effects on a larger scale than heritage with only regional or local importance, with the consequence that the latter might be disregarded by a policy maker, even if relevant for the local community (Martorana et al., 2019). On the other hand, whether heritage is part of the urban environment or it is located outside cities affects its accessibility and attractiveness as well as its interaction with the activities in the same area, for instance, the diversion of roads to protect archaeological sites or the increasing role of preventive archaeology in urban development projects.
Key Issues The Role of Government: Normative and Positive Issues The above arguments about the relevance of heritage for society’s well-being provide a normative rationale for government intervention. The economic features of heritage justify public intervention to maximize social welfare. In some cases, heritage, such as outdoor built heritage, exhibits public goods characteristics, being non-excludable and non-rival. To a greater extent, externalities (spillover effects) occur even if heritage goods and services are excludable; for instance, visiting an archaeological site or a museum may have positive effects not only on the user but also on social welfare because it enhances the sense of identity and increases the understanding of other people and cultures (Towse and Navarrete Hernández, 2020). Moreover, not all the benefits stemming from heritage depend on direct consumption and economic literature refers to them as non-use values (Peacock and Rizzo, 2008): this is the case of existence, option and bequest demand, respectively referring to the amount that individuals are willing to pay for ensuring that heritage exists for others, for having the option of consuming it in the future or for transmitting it to future generations. The above benefits cannot be fully provided through the market because they are not reflected by the price and public action is needed to avoid their under-provision according with individuals’ preferences (Bille, 2020). Moreover, there are also equity issues, namely to ensure the accessibility to cultural heritage to everybody, regardless of their economic means, providing a rationale for government intervention. The problem is how to value cultural capital and particularly archaeological heritage because, although the estimation of derived flows and economic impact can be done through the market and prices, its intrinsic valuation falls outside the market and needs social recognition to properly manage its provision and preservation (Klamer, 2014). In addition to well-known heritage that is cataloged and protected, there are also other remains and elements that need collective recognition for their preservation, or even those that are yet to be discovered are subject to uncertainty and may be considered as common-pool resources (nonexclusive but rival goods), often subject to looting and vandalism, unless there are sufficient mechanisms for protection or cooperation. Hence there are also concomitances between cultural and archaeological heritage with natural resources, as both are subject to conditions of sustainability and risk of irreversible disappearance (Rizzo and Throsby, 2006). Though the existence of market failure is widely agreed upon, the level of public support for cultural heritage is controversial as are related corrective measures (Towse, 2019). Moving from a normative to a positive perspective, it is worth noting that almost everywhere the government has a prominent role, though with different quantitative and qualitative features, in relation to the amount of public resources,
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the mix of public toolsddirect and indirect expenditure and regulation –, and the institutional approaches, with effects also on the role played by the private sector. Thus, to analyze how public action operates in practice, the political economy perspective is increasingly adopted to investigate the heritage public decision-making process (Mazza, 2020) and the negotiations taking place among several actorsdpolicymakers, public officials/experts, providers of heritage services, and the general public. All steps of the heritage decision-making process are characterized by information asymmetry (Mazza, 2020), a crucial open question being to what extent public decisions represent the preference of the public, especially when public funding is involved (Peacock, 1994). Information asymmetry is a feature especially marked in heritage decision-making as the specific knowledge and expertise involved enhances the role of public officials/experts, the implication being the inconsistency between the public process of policy-making and the society’s preferences, unless citizens’ participation to public decisions is enlarged to reduce asymmetrical information (Rizzo and Throsby, 2006). Depending on experts’ professional training, disagreements occur about priorities concerning what and how to conserve, with different impacts on the related costs and benefits (Rizzo, 2022). Several and different conflicts are at work: for instance, whether to allocate resources to preserve the pastdon the assumption that future generations will have the same tastes and technological possibilities as the present onedor to promote contemporary heritage (Peacock and Rizzo, 2008); how to define priorities between archaeological excavation interests and the integrity of natural reserves where the archaeological remains are located or between the need of archaeologists for research outcomes and the conservation of the sites they dig (Demas and Agnew, 2013); whether re-construction rather than a conservative approach should be used in archaeological sites (Stanley Price, 2009); what should be the role of preventive archaeology, just aimed at producing knowledge and preservation or at considering the social impact of urban development through a closer relationship with the construction sector (Watson and Fredheim, 2022); to what extent to rely on technologies for heritage understanding and interpretation with the related claimed potential risk of spoiling its special nature. Not to mention the trade-off arising between economic and conservation priorities since heritage conservation decisions and the related regulation may severely impact the possibility of using heritage for private and collective purposes and on urban regeneration and tourism to promote local development. It is also worth mentioning the lack of normative justification for the tight regulation usually preventing the sale of any artifact in public ownership, with no distinction regarding its quality, while it might be more beneficial for society to use the great amount of excavated artifacts of no artistic value to raise resources to be used for the conservation of the site rather than bearing the costs to keep them in repositories (if they are not reburied) with no benefits for the community (Giardina and Rizzo, 1994). In general, the strength of regulation and the tendency to overlook opportunity costs, with the related sustainability issues, appears the endogenous product of the public decision-making process, explaining why economic advice is more difficult to be accepted in the heritage conservation field than in other areas of cultural policy (Peacock, 2004). The degree of interest of experts for economic considerations may partially depend on the specific institutional framework, being lower where conservation is the task of governmental bodies and experts are allocated financial resources and do not need to justify their actions as instead, it happens when non-governmental bodies are responsible for conservation (Villaseñor and Magar, 2012). The concern for the expert-driven approach in the process of “heritagization” is widespread not only among economists but also in the heritage field, though with different arguments and great emphasis on values (Burtenshaw, 2014). Yet, the involvement of various stakeholders and the local community participation in the management of heritage sites has been advocated by international institutions, since the Burra Charter (Williams, 2018) and is also clearly expressed at European level in the Faro Convention, acknowledging an “individual and collective responsibility toward cultural heritage”, the question being how to move from theory to practice (Díaz-Andreu, 2017). The shifting toward community involvement in decision-making appears more spread in the archaeological field than in other cultural areas. The increasing importance of the public archaeology approach, which outlines the relationship between archaeological research and society, stresses the need to enable communities to define which heritage matters for them, even if of little archaeological significance for experts, and offers a good example of such a trend and many interesting case studies (Moshenska, 2017). The awareness of the shortcomings of the decision-making process calls for the evaluation of heritage conservation policies/ activities to reduce asymmetrical information and make heritage decisions sustainable and accountable.
Sustainability It is widely recognized that, in analogy with natural capital, the long-term management of cultural capital can be cast in terms of sustainable development (Rizzo and Throsby, 2006), the basic principles being intergenerational equitydrequiring that the present generation satisfies its needs without compromising the satisfaction of future generations’ needsdand the precautionary principledcalling for a risk-averse approach when decisions may lead to irreversible change. In fact, heritage may be subjected to the threat of deterioration, because of commodification (Ashworth, 2013) or the congestion of over-tourism, or even of irreversible loss due to the destruction of unearthed archaeological remains when urbanization or urban redevelopment take place or even because of wars and conflicts (Zubrow, 2016). Moreover, sustainability depends also on the size of benefits provided by the production and consumption of heritage goods and services. Several issues are at stake. Decisions regarding the extension of the lists of artifacts belonging to cultural heritage or the restrictions of the potential uses of heritage require to consider the related opportunity costs, otherwise it is likely that private funding is discouraged, implying that the demand for public intervention increases and the conservation objectives may not be
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fulfilled in the presence of public budget constraints (Peacock and Rizzo, 2008). The long-term sustainability of cultural heritage conservation requires that the decision-making process fosters the heritage economic values as a complement of its cultural values, focusing on the uses related both to social and market demand compatible with the assets. The awareness of the relevance of economic effects is permeating also the archaeological field, stressing the importance of the relation with the public and the complementarity between conservation and access and enjoyment to ensure the long-term sustainability of archaeology (Grima, 2017), a crucial issue being how economic and cultural values are balanced. The sustainability challenge is to enlarge as much as possible the extent of private support and participation in its various forms and to diversify the sources of revenue. Institutions “matter”: legal and administrative frameworks based on the “custodianship” model usually lead to heritage underutilization and limit cultural participation (OECD, 2018), negatively impacting on the size benefits generated by heritage. The engagement and support of the private and non-profit sectors also depend on how committed, transparent and accountable heritage institutions are, whether they are able to enlarge their public with targeted programs and to be sensitive to social responsibilities involving environmental and multicultural concerns.
Measuring Values and Assessment of Archaeological Heritage: Theoretical and Empirical Issues The interest in evaluation issues in the cultural field is longstanding and shared by heritage professionals as well as economists with different approaches (Angelini and Castellani, 2019) and a wide range of positions across cultural and economic perspectives as well as within each of them (Avrami et al., 2019). From an economic perspective, valuation methods can be used as important decision-making tools to inform policy decisions about the allocation of resources for the conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage as well as to assess the performance of cultural organizations to enhance their accountability. At the former level, extensive literature deals with impact studies, on the one hand, and valuation studies, on the other hand (Frey, 2005). Impact studies are favored by “art people” (Frey, 2005), and this is very much so in the archaeological field (Burtenshaw, 2014), while they are questioned by economists because of their advocacy in favor of heritage activities with the highest shortterm economic impact, in terms of employment and turnover, mainly measured by tourists’ expenditure, without adequately considering tourism adverse effects on heritage sites and on local communities nor heritage cultural and non-use values; thus, economic effects tend to be overstated while opportunity costs are disregarded and a misallocation of resources is likely to occur (Bille, 2020). More promising are studies that attempt to assess the social performance of a cultural and archaeological heritage recovery project through cost-benefit analysis, including estimates of the economic value assigned by users and non-users to the heritage assets. These estimates are measured either as direct use value or as a willingness to pay for non-use values, expressing the economic value in monetary terms. The literature on valuation studies on museums and built heritage is very extensive (Wright and Eppink, 2016), and within it, some studies investigate, with different methodologies based on revealed preferences or on stated preferences, a limited number of heterogeneous ruins or archaeological sites such as, among others, Templo Mayor, Cholula and Cacaxtla in Mexico, Stonehenge in the UK, Manitoba aboriginal rock paintings in Canada, Campi Flegrei in Italy, Heraklion Archaeological Museum and the Knossos Palace in Greece, the archaeological area of Garni in Armenia, the cultural and archaeological landscape in the Netherlands, the sanctuary of My Son in Vietnam, Vindolanda, Hadrian’s Wall in the UK, the urban and archaeological complex of Valdivia in Chile, Great Aamose in Denmark and the Poseidon temple in Sounio, Greece (for a literature review, Herrero Prieto, 2019). Though caution is needed for any generalization because of the differences in methodology, the scope of the analyses and the type of heritage, overall, the empirical evidence seems to suggest that positive values are assigned to the conservation of archaeological sites as well as to built heritage, with higher values for users (visitors or residents) than for non-users and that educational experiences are appreciated by the public (Rizzo, 2022). A major weakness of valuation studies is that they closely rely on welfare economics to evaluate willingness to pay without explicitly considering the peculiarities of heritage that, unlike other goods, generates both economic and cultural values (Frey, 2005). Cultural value is recognized as a determinant of economic value, rather than value in itself, and measured in monetary terms, whereas it is characterized by a multiple set of (aesthetic, spiritual, social, historical, symbolic and authenticity) attributes and has no single unit of account. Indeed, there is no agreed definition of cultural value among economists, and the relationship that exists between these values is an open issue in the academic debate (Angelini and Castellani, 2019) and is also a matter of discussion between economists and archaeologists (Burtenshaw, 2014). Shifting attention from the macro to the micro level, some form of evaluation is also called for as far as the production of heritage goods and services is concerned. In such a case, the purpose is not to measure the different values associated with heritage but to provide the various stakeholders with virtual measures of the performance of cultural organizations to make them accountable since they are mainly not market-oriented and rely on public funding. The interest of economists in assessing the performance of cultural organizations has grown in the last decades, mainly referring to museums and, to a lesser extent to archives and libraries, almost disregarding the archaeological field. The basic issues refer to the object of measurement and to the methodologies to be used. As for the former, it is worth noting that “there is no such thing as ‘the performance’ of cultural institutions” (Pignataro, 2011: 336), and there are different aspects, such as effectiveness and efficiency, to be evaluated. Being outcomes very difficult to measure, in the literature, attention is concentrated on efficiency, namely on technical efficiency, which measures the capability of maximizing production with a given amount of inputs (or, alternatively, minimizing
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inputs for a given level of output) (Herrero Prieto and del Barrio Tellado, 2020). Since cultural institutions are multi-product organizations, offering several outputs such as acquisition, collection, restoration, displaying, visits and some additional services (Fernandez et al., 2013), a crucial step for efficiency evaluation is to identify and measure outputs and inputs representing the various functions of the institution. For instance, in the literature, several physical, as well as monetary measures of the output of museums are proposed (e.g., number of visitors, number of days open per year, number of publications, number of restored objects, number of temporary exhibitions, etc.). The peculiar features of archaeological activities such as digging and conservation would require more specific analysis. Two different categories of methodologies are distinguished: performance indicators and efficiency frontiers (Herrero Prieto and del Barrio Tellado, 2020). Performance indicators are relatively straightforward measures; they can be simple numbers (number of visits, number of publications or, more often, ratios (cost per visitor, number of custodians per visitor, etc.), provide information on single aspects of heritage production and consumption and, therefore, are not suitable to grasp the complexity of multidimensional output nor to provide a clear valuation of the institution’s efficiency or a good comparison among institutions. Multidimensionality is taken into account through more advanced methods, such as efficiency frontiers methods, which are increasingly adopted in empirical studies with different techniques (Herrero Prieto and del Barrio Tellado, 2020). These methods take simultaneously into account all the relevant inputs and outputs of the production process (provided that data are available), construct one single measure of efficiency, estimate an optimal frontier in the production process and assess the level of efficiency of each production unit in terms of the distance from the frontier. As a consequence, it is possible to measure relative efficiency and make comparisons across institutions. Notwithstanding the development of evaluation studies at an academic level, in practice, performance evaluation in the cultural field is not systematically applied and lags behind other sectors, such as health or education. The quantity and quality of the available data, the characteristics of outputs related to complex functions, the problems of adequately measuring labor and capital, and the difficulties in some cases of correctly defining outputs and inputs, depending on the function to be measured, may explain the limited implementation of performance assessment (Fernandez et al., 2013). Data-gathering also requires commitment, systematic work and long-term vision, which are not always available and differ across countries (Navarrete Hernández, 2020), confirming the importance of the institutional framework also for the accountability of cultural institutions.
The Role of Technologies Technologies are deeply employed in archaeology and play many different roles as a tool for the various activities related to diagnosis, conservation, research as well as the utilization of heritage, with interesting economic implications. Technological advancements foster archaeological discoveries and research, making possible the production of public goods such as heritage preservation and knowledge (Giardina et al., 2016), and leaving room for improving the productivity of archaeological activities. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in its various formsdfor instance, websites, digitization, mobile applications and virtual and augmented realities - has many effects on heritage demand and supply (Rizzo, 2016). The possibilities of cultural consumption are increased, and more and diversified information is available to consumersdfrom the simplest one regarding opening hours, price or accessibility of a site to the more complex one on its cultural, historic or artistic contentda likely side effect being the enhancement of consumers’ capability of valuating heritage supply and the reduction of asymmetric information. It is common wisdom that ICT applications generate new possibilities for contextualizing and stimulating active consumption, thus improving users’ understanding and appreciation, also with positive effects on individual engagement. Contextualization and interpretation can be especially relevant in archaeological museums, which collect not only works of art but also simple items that require to be related to ancient everyday life to be meaningful to visitors. Virtual consumption raises also several issues. Its claimed beneficial impact on understanding and engagement cannot be taken for granted as it very much depends on the educational effects of ICT applications. However, no systematic assessment of this impact has been provided so far. Moreover, it is an open question whether virtual visits are a substitute or a complement to the actual experience (Rizzo, 2016). There is no clear evidence of audience enlargement (for Europe, Ateca Amestoi, 2018). Recently, the data collected on the effects of digital supply on participation in various cultural activities during the lockdown in the UK seem to suggest that the audience was not enlarged; the only increase in cultural consumption referred to those who were already engaged in real cultural experiences (Feder et al., 2022), which seems in line with the complementarity hypothesis. On the supply side, virtual archaeology provides a wide range of applications modeling the past, with increasing levels of expression and user engagement (Forte, 2013) not only with respect to heritage sites but also with the creation of virtual museums, a wellknown example being the Virtual Museum of Archaeology of Herculaneum. Moreover, as a result of technologies, the scope for the public funding of heritage may be reduced (Giardina et al., 2016). ICT, indeed, allows for producing joint products with divisible private benefitsdsuch as DVDs, e-books or web services with selective access -, positively affects the relations with funders, both in terms of advertising and sponsorships, and favors the voluntary provision of heritage activities through crowdfunding. ICT may also lessen sustainability problems in many ways. In the presence of decay and deterioration, “rivalness” in terms of conflicting objectives, such as preservation vs fruition, can be reduced, substituting actual visits with virtual ones (Giardina et al., 2016). Digital replicas are proposed as a solution to contrast the effects of over-tourism (Frey and Briviba, 2021). Still, it is an open question to what extent these replicas could also be a way of trivialization of heritage. Moreover, assuming the extreme approach that digital copies can substitute real heritage, economic constraints to invest in physical conservation for heritage
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transmission to future generations might be reduced. The controversial issue of replicas of cultural heritage is an old one, with some emblematic cases in archaeological heritage, such as the caves of Altamira (Spain) or Lascaux (France), which represented a technical feat at the time of building, as well as the provision of a new cultural supply, which has been the subject of valuation and impact (Parga Dans and Alonso González, 2018). Leaving aside the debate on the old issue copy vs original, well represented by the provocative question, “Why should all the objects be preserved if they can also be well documented by trusty copies?” (Ginsburgh and Mairesse, 2013: 154), it is, however, worth noting that digital documentation can play a crucial role to preserve the memory of heritage sites threatened by war. In addition, the globalization of culture favored by technologies may have a positive impact on the sustainability of heritage sites conservation through the effects on tourism, mainly if creative tourism is promoted for minor heritage sites, a widely quoted pioneer example being the exploitation of the archaeological and historical resources of Ename in Belgium (CHCfE Consortium, 2015). To what extent heritage institutions are willing to exploit the potentialities offered by digital technologies to be innovative and responsive toward the public is an open question. Such an aptitude varies across countries in relation to the institutional incentives and the constraints imposed by funding bodies and society (Rizzo, 2016), and also to the different approaches to conservation, whether the emphasis is on cultural communication and philological conservation, as in Europe, or is more oriented toward entertainment, without much attention to the distinction between “fake” and “authentic”, an example of the latter approach being the Chinese Daming Palace National Heritage Park (Forte, 2013). Finally, the inequality effects related to the occurrence of a cultural “digital divide” across social groups and heritage institutions are worth noting since they imply, on the one hand, the unequal representation of different social groups with adverse effects in terms of social inclusion and participation and, on the other hand, less visibility on the Internet for minor heritage sites compared to the “superstars” (Rizzo, 2016).
International Cooperation The analysis of archaeological heritage from an international perspective is becoming increasingly important for several reasons. Firstly, war and conflict situations lead to the destruction of archaeological sites and the looting of museums and sites, giving rise to a substantial black market of archaeological artifacts from these areas. This illicit trade of antiquities has given rise to new formulas of international cultural cooperation as well as best practice guidelines on art collection management and antiquities auctions. Most museums have now adopted stringent acquisition policies and inventory transparency rules in order to ensure that looted items no longer enter their collections (Demas and Agnew, 2013). More punitive court decisions on the antiquities market also seem to have curbed the illicit market and led prices to rise at auction (Beltrametti and Marrone, 2016). Nevertheless, there is an increasingly widespread custom in auctions of offering large and relatively undocumented bulk lot sales, which often masks illicit traffic and evidences a kind of gray market for antiques (Marrone, 2018; Greenland et al., 2019). Stopping these practices by both collectors and auction houses would lead to greater transparency and efficiency in the antiquities market. The scenario of destruction or over-exploitation of archaeological resources can also happen when there is an insufficient regulatory framework, which is the case of treasure-hunters pursuing sunken archaeological ensembles (see the case of the lawsuit between the Company Odyssey and Spain as regards the treasure of the frigate Mercedes, sunk in the waters near the Algarve). There might also be cases of insufficient regulation due to the lack of solid institutions in less developed countries, with a reduced capacity of having resources (curational skills and physical infrastructures) to preserve heritage, and finally, with a lack of social recognition and collective cooperation as regards this matter. This is why the government is often tasked with having to preserve and protect this under the hypothesis of solving a market failure (Gestrich, 2011). This option may offer an initial solution to the problems involving the definition and protection of archaeological heritage, but it also gives rise to government failures, particularly when dealing with legacies in precarious areas of developing countries and involving less scrupulous collectors. For example, most countries tend to adopt export bans on works of art and archaeological remains in an attempt to safeguard national cultural heritage. However, when these actions are not carried out correctly, either because institutional follow-up is weak or even due to corrupt government intermediaries in charge of heritage, such measures may prove to be counterproductive, in the sense that they may give rise to a parallel black market of archaeological artifacts and occasionally trigger the destruction or deterioration of the original sites. In this regard, Kremer and Wilkening (2015) show that figures for long-term international leasing contracts or sales with a repurchase option related to archaeological legacies and antiquities in developing countries may be more efficient measures since they maintain the incentive to protect archaeological heritage by deactivating the black market while also providing the country of origin with substantial sources of income. Closely linked to the issue of illegal traffic is the problem involving the repatriation of cultural and archaeological legacies seized during colonial times, particularly in African countries, which is triggering substantial international debate (Sarr and Savoy, 2018). Aside from the claims based purely on moral or ethical arguments, or the formal processes based on transgressed property rights for restitution, innovative forms of reintegrating cultural artifacts are emerging, which mainly revolve around the following alternatives (Snowball et al., 2022): Mutual Beneficiary Repatriation Agreements (MBRAs), involving the formulas mentioned above (leasing contracts and the array of agreed long-term loans); touring exhibitions, which may form part of reciprocal arrangements that are usually linked to an MBRA; and finally, so-called digital repatriation, based on the assumption that digitalized images or artifacts can serve as an effective substitute for the physical return of those artifacts (Frey and Briviba, 2022), and which give rise to a more ample discussion again on the validity and usefulness of heritage replicas.
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Finally, another interesting and increasingly widespread opinion involves considering cultural heritage, and in particular archaeological heritage, as the notion of a world public good (Comer, 2014) or even as a kind of global human right (Zubrow, 2016). The idea is that there are iconic archaeological ensembles that should be enjoyed by the world as a whole and which provide a vast array of positive externalities (knowledge, research, global identity, economic impact, etc.), responsibility for the provision and conservation of which goes beyond national borders and involves policies and institutions at an international cooperation scale. Clearly, such a description may be appropriate for prominent world-famous heritage and archaeological ensembles but would fail to apply to the bulk of less notable archaeological work whose recognition mainly relies on regional or local communities.
Summary and Future Directions The appreciation of cultural heritage as a factor of social well-being is widespread in modern societies, as a source of collective identity and creativity but also of global values. The multifaceted nature of heritage calls for a multidisciplinary perspective able to address its cultural, aesthetic, symbolic, spiritual, historical, social and economic features. However, considering economic issues together with traditional concerns of conservation and research is not easy and is a matter of controversial debate across disciplines. Though it is widely agreed that the long-term sustainability of heritage strongly relies on its capability of providing benefits to society, with technologies playing an important role in communication and interpretation, the definition of priorities between conflicting values is a challenging issue. Heritage decisions mostly take place outside market mechanisms and are characterized by marked information asymmetries, a crucial question being how to find a balance between the experts and the public so that public decisions are representative of society’s preferences, especially when public funding is involved. In such a context, to this end, valuation plays an important role as a decision-making tool for the efficient allocation of resources and appears a promising field of future theoretical and empirical research from different perspectives. Standard economic valuation techniques consider cultural value as embedded in economic value, measured in monetary terms, while its multiple sets of attributes cannot be easily expressed by a single unit of account. The valuation of cultural value is still in its infancy and is an emerging research area, the open and challenging question being how the value of cultural heritage can be assessed as a combination of two separate –economic and culturaldcomponents. A further valuation perspective refers to the expanding use of ICT applications for the public outreach of archaeological heritage; as available resources are scarce, the investigation of the opportunity cost of technological choices is important. Indeed, notwithstanding the claimed beneficial effects of ICT applications on the understanding and appreciation of heritage, so far, there is no evidence of any systematic assessment of their cost-effectiveness to this end. An additional area requiring attention refers to the management of archaeological heritage as far as performance evaluation is concerned. The archaeological management is based on a variegated array of activities, with some of them, such as excavation, both in its movable and immovable outputs, being peculiar to this field and, therefore, would call for a specific analysis which, so far, has not received attention. Innovative public partnerships are worth investigating, and to this end, the role of institutions is crucial to provide appropriate incentives to the different actors and to promote interdisciplinary dialog, which is crucial for the success of conservation and enhancement policies in different contexts. Finally, new formulas of international cooperation are appearing in relation to the possibilities of restitution or shared use of cultural and archaeological heritage between countries, but also in consideration of archaeological heritage as a global public good.
See Also: Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Archaeology; Funding in Archaeology: Public, Private and In-Between; Heritage and Sustainability.
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Funding in Archaeology: Public, Private and In-Between Elisabeth Niklasson, Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction DefinitionsdArchaeology, Funding, Public and Private A Brief History of Funding in Archaeology Overview: Public and Private Funding The Role of Public Funding: State-Interventionist Models The Role of Private Funding: Utilitarian Models Return Values for Private and Public Funding The Role of Transnational Funding Key Issues State Funding and Political Polarization Private Funding and Ethics Research Funding and Cognitive Authority Summary and Future Directions References
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The trajectories for funding archaeological activities differ across time and place. State control and public funding is still vital, but there is a (re)turn to private and hybrid forms. Two different models lie at the root of contemporary funding structures. They can be described as the state interventionist versus the utilitarian, self-regulating model. Shifts in political thinking, such as ideas of heritage democratization and neoliberal logics, influence what archaeology gets funded and what funders expect in return. There are strings attached to both public and private forms of funding that can result in adverse consequences for communities and archaeologists. Key issues include capitalism and ethics, cognitive authority and gender, and political polarization.
Abstract Funding is a cornerstone in all areas of archaeological research and practice: in archaeological heritage management, contract archaeology, the academic sphere, and all those activities in-between. What do funding arrangements look like in archaeology today? Where does the money come from? Which types of values are archaeologists expected to generate in return? To address these questions, this entry looks at different sources and forms of funding, from public to private and from national to transnational. It also considers the significance of funding arrangements beyond the money itself.
Introduction Without funding, archaeology would not exist. At least not as we know it today. More than just money changing hands, funding has important social and political dimensions. The arrangements under which funding is sought, negotiated and granted can be seen as intersections where the interests of archaeology and wider society meet. This means that most (if not all) funding comes with expectations to deliver some form of societal values. Such values may relate to the fulfillment of laws and regulations, to the advancement of knowledge and preservation, to further integration and social cohesion, or to boost tourism and economic development. When addressing the issue of funding, it is therefore important to look at both direct (monetary) and indirect (social and cultural) dimensions of value. To better understand these two sides, the entry begins with some definitions and a brief history of funding in archaeology. It continues with two sections divided based on the role of public and private funding, followed by key issues and a reflection on new constellations and hybrid forms. While a broad range of examples have been included, the main focus is placed on western countries due to their dominance in terms of capital, and in influencing funding models elsewhere.
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DefinitionsdArchaeology, Funding, Public and Private Due to the great diversity of archaeological practices and funding arrangements across the world, establishing a common terminology for this topic is problematic. For the purpose of this entry, archaeology is defined broadly, as an organized mode of engagement with material remains. This mode has its roots in the premodern antiquarianism and collecting practices in Europe, which fueled the growth of the 18th–19th century imperial, colonial and national archaeologies of the West, leading up to the establishment of archaeology as an academic discipline and profession (Díaz-Andreu, 2008). Archaeology can be said to involve the objects, records, and thoughts produced from this engagement, including the people and activities marked as its domain. Today, many archaeological activities fall within the wide field of Archaeological Heritage Management (AHM). I will use this term to refer to most aspects of archaeology outside of academia, including legal frameworks, administration, management, site conservation, and archaeological fieldworkdat regional, national and global scales. For archaeological investigations mandated by economic development, the catch-all term “contract archaeology” is used. Although it is important to recognize the nuances behind context specific terms like Cultural Resource Management, rescue, salvage, developer led, and preventative archaeology, contract archaeology will serve well at a general level of discussion. Funding can be defined as any financial support that enables archaeological activities. This includes money to survey, record, preserve, excavate, and research monuments and archaeological sites, as well as money to engage and inform. Importantly for this entry, financial support is also understood as transactions of values (Graeber, 2001: 1). The values transacted may be economic, in the sense of how much others are willing to give in order to obtain a service, product, or experience. They can be social and moral, relating to what is “good” or sought after in human life. Values can also represent a meaningful difference, or contrast value, when compared to other entities in a given context. Beyond what people actually want, however, anthropologist David Graeber suggests that values are “ideas about what they ought to want” (2001: 3). We should therefore always ask ourselves what values the funderdbe it the government, a public charity, or a private patrondwants to generate by way of archaeology. What do they want us to want? The entry distinguishes between the role of public versus private funding. While the two have always overlapped in archaeology, most countries tend to lean more toward one than the other. Public funding is more common in countries with strong state control (state interventionist models), while private funding is crucial in systems where ownership and management are shared between public and private actors (utilitarian models). Public sources derive mainly from taxation and political bodies. They include funding from national ministries and government agencies, local and regional councils, state funded universities, and intergovernmental bodies such as the European Union. Some non-departmental public bodies and publicly funded non-profits also belong in this category. Private sources mainly derive from actors in the for-profit sector and philanthropic donors, including businesses, international corporations, and individual benefactors. They can also include non-governmental organizations and private heritage charities and trusts that do not rely on public funds. Another way to consider the differences between public and private funding is to look at who the main beneficiary is. As Carman (2018) explains, in the private realm, customers bear the cost for goods but do not benefit directly from the financial gains of companies, while in the public realm, tax paying citizens bear the costs while also (ideally) benefitting from the work of the institutions. Today, however, the line between public and private is increasingly blurry.
A Brief History of Funding in Archaeology When did funding for archaeology begin? An early starting point for private funding would be antiquarianism. Not the tradition dating back to the Greco-Roman world or 11th century China (Miller and Louis, 2012), but the particular brand of humanistic antiquarianism of the 17th–19th centuries. During its heyday, collecting and studying relics was considered a sophisticated pursuit, taken up leisurely by sons of the upper classes on Grand Tours, and more seriously by philologists, doctors and lawyers who cherished ancient objects for their authenticity and ability to corroborate ancient texts (Díaz-Andreu, 2008). Most looked abroad to places dear to the western imagination, such as ancient Greece and Rome, but some also nurtured an interest in medieval Europe. Collectors and antiquarians were commonly self-funded or sponsored by wealthy patrons. In a few cases, they were supported by- or acted as advisors for royal and imperial courts. Their motivations varied greatly, from the advancement of individual standing to intellectual curiosity and efforts to discover the origins of civilizations and peoples. There was also an urge to bring order to experience in the “Age of Discovery” and to justify early colonialism (Díaz-Andreu, 2008: 101). The values transacted were thus social, linked to class and cultural refinement, and economic in the sense that objects were turned into valuable commodities. Together this paved the way for the exploitation of sites in the Mediterranean, and enabled the growth of archaeology as a discipline. When it comes to state funding, an early motivator can be found in the 15th–16th century missions to map the territories of kingdoms and religious realms. As part of this, efforts were made to identify ancient origins through inventorying monuments and relics. One of the first recognized attempts at state control came with the Swedish proclamation of 1666, when the king announced all monuments that represented the immortal glory of former kings and noblemen to be under protection of the crown (Jensen, 2006: 14). The document lists cairns, runestones, tombs, fortresses and castles. Just as with the early treasure trove laws in the UK, however, ancient remains were not yet seen as a common good but as private enrichment and a symbol of the crown. In 19th century Europe, archaeology began to develop as a discipline in its own right. Early antiquarians had been more interested in texts than archaeological excavations, but now many scholars decided to break with tradition to “create a new branch of knowledge . [that] embraced the entire material part of human history” (Schnapp, 1997: 275). This holistic approach was wrapped up in the search for a useable past both at home and abroadda past that could help build a national identity as well as
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legitimate colonial occupation and oppression (Díaz-Andreu, 2008: 128, 336–37). Archaeology thereby shifted from an individual activity based on small charities and scholarly societies to an organized pursuit involving state antiquaries, foreign institutes, large societies and universities. The concept of protecting monuments and sites as a common good became the norm, and legal frameworks for protection and listing sites of national significance were established (Carman, 2015). These changes gave the past a new purpose and led to new funding arrangements. Díaz-Andreu (2008: 16) has argued that before 1870 there were two different models for funding archaeology among the Western powers, with Britain and the US opting for a “utilitarian model”, and France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries for a “state interventionist model”. The division between the models can in part be traced to the self-regulating ideal in AngloSaxon common law versus the civic ideal in Roman Law. In the utilitarian model, which was linked to philistinism and suspicion of government, only that which was profitable would be sponsored by the state. Instead, archaeologists in Britain and the US had to win the hearts and minds of private donors, establish networks for collective sponsorship, and start charities. In the state interventionist model, public funding was the main means to support archaeological activities, including colonial and imperial archaeologies (Díaz-Andreu, 2008: 174). In France, private and charitable funding was even viewed as something that could undermine state authority. The state-interventionist model led to a higher level of funding in continental Europe than elsewhere, at least until the 1870s. From the late 19th century to the Second World War, AHM in Europe became increasingly institutionalized and professionalized. In Britain and the US, the state began to invest more public funds in archaeology at home. At the same time, European and American heritage laws and management systems spread globally as they were applied in colonial government administration (Carman, 2015). It was only in the aftermath of the Second World War, however, when efforts to restore cities and industries were well under way, that archaeology became a real concern in planning and development. More systematic excavations began, requiring more funding and more archaeologists (Carman, 2015: 34; Demoule, 2012). In many countries, the cost grew bigger than what governments were willing to pay, and in the 1970s the “developer pays” principle was introduced. It means that whoever orders the land-, housing- or infrastructure development has to cover the costs of archaeological investigations. Countries following state interventionist models either continued to rely on public funds or applied the principle under close government supervision, with state archaeologists conducting most of the work. Countries with roots in the utilitarian model, like the US and UK, soon opened up for private archaeological companies that operated as free enterprises. As King (1983: 144) notes, the new environment in the US “was one of legal fine points, competing public and private interests . and the heady but worrisome power, whether by law or bureaucratic fiat, to hold up multimillion dollar projects, determine the flow of contract money, and decide the fate of archaeological sites, historic buildings, and places of cultural importance to communities”. Today, development funded work represents the largest portion of archaeological activities, with the biggest markets in the UK and US. In 2019, there were 6720 employed anthropologists and archaeologists in the US. Out of these 4280 were working in privately funded domains, compared to 1380 in federal (public) branches, and 320 in universities and colleges (BLS, 2019). In the UK the same year, there were 5300 employed in commercial archaeology, out of a total of 7200 in all sectors (Aitchison and Rocks-Macqueen, 2020). Another important change in funding practices, which followed the post-war development boom, was the work of UNESCO. From the Hague Convention (1954) to the World Heritage Convention (1972), the remit of responsibility and concern for archaeological heritage expanded to the international level, with funding to follow (Meskell, 2018).
Overview: Public and Private Funding In many ways, the historic state interventionist versus utilitarian models for funding are still valid, but few countries fit neatly into just one. The following division between public and private funding therefore hides a lot of variation, but provides some anchoring in traditional forms.
The Role of Public Funding: State-Interventionist Models Government funding for AHM is indispensable in most parts of the world. The legal and administrative responsibility for selecting, protecting and managing heritage monuments and archaeological sites still lies primarily with nation-states and their dedicated heritage authorities. As Carman notes (2015: 134): “In no country is the responsibility for archaeology entirely delegated beyond government control”. National heritage agencies are generally funded by taxpayers via the state budget, but to what extent differs, and the power invested in them ranges from complete control to mere supervisory functions. In some countries, most decisionmaking power and funds are delegated to local or regional units. These can be provincial offices, county councils, museums, commissions, or parks services. Both national agencies and delegated bodies tend to issue permits and check professional accreditations for archaeological contract work. The assigned cost bearer for preservation and site management varies, however, and for excavations, the developer pays principle is now widely applied also in the state-interventionist model. Examples of countries that rely on state interventionist models include France, Denmark, Norway, Czech Republic, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, Poland, Thailand, Russia, and China. In China, for instance, all archaeological activities have traditionally been publicly funded. AHM is structured through three types of bodies: history museums, archaeological site museums, and archaeological site parks. These institutions provide funds, staff, and equipment for preservation and excavation, as well as storage, curation and display of archaeological material and research (Huijun and Doyon, 2021). Other public bodies, like local government offices,
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universities, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are also involved in excavations. Ambitious state-controlled systems often face problems keeping on top of things. China’s approach has been deemed inefficient and unrealistic, with market pressure, industrialization and urbanization leading to underfunding and a loss of control (Huo, 2016). A younger example is Vietnam. Since the first law for heritage protection in 2001, a combined structure of national and local management has been established, with the ministry for culture and its heritage department sharing authority with public agencies at district and commune level (Nguyen et al., 2022). This has led to another common issue in state-funded AHM systems: an overlap between management bodies leading to confusion over who is in charge. This often results in the duplication of tasks and carelessness in protecting the sites. A similar dynamic has been observed in Argentina, where the framework for AHM has resulted in a mosaic of uncoordinated governing bodies at different levels (Endere, 2010). The lack of clear policies and task distribution can be just as detrimental as commercial pressure and funding shortages. In contract archaeology, the developer pays principle is now a common feature in state interventionist models. This means that, even though the funding is often private, the archaeological work and price tag is decided by public authorities. Archaeologists will either be hired directly by state heritage agencies, museums and university units, or by commercial archaeological units that compete with the former (Everill, 2012). In many cases, the cost for the developer only covers part of the work, leaving out tasks such as post-excavation analysis and reporting (which may be state funded). Developers in Germany, for instance, rarely have to pay for wholescale archaeological investigations unless the archaeological resource is known or suspected beforehand. Also, while practices differ between Germany’s federal states, most archaeologists are hired by public institutions. In Denmark, there are no private archaeological companies, and while developers pay for bigger investigations, smaller ones are often paid for with public funds (Roland, 2018). In France, archaeological investigations are under the remit of the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) and funded via a special prepaid tax that applies to all developers. Sweden is an example of a mixed system. Before 1990, archaeological surveys and excavations were almost exclusively carried out by the National Heritage Board. Since then, due to political deregulation and rising infrastructure development, private companies are allowed to compete with public units. So far, around 50–70 independent companies have been established (Larsson and Löwenborg, 2020). The County Administrative Boards are still in charge of selecting who gets the job, however, and the National Heritage Board supervises and creates guidelines. Sweden is not alone in making such changes. Many countries using a top-down approach to AHM have allowed commercial archaeological units and private sponsorship of sites, and there is a search for alternative management structures (Gould, 2020). Concerning public funding for academic research, national councils and grant schemes are key. Both public and private universities usually have some core funding available, but larger research projects tend to rely on external grants. Some of the largest grants are distributed through government funded research agencies or councils. Almost every country has them. They are either placed under ministries, or more commonly, set up as independent and non-departmental bodies. The Swedish Research Council (VR, 2001) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, 2005) are two examples. The National Science Foundation (NSF, 1950) in the US is another. As an autonomous government agency, the NSF distributes funding for ca 12,000 research projects every year (the budget in 2022 was $8.8 billion). It awards grants for many disciplines, and archaeology has been included since 1954. For a long time, it was the only substantial funding source available, meaning that research that was not NSF funded often went undone (Yellen and Greene, 1985: 340). Some funding bodies, such as the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, 1939), do not just give grants but also employ people to do the research (including many archaeologists). With over 100 institutes and more than 5000 research staff, CSIC is one of the largest public institutions of its kind in Europe.
The Role of Private Funding: Utilitarian Models Archaeology takes on a utilitarian value when the funding it receives is measured based on the outcomes it produces. While a core principle behind economic utilitarianism is to fund that which creates the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people in society, capitalist and neoliberal translations of “benefit” has meant that job creation and tourist revenue are often valued higher than social benefits and knowledge generation. In utilitarian funding models, archaeology has to validate itself by attracting supplementary private funding. Today, when the need and costs of archaeological activities are higher than everdmatched by high demands on quality and impactdmany governments have begun to deregulate, diversify, and divest. Even if state control is still vital, commercial interests and utilitarian notions of value are now commonplace in archaeology. Although the UK and the US saw increased public funding and control of archaeology in the early 20th century, they are still good examples of utilitarian leaning funding models. Public funding covers heritage listing processes and legal protectiondhandled by Historic England, Cadw (Wales), and Historic Environment Scotland in the UK, and by the National Parks Service and Tribal- and State Historic Protection Officers in the US (Carman, 2015). Who owns and has the financial responsibility to care for archaeological heritage varies, however, involving a mix of federal and state actors, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), charities, trusts, landowners and businesses. For instance, while the NDPB Historic England deals with listing and planning queries, two charities own and care for the most important heritage sites in the countrydEnglish Heritage (400 properties) and The National Trust (500 properties). Both rely heavily on membership fees, donations and commercial trade. There is also a unique NDPB in the UK called the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) that supports archaeological activities carried out by community groups, private museums and local government actors. The funding for heritage represents a share of the total proceeds from the UK National Lottery, played by around 32 million people weekly (Bewley and Maeer, 2014). From 1994 it has generated £8.3 billion for heritage as a good cause, distributed on 48,000 projects (HLF, 2022).
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Similarly, private non-governmental organizations, philanthropic trusts, and charities manage a vast number of historic structures and museums in the US. Here, archaeological heritage can be both federally and privately owned depending on whose land it is on, and there is a long tradition of entrepreneurial involvement (King, 2013). Federal protection and funding cover around onethird of the US landmass, while the rest is in the hands of states, Native American nations, and private entities. Among the national institutions that do receive public funding are the Smithsonian Institution and its museums, and NPSda bureau in the Department of the Interior that cares for around 250 heritage sites and 55 privately co-financed National Heritage Areas. There are also many publicly funded grants and programs for AHM. Regarding archaeology in planning processes, both the UK and US systems are self-regulatory and based on the developer pays principle. Where funding comes from depends on who initiates the developmentdprivate industries and developers, individual landowners, or federal agencies. Unlike state interventionist models, private profit-making consulting firms and private nonprofits represent the norm, and interactions are chiefly between the client and the archaeological service provider. In the US, there is a wide range of service providers (King, 2013: 32), and there is variation in how compliance frameworks are implemented between federal, state and local levels. In the UK, the size of the contract archaeology market in 2020 was £224 million (Aitchison and Rocks-Macqueen, 2020). The same year, the estimated value of the US Cultural Resource Management sector was $1.4 billion (SRIF, 2020), a similar amount to contract archaeology in Europe as a whole. In the research sphere, there are hundreds of private foundations across the world that fund archaeology. They often bear the name of private benefactors, and distribute funding in their legacy. Bigger ones, like the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation in Sweden (SEK 2.4 billion in 2020) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation in the US ($2.8 million in 2021), operate in similar ways to state funded grant agencies, with set priorities and independent peer-review. Smaller ones are harder to pin down, as they operate in a myriad of ways based on their own interests and criteria. There are also increasing links between private industries and archaeological research. One example is the collaboration between researchers in Sweden and the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB), where archaeology is put to work in answering questions about long term toxic waste disposal and social memory (Holtorf and Högberg, 2020).
Return Values for Private and Public Funding What types of values do governments want in return for funding AHM and academic research? The motivations are, in some ways, the same as 100 years ago. The tenets of 19th century nationalism are still enshrined in heritage legislation and registries of protected sites, and AHM is still seen as a common good that benefits current and future citizens. However, there are two significant shifts that have reshaped the conditions for funding around the world, narrowing the ideological gap between the state-interventionist and utilitarian models. The first is the shift toward more inclusive and democratic heritage practices. Since the 1980s, nationalist, colonial and imperial ideas about what aspects of the past should be preserved, by whom and for whom, have come into question. This has led to new policies, such as the Australian Burra Charter (1979) that stresses cultural significance over monumentality, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) that gives Native Americans more control over ancestral human remains, and the European Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (2005) which calls for active community involvement in heritage decision-making. While there is a lot of work left to be done, such policies have had a big influence on nation states worldwide, resulting in funding for efforts to diversity representation in AHM. Even in China, an extreme example when it comes to uniform, politically forged nationalist narratives, there appears to be a trend toward a slightly wider representation of ethnic and cultural groups (Shelach-Lavi, 2019). The important fields of public archaeology and community archaeology (Richardson and Almansa-Sánchez, 2015) have also been born out of this shift. The second shift is the neoliberal marketization of culture since the 1980s, which has had significant normative effects on archaeological activities and funding structures. AHM has become more business-like and deregulated, with performance targets and economic benchmarks that need to be met and frequent splits or mergers between national heritage agencies to ensure efficiency. As a consequence, tax-paying citizens have increasingly become viewed as target groups and customers to be served by archaeology. While this ought to match the ideology of heritage democratization quite well, the focus on cost-effectiveness and developers’ needs has often led to a loss of transparency in government spending and the bypassing of indigenous stakeholders and local communities. Gould (2020) has noted that this also extends to philanthropic funding, as individual donors now ask for evidence of the money’s effect on people’s lives, or on the economy. Nonetheless, the extent to which donors care more about public benefits than the tax reductions they can claim on donations has been under debate. In research funding, what funders want is usually scientific excellence. Since excellence means different things in different fields, grant applications normally go through independent peer review based on the standards of the discipline(s). Increasingly, excellence has come to share space with impact and innovation. Not just impact in academia but broader social and economic impact. Unlike excellence, these criteria are often defined (or at least inspired) by national priorities and wider political goals. Here archaeology is also judged in comparison with other fields. Research funding is, therefore, not immune to political trends or the logic of neoliberalism. This competitive environment has tended to favor archaeological research that deals with technical solutions or which can address current social, economic and environmental issues. How far funding bodies and applicants must go to meet political priorities differ, however, and there is often an intentional vagueness built into the criteria.
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The Role of Transnational Funding Today the funding sphere for archaeology reaches well beyond the nation state. Since the end of the Second World War, new transnational organizations and intergovernmental bodies have created funding programs for archaeological sites and research. Such organizations usually receive funds from their member- or signatory states by way of quota contributions, fees and donations. This means they are, at least in part, publicly funded, although in some cases, like the World Bank, funding is acquired by way of multilateral and bilateral borrowing agreements that include private sources. Aside from these large funders, there exists a rich landscape of non-governmental bodies (NGOs) that work with heritage in economic development, humanitarian aid and peacebuilding. Among the most famous international actors is UNESCO (1945) and the World Heritage Convention (1972), which distributes money for archaeological sites through the World Heritage Fund (1977). The bulk of its income originates from compulsory contributions from nation states. Funding is directed to World Heritage sites with urgent conservation needs, but also to facilitate the development of heritage management policies (for instance to integrate community participation). What does this funding source want? Officially and ideally, the intention is to protect heritage of “Outstanding Universal Value” for the benefit of all present and future generations. In reality, however, scholars have found that the World Heritage regime as a whole has become a marketplace where the designation of heritage sites increasingly relies on favors and bartering between nations. This bartering is grounded in national prestige, political ambition and economic incentivesdthe opposite of what is intended (Meskell, 2018). Another transnational source is the European Union (1993 [1957]), where archaeology has received funding under different areas such as culture, research, regional development, neighborhood policy and external action. Under research policy, the European Research Council (ERC) and the EU Framework Programmes are key. The ERC funds archaeology within the wide remit of promoting academic excellence. Baked into this is a competitive ambition to produce research that surpasses other world regions, and to provide Europe with the research needed for social innovation and new industries. The EU Framework programs are closer to applied research. Here the overall objectives are already set. Archaeology has mainly been included in prompts relating to social and environmental challenges and sustainability. Funded projects have created new digital tools, new conservation techniques, and new approaches to citizen engagement. The EU Culture programmes also have a long relationship with archaeology (Niklasson, 2017). Since the first cultural funding actions in the 1980s, motivations have varied from protecting heritage for its intrinsic European values to funding heritage based on expected social and economic returns. Identity politicsdto foster a sense of European belongingdhave remained at the core. This funding has helped to build European networks in archaeology and supported projects on a range of topics and time periods. It has also, in some cases, led to a revival of narratives of a unique European civilization rooted in the archaeological record. Several projects dealing with the Bronze Age, the Greco-Roman era, and the Middle Ages, have pointed to a European identity in the distant past in their applications, and even linked it to the contemporary EU (Niklasson, 2017). The logic that guided the identity-building projects of the 19th century western nation-states is thus transposed at EU level. The World Bank (1944) is another influential funding source for archaeology. Of particular influence is the Framework for Action in Cultural Heritage and Development in the Middle East and North Africa (Cernea, 2001). This has led to considerable economic incentives for governments in this region to invest in historic and archaeological sites. Here, the concept of “sustainability” is key and heritage is seen as an engine for development and financial growth, tied to the social aim of reducing poverty. The bank has particularly funded rehabilitation projects in historic town centers and infrastructure for tourism at major archaeological sites. While many development goals have been achieved, researchers have highlighted important issues. By funding works on historic buildings and archaeological sites, the World Bank has helped generate badly needed jobs in poor regions. But the jobs have been temporary, and since focus has been on buildings rather than people, there has been little sustainability in terms of fighting poverty (Samuels and Lilley, 2015). Another issue is compliance regimes. Funded heritage projects need to follow the World Bank’s best practices to develop a site management plan to be used at national level (Samuels, 2008). This means that heritage policies in different countries end up quite similar and are not necessarily adapted to local circumstances. Also, since many countries do not have the technological or managerial capacity to implement large heritage infrastructure projects, external consultants tend to be engaged. These often implement a standard model with gift shops, visitor centers, and multimedia displays, making all sites look the same (Silberman, 2007). Lastly, there has been a tendency to use World Bank funding for heritage associated with the West rather than indigenous sites. In Tunisia, for instance, major restoration works were carried out at the Roman site of Uthina based on its attraction for Western tourists (Samuels, 2008), instead of (less economically viable) sites with local significance. The economic focus therefore tends to perpetuate a European colonial value regime. Finally, national and international NGOs that operate within or adjacent to the field of archaeological heritage are growing in numbers and becoming increasingly important. One example is India, where the dire need for conservation and management, combined with contradictory and poorly coordinated government responses, have led to a huge increase in heritage NGOs and consultancies (Meskell, 2021). Another can be found in Palestine. Here, unlike in most countries where the state is at the core of heritage preservation, national heritage is largely managed by NGOs such as the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC) and Riwaq, which rely on international funding (de Cesari, 2019). In helping to restore old buildings, drafting legislation, and upholding a registry of listed heritage, these NGOs take on some state-building tasks (de Cesari, 2019: 120). In doing so, they also help establish a base for governance in other areas. At the same time, due to their cosmopolitan nature, the NGOs have been less successful in public representation and in promoting grassroots initiatives. These new transnational funding sources have made collaborative archaeological projects possible that would otherwise never have happened. They have also backed huge efforts to promote, protect and preserve archaeological sites that would otherwise have
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crumbled. However, due to the motivations and criteria behind these funding schemes and their implementation, issues inherent in national funding models have sometimes been reactivated and new ones have emerged.
Key Issues If funding is understood as an intersection where the various aims of archaeology and heritage management meet and merge with those of wider society, it is important to look at situations where aims clash, and where the merger results in negative outcomes for those involved or affected. In what follows I will outline three major intersections that have been highlighted as problematic.
State Funding and Political Polarization In many parts of the world, having the state as guarantor and main funder of heritage management and archaeology is seen as the ideal. Public funding, distributed through the state budget to national heritage agencies and regional authorities, is often perceived as more reliable and legitimate than private funding, and with less potential for adverse outcomes. However, just as in the early days of archaeology, when state funding was linked to the aims of national identity-building and empire, public funding still comes with strings attached. These strings can take the form of amended antiquities laws, new heritage policies, or annual budget stipulations that outline the aims and performance targets of national heritage sectors. As discussed previously, the late 20th century saw a shift in what governments wanted from archaeology, both in the utilitarian direction of measurable use value and neoliberal efficiency and in the direction of fostering inclusive societies. The latter is something that many archaeologists and heritage practitioners, particularly in the West, have come to see as self-evident, forgetting that national aims can change. Nazi Germany probably still tops the list of situations where state funded archaeology has led to adverse outcomes. Härke (2014) notes how quickly the democratically elected Nazi Party took control of archaeology in 1933, by centralizing all archaeological societies under the new Imperial Association for German Prehistory (previously Kossinna’s German Society for Prehistory) and giving the SS-Ahnenerbe authority to conduct excavations. A department was also created under the remit of “ideological education”, with the aim to place the ethnic prehistory of the German people at the core of archaeology (Härke, 2014). The point Härke makes is that the urge for archaeology to always be socially and economically relevant can be a slippery slope. The definition of the public good that archaeology is meant to serve depends (at least in part) on the viewpoint of the sitting government. This rings true today as well. In Europe and the US, as well as in India and many other places, heritage is increasingly activated for polarizing political causes that reinforce divisions between “Us” and “Them” (Niklasson, 2023). We do not have to look further than Hungary to see how a democratically elected government of our era can change the political demands on archaeology through funding. After the populist radical-right party Fidesz won the majority in 2010, old cultural initiatives were defunded, and new institutions were established to harness and spread nationalist narratives of Hungary’s past (Bánffy, 2013; Bozóki, 2017). One example is the Institute of Hungarian Research (MKI) (2019), with its mission to establish the origins, culture and language of the Hungarians. Specific focus is placed on the Kingdom of Hungary (11th century onwards) and on validating the idea that Hungarians stem from the ancient Huns (rather than Finno-Ugric peoples). It hosts two archaeology centers, one on Hungarian prehistory and one on archaeogenetics. Other countries are also experiencing attempts to renationalize culture. In Scandinavia, populist radical-right parties have claimed more and more space in a polarized political landscape. They enthusiastically promote archaeological sites tied to national origin narratives, and their cultural policies aim to strengthen an ethno-national sense of identity. To achieve these aims they seek to redirect state funds away from contemporary arts and multicultural initiatives toward the heritage sector (Niklasson and Hølleland, 2018). These examples illustrate how state funding for archaeology and heritage is never neutral and the aims are rarely as stable as they are made out to be. Antiquity laws are usually built to last, along with the heritage bureaucracies that implement them. However, the priorities of governments (democratically elected or not) may well contradict the inclusive visions of archaeologists.
Private Funding and Ethics There have long been concerns about the effects of private funding in archaeology. What private funders want from archaeology varies, but economic goals (profits, jobs, investment) are sometimes seen as incompatible with the preservation ethos, knowledge goals, and ethical standards in archaeology and heritage. The concern is not only related to individual transactions but to larger processes of commercialization and privatization, which are based on models of efficiency, competition, and standardization, i.e., the ways capitalist and neo-liberal logics influence how archaeology is done and for whose benefit. One critique relates to academic freedom and the ethics of private sponsorship. In an illuminating exchange that demonstrates two different standpoints in archaeology, Hamilakis (1999) and Hodder (1999) addressed the role of funding in the Çatalhöyük project in Turkey. While recognizing the need to supplement university and state funds in this major undertaking, Hamilakis asks what the private fundersdincluding Shell, British Airways, Boeing, Fiat, and Visadwant in return. For instance, Visa was interested in hosting an exhibition about the obsidian objects found at the site, calling the pieces of volcanic glass “the first credit cards”. He points to the detrimental combination of the Turkish government using the project to promote Anatolia as the “cradle of civilization” and private companies using it to strengthen public relations for capitalist gain. Hodder retorts that, while aware of these uses, the idea of “the autonomous archaeologist” so often defended by armchair intellectuals is divorced from reality. Instead, he
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suggests, we need to negotiate and find acceptable compromises. Though both agree that multivocality requires us to challenge the structures of authority and power in archaeological projects, the question is if it is possible to avoid reproducing social and economic inequalities when working in capitalist structures (Hamilakis and Duke, 2007). If, as suggested above, a focus on profit leads to one sided state-authorized narratives and archaeological compliance with policies that harm minority groups and indigenous populations, this ethical issue becomes even more pressing in international infrastructure projects. The massive dam projects in the Middle East and North Africa are a case in point. Dams remain a contentious tool for economic development due to their impact on communities, farming, and ancient sites. Yet, over a thousand dams have been built in the last 50 years. Funded by multinational companies and with government approval in hand, such projects have necessitated large scale archaeological undertakings. Just as with other developer funded contract work, this means “placing the responsibility for archaeology on those whose projects will lead to its destruction” (Carman, 2015: 148). In these situations, pressure is high, and archaeology is seen as the last chance to save a record of the past. Yet, in doing so, archaeologists have facilitated the destruction of the cultural fabric and the displacement or dispersal of communities (Ronayne, 2008). Some argue it is better to save the archaeology than nothing at all and that it would have happened with or without the compliance of archaeologists, but there are examples where individual archaeologists have managed to disrupt dam projects (Kleinitz and Näser, 2011). Another concern related to private funding under the developer pays principle is the quality of research and the working conditions for archaeologists. A high supply of trained archaeologists, combined with contractors’ disinterest in archaeological expertisedwanting to get the job done quickly and inexpensivelydhas contributed to relatively low wages and poor working conditions. A study among 21 states in Europe (2012–2014), showed that archaeologists were paid less than the national average in over half of cases (Aitchison et al., 2014). Workers are also often employed on a seasonal basis, with little job security and tight deadlines that can lead to cutting corners (Everill, 2012). This makes contract archaeology particularly vulnerable in times of economic crisis and tends to reward low quality research (Schlanger and Aitchison, 2010). Nevertheless, due to demand, it is hard to imagine a sustainable alternative to developer funded archaeology. Without it, many countries would not have the capacity to record or protect archaeological sites at all. If heritage, as argued by Bewley and Maeer (2014: 241), “had to forever compete with the essentials of running a countrydeconomic prosperity, defense, education, health, and welfaredit would continue to be a low funding priority and therefore the benefits the heritage brings to society, at all levels, would be diminished”. Many therefore believe that the focus should be on improving the relationship between developers and archaeological units, and bridging the gap between cultural and economic values, so as to create more holistic practices (Burtenshaw, 2014).
Research Funding and Cognitive Authority There are many issues to consider when it comes to research funding. The lack of it is usually seen as the most pressing one, but there are others that deserve mention. One is the way funding shapes cognitive authority in science. According to feminist philosopher Kathryn Pyne Addelson (2003(1983): 177), researchers tend to see science as a neutral “stock of knowledge embodied in theories”. This makes it seem like issues relating to funding are merely external, having to do with political interference with the autonomy of the researchers. In reality, she argues, the cognitive authority of researchers also lies in their positions of power and social arrangements. They may have excellent theories, but it is their status that allows them to spread their ideasdtelling other researchers what their problems should be. With more funding come more opportunities for researchers in dominant fields to exercise cognitive authority, which in turn brings even more funding for specific types of research. This funding loop makes it clear how money affects both the contents and organization of the sciences. In archaeology, funding loops relating to cognitive authority have influenced everything from which geographical regions and specialisms receive more cash to which genders are more likely to get funding and be published. In the US, and in large parts of Europe, we are now reaching the point at which the number of men and women in archaeology is close to equal. Regardless of this, there remains a gap in funding allocation between genders. A recent study showed that NSF grants in the US are more often awarded to men than women and that men typically get higher dollar amounts (Heath-Stout and Jalbert, 2022). This pattern was also linked to male versus female dominated geographical specializations. Similarly, a study on ARC-funded archaeology Discovery Projects in Australia established that geographical foci and funding amounts favored men, and men were more often the leads in project consortia (Bowman and Ulm, 2009). In Spain, a study looking at publication patterns recently demonstrated that most papers in archaeological journals were still authored by men, in spite of an increase of women in archaeological research (Quiles and Corredor, 2022). There are a lot of explanations for these patterns, but cognitive authority and repetitive funding loops are certainly implicated. It is therefore important to think of funding as something internal rather than external to archaeological research: something that influences “the way we all will come to understand the world” (Addelson, 2003(1983): 180).
Summary and Future Directions This entry has examined different funding sources and funding arrangements in archaeology from the past to the present. It has attempted to show common patterns and point to important challenges that archaeology faces. Until the early 19th century, there was a reliance on self-funding and private patrons, along with collective funding through societies and personal networks. In the late 19th to early 20th century, there was a gradual shift to state funding and the idea of preserving the past as a common good. Today, state funding remains the norm in many countries, but there is also a heavy reliance on private funding and a gradual turn to hybrid
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forms. Yet the funding environment for archaeological heritage management and research is competitive, and there are far from enough funds to meet the needs. For the diverse actors involved in- and affected by archaeological investigations, current funding arrangements seem to produce as many positive as negative outcomesdwhether they relate to site protection, sidelining minorities and indigenous peoples, gender equality and academic freedom, or to fair working conditions. Based on the issues raised, the future of archaeological funding may therefore seem bleak. There are no perfect funding models to draw from for a holistic future scenario. Increasing the scope of private funding in state interventionist systems will likely cause as many problems as stepping up state control in systems with utilitarian roots. But promising ingredients can be found in emerging hybrid forms. Examples are grassroots buy-out schemes, issue-based public-private partnerships, and crowdfunding. The Scottish Government, for instance, motivated by a democratic deficit at the local level, has for some time allowed communities to buy state land with heritage assets in order to promote community empowerment. Similar initiatives exist in other parts of the world, with indigenous groups reclaiming ownership and management of heritage sites on ancestral land. This presents an interesting combination of democratization and the potential for economic development on citizen terms. In an environment where competition is fierce, a basket approach to fundraising for archaeological projects has also been suggested. A basket that includes individual donors, industry partners, state heritage agencies, and grant supported university researchers. Many funding agencies already call for such cooperation. A problem, however, is that mutually beneficial collaborations take time and planning to set up. Finally, a model for funding that will undoubtedly become more important in the future is crowdfunding. Successful examples include the Sandby Borg project in Sweden, where the engagement by individual contributors demonstrated the potential of crowdfunding to approach archaeological heritage “as a process of care and support rather than as a finished product with inherent values and meanings” (Wollentz, 2020: 276). Before engaging in exercises to find new and better funding models, however, it might be worthwhile for archaeology to return to Graeber’s definition of value. If value is what funders “want us to want”, and how people and institutions “represent the importance of their own actions to themselves” (2001: 47), the first step going forward is for archaeology to define the importance of our actions to ourselves and decide what we want others to want from us: a concentrated attempt to pinpoint and translate the values of the discipline and profession to other spheres, rather than letting values be dictated in one direction (by governments, companies, donors and other funding bodies). It is not about deciding between quality or quantity in archaeological activities, but about what satisfactory archaeological practice means in terms of knowledge-generation, social values, and collaboration with the people implicated in our work.
See Also: Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Archaeology; Economics and Archaeological Heritage.
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Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Archaeology Matthew J. Seguin, Seguin Archaeological Services, Hamilton, ON, Canada © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Archaeology and Engaging the Public Overview: Archaeology and the “Crowd” An Overview of Crowdfunding An Overview of Crowdsourcing Creating Connections Key Issues Looking Beyond the “Crowd” Issues in Crowdfunding Archaeology Issues in Crowdsourcing Archaeology Standing Out in the Crowd Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgment References
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Archaeology as a discipline has a hard time effectively engaging the public. When wielded strategically, perhaps the most valuable outcome of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing is the public engagement it facilitates. Crowd-based approaches can also help surmount funding and human resource barriers experienced by archaeology projects. The challenges that can arise when using these tools include miscommunication with the public and a lack of standard guidelines. These tools have the potential to produce mutually beneficial outcomes for both archaeologists and the public.
Abstract This entry provides an overview of how crowdfunding and crowdsourcing have been used in archaeology to engage the public, as well as offers examples of several successful projects. Next, it examines some of the benefits and potential drawbacks associated with these approaches and offers preliminary suggestions on best practices. The entry concludes with a summary of the key lessons drawn from various crowd-based archaeology projects and how these tools, if used strategically, may ultimately be of benefit to the field of archaeology now and in the future.
Introduction: Archaeology and Engaging the Public The world currently appears to be marching into a fourth industrial revolutionda revolution defined by increasing digital connectivity (Schwab, 2017). Meanwhile, many aspects of archaeology remain firmly rooted in its traditions. Although Schwab (2017) was speaking generally when he noted that there is a need for the world to adapt to this paradigm shift, his sentiments very much apply to archaeology. There are powerful digital tools, like crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, emerging in this era that are of particular relevance to archaeology. The term crowdfunding, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, 2022; crowdfunding entry); crowdfunding entry), is “the practice of funding a project or an activity by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, usually using the internet”. Oxford Dictionary (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, 2022; crowdsourcing entry) defines crowdsourcing as “the activity of getting information or help for a project or a task from a large number of people, typically using the internet”. Essentially, these digital tools leverage the power of the crowd to move a project forwardda project that may otherwise face significant barriers and never get off the ground. Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are not intrinsically related to archaeology. Nor are they new or innovative approaches in and of themselves. Yet when wielded strategically, they can prove to be invaluable tools to archaeology. An article from University Affairs (MacDonald, 2013) stated that, in general, projects “best suited to crowdfunding are those with broad popular appeal”. The same
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principle applies to crowdsourcing. Archaeology as a discipline already has broad popular appeal (Pokotylo, 2007), making it, in many ways, ideally suited to leverage these tools. Unfortunately, this has been hampered by long-standing miscommunication between the public, or in our case “the crowd”, and the field of archaeology. Overall, archaeology has had a hard time engaging the public. This has led to a fundamental disconnect between this discipline and how it is viewed and understood by the public. When asked about archaeology, most respondents in North America do not have any kind of standard definition for archaeology or archaeologists (Pokotylo, 2007). We can blame this, in large part, on the way this discipline has been misrepresented by mass media for generations (Gero and Root, 1995). Popular media has typically depicted a romanticized view of archaeology, wherein the archaeologist is a risk-taking adventurer, traveling to exotic locations to “rescue” valuable treasure (Gero and Root, 1995). It is perhaps because of this depiction and subsequent fear that archaeology may not be taken seriously as a discipline that archaeologists sometimes compensate by using overly complicated, dry, scientific language, making it difficult for the public to understand. Beyond this, the public has been, by and large, kept at a distance, barred from participating without academic credentialsdthe time-honored keys to the gates of knowledge. Those interested enough to try and engage in other ways must often scale a paywall to access knowledge, only to be met by the steep hill of jargon on the other side. Moreover, archaeology has always been a resource-intensive activity, often requiring significant money, time and effort. Funding in archaeology has taken many forms. In earlier times, it was not uncommon for digs to be self-funded by wealthy amateur archaeologists. Later, powerful and wealthy patrons, the likes of Lord Carnarvon or Eli Lilly, sponsored the work of professional archaeologists like Howard Carter and James B. Griffin. More recently, a great deal of archaeological work has been developer-sponsored, called cultural resource management (CRM) (Aitchison, 2000). With the exception of CRM-based archaeology, fundraising has become one of the most challenging and most essential components of running successful archaeological projects (Piscitelli, 2013). In conjunction with the need for credentials, this typically keeps archaeology well out of the reach of the general public. Fortunately, things are evolving. In fact, “an expansion and broadening of the content of ‘archaeological knowledge’” to be more inclusive and less authoritative, is occurring. “[This has broadened] the definition and meaning of ‘expert’” (Jameson, 2008). Thanks to this evolution, modern technologies like crowdfunding and crowdsourcing can offer the field more than money or labor. These technologies have the power to facilitate long-overdue engagement with the public, an outcome that can prove beneficial for all involved.
Overview: Archaeology and the “Crowd” Although there has been rapid adoption of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing around the world, their use by the archaeological community has been relatively limited, and corresponding research of the interaction between archaeology and the crowd has been equally limited, although growing. It is important to note that many archaeological projects utilizing crowdfunding or crowdsourcing may in essence, become examples of or very similar to the community or public archaeology projects. This may indeed often be the case, although exploring these similarities and overlapping themes is beyond the scope of this entry. It would, however, be beneficial for any archaeologist looking to leverage these tools to consult the literature that exists within the field of community archaeology, as there are valuable insights to be gained there.
An Overview of Crowdfunding While crowdfunding may be a modern buzzword adopted to represent the “sharing economy” (where individuals can “borrow” assets owned by someone else) (Investopedia, 2020), it is not a new concept. There are examples of “crowdfunding” that are hundreds of years old. One of the earliest examples dates back to 1713, when Alexander Pope was attempting to translate “The Iliad”. To fund the project, he asked donors to pledge money in return for being named in the acknowledgments section of the completed work (Kallio and Vuola, 2020). The emergence of crowdfunding as we understand it today can be traced back to 2003 when the Website ArtistShare.com went live. It was the first such platform that allowed artists to leverage the internet to connect with wider audiences willing to support them and cover their costs (Kallio and Vuola, 2020). A few years later, in 2008 and 2009 respectively, Indiegogo.com and Kickstarter.com, two of the most well-known crowdfunding platforms, were launched. These platforms truly brought crowdfunding to the mainstream (Indiegogo, 2022; Kickstarter, 2022). There were over 1250 active crowdfunding platforms on the internet by 2015 (Seguin, 2017). To date, Kickstarter alone has allowed 21 million people to pledge more than $6.6 billion. More than 220,000 projects, ranging from innovative new technological products, from videogames to archaeological excavations, have been able to secure funding (Kickstarter, 2022). These platforms act as community hubs, connecting interested members of the public with active projects called campaigns. If interest is high enough, people “pledge” to support the campaign with money, becoming “backers”. In return for their support, backers have sometimes been rewarded a “perk”. The perk can be nearly anythingda physical or digital item or a simple acknowledgment that conveys the value of the pledge and acts as an added incentive for an already interested member of the public. Different funding models exist across different platforms. However, most use either an “All or Nothing” and “Keep it All” model. As the name implies, under the “All-or-Nothing” model, a completed project only secures funding if 100% of its target has been met.
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The “Keep-it-All” model allows projects to take any funds that are raised, regardless of whether the target was achieved. Kickstarter. com uses an “All or Nothing” model. Indiegogo.com offers both options depending on the needs of the project. Most platforms charge a processing fee of between 8% and 9% of the money successfully raised (Experiment, 2022; Indiegogo, 2022; Kickstarter, 2022). As the crowdfunding ecosystem has grown, it has allowed more niche platforms to thrive. There is now a platform with a special focus on science-based projects called Experiment.com and even one that focuses solely on archaeological fieldwork called DigVentures.com, which uses a “Keep it All” model. There is also growing adoption of crowdfunding by academic institutions through platforms like CommunityFunded.com or GiveCampus.com. These companies allow institutions to create and launch their own in-house platforms. For instance, in Canada, the University of Alberta has its own crowdfunding platform, created through CommunityFunded.com. In an effort to support projects and entice users to their platform, the university has covered all associated project hosting costs for the researchers (University of Alberta, 2022). Although similar, institutional platforms differ in that they are largely restricted for use by members or alumni of the host institution. It is through these different crowdfunding platforms that those working in the field of archaeology are given a potential path to surmount one of the biggest barriers faced by many disciplines: research funding. While the traditional route of raising funds for research through granting agencies has the potential to provide considerable resources to successful applicants, competition is fierce. Statistics reported by the Canadian granting agency Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), show a meager 23% success rate for Insight Grant applications (for research excellence in humanities and social sciences) between 2012 and 2016 (Seguin, 2017). The success rate for Doctoral awards with an archaeology-based focus was an abysmal 8.8% from 2009 to 2015 (Seguin, 2017). This means that more than 90% of archaeology PhD students who applied to SSHRC were forced to look elsewhere for additional funding. Long applications, strict deadlines and high academic standing requirements only increase the barriers to a successful application. Additionally, the decision to fund or reject an application is made by a small number of “expert” judges. It is no wonder that Horta et al. (2022) suggest that academic funding is “increasingly associated with performativity, assessment, and competition”. With a project success rate of 47.75%, science-focused crowdfunding platforms like Experiment.com stand in stark contrast to traditional academic routes (Experiment, 2022). Moreover, success is determined by an inspired and engaged public. For this reason, many believe that crowdfunding can help democratize funding by transcending certain boundaries. If leveraged strategically, crowdfunding can help students do much more than just secure funding (Horta et al., 2022). Users have reported building valuable professional relationships and increased credibility through the crowdfunding process, giving them a better chance of securing traditional grants (Verhoeven et al., 2013). It is no surprise then that crowdfunding within academic settings has been gaining momentum (Horta et al., 2022). In fact, the number of archaeological projects that have procured funding through crowdfunding platforms, and the rate of success for archaeological-based projects, appears to be increasing over time (Seguin, 2017). Notions like the one previously held by retired archaeologist Dr. Volker Arnold -that crowdfunding somehow constitutes begging for charityhave all but disappeared. Volker later went on to successfully crowdfund a dig in Germany (Arnold, 2016). In fact, the DigVentures platform came into existence because a team of archaeologists wanted to secure more financial security for their projects and no longer wanted to be “reliant on handouts from charities” (Knowles, 2014). Projects hosted on the DigVentures platform have found greater success overall in comparison to those hosted on non-specific platforms. With a success rate of 85.71% (Seguin, 2017) compared to the industry standard of around 40% (Cowden and Young, 2020), it makes it a fantastic example of how the crowd and archaeology can work well together. Digventures customizes many of the standard crowdfunding approaches to appeal to their specific audience. For example, archaeology-specific perks like project updates, site access and tours, and even a chance to participate in excavation have proved highly successful (DigVentures, 2022). For this reason, despite a much smaller audience to draw from, a niche archaeology crowdfunding platform may experience greater success because of its ability to use more targeted strategies. It should be noted, however, that there have been a number of impressive archaeology projects successfully funded through generalist platforms. Unveiling the Sandby Borg Massacre, a Swedish archaeological campaign and Kickstarter success story, completed its funding initiative on Dec 31, 2014. It drew people to the campaign using a dedicated Website, as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts. Creative language and pledge rewards enticed people to join them for “an experience of a lifetime” in “unveiling the secrets of the Sandby Borg Massacre” (Sandby Borg Team, 2015). By employing targeted strategies, the Sandby Borg team created a compelling project that took advantage of everything the platform and the internet had to offer. They managed to raise kr465,619 SEK from 321 backers, which was enough money to aid them in the excavation of the Sandby Borg site (Seguin, 2017). Dig Hill 80, another Kickstarter success, is one of the most ambitious and successful crowdfunded archaeological projects to date. The Dig Hill 80 project aimed to raise V140,000 to excavate a WWI German trench fortress near Wijtschate, Belgium. They ended up receiving V178,891 from 2679 backers in 2018 (Verdegem, 2019). Like the Sandby Borg Project, they used strategies like engaging the imagination of the public and offering enticing incentives. Perks included virtual tours for schools and seats at a live event where project findings were presented. Some of the backers even volunteered their time, effectively becoming crowdsourced labor, to help complete the project (Verdegem, 2019). The project’s success was highlighted by the recovery and reburial of 110 missing soldiers. Without the public’s funding support, it is likely that these soldiers would still be missing today.
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An Overview of Crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing differs from crowdfunding in that rather than procuring money, organizers are asking the crowd to actively participate in the completion of a task. Citizen science is a smaller subset of the much broader crowdsourcing, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2022; citizen science entry). Crowdsourcing is a relatively new phenomenon on the internet. The widespread adoption of high-speed internet and the increasingly interactive nature of web programming have made citizen science possible. The ability to conduct much more complex work through a web browser or mobile devices, and tap into economies of scale, have allowed scientists and researchers to access significant resources at a reduced cost (Parrick and Chapman, 2020). The power of so-called “citizen scientists” to assist on complex and unwieldy projects has not been lost on federal governments. The Government of Canada has its own Citizen Science Portal. At the time of writing, the platform has 51 active projects from across the country, ranging from Assiniboine Park Zoo’s Beluga Bits project, which investigates Beluga whale social structure, to Worm Watch, which seeks to identify various worm species in Canada (Government of Canada, 2022). In 2012, the Federal Government of the United States launched a national action plan (Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act), calling on federal agencies to “harness the ingenuity of the public by accelerating and scaling the use of open innovation methods, such as citizen science and crowdsourcing, to help address a wide range of scientific and societal problems” (Gustetic et al., 2014). Like crowdfunding, most crowdsourcing projects are hosted on public web platforms. Currently, the most prominent of these, Zooniverse.org and SciStarter.com, host hundreds of projects. The Zooniverse platform alone has contributed to the publication of nearly 400 scientific papers and empowered 2,477,417 people from around the world to contribute their time and brainpower to scientific endeavors (Zooniverse, 2022). Citizen science provides an opportunity to gather and interpret information that would otherwise be impossible because of limitations on time and resources (Shirk et al., 2012). There have been several ongoing projects that allow the public to participate, to varying degrees, in archaeological citizen science. Below is a small sampling of the incredible breadth of crowdsourced and citizen science projects that have been used to assist archaeological endeavors. A particularly notable example of the public’s contribution to archaeology has been The Portable Antiquities Scheme in the UK. This project bridges the divide between the academic and the amateur by creating a record of archaeological or culturally significant materials and sites found by members of the general public. The Website states that “every year many thousands of archaeological objects are discovered, many of these by metal-detectorists, but also by people while out walking, gardening or going about their daily work”. Through their Website, people can submit detailed information, including images of archaeological sites and materials found during their daily lives, work or travels. All the finds submitted are accessible for the public to view (Portable Antiquities Scheme, 2022). To date, the public has contributed information on over 1,580,000 findsda significant contribution to the archaeological record and invaluable for future research (Portable Antiquities Scheme, 2022). This resource, and many of the records it has created, may not have existed at all if not for successful engagement with the public. Some crowdsourcing projects even allow participants to engage directly with original artifacts in digital form and then provide their insights and analyses. Participants thus become producers of primary archaeological knowledge. One such project, Ancient Lives, a Zooniverse project, asked participants to identify characters of several different ancient languages on fragments of papyri (Swindall et al., 2021). From there, a computer algorithm checked the identified characters against a database of known historical documents, eventually narrowing it down to the document they most likely come from (Swindall et al., 2021). The community research program Megalithic Portal asks the public to identify megalithic structures across the UK by uploading their findings and photographs. These are added to an interactive map that is freely available online (Megalithic Portal, 2022). In another crowdsourcing project run by the University of Iowa Libraries, called DIY History, people were asked to transcribe civil war diaries and letters (University of Iowa, 2022). This project was such a success that it was later expanded to include the transcription of many other collections (University of Iowa, 2022). A similar but much larger project from the Netherlands called Velehanden (which translates to ‘many hands’), gives users the opportunity to access and contribute to several ongoing projects. Users receive points for the work they complete and can compete with other users. This “gamification” of citizen science can create a powerful incentive to contribute to important work (Velehanden, 2022). The Valley of the Khans, run by National Geographic, takes crowdsourcing to another level by allowing lay people to digitally search unexplored locations for archaeological sites. The project was described as a “noninvasive archaeological survey of Mongolia’s sacred lands that allows web users around the world to actively participate in an ongoing, real-time scientific exploration” (Scistarter, 2022). The public was tasked with sifting through satellite imagery in search of anomalies on the ground. Identified locations were then verified by an expedition team which was concurrently working in the field (Lin et al., 2014). By allowing the public to help in the discovery of new archaeological sites, the project carried out its mission to “discover, record, conserve and protect Mongolia’s cultural history” (Scistarter, 2022). More than “10 K online volunteers contributed 30 K hours (3.4 years), examined 6000 km2, and generated 2.3 million feature categorizations’”. The outcome was that “55 potential archaeological anomalies were verified by the field team, ranging from [the] Bronze Age to Mongol period in origin” (Lin et al., 2014). Finally, a recent TED Prize winner, Sarah Parcak, received $1 million to create a global citizen science program specifically to identify new archaeological sites and protect cultural resources from looting called GlobalXplorer (GlobalXplorer, 2019). They successfully engaged nearly 97,000 volunteers for their first expedition (GlobalXplorer, 2019). Aside from the discovery of new archaeological sites, crowdsourcing can also be used in other unique and important ways. Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph in Syria, built over 1700 years ago and a UNESCO site since 1980, was destroyed by the Islamic State
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in 2015. In 2016, the Institute for Digital Archaeology (Institute for Digital Archaeology, 2022) crafted an ingenious way to mitigate this devastating loss. Using photogrammetry from thousands of publicly donated photographs of the monument, IDA was able to create a three-dimensional computer model of the structure. With this, they were able to construct a 1:3 scale replica from stone (Institute for Digital Archaeology, 2022). In a similar vein, the Arc/K project uses crowdsourced photogrammetry to recreate destroyed monuments. The public is instructed on how to take better photos in order to aid preservation initiatives. Photos are uploaded into an ever-growing database which can be compiled and used to help recreate monuments in a virtual space, accessible to anyone with internet access (Arckives, 2020). While certainly not an exhaustive list of the valuable work that has been conducted using crowdsourcing, the examples provided showcase the collective power of a committed public if adequately engaged. Projects otherwise too large, tedious, or complicated to be completed by a small team can be taken on. Furthermore, the public is keenly interested in sharing their knowledge and working with archaeologists to not only discover and learn about the past but also to protect that knowledge for the future. With many potential uses for crowdsourcing within archaeology yet unrealized, we are at the beginning of an exciting new era of public engagement.
Creating Connections Limp et al. (2011) stated that the “usefulness of any technique or method to archaeology, or to any field, is not a simple assessment of the value of that method (or technology) but an assessment of it in the context of archaeology and the benefits that derive from its use”. Although technology-driven, both crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are inexorably tied to the socialsphere. Our ability to successfully leverage these tools to create meaningful connections with the public can determine the success (or potential failure) of a project (Verhoeven et al., 2013). By virtue of process, crowd-utilized projects share information, which has the secondary benefit of potentially increasing a scholar’s visibility in their field (Harley et al., 2010). This increased visibility in a public forum like the internet is of critical importance (Graham, 2010). Data sharing online is not only important for the democratization and spread of knowledge but also allows for data preservation by ensuring that information is located in more than one location at any given time. These approaches also offer the field additional benefits aside from money and labordallowing us to disseminate knowledge on a scale previously impossible. These platforms help create low-barrier spaces where new relationships are fostered and valuable work can gain recognition. Furthermore, the intrinsic value of archaeology is realized as the public’s awareness of these projects grows. Public contributions and engagement with a project, even their social media “likes”, can be a signal of how much the public values a particular project and archaeology in general. Clearly, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing approaches can offer significant benefits, but like with any new tool, they are not without problems. Below we will discuss some of the key issues and challenges faced by an archaeological project that seeks to digitally engage with the crowd.
Key Issues Looking Beyond the “Crowd” While there is still significant untapped potential for the archaeological community to leverage the interest in the archaeology of online communities (Richardson, 2014), Smith (2014) points out that it might actually be more difficult persuading professional archaeologists of the virtues of digital engagement because of concerns over security or ethics. These concerns are not without merit. While the body of research in this area is growing, there is still a relative lack of empirical data on how best to use these tools within the field of archaeology. Because of the overlap between crowdfunded or crowdsourced archaeology projects and community archaeology projects when initiating such projects, it is prudent to consult the literature from these specific areas of archaeology. Investigating what has also been said in the realms of community and public archaeology, in conjunction with what has been written here, is important as there may be many parallel issues present within this discourse.
Issues in Crowdfunding Archaeology Perhaps one of the most critical issues relating to crowdfunding in general is related to the simple “lack of awareness and understanding about the industry, the rules and regulations, the potential risk, and relevant public policies" (Zhao et al., 2019). We have previously established it as a rapidly growing and evolving technology and discipline. It should be of little surprise then that the rules and regulations are also in flux (Mollick, 2014), or that those regulations may be as diverse as the borders they are written within. Additionally, the relative infancy of this modern iteration of crowdfunding means that there are, as yet, no universally agreed upon industry standards (Zhao et al., 2019). It has also been suggested that while some projects claim to be opportunities for engagement, they are in fact “not providing any actual learning experiences” (Perry and Beale, 2015: 158). A lack of attention to these dynamics (Smith, 2014) can lead to virtual commercialization of certain projects, perceived or otherwise, which can create tension between the public and the campaign host. Most platforms maintain a set of internal guidelines attempting to prevent the initiation of unethical projects or the misuse of funds. However, the particular types of ethical issues posed by archaeological projects may require deeper analysis (Seguin, 2017) and be beyond the scope of hosting platforms. For example, issues of ownership of the past and the ethics surrounding whether individuals
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should be charged to become involved in the excavation of their own past (Sayer, 2014) are unlikely to have been considered on more generalist platforms. Another issue to note is when careless amateurs, pseudoscientists or treasure-hunters posing as legitimate researchers online can gain access to funding and support for dubious projects. The consistent misrepresentation of archaeology may further complicate this, making it harder for a layperson to discern which projects are bona fide (Seguin, 2017). Such projects have been discovered (Seguin, 2017), although they have not yet been studied. Even more troubling is that projects like these may tarnish the reputation of the field itself or even do damage to the archaeological record (Seguin, 2017). To maintain credibility, archaeological projects will need to be transparent with ethical guidelines, researcher credentials and affiliations, follow and publicly cite regulations and consult appropriate stakeholders. As discussed earlier, communication is the key to successfully engaging the crowd. This does not mean that scientific language cannot be used, instead, there should be careful consideration of how language is used and who will understand what is being said. When surveyed, most backers of an archaeological crowdfunded project indicated that they had no background in archaeology or anything heritage-related (Koivisto, 2014). It is clear that archaeologists must endeavor to avoid too much academic language for fear of “obscur[ing] information fascinating to the general [public]” (Lippert, 1997), and ultimately deterring them from engaging altogether. Hui et al. (2014) believe that an effective tactic is to begin publicity before a project starts, and it has been shown that continued communication over the course of a crowdfunding project helps increase project credibility (Evers, 2012) and its chances of success (Seguin, 2017).
Issues in Crowdsourcing Archaeology Similarly to crowdfunding, one of the inherent risks of crowdsourcing is miscommunication between professionals and the public. Members of the public interested in the project need to have a clear understanding of what is being asked of them, how it should be done and for what purpose. Miscommunications at this juncture can result in logistical tensions between those running the project and those instrumental in its completiondthe crowd (Roche et al., 2020). With the limited resources many projects face, there may be little in the way of flexibility regarding timing or the reallocation of resources to correct these issues (Roche et al., 2020). It is critical to ensure that adequate attention has been paid to this first key communication milestone because once we engage the crowd in the mass production of data, we introduce the potential for erroneous data (Smith, 2014). The impact of erroneous data can be mitigated, but it is vitally important to carefully plan how errors will be identified and handled at the outset. Another challenge stemming from the use of crowdsourcing is that “3D scan and print technologies hold the potential to undermine the value placed on original cultural artifacts based upon their rarity and aura” (Cronin, 2016). Silberman (2014) has called the data created through the digitization of cultural property, like the crowdsourced 3D recreation of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph, “meta-cultural property”. He notes that these “meta-cultural” properties are in fact “cultural properties in [their] own right.” Despite the many benefits that may be innate to digital property, they are still affected by many of the same issues we might attribute to a physical item, like their impermanence or unequal access to them (Silberman, 2014). It is possible that heritage source materials become diminished in value simply by virtue of the meta-property’s existence, which changes the dynamic of access to information and potential economic benefits arising from it. Consider the recent sale of a historical artifact and its digital reproduction, where it was suggested that the buyer makes the artifact “permanently digital” by destroying the original (PetaPixel, 2022); a terrifying thought to the heritage-minded. In the creation of said meta-properties, we are also “creating, preserving, controlling, altering, reinventing and reinterpreting” narratives in ways very similar to a museum (Pickover, 2014: 2). The act of creating a meta-property for the public to view, thereby preserving one piece of knowledge over another, can play a “powerful role in framing and controlling our understanding of the past” (Pickover, 2014: 1). There are other implications for cultural heritage knowledge that exists in the public domain. While digital access to a project may significantly reduce barriers to entry, the ultimate power and control over the project reside with the few people running it. While these gatekeepers may see themselves as stewards, others may view them as digital colonialists since the ultimate choice regarding who might benefit still resides with them (Christen, 2012). This can be further complicated by the fact that as contributors to the process of cultural knowledge production, the public may also be interested in determining what happens to the knowledge they have helped to create and how it is handled. Just as no one crowdsourced project is the same, neither are the individuals that contribute to them. The outcomes, or the data they generate, may each form their own meta-cultural property. Suffice it to say, any crowd-based project may have broad ownership implications that should be carefully weighed before a project is initiated. While internet-based projects have the capacity to reduce barriers of entry for the public, they simultaneously introduce complexity to project facilitators. That complexity can take many forms, such as technical issues related to privacy and security for data and for participants or even participant-related complexities as the many different stakeholders who become involved in a project may have differing, potentially conflicting, ideas, ideologies or histories. In the beginning, we defined the public as meaning the general public. The truth about utilizing the crowd on the internet is that any number of different publics can engage with a project in a variety of ways that may not have originally intended, or even considered. Despite all our best-efforts, unforeseen issues can arise, likely at inopportune moments. Those looking to harness the power of many hands, many brains, or even many wallets, must be ready to pivot and adapt as needed.
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Standing Out in the Crowd With the rapid adoption of both crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, there are now innumerable projects on the internet, each vying for the (or a) public’s attention. This form of public engagement gives rise to a myriad of complex issues that are still not well understood. While the fear of being lost in this competitive and mercurial landscape is understandable (Zhao et al., 2019), there is far more to be gained than lost. Both crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, especially the subset of citizen science, have been successfully integrated into other disciplines and are each being studied. Billions of dollars have been raised, and millions of people are engaged. The field of archaeology can take guidance from the valuable work conducted by other disciplines. In order to effectively use these tools, we must actively understand, use and refine them.
Summary and Future Directions Archaeologists are already exploring the use of crowdfunding, and preliminary research conducted on crowdfunded archaeology projects suggests that they are more successful than the industry average (Seguin, 2017). Furthermore, they have the capacity to facilitate easier collaboration between researchers, scientists and professionals of other disciplines (Seguin, 2017). This creates a transformative learning environment and helps to increase awareness of current issues (Bela et al., 2016), helping the public to understand and appreciate the importance of archaeology and the preservation of history. In addition, crowdfunding can be used to bridge funding gaps, both inside and outside of the academic system. Ultimately, the largest potential benefit of these approaches is the engagement and sharing of information with the public and the proof of public interest through their engagement (Seguin, 2017). If this occurs in practice, it can create a positive feedback loop of engagement and acceptance. The increased use of citizen science has a positive effect on the “confidence in its results [they create and] could affect public support for and acceptance of citizen science research” (Lewandowski et al., 2017). Future collaborations could see backers and citizen scientists not only providing time or money but also help to shape the research questions (RiveraCollazo et al., 2020), participate in the analysis (Roche et al., 2020) and ultimately improve that research through their unique perspectives, skill sets, and knowledge (Lin et al., 2014; Lewandowski et al., 2017). Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing represent two intriguing new public engagement approaches that can be harnessed by archaeologists. Widespread access to cellphones, and other mobile technologies, have the capability to be leveraged for “ground truthing, site monitoring, and site discovery” (Smith, 2014: 756). In the future, techniques like machine learning could be used to enhance our capacity to problem solve and recognize patterns many times over. If archaeologists can begin to think critically about how to approach the public and use the tools of mass communication adeptly and responsibly, perhaps we can not only improve our chances of success but learn something from the process itself. Smith (2014: 757) may be right when he said that the entirety of professional archaeologists would be “inadequate to stem the tide of archaeological destruction that is already occurring”. This means that we need allies, many multitudes, to help us with this monumental task. There is a chance that if we reach out to the public and ask for their help through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing initiatives, we will discover there are far more people who share, or who could share, our love of this discipline.
Acknowledgment For Avni, whose tiny, dimpled smile reminds me that there is a bright future ahead of these stormy times. For the future researchers who might use these and many other yet unknown and wondrous tools to uncover and preserve the past for her and the rest of us.
See Also: Economics and Archaeological Heritage; Funding in Archaeology: Public, Private and In-Between.
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Professional Careers in Archaeology Toma´s Mendiza´bala and Jean-Se´bastien Pourcelotb, a Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y CulturalesdAIP, Edificio de la OCA, San Felipe, Panamá; and b Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá. Plaza Catedral, San Felipe, Panamá © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Careers in Academia Public Sector Jobs Consultancy or Private Sector Work Other Professional Fields Summary and Future Directions References
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Archaeology is a viable, promising career path. Archaeological careers can develop along three main avenues: academia, government, and consultancy. Salient points of each career path are highlighted, with their advantages and drawbacks. An experienced archaeologist is a person possessing many skills of use in the archaeological profession and others. Archaeology can be an enjoyable and well-paid job.
Abstract Archaeology is a fulfilling career path, both personally and professionally, and, contrary to popular belief, those who practice it do not succumb to inevitable poverty. There are three main avenues to develop archaeological careers that can be roughly split into the academic world, which includes non-profit research institutions, museums and universities; the public sector performing research as well as (mostly) supervising the work of others and enforcing cultural resource laws; and private sector work or consultancy. These paths can all lead to successful careers with decent to excellent wages, but more importantly, both the studying of archaeology in university and its practice endow archaeologists with a wide range of abilities that can prepare them to face many situations, and thus be fit for many jobs outside of the field.
Introduction Many archaeologists today will confess that when they were considering archaeology as a career in university and devoting much of their lives to professionally studying the past, the expressiondor objectiondoften heard from family and friends alike would be: “. but you’ll starve to death!”. Once graduated and with a few years of experience, the expression most often heard in casual conversations would usually change to: “Oh, I so wanted to be an archaeologist, but I always thought I would be unemployed and starve to death.” So, for those of you seriously thinking of following a career in archaeology, fear not. Archaeology is not only a very rewarding career path, professionally and economically, but also one that opens a greatly diverse array of possibilities for professional development and personal fulfillment. Archaeology in the Americas is considered a specialization within the broader field of anthropology, while in countries that follow a more European academic tradition, it is treated as a distinct discipline. The current legislation in most countries requires archaeologists to hold a university degree; otherwise, it is impossible to practice the discipline. Furthermore, in some places, it is required that those directing archaeological research possess a postgraduate degree, either a master’s or (more often than not) a doctoral degree. Whatever academic qualification you hold, there are usually three paths to follow if you want to become a professional archaeologist: academia, the public or the private sectors. Many archaeologists can and will take all or some of these paths along their careers. However, there is also the possibility of taking a different professional path altogether with the abilities and skills acquired in the archaeological profession. That is to say that not everyone with a degree in archaeology will dedicate themselves to it, and even if you do become an archaeologist for some years, you do not have to continue being one for the rest of your life. In what follows, we will try to give the readers an idea of what it is like being an archaeologist in each of these three scenarios and in other professional trajectories that might be chosen based on our own experience and that of colleagues working in developing
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and industrialized countries in order to convincingly show that archaeologists most definitely do not starve to death and that, indeed, archaeology is a very rewarding and enjoyable career path.
Overview and Key Issues Careers in Academia By academia, we refer to non-profit organizations that have a scientific or academic aim, such as universities, museums, or research institutes, which can either be public, private or a mixture of both. These will usually conduct what most practitioners refer to as “scientific” or “question-driven” archaeology; those whose research projects are designed around answering a specific set of questions, as opposed to what is known as “contract” archaeology, which we will explore later in more detail. A career in archaeology can usually have “humble” beginnings related to an academic research project, starting off as a student during the summer holidays when many universities expect their faculty to direct research in the field and employ students as laborers. Students and faculty will also be expected to familiarize themselves with the archaeological and historical literature of the site or region to be studied, meaning long hours of reading before setting foot in the field. Generally, at this stage, it is unpaid work, and students can even pay a fee to participate, as these endeavors are considered part of their academic credits. Notwithstanding the lack of remuneration, the training received in these field seasons is valuable as you not only develop the skills needed to progress in your career but also allows to accumulate experience that will help build up your curriculum at a very early stage. This can bolster the odds of finding a job once you have graduated, as well as increase the likelihood of being accepted at a master’s or doctoral program. Furthermore, these field seasons also give you the opportunity to fully grasp the gritty, arduous and unglamorous part of archaeology. One can expect working long hours in the sun, rain or high humidity, or even the cold; tiring days of walking through the jungle, kneeling at a dig site carefully excavating a feature while mosquitoes feast on you; acquiring strong arms by thrashing the screens to sift sediments and catch small archaeological finds; to then processing the day’s work at night in a computer or revising field diary notes. And this only covers fieldwork; we have not mentioned laboratory analysis yet. Nonetheless, despite these grueling tasks, most people who go into archaeology will tell you that no matter how hard a time they had, they absolutely loved every minute of working in the field. At the same time, this will be a very important chance to grow as an archaeologist and as a person, as this is a unique opportunity to get to know your future peers and colleagues, to work as part of a team, to exchange impressions and information on how to deal with archaeological remains, how archaeological data is obtained and interpreted, to dismantle your possible preconceptions and prejudices, to potentially turn your previous mentality upside down, even more so if there is the opportunity to do fieldwork away from your home country and get to know other peoples and cultures. Few instances can create more camaraderie, enduring friendships and professional ties, or meaningful cultural exchanges than shared physically demanding work in a cramped space and under difficult conditions. After a hopefully fruitful field season, where (with a combination of both luck and skill) the surveys or excavations yielded many findings, it is time to process them in the laboratory. As a rule, this phase always takes more time than fieldwork, as much as thrice the time or more, depending on the project’s ambitions and aims. Laboratory work can be very tedious as it can require washing the dirt off the remains, marking the provenance on each fragment of artifact found, bagging, cataloging, applying conservation measures and other procedures directed toward the ordering of the data to make sense of it. All this work, digging in the field or sherd counting in the lab, can be and usually will be carried out by students at different stages in their careers; either as part of an unpaid university course in college or in a museum or research institute as a volunteer, intern, employee, or through a grant or fellowship where hopefully payment will be involved. Post-graduate students doing a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation will commonly be paid to do this kind of work. Together with the field and archive data and laboratory analysis, the interpretation of the whole dataset can follow using the theoretical tools that were often learned at university to then ultimately produce publications presenting the results, with the aim of explaining more than merely describing what was found. In most academic research institutions, it is necessary to have attained a doctoral degree at this stage. These professionals are the ones who interpret, analyze, and publish the data gathered and processed by their assistants in training. Writing, revising, sending in the drafts for peer review, revising again and finally getting a journal article or book published are very time-consuming endeavors, which take most of the time available to the person in charge of a research project, not to mention the administrative demands of the job and/or individual projects. However, leading and eventually publishing the results of a research project and participating in the process of its academic divulgation through presentations for the general and scientific audiences also means that, in most cases, it is the academic archaeologists who are at the forefront of the profession, creating new knowledge that spreads around the word. It is important to mention that the leaders of an academic project or a research department are also the ones with the most administrative demands on their schedule. These obligations can begin with the writing of grant proposals to obtain the necessary funds to carry out the research as, oftentimes, these funds will not necessarily come from the researcher’s institution. Grant proposal writing is another very time-consuming labor, which has developed into almost a separate science or art form. Apart from that, as part of the job, project leads can also be obligated to deal with management issues related to human resources (keeping a healthy, stress and harassment-free work environment among complex groups of people), maintenance (overseeing mundane office building issues like security or upkeep of the air conditioning systems), accounting (making sure the bills are
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paid for the institute, museum or project), logistics (organizing transportation, accommodation and meals for field work) and a whole host of other concerns for which they usually received no formal academic training. This is precisely when much of the experience achieved in the field and laboratory while being an underling will come in most handy and be put to use. Making sure a research project does not go over budget, that a museum does not get broken into, or that students in the field survive the season unscathed is as important as gathering, analyzing and successfully publishing scientific data. Achieving the balance between managing scientific and administrative responsibilities (and knowing how and to whom to delegate them) is a skill that can be learned through experience and a structured training program. It must also be said that academia is a very competitive world, sometimes even more so than in commercial or contract archaeology. With ever shrinking academic and research budgets, faculties and salaries in formal institutions, and more graduates every year, there tends to be little turnover in academics, meaning that once somebody finds a good academic position, they will do their utmost to keep the job until retirement age or beyond. This is why some universities and research institutes sometimes have very old staff, which, depending on the general development of the discipline in every country, can be advantageous or not. This statement is just a matter of fact, not a judgment of senior faculty. However, this, in turn, increases the competition for academic positions and lowers the number of jobs available. Thus, young students fresh out of college that wish to pursue archaeology professionally tend to look for career development in other sectors within the discipline.
Public Sector Jobs Depending on the legislation and the state of development of the civil service in each country, having a government position in archaeology can be a rewarding career path with prospects for long term labor stability. These public sector jobs tend to be more for the graduate level archaeologists, either with a bachelor’s or (preferably) with a master’s or doctoral degree, that have some field experience already under their belt because a lot of the work can and will be about enforcing the national legislation on cultural resources. As most legislations consider a professional to be the holder of a degree, having a student making decisions over official matters is rare. This is the domain of culture ministries or secretariats, or departments of cultural patrimony or heritage at many levels, contingent on each country’s laws, whether it be national, state, provincial, municipal, county or city authorities the ones charged with dealing with cultural resources and their administration, conservation, proper respectful research and divulgation. Nonetheless, in some countries, these responsibilities can also be assigned to local, municipal, provincial or national museums. It is usually from these public museums that scientific archaeological projects will be proposed and carried out, following the same steps as outlined above for academic jobs. A state museum or research institute will have the advantage of having not only easier access to public funds but also already possessing infrastructures such as laboratory and storage spacedalways at a premium and in short supplydto handle the processing of the archaeological materials coming in fresh from fieldwork. Grant proposal writing, archival research, fieldwork, laboratory analysis, publication of results, and museum exhibits are part of what a public sector archaeologist can expect to do, with the accustomed host of students or recent graduates in the front lines on the field and laboratory, and more experienced post-graduates doing analysis, publications, and exhibitions. However, governments are finding it increasingly more difficult to carry out this type of research by the eternal constraints on public budgets. Thus, especially in the developing world, public sector positions are mostly dedicated to running the bureaucracy. That is, enforcing the law through the processing of the pertinent paperwork and follow-up procedures. This administrative work, usually far from the forefront of research, will be dedicated in large part to reading research permit proposals and later the reports from scientific and “contract” archaeology projects and judging whether or not they comply with the current cultural resource legislation. In addition, it may also be necessary to carry out inspections or field visits to ongoing projects, ask for changes in the reports, verify the catalogs of artifacts, ensure their proper long-term storage, and fill in the paperwork documenting all this. The job entails not only scrutinizing the work of your colleagues, the archaeological teams in the field, but also accompanying them in overseeing the behavior of land development promotorsdwhether public or privatedand the building contractors, who sometimes find it in their interest to cut corners and try and forego archaeological compliance with the law. Most countries will have some sort of regulation for how archaeological work must be carried out, either by academic research projects or contract archaeology for building developments. These regulationsdwritten by archaeologists cooperating with lawyersdare, in essence, a list of minimum requirements to which all archaeological projects should adhere so that they can be judged on an equal footing. Meaning that no archaeological project should be able to claim that their work was unfairly treated because of personal reasons. This, in turn, protects the overseeing archaeologist in the public sector from accusations of preferential treatment toward some colleagues. However, matters are not always as clear cut as they should or could be. Many interests can come together in infrastructure projects that affect cultural resources. In some places, this can be a source of corruption for public servants, especially when a scientific or technical determination can alter the course of a costly project. A building contractor or even a president or minister who does not want that pesky archaeological site to stand in the way of a new bridge or airport can wield strong, if not unbearable, pressure on a public archaeologist. A country can boast of the most complete and inclusive legislation, but if public institutions are not strong enough to enforce it, or there is no political will to support them or public sector employees in their technical decisions, all will be for naught, to the detriment of cultural heritage. It must be said and emphasized that government sector work comes with its risks. Many have been the public sector archaeologists all over the world whose careers were stalled, promotions ignored, or just outright found themselves out of work for trying to enforce the law or do their jobs right.
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A country with a weak civil service can see its public sector jobs suffer a high turnover of employees, who, no matter how well trained, can be fired and replaced by political appointees with every electoral cycle. This is the bane, the rock that many countries keep stumbling upon. It also results in poor technical supervision and, ultimately, the irreversible loss of archaeological heritage and brain drain. Professionals would rather work in the private field than risk their careers working for governments under such conditions. On the other hand, robust civil service laws that encourage public sector employees to remain and prosper in their jobs develop professional pride not only in the worker but also in public for the institution that servant represents. Well managed and nurtured national or community pride for any institution, such as a research center, museum or national park, can be an effective means to foster the conservation and proper management of cultural heritage. As with academic archaeologists, public sector jobs also involve skills not taught formally in university but rather learned in the field and through everyday on-the-job experience. In government positions, archaeologists are frequently required almost to become legal practitioners to interpret, enforce and sometimes even write laws and regulations. Here, as in all scientific work, of key importance are writing skills and a command of language. As any lawyer can attest, clear and meaningful written communications are the bedrock of any legal argument, and archaeologists must be up to speed navigating the sometimes-muddy waters of legal interpretations of the law. Also, archaeological evaluations of major development projects will have to compete with the interests of other government institutions safeguarding their own interests: environment, biodiversity, health, water distribution, and the rest of all matters state-regulated. Comprehensive handling and knowledge of the archaeological but also environmental legislations in general are crucial for the proper scrutinizing of any development project. Not to be forgotten are good interpersonal relationships skills. A professional that can maintain good working relationships not only with teammates but also with members of other government institutions, archaeological contractors, and building contractors can make projects run smoother and research advance rapidly. There will come a time in every project where even if the law is clear cut, circumstances will not permit for clear black and white decisions, and compromises and negotiations will be needed. Another very important aspect to consider about good relationships and public speakership is that even more than academic archaeologists working in scientific institutions, public sector archaeologists are public servants who owe their positions to the taxpayer. Thus, conveying transparent, accurate and relevant information as to ongoing projects, new discoveries, the state of conservation of public monuments and collections, the possible threats to cultural heritage and prevention measures taken, among a widely varied host of issues, is sometimes one of the most delicate functions a public employee can face. Whether a bulldozer impacted a burial site, a museum collection got stolen or vandalized or intervening in a land ownership argument between new settlers and indigenous peoples, most often than not, a public sector specialist will have to come forward and try to explain and calm down situations that at times can be very tense. The ability to explain to a public, lay audience, sometimes through the distorted lens of a newspaper or short television interview, complex circumstances, finds, sequences of events and how these intermingle with compliance with the law is one that is often required of archaeologists in the public sector whether they are directors of an institution or the person in the field overseeing earth movements that could impact a site. That is another necessary skill that is not taught in college but rather acquired through practice in the field, academic and professional meetings and symposia to face situations not frequently encountered in other careers. Academic archaeologists will also have to face the public, but usually not as often and under less complicated circumstances. All this while carrying out the job in a transparent, accountable manner, subject to public and even legal scrutiny, as with most other public servants enforcing the law. As the saying goes, “Caesar’s wife needs not only to be honest but appear to be so.” An impeccable reputation is of utmost importance for public sector archaeologists that can also be involved in judicial investigations assisting other public authorities that can range from settling land disputes, determining who impacted a site, if the law and procedures were followed during a project, or the criminal prosecution of looters, thieves and illegal or unscrupulous collectors that profit from the black market sale of cultural property and the laundering of antiquities through supposedly respectable institutions like museums and auction houses. It is not uncommon for archaeologists to have to cooperate with law enforcement institutions ranging from local police to interstate prosecutors to even INTERPOL (The International Criminal Police Organization) in the persecution of illegal international dealers. As with all the other aspects of the job, it is of vital importance to know national law, the history of its development, and international treaties that govern the discovery and lawful exchange of cultural property. This is especially important in countries that have declared all cultural property or materials obtained through archaeological means to belong to the state, which is not the case worldwide. Again, legislation on cultural and archaeological property is not something frequently taught in university courses, a situation that sorely needs a remedy. In jurisdictions with robust state institutions, the specialist will be accompanied by a host of other professionals, such as police, lawyers, administrators, politicians, and diplomats, which will bring down the full force of the law on criminals or assist in enforcing the rules. But in some other places, it is not uncommon for the archaeologist to have to balance some or all these functions him or herself, sometimes having to face serious dangers without much state support, such as local looting mafias or families with entrenched customs and social protection from neighbors, antiquities trafficking international networks, and powerful, wellconnected collectors who can make your career very difficult, if not end it. It is in prosecuting these offenders that your skills in lawyering and your excellent relationships with your institution’s legal department will be most useful. Archaeologists can assist in the enforcement of international law by participating in multilateral meetings of regional or worldwide organisms like UNESCO and its advisory bodies, such as the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), or the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Furthermore, by attending professional national or international gatherings, archaeologists can come
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together and decide how best to advise governments. Everything from deciding which sites can be included in the world heritage list to following each country’s accountability in the management of its heritage to making recommendations on what artifacts to put in “red-lists” of stolen goods is the purview of the committed public sector archaeologist.
Consultancy or Private Sector Work Given the high competitiveness for academic and government sector jobs due to the stability they offer and their limited numbers, many archaeologists often turn to the consulting business. This facet of archaeology comes about as many countries have enacted legislation that requires construction and other development projects to predict, measure, constrain and mitigate the impact they have on the environment and all the resources contained therein, both natural and cultural. Thus, the field of “Cultural Resource Management” (CRM) has emerged, which, according to some estimates and depending on the country and its legislation, is the fastest growing job sector for archaeologists, already practicing and new to the profession (Altschul and Klein, 2022). CRM works together with all the other aspects considered in an “Environmental Impact Assessment” (EIA); it occupies a host of scientists that document and study the flora, fauna, climate, sociology, archaeology, history, and many other aspects of a given area that will be either directly or indirectly affected by a development project. These can range from a vast dam that floods an entire valley to the building of a road or hospital or a private housing complex, or a pig farm. All development projects have some impact on the environment, and it is the business of the consultant to not only detect the valuable resources in the area but also determine whether the project is feasible or not depending on its impact and what measures can be taken to mitigate its effects on cultural resources. Even though scientific or academic archaeologists occasionally display a pedantic attitude toward this line of work, scorning it as unscientific or as merely descriptive, many archaeological sites the world over have been documented and saved from the potential airport runway, golf course or shopping mall that were initially intended for a chosen area. While there may be some truth to these observations, it is still necessary work that, at least from the archaeological perspective, has brought to light much valuable archaeological data and has contributed to a better understanding of the past. Oftentimes in countries with a limited number of academic institutions performing question-driven research, there may be entire regions whose only available archaeological information comes from development-oriented studies. The importance of high-quality contract archaeology research should not be readily dismissed as it can prove to be valuable in the formulation of new academic-oriented projects. CRM work follows almost the same steps as any other scientific project, except perhaps for the initial question-driven approach that an academic research project should wield. Usually, the developer of a project will acquire or choose a specific area in which to build and will hire a consulting firm that will carry out the entire EIA in all its aspects. These firms can have staff archaeologists, but there are also independent archaeology CRM for-profit private companies, that will specifically carry forward the archaeological facet of the EIA, working with other firms specialized in other areas. Clients will offer a project, and consulting firms will bid for it in a free-market environment, with all its “for better or worse” rules. However, different projects have different promotors, funders, and conditions for funding, especially if they are large scale developments such as dams, highways and other public infrastructure ventures, which can usually be subject to international funding and thus more strict conditions pertaining to the thoroughness and complexity of the EIA in general and CRM evaluations in particular (Mason and Ying, 2020). As said before, CRM assessments can be carried out by specialists, for-profit archaeology firms, or also by scientific or academic institutions who can also participate in these projects as they usually help cash-strapped organizations survive and develop new areas of research even if they sometimes do not want to admit it. CRM, then, advances like any other archaeological research undertaking would. Archaeologists consult the available literature on the area under study, then go to the field, survey and obtain the baseline data of the cultural resources located, which at this stage is usually a more descriptive study with the location and characterization of whatever was found and summary preliminary interpretations. The next step is the proposal of mitigation measures to either have the development modifieddbuilt elsewheredto avoid the impact on the archaeological features altogether or proceed with more detailed surveys and rescue excavations if the project cannot be altered. Whole teams of archaeologists are mobilized for these endeavors, providing mostly temporary yet well-paid jobs for the larger host of field workers who can be archaeologists. However, in some countries, local unspecialized hand labor can also be used. The better salaries are, of course, reserved for the upper echelons or owners of the companies, those in charge of the interpretation of the findings and the writing of the final reports. It is not uncommon to find many archaeologists working at all levels in CRM companies, even the owners or high-ranking employees, without a doctoral degree but with decades of field, laboratory and writing experience. It is also common that after the archaeological reports are handed in, the information therein never sees the light of day and remains unpublished as what is called “gray literature.” Archaeologists working in CRM sometimes do not feel the need or obligation to publish since it is not usually required by the contracts or the law, and thus the hours dedicated to a publication are not paid. Also, whenever a report is finished on one project, one is usually engaged in the next survey. Furthermore, publication of the results of CRM work will depend on the country’s legislation, previously agreed conditions with governments or clients, the natural and cultural sensitivity of a given area, the opinion of the local communities or even security concerns about future looting. Thus, it is mostly in the lack of publication of these results that the most deserved criticism of CRM comes from academic colleagues. This is a situation that needs revising because, depending on the country and the legal circumstances of the EIA process, the information garnered in a CRM study may be made available to the public or not. There are some countries where all these reports, which have been gathered in public offices for the last 30 years, are easily provided to whoever asks for them, but this is not a universal condition. Ideally, these studies should be organized in
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georeferenced databases to facilitate their access to the public and to archaeologists who might find important and valuable information to incorporate into their current research or project design. CRM studies also provide the most common opportunities for archaeologists from the private, academic, and public sectors to meet, discuss and argue over sites and procedures in the field. Within the CRM compliance procedures, usually, government archaeologists will inspect projects from the beginning, evaluate the research proposals and any reports produced, and ask to meet the archaeology team to supervise the whole procedure from survey to mitigation. The most thorough reviews will come in the mitigation phase, particularly when it includes extensive rescue excavation of a site, when proper storage and conservation measures need to be taken into account, of course, at the expense of the project promotor, whether it be a private company or the government. In many jurisdictions, free market rules can apply in the EIA process, and as said before, for better or worse, they are a fact of life in a world where time is money. In that sense, they can sometimes adversely affect the EIA process. Thus, for instance, project promotors, whether public or private, are always looking out to cut costs, usually at the expense of the less important aspects in their perspective, such as cultural resources. CRM firms frequently face pressure from clients to downplay the relevance of the sites and features found, and to carry out rescue excavations, laboratory analysis and write reports as quickly and cheaply as possible. This pressure to lower standards can also come from within the archaeology firm itself, chiefly if it undercuts its own prices to win a bid for a project. It is in these kinds of conflicts of interest when the public sector archaeologists must make their authority felt: to ensure underbidding does not affect the quality of the archaeological work, to enforce the law and make sure the promotors of a project comply with it. It must be said that in some places, the worst offenders are government agencies themselves when undertaking large infrastructure projects that they assume will bring in future electoral gains. Oftentimes high-ranking government officials do not even want to hear about those pesky archaeologists from the ministry of culture delaying that road, dam or hospital because they found another Paleoindian feature, another 2000-year-old shipwreck or buried suburb. The ways to curtail this perverse incentive to lower standards are complex and involve many aspects, such as teaching a strong work ethic at university for young archaeologists, bringing to bear effective communications to get the public involved in protecting its heritage, and, most importantly, having robust environmental and cultural resource laws and strong public institutions that can effectively enforce the law, strive to maintain high scientific standards by supervising the work and punish those who will not comply. Working in contract archaeology will usually allow you to accumulate extensive fieldwork experience in a relatively short period of time and by being exposed to different situations that can arise during the excavation (from torrential rains to disputes with people from the community or a contractor), you will also learn how to handle them more appropriately. Likewise, it is very likely that at some point, you will be in contact with people who, in one way or another, may be impacted by the type of work you are doing, which will force you to learn to effectively express not only what you are finding but also the importance of what you are doing. This constant and unavoidable exposure to the general public can also drive the development of important soft skills related to communication, which throughout your career, can enable you to learn how to reach a larger audience. From an academic perspective, another benefit of working in the private sector is that it allows you to excavate in different geographical areas, and that will require you to become familiar with the available archaeological information of different places, expanding your knowledge about the history of various regions. Despite these complexities, the best part of working as an independent consultant or owning a consultancy firm is professional freedom, being able to be one’s own boss, deciding how to spend your time and resources, choosing to have a family life, for instance, balancing between work and personal life. Being able to accept projects or not depending on one’s own interests, aims and ethics. Knowing that all the hard work put into a site or a report is for your own profit, personal and professional. Fewer things in life are better than being able to tell a client or government agent whose ethics do not align with one’s own: “get yourself another consultant.” Although there are some large archaeological firms with many employees, it could be said that there are many more that are just single consultants hired by larger environmental firms to supervise the CRM part of an EIA. What could be called “mom and pop” or “kitchen table” archaeology firms, where there could be one or two archaeologists business partners who hire personnel as is necessary on a project-by-project basis. Depending on the projects and how the investigations are managed, these can prove to be very profitable, more frequent, small-scale ventures that can often be more convenient than larger one-off projects.
Other Professional Fields After years of experience in any of the fields presented above, sometimes in one or two (or in all three of them like the authors), the archaeologist will have acquired both in university and professional practice a broad range of skills that can prepare them for many other jobs outside or on the fringes of archaeology. To begin with, to be a good archaeologist, you need to read, a lot, and then some more. You must love reading, and this is a prerequisite and non-negotiable; if reading is not your thing, neither is archaeology. Furthermore, you need to be able to write successfully. Fortunately, all that reading and frequent essay-writing in college tend to create good writers, and this a skill that will continue to be developed during your career as an archaeologist, given the copious number of publications you will be editing in the form of articles or reports. The ability to write well in your native language is in and of itself an ever-scarcer talent that good employers the world over, from multinational companies to governments and firms, will strive to acquire and keep. Another skill that will prove to be fundamental in your professional career, whether in archaeology or not, is knowing how to conduct sound research. Beginning with how to design a good investigation to what sources of information and types of analysis
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best suit your research questions are just some of the skills that you will learn both with practice and good mentorship. This ability to carry out solid research, paired with good writing, can also open other employment opportunities outside of archaeology, as content creators for educational programs and social media posts and curators of exhibits in historical museums. By the time you have a couple of decades of experience after college (and they will go by fast) you will have acquired valuable proficiency, as we have seen above, in dealing with issues like: organizing field seasons and projects facing difficult logistical situations, procuring your staff and students are well fed and healthy and return home safely; training and teaching students; managing staff, colleagues, and contractors, dealing with human resources issues such as productivity, work-life balance or a healthy work environment; keeping a project not only on budget, in the case of academic work, but profitable in consultancy, while maintaining high professional and ethical standards; assisting in the writing or even drafting legal documents such as laws, regulations, professional and ethical manuals or even fines and penalties for those who flaunt the law; creating, designing, writing and buildingdcuratingdmuseum exhibits; undertaking the conservation and restoration of delicate ancient artifacts or buildings; managing large collections of artifacts and ensuring their long term survival; and all this, managing complex teams of people working under the pressure of limited budgets and schedules, draconian deadlines and demanding clients. These are only some of the experiences an archaeologist can acquire during his or her career. And to this must be added the longterm perspective one acquires from professionally studying the past, the ability to try to get in the other person’s shoes and see issues from a different angle, to recognize your own biases and try to overcome them even if you know it is altogether impossible. These mental tools are drilled into you in college and come with the job. And then, to these skills, add whatever specialization you acquired within archaeology in college or the field, which can range from egyptologist to zooarchaeologist or palynologist. Thus, archaeology prepares you for most managerial-level jobs in any consultancy firm, for instance, not necessarily dealing with archaeology but with the environment in general. Many institutions, public and private, are nowadays looking for an articulate and well-rounded professional that can demonstrably and successfully carry out a given project, managing people under limited budgets and time constraints, and can communicate in a correct, efficient and engaging manner. Consultancy work especially gives archaeologists the chance to branch out and have many different clients that will need to draw on that experience and knowledge without having to go to the field or elaborate on a research project. It can be media and publicity companies, legal firms, real estate development companies, auction houses, and even just common individuals seeking an appraisal or evaluation of the family heirlooms. You are also prepared for a managerial-level government office dealing with environmental management, not only as an archaeologist evaluating CRM reports. And, of course, there is the education sector, where archaeologists can fit in at many levels, from designing curricula to actually teaching. At heart, archaeologists end up being storytellersdteachersdwhich can have a tremendous impact in impressing young minds in the right way, sporadically or full-time, from kindergarten to university.
Summary and Future Directions In sum, the study and practice of archaeology will provide the committed practitioner with a very broad skill set, useful in a wide array of professional situations within and outside the archaeological world, while ensuring decent living wages and chances to grow as a person and as a professional. While some career paths in academia or a government position can afford better longterm job stability, working as a consultant offers freedoms few other jobs can imagine, such as choosing your own schedule or whom to work for. As we have seen, a broad range of opportunities is on offer for the experienced archaeologist, arising as he or she acquires experience, specializes within the field or decides to opt for a more managerial position. Archaeologists will always have work, at least in the foreseeable future. It is a job that will not likely be replaced by automation, always requiring a human approach and feel. Writing history is not for machines, and the current state of artificial intelligence is not suitable for the interpretation and shaping of histories that archaeologists engage in. A machine can be a useful repository of archaeological information, but the focus, themes and explanations will be chosen by a human specialist. Unanswered questions about the past will always exist and will always need archaeologists to answer them. Furthermore, the staggering, epoch-changing amounts of garbage being produced by our global civilization will be the material cultural heritage which future archaeologists will tackle. They will have jobs needing to explain how and why their Anthropocene forebears could trash the planet so thoroughly, from the deepest ocean to the highest peaks. In the nearer future, professionals of this century will be required to be proficient in the use of new technologies and software to remain competitive within and outside the discipline, such as computer aided design and drawing, geographical information systems, 3D graphic modeling, aerial drone operation, large and complex database management, to name a few. The explosion of new applications in hand-held devices that are useful in archaeology and that can have an unforeseen impact on how the profession is undertaken is almost overwhelming. Formal training in archaeology should adapt to these new realities. Concerning the immediate future, a serious issue will also be that of collections management. Academic research and especially CRM are stretching the limits of how much material heritage governments, institutions and communities can feasibly and responsibly collect, study and store. Developing economies with increasing construction projects, alongside climate change and sea level rise, will stimulate the rescue excavation of many sites adding further burdens to already struggling collection-holding facilities. There is also the issue of indigenous communities and formerly colonized countries asking for the repatriation of their heritage. Specialists in artifact conservation, the handling of large databases, international cultural heritage repatriation law and archaeological ethics will be foreseeably busy. By the same token, the training of new archaeologists should include more profound and frequent considerations on the cultural heritage law of the country where it is taught and the ethics of the profession. CRM archaeologists will still need to rescue
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sites that will be impacted by development, but academic researchers will soon have to ask themselves if it is necessary and/or ethical to excavate a site if they know there will be nowhere to responsibly store what is found. Archaeology requires hard work, the capacity to analyze complex data sets, and to summarize the information in a manner, written and spoken, that is understandable to scientific and lay audiences. When given a chance to practice pure archaeology, doing research or consultancy, public or private, from the field to the lab and on to publication, it can become a lifelong passion. Many practitioners refer to it as a bug, or an itch, the need to know what is out there beyond the next hill or why things are the way they are and how they came to be. In satisfying that itch, archaeology can be much fun, and it pays.
See Also: Archaeological Heritage Management; Funding in Archaeology: Public, Private and In-Between; Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management.
References Altschul, Jeffrey H., Klein, Terry H., 2022. Forecast for the US CRM industry and job market, 2022–2031. Adv. Archaeol. Pract. 1–16. Cambridge University Press. Mason, Andrew R., Ying, Meng, 2020. Evaluating standards for private-sector financial institutions and the management of cultural heritage. Adv. Archaeol. Pract. 8 (1), 1–14. Cambridge University Press.
Archaeology and the Future Cornelius Holtorfa and Anders Ho¨gberga,b, a UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden; and b Palaeo-Research Institute, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Future Archaeologists Looking Back at Our Times An Emerging Archaeology of Past Futures Anticipated Futures and Predictions Preserving Archaeological Heritage for the Benefit of Future Generations Heritage Futures Key Issues Addressing the Future Impacts of Climate Change Promoting Trust and Solidarity and Preventing Violent Conflicts in the Future Building Capacity in Futures Literacy Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading Relevant Websites
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Archaeology concerns not only past and present pasts but also future pasts as well as past, present, and future futures It is important to consider how archaeology and archaeological heritage can provide specific benefits for future generations Archaeology can contribute to foresight, e.g. relating to climate change and human conflicts Heritage futures is a new and fast developing field of research in heritage studies and archaeology Futures literacy is an important capability needed to make better decisions for the future
Glossary Futures literacy The capabilities of (1) realizing existing assertions about the future, (2) imagining multiple futures, and (3) using futures in the present Heritage futures The roles of heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies Presentism The unquestioned assumption that the current status quo is timeless
Abstract The future is an important new topic for archaeology. Archaeologists do not only study past futures but are also concerned with future pasts and in particular with the impact of their work on future societies. Drawing on the notion of “heritage futures”, archaeological heritage is claimed to contribute to sustainable development and address challenges posed by climate change, human conflicts, and others.
Introduction Literally, archaeology is the study of the past in the present. However, as archaeology may affect the future of society today and since past societies had futures too, it is pertinent to ask about archaeology in relation to past and present futures. Significantly, all futures are multiple but what futures, more than anything else, have in common is that they differ from the present (Holtorf and Högberg, 2021a). Whereas historians have been publishing histories of the future and discuss the future as a domain of historical enquiry (Staley, 2022), there are few archaeologists interested in the future. Those that have begun to address future related questions, usually base their arguments on existing archaeological knowledge of the past. Lane (2015: 495) claimed that archaeology would
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benefit from being more careful in “making exaggerated claims that our backward-looking curiosity really can help us navigate the hazards of the Anthropocene”. On the other hand, archaeology can nevertheless provide some valuable perspectives on futurerelated questions concerning topics like climate change and sustainability (e.g. Altschul et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2020; Holtorf and Högberg, 2021a). Despite heritage often being said to be preserved for the benefit of future generations, very few archaeologists professionally study archaeological heritage in relation to the future (Högberg et al., 2017). Although archaeological research is commonly archived for future use relating to future pasts, archaeological studies of past futures are relatively rare. In his discussion of emerging archaeologies of the future, Rodney Harrison has been calling “for a focus on an archaeology of the present as the temporal position from which futures are assembled” (Harrison, 2017: 170). He went on to argue that “in the same way that there are many pasts, there are also many possible futures bound up and realized by these pasts that archaeology makes in the present” but that “the potential for an archaeological engagement with the study of emergent futures has remained largely undiscussed” (Harrison, 2017). As uses of the past (past, present, and future) have become an important field of research within archaeology, and there are hopes and expectations that all academic fields will contribute to sustainable development, the impact of archaeology on future societies has lately become an issue of increasing relevance.
Overview Future Archaeologists Looking Back at Our Times From time to time, artists and others have been thinking about future archaeologists discovering and making sense of the remains of our present. One classic example is illustrator and writer David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries (1979), where archaeologist Howard Carson in the year AD 4022 discovers the remains of an American motel and interprets the relics in imaginary ways that do not correspond much to the knowledge of contemporary people familiar with motels. Other examples include exhibitions of how material remains of the present may come to represent our age in the future (e.g. Flutsch, 2002), in recent years increasingly focusing on telling the disastrous story of the Anthropocene (e.g. Campbell, 2021). Such future archaeology, although highly speculative and methodologically unsophisticated, is a strong rhetorical trope in the present as it draws on familiar objects of our own time, re-contextualized by the stereotypical archaeologist seemingly discovering (or failing to discover) truth about ourselves below the surface.
An Emerging Archaeology of Past Futures Studying monuments, archaeologists have often been exploring how people have been making sense of the past and memory in the landscape. It is just as possible to focus on what people in the landscape may have been anticipating and imagining for the future. Evidence for past projections of intentions into the future, such as deposition of hoards, votive offerings, funerary rituals, or settlement-planning can be found already in prehistory (Gardner and Wallace, 2020). With reference to the American Southeast, Sassaman (2012) discussed the possibility of alternative futures that were available to people in the past, much as they are available to us today. A distinct archaeology of past futures is however still in its infancy. Prehistoric futures have been studied in relation to the construction of monuments. Whereas Holtorf (1996) argued that prehistoric monuments, such as megalithic tombs, were constructed with prospective memories in mind, that is with specific intentions for the future, Richard Bradley (2002: ch. 4) countered that arguably in many cases the intentions were more short-term, and the process of building monuments may have been more significant than completing them. Classical antiquity offers a wider range of sources than prehistory from which the archaeology of past futures can benefit. For example, Shaw (2019) found much to discuss regarding the question whether the Romans had a futuredand how the future was perceived in relation to public benefactions, long-term private credit, state financing, and strategic planning in ancient Rome. Extending this further, Versluys and Sluiter (2022) discussed the realm of the Possible in Greco-Roman Antiquity, pointing, among others, to the significance of divination, predestination, and future reputation and leading to the conclusion that their future was certainly not the same as our past. In one study of a recent past future, Ljunge (2021) studied the remains of 51 ski-jumping towers built between 1890 and 1960 in southern and central Sweden. According to his analysis, the characteristic design of these towers built of wood and concrete let them become landmarks associated with modernist ideals of progress and a strong belief in a bright and prosperous future at that time: “Ski jumps created an aura of being a part of progress, both in relation to their architecture and to the act of witnessing ski jumping, where the competitors seemed to challenge the limits for human capacity” (Ljunge, 2021: 136).
Anticipated Futures and Predictions Analyzing trends in the evolution of political hierarchy over the last 12,000 years, Peregrine et al. (2004: 1) predicted once that “a world state is likely to have appeared by AD 5000”. Their conclusion was based on forecasting and is, as such, an example of the use of archaeological knowledge to predict the future. Such forecasting endeavors have been criticized by many (e.g. Facer and Sriprakash, 2021). Indeed, Peregrine and colleagues themselves see their result merely as an intellectual exercise with little actual value for
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understanding the future: “[.] such extrapolationdusing the past to predict the futuredsmacks of augury to us, and we, therefore have coined the term archaeomancy to describe it (rather than forecasting or prediction). This term archaeomancy reflects our uncertainty as to the legitimacy of using the prehistoric past to predict the future” (Peregrine et al., 2004: 12). This is in line with Lane (2015: 486), who concludes that “there remain several underpinning assumptions and unexamined philosophical questions that need to be addressed before archaeologists can claim that their research on past human-environment interactions [.] can provide actual solutions to the [future] challenges of our time”. Others have gone beyond the prediction and forecasting of human societies to explore other future-related topics. In environmental studies, models of prehistoric climate variation and long-term human impacts on the environment have been used to discuss possible future trends (Xu et al., 2020). Patrick V. Kirch suggested that an archaeology of prehistoric global change analyzing effects of uncontrolled human population growth on environmental degradation, eventually leading to sociopolitical crises, can make a contribution “to the future of this planet” (Kirch, 2004: 23). The historian Daniel Lord Smail used a long-term perspective of prehistoric human evolution to discuss the deep history of the human brain and its past, present, and future in order to discern what is fundamentally human today and how this understanding might be constituted in the future (Smail, 2008). Recently, on the basis of an exploration of economic history drawing on archaeobotanical and ethnoarchaeological data, Amanda Logan discussed food insecurity in Ghana. She shows how it emerged as late as the 19th century, in connection with the introduction of market economies and colonial rule. Logan’s (2016) results reveal a potential in certain areas “to maintain a high level of food security even during severe, prolonged drought” in the future (Logan, 2016: 11). Another area of predictions in archaeology is the archaeological job market. For example, Altschul and Klein (2022: 1) recently anticipated that “In the next 10 years, the US cultural resource management (CRM) industry will grow in terms of monies spent on CRM activities and the size of the CRM labor force [which.] will lead to the creation of about 11,000 new full-time positions in all CRM fields.” In contrast, Parga Dans (2019) warned about a coming collapse of commercial archaeology. Using Spain as an example, she discussed the need for a new paradigm of archaeological heritage management in the 21st century that focuses less on business models and more on societal aspects of archaeology. These positive as well as negative anticipated futures have important implications not only for prospective students’ choice of study subject but also for university education priorities, both in terms of skills taught and number of places offered. A different area of prediction is studies on archaeology and heritage from a “non WEIRD-world” perspective (WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), pointing to the fact that research needs to take in approaches to archaeology and heritage not previously explored. Analyzing Somali perspectives for archaeological research, Mire (2007: 49) for example argues that future “heritage management and archaeological research can only be achieved if [.] a local approach is taken into consideration” and becomes integrated in future methodologies.
Preserving Archaeological Heritage for the Benefit of Future Generations In regard to archaeological heritage preservation, archaeologists work to document and preserve sites and their environments for future generations. When sites are being developed, archaeologists involved in cultural resource management excavate sites to create new knowledge and inspire new values to be associated with the site in the future. But, in managing archaeological heritage, most assumptions about the future do not build on an understanding of how the future will be different from today. Instead, researchers imply that key aspects of archaeology and heritage familiar to us in contemporary society will not change greatly in the future (Högberg et al., 2017). Such a tendency to assume a likeness between the present and the future corresponds to the way people, as individuals, “expect to change little in the future, despite the fact that they have changed a lot in the past” which “bedevils their decision-making” (Quoidbach et al., 2013: 96). It is easy to agree with Spennemann (2007) that the future is often little more than a popular “catch phrase” in relation to preserving archaeological heritage, while present archaeological practice remains firmly focused on the past and the present. We cannot know how or if future generations will perceive, use, and receive benefits from archaeological heritage. And, we cannot be certain that the various heritage objects and landscapes archaeology preserves, will be appreciated by future generations. The practices of preserving archaeological heritage for the benefit of future generations has only existed for a few centuries. It is a practice that does not stand outside history but is firmly situated within it. We have no idea of the relevance of preserved heritage in the future. However, Borck (2019) once pointed to a possible consequence of what we choose to preserve for the future. He argued that an archaeology that fails to select cultural heritage representing pre-colonial and indigenous societies for protection will unwittingly contribute to particular future histories: such that underrepresent and thus denaturalize societies with horizontal power structures, which will ultimately make them seem less “normal” and thus possibly less likely to occur in the future (Borck, 2019). Arguably, in some cases, the destruction of archaeological heritage can benefit future generations too. Queries about actual future benefits likely to result from policies of conservation are usually deemed to be unnecessary. But as Holtorf and Kristensen (2023) proposed, heritage destruction and decay may not only, in certain circumstances, prevent harm from future generations, e.g. by reducing forms of symbolic oppression, but they can also be seen as a medium and manifestation of dynamic transformations that allow more sustainable forms of development to emerge and spread, not least when seen in the context of long-term change.
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Heritage Futures In recent years, archaeologists have been instrumental in bringing about the field of “heritage futures” (Harrison et al., 2020; Holtorf and Högberg, 2021a). Heritage futures is about the roles of heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies. It takes future orientations of heritage seriously, by thinking of archaeology and heritage practices as “a series of activities that are intimately concerned with assembling, building and designing future worlds” (Harrison et al., 2020: 4). The field of heritage futures develops new strategies and approaches to heritage studies, management and archaeology by replacing tropes of risk and threats to heritage, “with more positive and creative engagements with change and transformation [.] accepting uncertainty as an opportunity rather than as something to be feared” (Harrison et al., 2020: 486). Archaeology makes a strong contribution to this role of heritage in contemporary society. One example of work conducted from a heritage futures perspective is by Anders Högberg and colleagues (forthcoming) who investigated how managers and employees at museums in Sweden think about, work with, and relate to the future in their daily practice. Their results show that future perspectives at the museums studied were largely locked in the present or in a near future which, in addition, often remained implicit and unspoken in ordinary museum practices. The museums worked with short future perspectives, often linked to concrete daily tasks or development work. Another example of studying heritage futures concerns efforts by archaeologists to communicate to future generations information about long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste. Holtorf and Högberg (2021b) discuss how nuclear waste and repositories of nuclear waste can be considered as a material legacy of the 20th and 21st centuries and constitute a very particular kind of cultural heritage. Joyce (2020) uses her archaeological knowledge to examine critically the underlying assumptions in contemporary discussions of how sites for repositories of nuclear waste should be marked. In relation to such concerns with nuclear semiotics, we concluded elsewhere that it is by understanding changing perceptions of past and future, and indeed of change over time more generally, that archaeology allows us to make better decisions concerning the sustainable preservation of information, knowledge, and meaning in a long-term perspective (Holtorf and Högberg, 2021b). We concluded that nuclear waste will not necessarily be seen as hazardous waste in the future, posing a threat to humanity nor that its radioactivity or other physical properties will always be considered its main property. Such insights arguably can alter how we understand the danger of radioactive waste in relation to its future use. Although radioactive substances are dangerous when they, for example, enter the food chain, the locations of their storage or disposal do not have to be seen forever as areas of threat. As society changes over time, they can potentially be transformed into altogether different things, for example as an asset or simply a place for waste that in the past (i.e. our present) was seen as dangerous but now (i.e. in future societies) can easily be controlled and is therefore not dangerous in the same way. This is a way of looking at radioactivity informed by a possible future context. It is not to deny or ignore existing dangers posed by radioactive material to future generations. The continuing discussions about long-term communication strategies concerning long-term storage facilities of nuclear waste can provide archaeologists with inspiration for considering future humans and their worlds. As it is, the lack of substantial engagement with future issues in current heritage management and heritage studies contrasts sharply with the commitment that we have come across among professionals in the nuclear waste sector addressing concerns that lie in the long-term future. There are a number of comprehensive studies (e.g. Schröder, 2019) discussing how to communicate with our descendants, or indeed other forms of intelligent life that may exist many thousands of years ahead, so as to prevent that they inadvertently expose themselves to radiation. These studies are not about predicting or controlling the future. They were set up to improve understanding possible futures and how contemporary practices may bring about a variety of different futures.
Key Issues Addressing the Future Impacts of Climate Change Cultural heritage and climate change are deeply interrelated and there are many issues where both realms impact on each other (Harvey and Perry, 2015). Many issues at the interface of cultural heritage and climate change require more research in the future, including in archaeology. There is still much untapped potential for archaeology to contribute to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Kohler and Rockman, 2020). There is a current discussion on how archaeologists are best able to contribute to understanding and mitigating the future impact of climate change (Xu et al., 2020). Whereas initially, there was considerable concern about the extent to which archaeological sites are vulnerable to the impact of sea-level rises and other direct consequences of climate change (Lane, 2015), now there is an increasing interest in how the knowledge and skills of archaeologists can assist societies in reducing carbon emissions, enhancing their sustainability, and adapting to the impacts of climate change, even accepting loss (Xu et al., 2020). Also, researchers have drawn attention to difficulties involved in translating results from climate research into actions in society. Science-based understanding and policies are “entangled with, and mediated by, complex social, cultural, political and economic forces and dynamics” (Shepherd et al., 2022: 6). Some archaeologists have therefore emphasized that in order to deepen knowledge about the effects of climate change and find ways for future societies to manage them, more research about such entanglements is needed (e.g. Lane, 2015). For example, from archaeological understandings of past disasters and subsequent adaptation to existing hazards we can learn how past crises eventually contributed to long-term resilience, which may provide lessons for the present. Similarly, Turner et al. (2020) argued with reference to case-studies in China, the Mediterranean and the UK that knowledge gained through landscape
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archaeology can help stakeholders to imagine future land-use and management practices which are more sustainable than those of today but also that deeper commitments to transdisciplinary work will be needed to achieve that. Another issue of increasing relevance concerning the impact of climate change is archaeology’s long-standing association with national/ethnic identities and associated territorial claims. As and when significant numbers of people will be displaced as a result of climate change (so called climate refugees) and subjected to future resettlement programmes, common interpretations of archaeological heritage symbolizing collective property rights will make it harder rather than easier for groups to move elsewhere and also to welcome others in their own perceived home areas. Cultural conflicts and tensions may arise and the possibly much needed extension of global solidarity and trust within and between societies could be hindered.
Promoting Trust and Solidarity and Preventing Violent Conflicts in the Future An important question for debate concerns the role of archaeology in relation to violent human conflicts in the future. Conflicts associated with nationalist politics and religious extremism are often driven by strong collective identities rooted in stories about a common origin and common traditions manifested in cultural heritage and in parts represented by archaeological sites and objects. The roles of archaeology as part of identity-creating processes is often considered to be self-evident for archaeological heritage, which has long been associated with cultural groups. However, when membership in groups is linked to essentialist assumptions promoting ideas of distinct cultural identities and group-specific values, it can undermine common human solidarity and mutual trust, both in and between societies (Högberg, 2016). Mobilizing feelings of tribal identity can even incense human violence. Considering archaeology’s impact on societies of the future, archaeological heritage may need to be rethought and given new significance. Globalization has meant that there is an increasing number of people migrating between world regions, whether as refugees, for work or for family reasons, resulting in increasing cultural heterogeneity in many contemporary nation-states. As stressed by Prescott (2016: 27), global migration and communication have created a rupture making it difficult to go on as before, and “the traditional national–ethnic narratives are no longer tenable options”. In the light of a recent UN report entitled Our Common Agenda (Guterres, 2021: 3–4), for the future the world needs to “re-embrace global solidarity” and to “renew the social contract between Governments and their people and within societies, so as to rebuild trust.” Globally, national histories and heritage are losing their potential to contribute internally to social cohesion and trust and externally to foster solidarity and help understanding societies’ distinctive idiosyncrasies. According to the social anthropologist Macdonald (2013: 162), it is unclear “whether it is possible to draw on memory and heritage to form new identity stories that include rather than exclude cultural diversity and ‘mixed’ culture.” This need for writing histories of what people share rather than what divides them has been brought to the point by social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen:
At a time when nativism and divisive identity politics threatens people’s autonomy and well-being across the planet, from autochthonism in Africa to militant Islamism in the Middle East and emergent ethnonationalism in Europe, an ontology of social being that does not privilege boundaries and origins over connectedness and impurity is deserving of sustained and systematic attention. Eriksen (2019: 6).
Högberg (2016: 47) once proposed ways for archaeology and heritage management to move in the direction called for by Eriksen by suggesting to rethink the concept of archaeological heritage, from “something inherited (essentialism, ethnos) to something to be chosen (in flux, demos), from a thing (a subjective) to a process (a verb)”. In doing so, archaeology would also need to rethink the concept of citizenship, “from a definition of who everyone is and what they are supposed to do (based on ethnicity and origin), to what everyone actually does and wants to be (based on shared values and present and future opportunities and obligations)”.
Building Capacity in Futures Literacy The concept of “futures literacy” has been developed by, among others, the Global Futures Literacy Network, initiated by a team around futurologist Riel Miller at UNESCO. Futures literacy has been described as a capability to “understand how the future affects the present and, conversely, how the decisions and actions in the present affect the future. The goal of developing futures literacy is to learn to think more creatively, critically and broadly about the future. Through enhanced futures literacy individuals become more conscious about the diversity of possible futures and their own capability to influence the direction of the future” (University of Turku, 2021). Futures literacy creates an awareness of the anticipatory assumptions concerning the future which present-day decisions, often un-reflected, tend to be based on. It is a learned or in other ways obtained capacity to imagine multiple anticipated futures that differ from the present. Hence, it has the capacity to liberate people from “presentism”di.e. the unquestioned and disabling assumption that the current status quo is timeless. In developing futures literacy, the ways in how past knowledge and future expectations shape human understanding and action in the present are clarified (Holtorf and Högberg, 2021b: 148–50). Importantly, a developed futures literacy is not aimed at controlling the future or predicting it, but at improving our understanding of the roles of the future in contemporary practices and how such practices may bring about a variety of different futures.
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Futures literacy thus makes clear how past knowledge and future expectations shape understanding and action in the present. It helps to visualize a variety of possible futures that are different from the present. In doing so, it can give archaeologists theoretical and practical tools for acting in the present in relation to its futures (Holtorf and Högberg, 2021b: 149). What can we reasonably expect from future generations? How can the uncertainties and opportunities that are built into a future perspective be best used as creative sources of inspiration to develop what archaeologists know and do today? Which new pasts do we need to better understand potential futures? Actively working to improve one’s own work based on questions like these can result in enhanced futures literacy (Högberg et al., 2017). An example: when an archaeological museum in their practice says, “we preserve for the future”, this implies certain assumptions about how an archaeological collection can or should be activated in the future. It also makes assumptions about common conservation practices and how these relate to an imagined future (Harrison et al., 2020). An enhanced futures literacy helps to develop such assumptions and practices, facilitating the creation of more precise definitions of the words “preserving”, “for” and “the future” in the action-oriented phrase “preserving for the future” (see discussion in Holtorf and Högberg, 2021b). These are issues that have been explored in relation to specific projects. In 2007, visitors to the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm were invited to select contemporary objects as “future memories.” Together with attached labels containing stories about their perceived significance in the present, the objects were first formally recorded and registered in the museum’s database and then permanently “incavated” inside the museum courtyard in holes that had previously been dug by other visitors in a participatory excavation project. The intention was to inspire reflections on memories, both in relation to the past and to the future. The project was also meant as a provocation for the museum and heritage sector to reflect on their current practices, not least concerning the benefits they will offer to people in the future (Wahlgren and Svanberg, 2008). Previously, we discussed futures literacy, archaeology and heritage management using the term futures consciousness (Holtorf and Högberg, 2021b). We did so starting from a discussion on historical consciousness. Historical consciousness refers to the principal cognitive structures that generate meaning when a particular historical perception is given significance, informing the way we look at the present and the future in the light of historical knowledge. We argued that “particular perspectives on the future can generate meaning in a similar way, with consequences for how we see the past and the present [.] when shifting attention from the past in the present to the future in the present, historical consciousness turns into future consciousness. Just as historical consciousness manifests itself in uses of the past, future consciousness manifests itself in perceptions and uses of the future” (Holtorf and Högberg, 2021b: 148). Hence, the terms futures literacy and futures consciousness are closely related, but they are not the same. Futures literacy involves an instrumental practice: to become more aware of the uses of the future in contemporary society and to get better at imagining multiple futures, i.e. acquiring new knowledge and skills. Futures consciousness is both a cognitive ability, everyone has it, and an analytic tool that can be used to understand the many roles futures have in understanding the present in relation to its pasts and futures. In theory and practice these concepts are, however, seamlessly integrated. In a critical discussion on various international applications of futures literacy “to codify and cultivate a new ‘human capability’”, futurologist Keri Facer and sociologist Arathi Sriprakash (2021: 1) showed how such efforts risk “narrowing what constitutes ‘rational’ uses of the future, positioning a small technocratic elite as authorities in its practice and casting other uses of the future as forms of illiteracy”. This echoes discussions on decolonization in archaeology and heritage management, emphasizing the need to reshape archaeology and its practices to break away from former power relationships to achieve broader potentials for archaeologies in all parts of the world. The concern with futures in heritage has also attracted criticism. Some scholars suggested that heritage management should not be concerned with the future as this distracted from the need to attend to contemporary uses of heritage and their politics and ethics in the present. However, it is a question of intergenerational justice to try and avoid all forms of “presentism” in contemporary society and consider the interests of future generations as well. Making development more sustainable and addressing the prospect of future climate change, pandemics, economic crises, and nuclear warfare, among other challenges, are urgent tasks that lie in the interests of future generations. Archaeological heritage practices may be able to contribute in small but important ways. It is not a question of choosing between the rights and interests of present and future communities but of finding ways of considering them both.
Summary and Future Directions Some archaeologists, such as Morris (2010), have been trying to forecast future developments based on historical analysis and reasoning building on archaeological research of the previous decades. But even the presently most familiar accounts of the human past may have to be rethought today, with significant implications for the story of the human future and thus future pasts. As Graeber and Wengrow (2021) demonstrated, from understanding the long human path to the present can derive the insight that the human freedom (and associated responsibility) in building the future is much larger than widely assumed. Over the coming years, we can anticipate a plethora of studies of future pasts and archaeologies related to the Anthropocene, the impact of climate change, and other aspects of sustainable development (Lane, 2015; Altschul et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2020; Campbell, 2021). From time to time, archaeologists debate the future of their discipline in changing social and political contexts. Whereas some foresee and welcome the demise of archaeology in the future (Hutchings and La Salle, 2021), others have more hopeful visions for archaeology. Today, there are signs that the entire project of archaeology may have to be rethought in relation to a changing world. For example, Campbell (2021: 1324–7), argued that “[t]raditional archaeology becomes problematic upon entering the
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Anthropocene: we must define archaeology for a future of sequencing DNA, collecting microplastics and detecting radioactivity.” In his view, archaeology “examines the sum of human residue and its persistence,” becoming “the study of human cultures across time, examining past and future objects,” including the study of nuclear waste, contemporary plastics, and atmospheric CO2. Archaeologists should start to think more in the long-term, not only backwards but also forwards. They should ask questions like these: Which futures are archaeologists anticipating and working for? How do specific perceptions of the future inform archaeological practices? What are archaeologists’ aims for future presents and future pasts? How confident can they be that archaeological work today will have impacts that are beneficial for humans and others living tomorrow? (Dézsi, 2023). Asking questions such as these will build capacity among archaeologists to be better connected in their work with pressing social, economic, political, and ecological issues of our time, many of which will impact future generations too.
See Also: Archaeology and Cyberspace; History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques; Predictive Modeling in Archaeology.
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Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kirch, Patrick V., 2004. Oceanic Islands: microcosms of “global change”. In: Redman, Charles L., James, Steven R., Fish, Paul R., Rogers, J. Daniel (Eds.), The Archaeology of Global Change: The Impact of Humans on Their Environment. Smithsonian Books, Washington, DC, pp. 13–27. Kohler, Timothy, Rockman, Marcy, 2020. The IPCC: a primer for archaeologists. Am. Antiq. 85 (4), 627–651. Lane, Paul J., 2015. Archaeology in the age of the Anthropocene: a critical assessment of its scope and societal contributions. J. Field Archaeol. 40 (5), 485–498. Ljunge, Magnus, 2021. Jumping towards the future: understanding the remains of Ski Jumping Towers in southern and Central Sweden. J. Contemp. Archaeol. 8 (1), 112–137. Logan, Amanda L., 2016. Why can’t people feed themselves?: archaeology as alternative archive of food security in Banda, Ghana. Am. Anthropol. 118 (3), 508–524. Macaulay, David, 1979. Motel of the Mysteries. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Macdonald, Sharon, 2013. Memorylands. Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. Routledge, London. Mire, Sada, 2007. Preserving knowledge, not objects: a Somali perspective for heritage management and archaeological research. Afr. Archaeol. Rev. 24, 49–71. Morris, Ian, 2010. Why the West Rulesdfor Now. The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Parga Dans, Eva, 2019. Heritage in danger. The collapse of commercial archaeology in Spain. Archaeol. Dialogues 26, 111–122. Peregrine, Peter N., Ember, Melvin, Ember, Carol R., 2004. Predicting the future state of the world using archaeological data: an exercise in archaeomancy. Cross Cult. Res. 38 (2), 133–146. Prescott, Christopher, 2016. Is there an alternative to the nation state? Archaeol. Dialogues 23 (1), 18–27. Quoidbach, Jordi G., Daniel, Gilbert T., Wilson, Timothy D., 2013. The end of history illusion. Science 339, 96–98. Sassaman, Kenneth E., 2012. Futurologists look back. Archaeologies 8, 250–268. Schröder, Jantine, 2019. Preservation of Records, Knowledge, and Memory (RK&M) Across Generations: Final Report of the RK&M Initiative. OECD, Nuclear Energy Agency, Paris. Shaw, Brent, 2019. Did the Romans have a future? J. Roman Stud. 109, 1–26. Shepherd, Nick, Cohen, Joshua Benjamin, Carmen, William, Chundu, Moses, Ernsten, Christian, Guevara, Oscar, Haas, Franziska, Hussain, Shumo T., Riede, Felix, Siders, A.R., Singh, Chandni, Sithole, Pinai, Troi, Alexandra, 2022. ICSM CHC White Paper III: The Role of Cultural and Natural Heritage for Climate Action: Contribution of Impacts Group III to the International Co-sponsored Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change. ICOMOS & ISCM CHC, Charenton-le-Pont, France & Paris. Smail, L. Daniel, 2008. On Deep History and the Brain. University of California Press, Berkeley. Spennemann, Dirk H.R., 2007. The futurist stance of historical societies: an analysis of position statements. Int. J. Arts Manag. 9 (2), 4–15.
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Staley, David, 2022. The future as a domain of historical inquiry. In: Simon, Zoltán B., Deile, Lars (Eds.), Historical Understanding. Past, Present, and Future. Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 155–165. Turner, Sam, Kinnaird, Tim, Koparal, Elif, Lekakis, Stelios, Sevara, Christopher, 2020. Landscape archaeology, sustainability and the necessity of change. World Archaeol. 52 (4), 589–606. University of Turku (2021). Versluys, Miguel John, Sluiter, Ineke, 2022. Antiquity. In: Glãveanu Vlad, P. (Ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Springer, pp. 1–7. Wahlgren, Katty H., Svanberg, Fredrig, 2008. Public archaeology as renewer of the historical museum. Publ. Archaeol. 7 (4), 241–258. Xu, Chi, Kohler, Timothy A., Lenton, Timothy M., Svenning, Jens-Christian, Scheffer, Marten, 2020. Future of the human climate niche. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 117 (21), 11350–11355.
Further Reading Ballard, Chris, Baron, Nacima, Bourgès, Ann, et al., 2022. White Paper on Cultural Heritage and Climate Change: New Challenges and Perspectives for Research. Joint Programming Initiatives “Cultural Heritage and Global Change” (JPI CH) and “Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe” (JPI Climate). Dawney, Leila Alexandra, Harris, Oliver J.T., Sørensen, Tim Flohr, 2017. Future world: anticipatory archaeology, materially affective capacities and the late human legacy. J. Contemp. Archaeol. 4 (1), 107–129. DeSilvey, Caitlin, 2017. Curated Decay. Heritage Beyond Saving. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Fluck, Hannah, Wiggins, Meredith, 2017. Climate change, heritage policy and practice in England: risks and opportunities. Archaeol. Rev. Camb. 32 (2), 159–181. Henderson, Jane, 2020. Beyond lifetimes: who do we exclude when we keep things for the future? J. Inst. Conserv. 43 (3), 195–212. Holtorf, Cornelius, 2015. Averting loss aversion in cultural heritage. Int. J. Herit. Stud. 21 (4), 405–421. Holtorf, Cornelius, Bolin, Annalisa, 2022. Heritage futures: a conversation. J. Cult. Herit. Manag. Sustain Dev. Holtorf, Cornelius, Högberg, Anders, 2014. Communicating with future generations: what are the benefits of preserving for future generations? Nuclear power and beyond. Eur. J. Post-Class. Archaeol. 4, 315–330. Holtorf, Cornelius, Högberg, Anders, 2019. The valuable contributions of archaeology to present and future societies. Antiquity 93 (372), 1661–1663. Inayatullah, Sohail, 2020. Co-creating Educational Futures: Contradictions Between the Emerging Future and the Walled Past. Education Research and Foresight Working Papers 27. UNESCO, Paris. Lindsay, William, 2005/6. Time perspectives: what “the future” means to museum professionals in collections-care. Conservator 29, 51–61. Lucas, Gavin, Olivier, Laurent, 2022. Conversations About Time. Routledge, London. Macdonald, Sharon, Morgan, Jennie, 2018. How can we know the future? Uncertainty, transformation, and magical techniques of significance assessment in museum collecting. In: Falkenberg, Regine, Jander, Thomas (Eds.), Assessment of Significance. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, pp. 20–26. Miller, Riel, 2007. Futures literacy: a hybrid strategic scenario method. Futures 39 (4), 341–362. Miller, Riel, 2011. Opinion: futures literacydembracing complexity and using the future. Ethos 10, 23–38. Mitman, Gregg, Armiero, Marco, Emmett, Robert S., 2017. Future Remains. A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Morgan, Jennie, Macdonald, Sharon, 2018. De-growing museum collections for new heritage futures. Int. J. Herit. Stud. 26 (1), 56–70. Reilly, Matthew C. (Ed.), 2019. Special issue: futurity, time, and archaeology. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 6 (1). Spennemann, Dirk H.R., 2007. Futurist rhetoric in US historic preservation: a review of current practice. Int. Rev. Publ. Non Profit Mark. 4 (1/2), 91–99. Taylor, Joel, 2013. Intergenerational Justice: A Useful Perspective for Heritage Conservation. CeROArt. Trauth, Kathleen M., Hora, Stephen C., Guzowski, Robert V., 1993. Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Sandia report SAND92–1282, UC-721. Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Relevant Websites Animation: What are Heritage Futures and Why Do They Matter?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼oe0aMQXzqLI. Climate Heritage Network: https://www.climateheritage.org/. Heritage Futures Project Webpages: https://heritage-futures.org/. ICCROM Foresight Project: https://www.iccrom.org/what-we-do/research/foresight. ICOMOS, 2019. The Future of Our Pasts: Engaging Cultural Heritage in Climate Action. https://www.icomos.org/en/77-articles-en-francais/59522-icomos-releasesfuture-of-ourpasts-report-to-increase-engagement-of-cultural-heritage-in-climate-action. UNESCO Futures Literacy: https://en.unesco.org/themes/futures-literacy. UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University, Sweden: https://lnu.se/en/unescochair. Zuccotti, Paula, 2019. Every Thing We Touch. Future Archeology. TheOverworld Ltd. https://futurearcheology.org.
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY SECOND EDITION
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHAEOLOGY SECOND EDITION EDITORS IN CHIEF
Dr. Efthymia Nikita The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus
Professor Thilo Rehren The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus
VOLUME 2A
Fieldwork SECTION EDITOR
Dr. Dmitriy Voyakin International Institute for Central Asian Studies
AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON • NEW YORK • OXFORD PARIS • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier
Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, Netherlands, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, United Kingdom 50 Hampshire Street, 5th Floor, Cambridge MA 02139, United States Copyright Ó 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions. This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein). Notices Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. Practitioners and researchers may always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-323-90799-6 For information on all publications visit our website at http://store.elsevier.com
Publisher: Oliver Walter Acquisitions Editor: Fiona Geraghty Content Project Manager: Nitesh Shrivastava Associate Content Project Manager: Prashanth Ravichandran Designer: Miles Hitchen
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 2A Contributors to Volume 2A
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Editor Biographies
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Foreword Acknowledgments Classification of Archaeological Sites Vadim Sergeevich Bochkarev and Andrei Vladimirovich Poliakov
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Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic) Konstantin Nikolaevich Gavrilov, Sergey Yurievich Lev, and Alexander Konstantinovich Otcherednoy
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Site Formation in Caves and Rockshelters Dominic Stratford
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Rock Art and Petroglyphs Viktor A Novozhenov
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Shell Middens Harry K Robson, Niklas Hausmann, and Nicky Milner
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Hunting Traps, Jumps, and Kill Sites Matthew E Hill, Jr.
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Agricultural Fields Robert N Spengler, III
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Settlements, Tell Formation Thomas W Davis
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Cemeteries and Necropoleis Ian Hanson
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Site Formation: Conflict Sites John Carman
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Road and Transport Networks Adam Pazout, Tom Brughmans, and Pau de Soto
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Treasures, Votive Artefacts and Offerings Christoph Huth
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Contents of Volume 2A
Quarrying and Building Stones Brigitte Cech and James A Harrell
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Mining, Beneficiation: Raw Material Appropriation Thomas Stöllner
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History of Fieldwork Approaches, Methods and Techniques Steve Roskams
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Survey John Bintliff
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Geophysical Prospection Apostolos Sarris
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Airborne and Space-Borne Prospection Vasily Novikov
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Predictive Modeling in Archaeology Marco Nebbia
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Stratigraphic Diagrams Tim Williams
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Mortuary Excavation and Recording Approaches Selin E Nugent
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Mapping Methods Ian Johnson
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Sampling Methods and Theory EB Banning
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Stone, Mudbrick and Burnt Brick Structures Chamsia Sadozaï, Sébastien Moriset, and David Gandreau
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Dry, Cold Excavations Henri-Paul Francfort
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Waterlogged Sites Albert Hafner
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Underwater Archaeology Hakan Öniz, Arturo Rey da Silva, and Akifumi Iwabuchi
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Preservation of Archaeological Remains in Situ Jane Sidell
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Archaeology and Cyberspace Gaygysyz Jorayev
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CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 2A EB Banning Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Ian Hanson Bournemouth University, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Poole, United Kingdom
John Bintliff School of Archaeology, Classics and History, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
James A Harrell Department of Environmental Sciences, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, United States
Vadim Sergeevich Bochkarev Institute for the History of Material Culture of RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia
Niklas Hausmann Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, LeibnizZentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), Mainz, Germany
Tom Brughmans Center for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet), Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Matthew E Hill, Jr. Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States
John Carman Bloody Meadows Project, School of History & Cultures, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Christoph Huth Universität Freiburg, Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
Brigitte Cech Independent Researcher Thomas W Davis Lanier Center for Archaeology, Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, United States Pau de Soto Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Henri-Paul Francfort French National Center of Scientific Research, Paris, France David Gandreau CRAterre-AE&CC/ENSAG/UGA, Grenoble, France Konstantin Nikolaevich Gavrilov Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Albert Hafner University of Bern, Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Oeschger Centre for Climate Research (OCCR), Bern, Switzerland; and Yale University, Department of Anthropology, New Haven, CT, United States
Akifumi Iwabuchi ICOMOS-ICUCH, Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, Tokyo, Japan Ian Johnson University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Gaygysyz Jorayev UCL Institute of Archaeology, London, United Kingdom Sergey Yurievich Lev Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Nicky Milner Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, United Kingdom Sébastien Moriset CRAterre-AE&CC/ENSAG/UGA, Grenoble, France Marco Nebbia UCL Institute of Archaeology, London, United Kingdom Vasily Novikov Russian State University for the Humanities, ET “ENERGOTRANSPROEKT”, Moscow, Russia
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Contributors to Volume 2A
Viktor A Novozhenov International Dialog Department of UNESCO, Center for the Rapprochement of Cultures, Almaty, Kazakhstan Selin E Nugent Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom Hakan Öniz ICOMOS-ICUCH, Akdeniz University, Antalya, Turkey Alexander Konstantinovich Otcherednoy Institute of the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Adam Pazout Center for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet), Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Andrei Vladimirovich Poliakov Institute for the History of Material Culture of RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia Arturo Rey da Silva ICOMOS-ICUCH, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Chamsia Sadozaï CRAterre-AE&CC/ENSAG/UGA, Grenoble, France Apostolos Sarris Digital Humanities GeoInformatics Lab, “Sylvia Ioannou” Chair for Digital Humanities, Archaeological Research Unit (ARU), Department of History and Archaeology, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus Jane Sidell UCL Institute of Archaeology and Historic England, London, United Kingdom Robert N Spengler, III Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany; and Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany Thomas Stöllner Ruhr-University Bochum, Institute of Archaeological Studies, Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, Department of Mining Archaeology, Bochum, Germany
Harry K Robson Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, United Kingdom
Dominic Stratford School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Steve Roskams University of York, York, United Kingdom
Tim Williams UCL Institute of Archaeology, London, United Kingdom
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES Editors in Chief Efthymia Nikita Associate Professor in Bioarchaeology, Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus Efthymia Nikita studies human skeletal remains in the Mediterranean from prehistoric times to the Middle Ages, examining health, diet, demography, and other important aspects of life in the past, often giving voice to people on the “historical fringe” such as women and children. She obtained a degree in Archeology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She held postdoctoral positions at the British School at Athens and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, as well as a Marie Sk1odowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Sheffield. She has published more than 95 scientific articles and book chapters, including the textbook Osteoarchaeology, which received an honorable mention from the Association of American Publishers for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Awards). She has also authored four open access guides to bioarchaeology and statistical analysis, which are used by thousands of scientists worldwide. She recently became co-editor of Elsevier’s Journal of Archaeological Science, and in 2022 she was awarded the Dan David Prize for her outstanding contribution to the study of the past. Alongside her scientific work, she has written an osteoarchaeology book for children and has coordinated the preparation of a book of educational activities for the archaeological sciences.
Thilo Rehren A.G. Leventis Professor in Archaeological Sciences, Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus. Thilo Rehren completed a Masters and PhD in Earth Sciences, before starting his professional career in 1990 at the newly established Institut für Archäometallurgie at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum in Bochum, Germany. In 1999, he was appointed to the new Chair in Archaeological Materials and Technologies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in London, UK, where he built a major international research group of postgraduate students and postdocs. Following a 5-year secondment to establish and lead UCL Qatar as a postgraduate training and research Centre of Excellence in Museology, Conservation and Archaeology, as part of Education City in Doha, Qatar, he joined the Cyprus Institute in 2017. For a decade, he served as Co-Editor in Chief for the Journal of Archaeological Science and has co-edited a good number of conference proceedings and topical volumes. His research focuses on the reconstruction and understanding of the technological processes related to the manufacture of metals, glass, glazes, and ceramics. For this, he combines concepts and methods developed by the materials and natural sciences in order to shed light on the tremendous achievements of past craftspeople and proto-engineers. He places particular emphasis on the integration of archaeological, scientific, and historical information and on investigating the correlation and cross-fertilization between different crafts and industries in order to understand the evolution of technical understanding within the wider setting of varied cultures and societies. He is proud of the nearly 40 PhD students and 15 postdocs he has had the privilege to supervise; most of them are now advancing archaeological sciences, including holding prestigious chairs and research positions at universities, museums, and research institutes worldwide. Thilo has an extensive publication record in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, often in cooperation with his students and even long after they became colleagues and developed their own research. He has served in numerous appointment and promotion committees and regularly acts as a peer reviewer for leading journals and national and international grant awarding bodies. In 2022, he received the Cyprus Research AwarddDistinguished Researcher. At home, he enjoys looking after eight cats.
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Editor Biographies
Section Editors Peter F. Biehl Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, United States Peter Biehl is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz. He received his PhD from the University of the Saarland in Germany and did his postdoctoral research at the University of California Berkeley. He has taught at universities in Buffalo, Halle, Freiburg, Cambridge, and Paris. His research focuses on the Neolithic and Chalcolithic in Europe and the Near East, climate change in the past, as well as museums and archaeological heritage. He has written and edited 10 books and more than 100 articles, book chapters, and exhibitions. He is a fellow of the American Council on Education (ACE), the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the German Archaeological Institute. He received the State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor’s Award for Internationalization and the University at Buffalo’s Distinguished Postdoc Mentor Award. He has been serving on the Executive Board and Oscar Montelius Foundation of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) and is currently the co-chair of the EAA Community on Climate Change and Heritage and the initiative for Social Archaeology and Climate Change (SACC). His and his students’ research has been funded by the ACLS, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Belgian American Educational Foundation, British Academy, European Union Leonardo DaVinci, Field Museum, Fulbright, MUSE, NSF, Public Humanities New York, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He has excavated at the Neolithic enclosure of Goseck in Germany, and the West Mound of the UNESCO world culture heritage site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He has worked with artists, musicians, and performers in innovative and collaborative projects including outreach programs with public schools. As director of the Marian E White Anthropology Research Museum at the University at Buffalo, he co-developed the critical museum studies master’s program. He is Academic Editor of PLOS ONE, editor-in-chief of SUNY Press Distinguished Monograph Series of the Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology, as well as on the boards of Archaeological Dialogues, Journal of Neolithic Archaeology, and Les Nouvelles de l’Archéologie. Peter Biehl would like to thank Jacob Brady for his editorial assistance in this project. Shadreck Chirikure Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science & British Academy Global Professor, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Shadreck Chirikure graduated with an MA in Artefact Studies (2002) and a PhD in Archaeology (2005) from University College London. His research work, past, present, and prospective, is focused on six main areas: (i) reconstruction of ancient technologies (e.g., metallurgy, ceramics, etc.); (ii) artefacts, technology, and innovation; (iii) integration of social science theories with scientific techniques to enhance effectiveness of scientific methods; (iv) history of technology; (v) application of scientific techniques to conserve artefacts and sites; and (vi) public engagement through heritage science including exhibitions. This work is pursued through excavations, museum-based projects, laboratory investigations (optical microscopy, SEM-EDS, EPMA, WD-XRF, (LA)-ICP-MS, etc.), and experimental work, bringing together natural and social sciences with humanities. In the process, Chirikure uses the results of discoveries in the field and the laboratory to develop new understanding, conserve heritage, and tackle global challenges. He is a recipient of several prestigious awards, a Fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Chirikure is the author of Metals in Past Societies (Springer, 2015) and Great Zimbabwe: Reclaiming a Confiscated Past (Routledge, 2020). He is Editor in Chief of the journal Archaeometry, Editor in Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African Archaeology, Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Anthropology, and co-editor of the Cambridge History of Technology.
Editor Biographies
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María Luz Endere Professor in Legislation and Cultural Resource Management, Faculty of Social Sciences, National University of the Centre of Buenos Aires Province, Buenos Aires, Argentina Senior Researcher, Program PATRIMONIA, Institute INCUAPA, National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Olavarría, Argentina María Luz Endere’s research focuses on heritage studies, particularly legislation and management, indigenous people’s rights on cultural issues, public perceptions, and sociocultural sustainability of cultural heritage. She obtained a degree in Law from the University of Buenos Aires, a degree in Archaeology from the National University of the Centre of Buenos Aires Province, an MA in Museum and Heritage Studies, and a PhD in Archaeology from University College London. She heads the Interdisciplinary Heritage Studies Program (PATRIMONIA) at the Institute INCUAPA. She has published more than 110 scientific articles and book chapters and 3 books. She was co-editor of the Journal Intersecciones en Antropología and is currently a member of the editorial board of several journals, including the International Journal of Cultural Property. She is the director of the UNESCO Chair in Archaeological Heritage and the Observatory of Cultural Heritage at the National University of the Centre of Buenos Aires Province. In addition to her research, she develops academic management activities, public outreach, and community support of heritage issues.
QIN Ling 秦岭 Associate Professor of Neolithic Archaeology and Archaeobotany at the School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, Beijing, China QIN Ling completed her PhD on Neolithic social complexity in the lower Yangtze River area. Her main research areas include Chinese Neolithic archaeology, field archaeology methods, archaeobotany, archaeological theory, and methodology. She has worked extensively on Neolithic excavations in China, jointly directing fieldwork in many sites at Zhejiang, Shandong, Shaanxi, and Henan. Since 2022, she is the Project Leader at the Tonglin city site at Linzi, Shandong province. Currently, she is also leading the subproject “Livelihood, Resources, and Technology in the Origin of Chinese Civilization” as part of the national research project “Research on the Origin of Chinese Civilization.” She is involved in several other national-level projects, including the major project of the Ministry of Education’s Key Research Base in Humanities and Social Sciences, “Technology and Civilization: Exploring the Formation of Prehistoric Chinese Civilization through Jade Handicraft Industry.” Her current research interests focus primarily on Neolithic jades in Eastern China, early agriculture developments in China, as well as the theory and practice of early civilizations study in a comparative perspective around East Asia.
Ulrike Sommer Senior Lecturer in European Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, United Kingdom Ulrike Sommer is a prehistorian who mainly works on the Early Neolithic of Southeast and Central Europe. She has excavated in Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania, Iraq, and Indonesia. Her current research project “Between the Mountains and the Flood” investigates the Neolithisation of North-West Romania in cooperation with the Museul Iudețean Satu Mare, Romania. Other research interests include lithic technology and lithic raw materials, archaeological theory, the history of archaeology, especially the relation between archaeology and nationalism, and archaeological taphonomy. She obtained her MA and PhD at the Department of Prehistory of Frankfurt University (Germany). She subsequently was Curator at the Open Air Museum Groß Raden (Germany) and worked for the Museums-Association in Lüchow-Danneberg (Germany). She has also worked in a Collaborative Research Centre on the formation of regional identities at Leipzig University (SFB 417). She has taught at Leipzig and Frankfurt Universities as well as at UCL. She is currently teaching courses on the Neolithic of Europe, European Prehistory, Artefact Studies, and the use of Organic Materials at UCL. She is cofounder of the German Workgroup on Archaeological Theory (now TIDA). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory, and she has published more than 70 articles and book chapters on Neolithic archaeology, taphonomy, and public archaeology, as well as 4 edited volumes on themes as diverse as archaeology and memory, the history of archaeology, archaeological theory, and national traditions in European archaeology.
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Dmitriy Voyakin Director of the International Institute for Central Asian Studies Director General of Archaeological Expertise Scientific Organization Member of the National Commission for UNESCO and ICESCO of the Republic of Kazakhstan
Dmitriy Voyakin began his professional career as a Research Scientist in 1997, subsequently advancing to the roles of Senior Research Scientist and ultimately Head at the Department of Documentation and Archaeological Conservation in the Institute of Archaeology MES, Almaty, Kazakhstan, a position held in earnest since 2005. He obtained a Master of Arts (1999) from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, graduating with Honors, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy (2010) from the Institute of Archaeology, Republic of Kazakhstan. He served as General Director of “Archaeological Expertise” LLP beginning in 2006 and took on the role of Director for the intergovernmental organization “International Institute for Central Asian Studies” in 2018. Simultaneously, he served as a Delegate to the World Heritage Committee (2014–2017) and as Secretary-General for Kazakhstan’s National World Heritage Committee (2014–2018). He is a contributing Member of the National Commission of the Republic of Kazakhstan for UNESCO and ICESCO since 2018. He has served as field director for more than 10 archaeological expeditions, including several with an international scope. These included permanent archaeological expeditions at Otrar, Kayalyk, Akyrtas, Taraz, Sygnak, Dzhan Kala, Dzhankent, Dzhuvara, the medieval Christian site Ilibalyk, and archaeological explorations at sites situated on the now arid seabed of the Aral Sea. He has published 21 books and more than 200 scientific papers. He functioned as a UNESCO regional facilitator for the Silk Road serial transnational nomination and played a principal role as author and executor in the establishment of archaeological park projects, specifically “Kone Taraz” (Ancient Taraz), “Ancient Shymkent,” and “Kultobe-Yassy-Turkestan.”
FOREWORD
Archaeology is a cumulative discipline; new data, facts, and knowledge are constantly being added to what little we know of the past, rather than just replacing old data and observations. In this sense, we do not see this 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology as a replacement of the 1st edition, published in 2008, and which continues to attract good citations every year (Fig. 1). Instead, we see this new edition rather as a 2nd volume, offering additional knowledge, data, interpretations, and discussions, often presenting new viewpoints, and looking at the archaeological record from different perspectives. While earlier facts and data remain valuable, increased knowledge enables improved interpretations, and old interpretations, sometime not more than prejudice and assumption passed on as orthodoxy, are finally becoming obsolete as new voices, concepts, and questions advance the discourse. Our ambition for the 2nd edition was to be as multivocal and inclusive as possible, to localize contributions and contributors, to enable a cross-cultural comparison. We are very grateful to the nearly 400 colleagues who with their entries made this a truly global work. The overall structure, the selection of entries, and the recruitment of contributors for this 2nd edition is the collective work of the Editorial Team, who shared the ambition for an encyclopedia in the spirit of an Archaeology of One World.1 The demographics of this team is no coincidence. Half of us are from continental Europe, and the others hail from Africa, Central Asia, China, and South America. While two are based in the United Kingdom and one in the United States, none grew up theredindeed, between us we have six different mother tongues. This multivocality is similarly reflected in the current academic affiliations of the 378 individual entry contributors. The largest number (69) is based in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom (47), the two traditional powerhouses of global archaeology; together with authors based in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, they make up about 35% of the total contributors. Continental Europe hosts in total 144 contributors, nearly 40% of the total, followed by 57 authors, about 15% of the total, being based in Asia. Some 27 authors are based in Latin America, roughly 7% of the total, while only 14 are based in Africa, just below 4% of all our authors (Fig. 2). Much could, and probably should, be written about this distribution, and why archaeology still is so overwhelmingly dominated by the Global North. One facet of this picture may suffice to highlight: our numbers refer to the current academic affiliations of the authors, and not their personal, or even scholarly, country of origin. A detailed study of the individual biographies would quickly highlight the strong flow of talent from the Global South to institutions in the Global North; thus, the picture is heavily skewed in
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Annual citation rates for the 1st edition of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology, showing its ongoing currency as a scholarly resource.
Several of us were influenced in their formative years by the unforgotten Peter Ucko; we hope he would approve of our endeavor.
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Fig. 2 Heat map of the academic affiliation of the 378 individual contributors to the Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2nd edition. Both the United States and the United Kingdom benefit from significant inward migration of scholars born elsewhere. The map also reflects the dearth of professional positions in archaeology in much of Africa, in addition to the biased network of the editorial team.
favor of US and UK affiliations by the effects of different economic strengths of academic institutions. This goes directly hand-inhand with the differences in opportunities for successive generations of emerging scholars in different countries, rather than reflecting a somehow natural imbalance in talent among the different regions of the World. To hazard a guess, the heat map shows large swathes of Africa not represented by a single author, while there are probably more African-born archaeologists working in the United States and United Kingdom alone than in all of sub-Saharan Africa taken together. Indeed, several of them have contributed here, making their voice heard. Other important regions are woefully underrepresented, toodparticularly Arabia and Southeast Asia, and not for a dearth of archaeology or scholars! While much still needs to be done, we are confident that we have taken a decisive step in the right direction and achieved a diversity of contributors that would not have been possible a generation ago. This diverse representation contributes essential localized understandings of the archaeological record across geographies and time periods, allowing nuanced comparison of theories, methods, interpretations, and ethics in one place. Different regions of the world have their own traditionsdfor example, African, Chinese, Latin American, and so ondwhich collectively makes archaeology a very healthy discipline. Issues of ethics, access to materials, and availability of resources continue to bear on archaeological knowledge production and are also reflected in this 2nd edition. Undoubtedly, this global profile and the myriad of local issues presented offer readers an unparalleled opportunity to explore World Archaeology across its breadth and depth in one place. While this posed a lot of interesting challenges not only for the editorial team, but also for the technical team, we are glad we took on these challenges and felt it a mere inconvenience well worth the effort. We hope and trust that any issues arising from our ambition for a truly global representation of archaeology will be generously overlooked by the readers and reviewers of this volume. Some lamentable gaps remain in our coverage, something we hope will be addressed in the next edition, when times hopefully enable an even more balanced coverage, and sufficient freedom and support for scholars worldwide to devote time to sharing their unique knowledge, viewpoints, and experiences with a global audience. For now, we thank wholeheartedly those many colleagues who accepted our invitation to contribute entries to this Encyclopedia and made the whole project possible. Peter Biehl, Shadreck Chirikure, María-Luz Endere, Efthymia Nikita, Ling Qin, Thilo Rehren, Ulrike Sommer, Dmitriy Voyakin
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are most grateful to the Acquisition team of Elsevier for entrusting us the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology and for fully supporting our ambition for an inclusive and diverse team of Section Editors and contributors for this. We are grateful for the blessing that the editor of the 1st edition, Deborah M. Pearsall, gave us to take on this challenge, and for the high standard she set in the design and content quality; we are sure that the 1st edition will continue to be useful for future generations of scholars and retain its currency for many years to come. Mahmoud Mardini created some 150 maps for the new edition, ensuring consistency across entries in design and appearance; we are sure he learned much more about geography and global archaeology in the process than he ever thought he would! Our most sincere thanks go to the 378 contributors who have given their time and knowledge to write the entries; it is their scholarship and viewpoints that will help shaping the future of archaeology on a global scale, setting the agenda for future generations. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our team of Section Editors, for sharing our vision and shaping their sections, and then identifying and persuading the leading, and often the future leading scholars in each field within their section to contribute. They graciously handled the entries in their section through peer review and language edits, and often even full translation. We thank Ilia Kovalev for the translation of several Russian texts into English, too, done at short notice. We are most grateful for the ever-supportive technical team, led first by Rekha Nimesh and then by Nitesh Shrivastava and Prashanth Ravichandran, for managing the production through multiple rounds of page proofs and corrections and for their patience and persistence in guiding this project to a timely anddwe trustdsuccessful end. Efthymia Nikita and Thilo Rehren
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Classification of Archaeological Sites Vadim Sergeevich Bochkarev and Andrei Vladimirovich Poliakov, Institute for the History of Material Culture of RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Classification of Archaeological Sites Profane Sites Sacral Sites Key Issues Profane Sites Settlement-Related Sites Productive and Industrial Sites Infrastructure Sites (Roads, Moors, Piers, Canals, Aqueducts, etc.) Random/Haphazard Deposition Sacral Sites Burial Sites Ritual Sites Rock and Cave Paintings, Geoglyphs Menhirs, Stelae, and Statues Votive Deposits Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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The process of archaeologization of traces of past human activity leads to the formation of archaeological sites; All archaeological sites can be divided into two large classes: profane or sacral, each further structured into categories; The variety of types of archaeological sites is extremely large; only the most common types are described in this entry.
Abstract This entry discusses the concept of classification of archaeological sites, a methodological issue that has been represented very poorly in the scientific literature. It is proposed herein to divide the entire array of archaeological sites into two fundamental classes: profane and sacral. The former is subdivided into four main categories: settlement, industrial, infrastructural sites and places of random or haphazard deposition. In turn, sacral sites are divided into burial and ritual sites, ritual imagery, stelae and sculptures, and votive deposits. In each of these categories, the most important and frequently encountered types of archaeological sites are described. In addition, this entry addresses the formation of archaeological sites and features, including the processes of archaeologization of the traces of past human activity.
Introduction The subject of archaeological study is the human past. Unlike history, archaeology does not use written sources, but elements of the material culture and organic remains that have been preserved. Archaeological sites are locations that preserve archaeological remains, and include settlements, burial grounds, mines, arable fields, roads, sanctuaries, and many more (Sher, 2004: 144– 123; Bochkarev, 2014: 47–51). Archaeological sites arose as a result of the activities of people in the past and the archaeologization of their material culture and organic remains. Archaeologization refers to the transition of a living culture into a dead or “defunct” one (Eggers, 1950: 49–59; Eggers, 1959: 262–270; Klein, 2014: 19). The archaeologization process has several successive stages (Klein, 2012: 124–126). It
Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2nd edition, Volume 2
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starts with certain components of the material culture going out of use or circulation, for some reason or another, thus losing their functional purpose. These may be lost or discarded artifacts, household or construction waste, industrial residues, abandoned buildings, etc. This also includes artifacts suitable for further use, but for ideological reasons deliberately removed from the corpus of a functioning culture. As an example we could cite grave goods from burials and votive hoards. Turning into deposits (or “defunct” culture), these components of material culture ended up completely at the mercy of the natural environment (Clarke, 1973: 18–20). Most often, exposure to this environment was detrimental to their integrity. Earthquakes, wind and water erosion, ground pressure and landslides, as well as other natural taphonomic factors have caused irreparable damage to archaeological objects and sites. For example, many earthen structures, such as mounds, when exposed to natural factors, change their original size and shape (Gryaznov, 1961). They turn into rounded hills, although initially they could have had, for example, the shape of a truncated pyramid (Marsadolov, 2010, Fig. 21). Those deposits that managed to avoid physical destruction continued to be exposed to various kinds of chemical reactions (fast or slow burning, decay, oxidation, etc.). Fortunately, not all deposits get destroyed. Some of them remain preserved, but usually in a transformed form. Artifacts could change size, color, and sometimes structure, as well as chemical composition, e.g., corrosion of metals, iridescence of glass, patinization of flint, fossilization of bones. Natural exposure of cultural deposits is heterogeneous depending on the local conditions, and results in a differential impact on the deposits. In an inert environment (for example, permafrost), artifacts, especially from organic materials, can be preserved excellently. Of great importance for the state of cultural deposits is the time factor. The older they are, the stronger the impact of various natural forces they get exposed to. This is very clearly demonstrated at some early Paleolithic sites. Ultimately, the impact of various natural forces turns cultural deposits into “fossil objects” (Bochkarev, 2014: 51). They seem to become part of the natural environment (Renfrew and Bahn, 1991: 47–60). It is not that important where archaeological sites are located: under ground, under water, on the ground surface, etc. It is important that they represent a culture of the past, and thereafter were integrated into the natural environment. The age of the sites does not matter much, either. They can be Paleolithic deposits or modern ones, so long as they found themselves outside the frames of their own culture, and have relinquished their functional purpose. From this point of view, the upper chronological boundary of archaeology cannot be firmly fixed, as illustrated by the emergence and successful development of the so-called industrial archaeology. It should be emphasized that archaeological sites are cultural deposits, in the first place. Nature destroys them, transforms them and creates something new out of them. Thus, they get to belong to both culture and nature, and may be attributed to a special category of cultural-and-natural sites. Researchers are primarily interested in the cultural and historical information contained in archaeological sites. As a result of the archaeologization process, however, little of it is preserved, and it is presented in a coded form. The situation is further aggravated by the fact that a significant part of this information is not only lost, but gets transformed and distorted. This has been going on since the first stages of sedimentation and deposition on the site. From an interpretative point of view, the archaeologization process has both positive and negative aspects. Thanks to it, a significant part of the heritage of past cultures is preserved. At the same time, this heritage reaches us in a very fragmentary, incomplete and distorted condition. Therefore, it needs to be interpreted critically (Jacob-Friesen, 1928: 98–101; Schiffer, 1976: 67–84; Formozov, 1977). External and internal criticism are essential. The former evaluates the reliability and authenticity of archaeological materials (Klein, 2014: 94–95), while the latter looks at how much one can trust the content of these materials (Klein, 2014: 95). Depending on the functions performed by certain sites within a “living” culture, the resulting archaeological sites are usually divided into several types. These may be distinguished into settlement, burial, cult (ritual) sites, hoards, and singular finds (not part of assemblages), and differ in their composition, context and origin. All of them are characterized by a frequent occurrence and high variation. Each of them can be further subdivided into a number of smaller categories. This is especially true for settlements and burial sites. For example, settlements, depending on the chosen classification criterion, may be divided into towns or villages, long-term or short-term settlements, “tells” (Arabic for “hill”), campsites, etc. Burial sites may be burial mounds or ground burials, tombs or shrines, pyramids, dolmens, fields of burial urns, columbaria, cenotaphs, etc. In addition to these five main types of sites, other categories may include shipwrecks, workshops, mines, roads, battlefields, geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and many others. These are less common, but of significant value. Each of the types of archaeological sites mentioned above has a number of unique characteristics depending on their origin, process of archaeologization, as well as the context (i.e. natural environment). These features must be taken into account for their successful study during field and desk research. Therefore, the classification of archaeological sites is a critical task.
Overview Classification of Archaeological Sites Archaeological sites are an extremely broad concept, combining all surviving traces of ancient human presence and activity. Classifying archaeological sites into categories is essential in order to identify broader patterns in this presence and activity. However, all attempts to create a universal classification run into several conceptional issues, preventing the formulation of the final version. This is, first of all, due to the almost limitless diversity of the world cultures. It is practically impossible to create a universal list of site types equally applicable to dwellers of the African Sahara, highlands of Tibet, and Greenland. By the same token, the variety of archaeological sites changes with time, reflecting the development of human society. In the Paleolithic era, there were few sites types,
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and by the late Middle Ages their number had multiplied. Finally, the development of individual regions and territories (or sometimes even entire continents) always has certain features, affecting the formation of archaeological sites. A good example can be found in pre-Columbian America and its dwellers, who lacked knowledge and technical skills required for iron making (Martin, 1999). Moreover, before the arrival of the first Europeans to North America, even copper was used only in its native form there (Rapp et al., 1998). The other challenge is the complex structure of archaeological sitesdit is a common occurrence when a whole set of objects that could be attributed to different archaeological site types are found within a single site. For example, an ancient town could include residential areas, as well as temples (ritual sites), workshop areas (rabads, the trade and commercial districts), and roads as its integral parts. Therefore, a single site can combine a set of multiple site types’ attributes. Finally, the position of the observer, i.e. the archaeologist, has a significant impact on the perception of the studied site. The existence of various archaeological schools of thought in different countries, or even within the same country, can lead to different attribution of the same site. Also, the features used as criteria for the site type attribution can also vary. Here, a significant factor is the general underdevelopment of archaeological terminology, as well as the small number of archaeological dictionaries that allow correlating archaeological terms from different languages (e.g., Savvonidi, 1995; Vasiliev et al., 2007; Khrapunov, 2008). Besides, the development of archaeological site classification never stops. The meaning or functional interpretation of already known sites gets revised, fundamentally new types are identified, and some types are broken down into subtypes. For example, based on the purpose of their deposition, hoards are currently divided into ritual hoards (sacral deposits) and temporary hoards, i.e. those meant to be recovered again, and this is only the beginning of interpretation of this site type. The classification of archaeological sites is a living organism, not a rigid structure. As a result, most archaeologists use their own models developed within certain scientific schools, or resort to describing variants of sites in particular regions. However, despite all these difficulties, classification is crucial for the further understanding of archaeological sites. To begin with, the hierarchical structure of the concepts and terms used should be outlined. Here, the following taxa will be used: classdcategorydtypedsubtype. The highest position belongs to the concept of “class”, which allows us to divide all archaeological sites into two extremely large groups: profane sites of daily activity and sacral sites, reflecting features of spiritual activity. Each of the two classes has its own defined characteristics. A “category” is a structural unit of a lower order, allowing to single out groups of types within classes based on their similar characteristics. Finally, the “type” and “subtype” are the units of the lowest order, which form the basis for classification (Fig. 1). In the next sections the characteristics of the classes will be discussed, followed by the description of their subdivision.
Profane Sites This class includes both secular and common sites formed by everyday household activities of humans. The most important feature of common sites is the inadvertent nature of the traces left here by the ancient people. This allows unbiased study of the economy of past societies. However, the usual lack of archaeological evidence should be noted. Even if we put the question of organic preservation aside, there are still many factors why a certain site may be difficult to attribute and characterize. For example, there are very few finds of metal items in settlements of the early metal ages. This can be explained by the high value of metal at that time and subsequent practices aiming to conserve this valuable raw material. For example, broken bronze items were not discarded, but were usually remelted to make a new object.
Sacral Sites This class represents the sites that appeared as a result of religious and spiritual activities of ancient people. The particular circumstances of their formation leave an imprint on the cultural and historical information they contain. For example, grave goods may differ from the objects used in everyday life. Besides, the set of items placed into the grave was likely following specific sociocultural norms; as a result, studying ancient people solely through sacral sites can result in a distorted picture. For example, only bronze items were predominant in late Scythian burials of the Minusinsk Basin (Russia), even though iron has already been used very actively. It is possible that bronze was perceived as a sacred material, and there was a whole production of miniature bronze objects intended to be used as grave goods. Concluding this brief description of classes, it should be emphasized that their division is partly conventional. There are numerous examples of common sites endowed with sacral attributes. For example, during the early metal ages, even such mundane objects as kitchenware vessels were decorated with sacral ornaments. Conversely, many sacral sites also served as indicators of secular social status.
Key Issues Profane Sites Settlement-Related Sites This category unites all types of archaeological sites, with evidence of people’s habitation, i.e. the areas where they lived, cooked and consumed food: caves, grottoes, campsites, towns, villages, settlements, residential areas, citadels, etc. This category is the most extensive and difficult to classify, with dozens of possible site types. Some of the sites’ characteristics have fundamental importance, therefore all sites can be divided into two taxa based on their permanent or intermittent use for habitation, respectively. Archaeological sites with periodic human presence include campsites on trade routes, nomadic camps, and seasonal settlements. Presence or
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Classification of Archaeological Sites
Scheme of categorization of archaeological sites.
absence of fortification is another characteristic feature, allowing to differentiate the following site types: a settlement, a fortress, a castle, a tower, etc. The technology of the site’s construction is also important, as well as local traditions. A good example of how both technology and traditions affect the site type is “tells”, a very special type of residential sites, typical of some regions of Eurasia (Pumpelly, 1908; Sarianidi, 1962; Verhoeven, 1999). Based on adobe-brick architecture, tells required gradual but constant rebuilding, which led to the formation of unique artificial hills, successively built up of multiple layers of stratified deposits. The variety of types and subtypes of residential sites is so great that their full description cannot be presented within this entry. In the following paragraphs, a brief outline of the most common types of this category is provided. Caves, Grottoes, Rock Shelters This type of site is defined by its specific spatial arrangement and is traditionally associated with the most ancient period of human history, the Stone Age (Kornfeld et al., 2007). The existence of a practically ready-made dwelling, protecting people from natural forces and wild animals, was indeed an important criterion for the choice of a place to stay. Over time, the significance of this site type gradually decreased, as mankind developed other ways to overcome environmental threats. However, such sites regularly exhibit traces of later human presence, indicating the possibility of their reuse as temporary shelters. Campsites The main criteria for distinguishing this type of sites are relatively thin cultural layers and the absence of permanent dwelling remains. Additionally, storage pits and/or hearths can be found, some of which are delineated by stone structures, as well as patches of burnt soil, indicating repeated firing or the long-term upkeep of fire in one spot (Belanovskaya, 1995).
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Campsites are among the most difficult site types to detect and document, due to the lack of surface signs. The most common methods for their detection are archaeological survey and coring, while remote sensing methods (magnetometry, georadar, etc.) are not very effective with this site type. Studying these sites is additionally complicated by the lack of stratigraphy, i.e. of archaeological remains deposited over a very long period of time, usually forming a solid cultural layer. There are two main subtypes of campsites, differentiated by the principle of their formation. The first is campsites serving as a temporary shelter located on regular transport or trade routes. The second subtype is associated with certain types of agricultural management, as is suggested by the absence of stationary dwellings. An example can be found among the sites of nomads of the Eurasian steppes or reindeer herders of the north, which are characterized by the use of light and portable dwelling structures. With the gradual exhaustion of the forage base, the population of the sites would move to new territories, which made the construction of permanent dwellings irrational. Such relocation was periodic, and usually took place along an established route. Settlements Unlike campsites, settlements are distinguished by the presence of permanent dwelling remains and relatively thicker cultural layers, which indicates long-term human habitation in the area (Passek, 1949; Hayden, 1996). The most common signs of permanent dwellings are pit houses or semi-dugout sunken-floor buildings, post holes, and foundation structures (Savinov, 1996). However, there are also other, less common variants, for example, traces of Neolithic pile settlements on the bottom of lakes or in riverbeds. The methods of their identification are generally the same as for campsites. The main role is played by the archaeological survey. It is also quite common to observe traces of dwellings on the modern surface in the form of depressions, rows of post holes or surviving stone structures. In contrast to campsite detection, remote sensing techniques are very efficient in identifying and studying ancient settlements. Remote sensing allows general mapping of settlements as well as helps to differentiate individual buildings and structures without excavation. Unlike campsites, settlements provide an archaeologist with an opportunity to excavate larger areas, allowing to distinguish functional areas of the site: living quarters, outbuildings, workshops, etc., which allows a reasonable interpretation of the economic model of the population. The stratigraphy of the settlements requires special attention. Usually, such sites have a rather long lifespan, resulting in formation of stratigraphic layers reflecting various chronological periods. Ancient Towns The next type implies the presence of fortification in the form of ditches, ramparts, palisades, etc. Traditionally, these are woodenearth and stone structures. They come in significantly varying sizes, ranging from a few hundred square meters to many square kilometers. Ancient towns’ layout varies from irregular to regularly planned urban spaces. Sites of this type are usually clearly visible on the ground and can be easily identified by archaeological survey. However, an even more efficient way to identify ancient towns is the analysis of aerial photography (Fig. 2). A striking example of the successful use of this technique is the identification of a large group of fortified settlements of the Sintashta archaeological culture in the southern Trans-Urals (Zdanovich and Batanina, 2007). While studying ancient towns, it is necessary to put additional research effort into the
Fig. 2
Aerial view of the Arkaim settlement, taken in 1987 before the archaeological excavations (Zdanovich and Batanina, 2007)
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design of the defensive structures; the very existence of such remains implies the presence of armed threat, which can be of either external or internal origin. Complex Towns and Fortresses (Shakhristans, Rabads, Citadels) Finally, the town or shakhristan is the most developed and chronologically latest version of residential sites. It has a number of distinctive features, in terms of both social structure and archaeological remains (Andreev, 2010). The boundary between towns and ancient town settlements cannot be formulated as a set of clear-cut criteria, but is rather a combination of various features. In regions where stone was scarce, towns were built differently. For example, in the north of Ancient Rus’, wood served as the main construction material due to its accessibility, as can be seen in Veliky Novgorod (Zasurtsev, 1967; Thompson, 1967; Kolchin and Yanin, 1982). In the meantime, in the steppes and deserts of Asia adobe architecture thrived, starting from the Neolithic era and covering later urban periods as well (Pumpelly, 1908; Sarianidi, 1962; Verhoeven, 1999). In the Mediterranean region, where forest was scarce, structures were mainly built of stone (Fig. 3). A separate subtype of towns are fortresses or citadels featuring elaborate defensive structures. Their study is a special field of archaeology, closely related to the study of defensive and offensive weaponry, as well as tactics and strategy of ancient warfare. An extremely interesting element of archaeological study of fortresses are the traces of assaults, which researchers sometimes even manage to associate with specific historic events.
Productive and Industrial Sites This is the second most important category associated with daily human activities. To sustain life, representatives of human groups had to leave their habitat to obtain the necessary resources: food, minerals, construction materials, etc. In many cases, to facilitate logistics, processing of raw materials was required: butchery, metal extraction, quarrying of stone. With the development of society, other needs appeared which led to the creation of infrastructure facilities: roads, canals, aqueducts, etc. As a result, special traces of human activity associated with production and processing sites can be identified. It should be noted that humans have always aimed to bring industry as close as possible to the places of their permanent dwelling. Therefore, the emergence of industrial sites right on the territory of residential facilities is an absolutely inevitable phenomenon. In this category, we consider only those cases where these structures for some reason were located outside the residential areas, and constitute completely independent sites. Animal or Fish Traps Structures related to hunting or fishing are a specific type of archaeological sites. Usually they are hunting pits, which were dug out and disguised either beside animal trails or in places where animals could be driven to (Poshekhonova, 2006; Rudkovskaya, 2016). Unfortunately, the amount of information such sites can provide is limited. The correct dating is challenging as well. However, the study of these sites began recently and it has certain scientific prospects. An example of the use of such fishing traps are mazes made of poles or stone structures driven into or put onto the bottom of a water body or riverbed. They could be located either in the course of rivers (for example, Australian Aboriginal fish traps on the Barwon River in Brevarrina, Brevarrina County, New South Wales, Australia), or in tidal zones (traps of the archipelago of Penghu in western Taiwan).
Fig. 3
Aerial view of the Acropolis of Mycenae (Demakopoulou, 1999)
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Places for Cutting and Dressing Raw Food When hunting, fishing, and gathering were the main sources of food supply, this specific site type was abundant. Hunting grounds were naturally located at some distance from places of human habitation. Transporting whole animal carcasses to the dwelling was time-consuming and impractical. As a result, a temporary camp would be set up at a hunting areada place for the initial cutting and dressing of animal carcasses, from which only the necessary parts were extracted. Most often, over the course of time, these camps were located in the same convenient places. They are distinguished by a large number of bones and horns with cut marks. Shell heaps or middens are a subtype of this category (Meehan, 1982; Andersen, 1991). Shellfish production cannot be carried out constantly in the same areas, therefore catchers are normally forced to move further and further away from their places of dwelling. As a result, the transportation of the caught shellfish to the settlements becomes more and more difficult. This leads to a logical solution in form of the primary processingdthe separation of the shells, which account for a significant part of the weight of the catch. Over time, transition to agriculture and husbandry significantly reduced the role of such sites. Moreover, progressive forms of transportation (pack animals, vehicles) emerged which allowed processing at the permanent dwelling. Structures Related to Agriculture (Dams, Canals, Terraces) and Cattle Breeding Agriculture is one of the most important types of human economic activity. At the initial stages of its development, mostly the areas naturally suited for agriculture were exploited. However, with demographic growth and development of trade connections came the need to expend the areas of agricultural use. In arid climates, irrigation is the most important element of successful farming and the most effective way to increase soil fertility and crop yield. This required irrigation facilities (dikes, canals), constituting a separate type of archaeological sites (Andrianov, 1969; Lisitsyna, 1978; Ortloff, 2020). Some regions provided additional options for expanding crops. In mountainous areas, the solution would come through artificial leveling of land by creation of terraces (Brown et al., 2021; Borisov and Korobov, 2009). Such extensive alteration of natural landscapes is an important example of humans adapting the environment for their needs. This type of sites, similarly to fortified settlements, is easily identifiable by visual observation of an area. However, the most effective way here is the use of aerial and satellite images, allowing to identify and observe large-scale structures in their entirety. Places of Extraction of Mineral Resources (Mines, Quarries, Pits, etc.) Places of extraction of minerals constitute a separate category of archaeological sites, varying in their purpose and organization. For example, mines or pits used for the extraction of metal ores were recorded since the Eneolithic, when the technology for obtaining metal from ore was first discovered. The main difficulty in working with these sites is their poor state of preservation. Very often they are severely damaged by subsequent workings or mining activity, and due to the lack of diagnostic archaeological finds, they can be difficult to date. Another common example of resource extraction sites are quarries. Stone was widely used both for the construction of residential buildings, fortresses, burial construction, and ritual buildings. Good examples are the quarries of ancient Egypt and Sudan, which supplied stone blocks for the construction of palaces, temples and pyramids (Klemm and Klemm, 2008; Cech et al., 2018). Workshops and Industrial Sites (Stone Splitting, Metallurgy, etc.) A fairly common type of archaeological sites are workshops or industrial areas. They are known since the Stone Age, when they appeared in form of flint knapping workshops (Tarasov and Nordqvist, 2022). The main purpose of these sites is the primary processing of extracted resources. Raw material deposits were often in hard-to-reach places at a great distance from stationary settlements. Primary processing sites emerged to reduce the expenses of transportation and were located near the mining sites. The most striking examples are metallurgical workshops. Transportation of ore is extremely inefficient, since the rock wastes accounts for the majority of original mass of the extracted ore. Therefore, smelting sites were arranged in close proximity to the mines, which often also were in areas rich in wood for charcoal production. The use of hazardous materials additionally justified the territorial isolation of workshops and industrial sites. Most often, this was related to blacksmiths, ceramic workshops, and other industries associated with open fire.
Infrastructure Sites (Roads, Moors, Piers, Canals, Aqueducts, etc.) The development of human society is directly related to communication and provision of transport routes. At the initial stage infrastructure sites left practically no traces, but as the technology developed, the evidence of their construction became more and more prominent (Harding, 2000: 173–185). Roads needed paved surfaces, which required complex technology. The best examples of well-preserved transport arteries are Roman roads (Laurence, 1999) (Fig. 4), and the Inca road network in South America (Hyslop, 1984). Waterways were equally important. Two main types of archaeological sites can be distinguished in this category. Firstly, mooring quays, piers and other similar structures that ensure the mooring of ships. Their importance is especially high to ensure the speed and safety of loading and unloading of ships. Secondly, canals provide communication between various water basins or allow the delivery of bulk materials by water, as close as possible to the production and consumption sites. An example of the latter type is the network of canals in the UK that supported the industrial revolution. However, infrastructure facilities are not limited to land roads and waterways. They include, for example, Roman aqueducts, which delivered water to large cities for a variety of purposes: feeding fountains and city baths, watering gardens, providing water to industries and sewage facilities, etc. (Fig. 5).
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Classification of Archaeological Sites
Fig. 4
Ancient road in Pompeii (Italy).
Fig. 5
The aqueduct in Segovia (Spain).
Random/Haphazard Deposition This category requires its own special recognition and interpretation. If the placement of settlements, workshops and other sites described above was a deliberate action tied to certain conditions, the random deposition occurs spontaneously. Its character usually does not allow targeted research, therefore, such sites are usually discovered accidently, often as a result of modern economic activity. Haphazard, Isolated or Singular Finds This large category of artifacts is represented by a significant number of items kept in museums. Most often, these items were found by local residents as a result of their daily activities, such as during deep plowing of fields. Unfortunately, such finds provide only limited information, as they lack archaeological context. Haphazard finds can also occur during archaeological survey. Battlefields These sites formed spontaneously as a result of military operations. In rare cases, it is possible to find the remains of warriors with traces of trauma that led to their death, as, for example, in the Tollensee River valley in MecklenburgdVorpommern (Brock, 2015).
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However, this rarely happens, since most often the bodies were buried, and ammunition and weapons were collected after the battle. Battlefields usually retain only some traces of the battles: arrowheads or bullets, damaged small items of equipment. To study this unique type of sites, special research methods are often used to reconstruct the actions of the opposing sides. Hoards as Temporary Deposits The classification of hoards as random deposits is based on the fact that their discovery cannot be predicted or planned. As a rule, they are found by chance and most often by people not related to academic archaeology. It is assumed that the hoard-makers originally intended to retrieve the hoard, but for some reason this never happened (Bochkarev and Klimushina, 2022). The first hoards appear in the Stone Age, and they continue to be deposited to this day. They may include items made from various materials: ceramics, bones, horn, glass, metal, etc., although since the Eneolithic, metal hoards become widespread. They can be divided into treasure, foundry workers’, merchants’, and household hoards. Votive deposits (“ritual hoards” or “sacral hoards”) will be considered in the class of sacral sites. Shipwrecks Shipwrecks are very particular and informative sites. They also belong to the random deposit type, as they were rarely deliberately sunk, and are studied by underwater archaeology or by recovery and further study and conservation in traditional ways (Cederlund, 2006). Shipwrecks provide information about the ship itself, its designs and equipment, as well as information regarding its cargo, which allows to analyze traffic flow, volumes of goods transported and other details of the transport infrastructure and trade (Bass, 1987; Pulak, 2005). Other research concerns military affairs based on the combat ammunition of ships and their special structural elements (e.g., rams). Human Remains A rare form of spontaneous deposition are the bodies of people who died accidently or were killed and not buried. The best-known case is Ötzi (an ice mummy of a Bronze Age man) discovered in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps in Tyrol (Fowler, 2001). The rarity of such sites is due to the unique conditions required to preserve the organic remains. Under normal conditions, a body decomposes or is taken away by animals and thus the information gets lost. One of the characteristic features of such sites is the preservation of all everyday equipment, in contrast to burials and their strictly regulated set of grave goods.
Sacral Sites Burial Sites This category unites all cases related to funerary practices, regardless of their form. Since ancient times, all actions performed after the death of a person follow a strictly regulated ritual. The most abundant type of burial sites is cemeteries: a territory specifically allocated for burials, ranging from a few to tens of thousands of burials. Burial sites vary widely in type, and only the most common options are further discussed. Moreover, a burial is not always defined by the presence of human remains (inhumation, cremation), but also include cenotaphs, i.e. burials that do not contain human remains in any form. Burial Grounds This type of sites appeared in the most ancient periods of human history. The main distinguishing feature is the absence of pronounced near-tomb or grave structures (fences, barrows, memorials, etc.). Most often, burial grounds consist of rows of buried graves, sometimes with wooden structures which are usually not preserved (Molodin, 2012). Soil burial grounds are among the most difficult types of sites to identify. The absence of tomb structures leads to the lack of any visual hints that could help site identification. Such sites are usually found during field excavations; under certain conditions, remote sensing can be fruitful as well. Burial Mounds An extremely common type of sites, characterized by the presence of a stone, earth or combined mound or barrow over the burial structure (Korenevsky, 2012). Their dimensions can vary; the surviving height of the barrow of the royal Scythian burial mounds in the Black Sea region, for example, exceeded 20 m (Galanina, 1997; Cugunov et al., 2010). Most often, mounds have a variety of adjacent structures composing a single burial site: a fence, ditches, menhirs, or memorials. Usually mounds are connected to burial grounds, which are ancient cemeteries associated with one or more adjacent settlements. The tradition of erecting burial mounds is widely present in societies relying on cattle breeding as the main form of economic activity (Fig. 6). Tombs and Shrines (Complex StructuresdPyramids, Shaft-Type Tombs, Mausoleums, Dolmens, etc.) The next level of complex burial practices are tombs or shrines. This group of sites is very diverse in terms of its characteristic features and defined by complex constructions and the presence of a tomb entrance or “dromos.” This category includes both Egyptian pyramids and shaft tombs, as well as mausoleums, dolmens and other similar structures (Lehner, 1997; Arnold, 2003). Unlike burial mounds, they are more characteristic of societies and civilizations leading a sedentary lifestyle.
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Fig. 6
A burial mound in the Salbyk Valley (Republic of Khakassia, Russia).
Ritual Sites This category concerns the performance of ritual actions that are not always associated with the death of a person and/or their burial. Any evidence of rituals, worship of gods, shamanic rites and other similar actions may falls into this category. Unfortunately, it is hardly possible to understand the meaning of these rituals, especially in the absence of literary sources in the earlier stages of human history. It can be only assumed that the rituals would seek help of spirits, gods or natural elements. In order for these requests to be accomplished, it was necessary to follow certain rules and perform rituals, accompanied by the necessary accessories and surrounding details. Studying ritual structures and images, archaeologists try to reconstruct rituals observing their traces and “setting” in which they were carried out. Ritual Platforms and Places of Sacrifice The simplest form of ceremonial constructions are ritual sites (Harding, 2000: 309–313). Most often, these are specific places of natural origin, which were perceived by ancient people as something beyond the ordinary. These can be either viewing platforms on top of hills or rocks, or places of worship “hidden” from strangers. Sometimes places where objects of worship were installed can be traced: most often these can be wooden poles with carved images. It was probably believed that the “feature” of this place allows one to establish a closer contact with the spirits or gods to whom the sanctuary was dedicated. An important element of worship was the offering of “gifts”. From an archaeological perspective, it is these “gifts” that make it possible to identify and date such ritual sites. A particular variant of ritual sites are megaliths. These objects were made of huge stone blocks, which required an extensive workforce to procure and arrange. The grandeur of these structures emphasized the importance of the ceremonies and enhanced the sanctity of the place. The most famous megalith site is Stonehenge in Wiltshire, UK (Chippindale, 2012). Unfortunately, even such complex sites do not provide us with an understanding of the nature of the rites. Temple-Related Structures Temple structures become a logical result of the development of ritual sites and megaliths (Medieval temple Archaeology, 2017). Their main distinction is the organization of a closed space for rituals. Unlike in previous periods, when ceremonies were held in the open, temples allowed to “hide” them from strangers’ eyes. This is probably the result of several processes, such as urbanization, the coexistence of representatives of different religions and beliefs within one settlement, and the development of the idea of creating a “special” place. Temples can vary significantly in their design and building materials.
Rock and Cave Paintings, Geoglyphs Among the most amazing phenomena preserving evidence of the spiritual life of ancient people are images applied to various surfaces (Fig. 7). The themes of such images are extremely diversedfrom individual signs, tamgas and ornaments, to images of people or animals, to some plot or story-telling compositions. The tradition of drawing on the walls of caves, rocks, loose stones, as well as the surface of deserts, originated in the Paleolithic (White, 2003; Zhitenev, 2018) and continued to develop until ethnographic modernity. Rock paintings are found all over the world. They are almost omnipresent in places with a significant number of stone slabs available. There are two main methods of drawing execution: painting and engraving or scratching. Unfortunately, the images executed using paint survive rarely. However, where they do, they require huge efforts for their further preservation. Images applied by punching or scratching are more widespread and durable (Poikalainen and Ernits, 1998; Devlet and Devlet, 2011; Kolpakov and Shumkin, 2012; Helskog, 2014). They are also subject to weathering, but not to the same extent as painted images.
Classification of Archaeological Sites
Fig. 7
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Rock image of Kalbak-Tash I (Altai, Russia) (Devlet and Seog-Ho, 2014)
A very special type of archaeological sites are geoglyphs. These are huge ground images. The most famous of these are drawings in the Nazca desert in South America (Aveni, 2000; Lambers, 2006). Several hundred drawings, about 700 geometric images and over 13,000 individual lines or their groups are known to date, and new images continue to be discovered as a result of joint research by scientists from Japan and Peru.
Menhirs, Stelae, and Statues A separate type of ritual structures are various stone sculptures (Olhovskiy, 2005). These can be either simple stones without any traces of images, or complex sculptures depicting people, gods, or entire myths (Fig. 8). Some of these stones might be associated with burial practices, but for the most part they are objects of worship and, possibly, are associated with ritual sites. A striking example of such sculptures are “deer stones”, found in the Eurasian steppe and adjacent mountain systems (Savinov, 1994; Volkov, 2002). Most often, they schematically depict persons and elements of their clothing (belt), jewelry (temporal rings, necklace) and military outfit (dagger, knife, puncheon, axe, bows etc.). The face is usually depicted by several oblique lines, and on the stone itself there may be numerous images of animals, primarily deer, which gave the name to this special group of stelae. They date from the Late Bronze Age and the Early Scythian period. There are also more ancient traditions of installing stone stelae with complex images. For example, they are widespread in the Okunevo culture of the Middle Yenisei and the Yamnaya culture of the Northern Black Sea region (Leontiev et al., 2006).
Votive Deposits Votive deposits should be singled out as a special type of archaeological sites. They are fundamentally distinguished from temporary hoards, although they often differ little from them in their content and context. As a result, the term treasure is also often applied to them. However, their nature is fundamentally different. One of the clearest examples of votive deposits are the many European hoards from the Bronze Age. These were gifts to gods, from whom people asked help (Hansen, 2013: 279). Unfortunately, most of these votive deposits lack archaeological context, since they are usually retrieved by non-scholars.
Summary and Future Directions These are the main varieties of archaeological sites known to date. Both their quantity and almost limitless diversity are striking. Interestingly, this diversity was gradually increasing over the course of history and reached its maximum in medieval archaeology and the archaeology of the Early Modern period. This in itself speaks for the progressive rate of human cultural development. In the meantime, these sites are an indispensable source of information about the past of mankind, making them our common precious heritage. Despite this, the typology of archaeological sites has not been sufficiently studied. Not all of them have been adequately documented and systematized, and many are still being defined. The work proposed here is one of the first attempts to fill some of the existing gaps.
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Fig. 8
A deer stone, Mongolia (Kovalev and Erdenebaatar, 2021)
Future research prospects include the need to continue the systematization of archaeological site classification, with an emphasis on further description of characteristic features, and the identification of site types and subtypes. This should include not only their functional purpose, but also local features. The examples here are based primarily on Central Asian and western Eurasian examples, while different conditions elsewhere will have resulted in other manifestations of archaeological site remains. This will make it possible, even necessary, to identify new types of sites which we have not distinguished yet. In particular, it is necessary to develop a conceptual and terminological dictionary of archaeological sites with a higher level of precision and clarity. It is important to create multi-language dictionaries that unify the meta-language and terminology of archaeology, and to propose more precise definitions for the main types of archaeological sites (settlements, burials, hoards, etc.), within a unified terminology. Completing these goals will create a solid basis for further scientific endeavors.
See Also: Cemeteries and Necropoleis; Settlements, Tell Formation; Shell Middens; Site Formation in Caves and Rockshelters; Site Formation: Conflict Sites.
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Korenevskiy, Sergei N., 2012. Rozhdenie kurgana. [Birth of Barrow]. TAUS, Moscow. Kornfeld, Marcel, Vasil’ev, Sergey, Miotti, Laura (Eds.), 2007. On Shelter’s Ledge: Histories, Theories and Methods of Rockshelter Research. British Archaeological Reports International Series vol. 1655. BAR, Oxford. Kovalev, Aleksey A., Erdenebaatar, Diymaazhav, 2021. Olennyye kamni v drevnem rituale kochevnikov Mongolii [Deer stones in the ancient ritual of the nomads of Mongolia]. SPbGMISR, St. Petersburg. Lambers, Karsten, 2006. The Geoglyphs of Palpa, Peru: Documentation, analysis, and Interpretation. Linden Soft, Aichwald. Laurence, Ray, 1999. The Roads of Roman Italy: Mobility and Cultural Change. Routedge, London. Lehner, Mark, 1997. The Complete Pyramids. Thames & Hudson, London. Leontiev, Nikolai V., Kapelko, Vladimir F., Esin, Yuri N., 2006. Izvayaniya i stely okunevskoj kul’tury [Okunevo Culture Statues and Stelae]. Khakassia Book Bublishers, Abakan. Lisitsyna, Gorislava N., 1978. Stanovlenie i razvitie oroshaemogo zemledeliya v YUzhnoj Turkmenii [Formation and Development of Irrigated Agriculture in Southern Turkmenia]. Nauka Publishers, Moscow. Marsadolov, Leonid S., 2010. Bol’shoj salbykskij kurgan v Hakasii [Big Salbyk Burial mound in Khakassia]. Khakassia Book Bublishers, Abakan. Martin, Susan, 1999. Wonderful Power: The story of ancient copper working in the Lake Superior basin. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI. Meehan, Betty, 1982. Shell Bed to Shell Midden. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Molodin, Vyacheslav I., 2012. Pamyatnik Sopka–2 na reke Omi: kul’turno-hronologicheskij analiz pogrebal’nyh kompleksov odinovskoj kul’tury. T. [Sopka-2 Site on the Om River: Cultural and Chronological Analysis of the Burial Complexes of the Odinovo Culture], vol. 3. izd-vo IAET SO RAN. Publishing House of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography SB RAS, Novosibirsk. Olhovskiy, Valeriy S., 2005. Monumental’naya skul’ptura naseleniya zapadnoy chasti yevraziyskikh stepey epokhi rannego zheleza. Nauka, Moscow. Ortloff, Charles, 2020. The Hydraulic State: Science and Society in the Ancient World. Routledge Press, New York. Passek, Tatyana S., 1949. Periodizaciya tripol’skih poselenij [Periodization of Trypillia Settlements]. Nauka Publishers, Moscow. Poikalainen, Väino, Ernits, Enn, 1998. Rock Carvings of Lake Onega. The Vodla Region. Estonian Society of Prehistoric Art, Tartu. Poshekhonova, Olga E., 2006. Raboty v bassejne r. Erkalnadejpur.Vestnik arheologii, antropologii i etnografii [Work in the Basin of the Erkalnadeypur River]. Bulletin of Archeology, Anthropology and Ethnography 7, 253–255. Pulak, Cemal, 2005. Discovering a royal ship from the age of King Tut: Uluburun, Turkey. In: Bass, George F. (Ed.), Beneath the Seven Seas. Thames & Hudson, New York, pp. 34–47. Pumpelly, Raphael, 1908. Ancient Anau and the Oasis-World. Explorations in Turkestan. 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Rapp, George, Gibbon, Guy, Ames, Kenneth (Eds.), 1998. Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: An Encyclopedia. Taylor & Francis, New York. Renfrew, Colin, Bahn, Paul, 1991. Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. Thames and Hudson, London. Rudkovskaya, Maria A., 2016. Lovchie zverolovnye yamy na r. Kedrovoj (Hanty-Mansijskij rajon HMAO - YUgry).Hanty-Mansijskij avtonomnyj okrug v zerkale proshlogo. Tomsk; Khanty-Mansiysk [Hunting Trapping Pits on the Kedrovaya River (Khanty-Mansiysk Region of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug - Yugra)]. Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug in the Mirror of the Past 14, 304–316. Sarianidi, Victor I., 1962. Eneoliticheskoe poselenie Geoksyur. Trudy YUzhno-Turkmenistanskoj arheologicheskoj Kompleksnoj Ekspedicii [Eneolithic Settlement Geoksyur]. Proceedings of the South-Turkmenistan Archaeological Complex Expedition, Ashkhabad. Tome X, pp. 225–318. Savinov, Dmitriy G., 1994. Olennye kamni v kul’ture kochevnikov Evrazii [Deer Stones in the Culture of Eurasian Nomads]. Izd-vo SPbGU. Publishing House of the Saint Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg. Savinov, Dmitriy G., 1996. Drevnie poseleniya Hakasii. Torgazhak [Ancient Settlements of Khakassia. Torgazhak], vol. 112, Petersburg Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg. Savvonidi, Nikolai F., 1995. Kartinnyj arheologicheskij slovar’ (anglo-russkij). Illustrated Archaeological Dictionary (English-Russian). Schiffer, Michael, 1976. Behavioral Archaeology. Academic Press, New York. Sher, Yakov A., 2004. Eshchyo ob arheologicheskih istochnikah i «zaklyuchyonnoj» v nih informacii//Arheolog: detektiv i myslitel’. [More About Archaeological Sources and the Information “Contained” in Them] Archaeologist: A Detective and a Thinker. Izd-vo SPbGU. Publishing House of the Saint Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, pp. 114–123. Tarasov, Alexey, Nordqvist, Kerkko, 2022. Made for exchange: the Russian Karelian lithic industry and hunter-fisher-gatherer exchange networks in prehistoric north-eastern Europe. Antiquity 96 (385), 34–50. Thompson, Michael Welman, 1967. Novgorod the Great: Excavations at the Medieval City. Evelyn, Adams, London. Vasiliev, Sergei A., Bozinski, Gerhard, Bradley, Brus A., Vishnyatsky, Leonid B., Girya, Evgeniy Yu, Gribchenko, Yuri N., Zheltova, Maria N., Tikhonov, Alexei N., 2007. Chetyrekh’yazychnyj (russko-anglo-franko-nemeckij) slovar’-spravochnik po arheologii paleolita. A Four-Language (Russian-English-French-German) Dictionary-Reference Book on Paleolithic Archeology. Petersburg Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg. Verhoeven, Marc, 1999. An archaeological Ethnography of a Neolithic community. Space, place and social relations in the burnt village at tell Saby Abyad, Syria. Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut in het Nabije Oosten. Volkov, Vitaliy V., 2002. Olennye kamni Mongolii [Deer Stones of Mongolia]. Nauchnyi mir publishers, Moscow. White, Randall, 2003. Prehistoric Art. The Symbolic Journey of Humankind. Harry N. Abrams Inc., Publishers, N.Y. Zdanovich, Gennadiy B., Batanina, Iya M., 2007. Arkaim – «strana gorodov»: Prostranstvo i obrazy (Arkaim: gorizonty issledovanij). [Arkaim: The Country of Cities. Space and Images (Arkaim. Horizons of Research)]. Krokus Publishers, Yuzh.-Ural. Book Publishers, Chelyabinsk. Zhitenev, Vladislav S., 2018. Kapova peshchera – paleoliticheskoe podzemnoe svyatilishche [Kapova Cave - Paleolithic Underground Sanctuary]. Zasurtsev, Petr I., 1967. Novgorod, otkrytyj arheologami. [The Novgorod discovered by archaeologists]. Nauka Publishers, Moscow.
Further Reading Muckelroy, Keith, 1978. Maritime Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Vakhoneev Viktor, V., 2020. Morskaya arheologiya. Uchebnik dlya vuzov. [Marine Archeology]. Learner’s Book for Higher Education Institutions. Editorial and publishing center of SevGU [SevSU], Sevastopol.
Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic) Konstantin Nikolaevich Gavrilova, Sergey Yurievich Leva, and Alexander Konstantinovich Otcherednoyb, a Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia; and b Institute of the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview The Cultural Layer as an Object of Research Key Issues Stages in Site Formation The First Stage The Second Stage The Third Stage Early and Middle Paleolithic Open-Air Sites The Upper Paleolithic Open-Air Zaraysk Campsite Complex Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References Further Reading
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During the study of cultural layers of Stone Age sites, it is important to concentrate on the location of ancient habitation surfaces, and their spatial distribution. Research tasks should contribute to the identification of both anthropogenic and natural factors of the formation of cultural layer(s). The main aim of the research is to reconstruct the history of the existence and formation of the site and its subsequent transformation into an archaeological site. From a methodological point of view, it is critically important to provide an analysis of the spatial structure of both the site as a whole and the individual objects within it. To obtain meaningful information about the factors influencing the formation of the archaeological site, it is necessary to strictly link the general spatial structure of the site and the objects (individual artifacts, accumulations of archaeological material, soil samples and organic remains, etc.) to be studied by different scientific methods. Ultimately, the whole complex of field studies of open-air sites is aimed at creating an archaeological source to enable fullfledged, comprehensive study in the future in laboratory conditions.
Abstract This entry presents some general methodological approaches to the study of open-air Paleolithic sites, including offering definitions for the concepts of “open-air site”, “cultural layer”, and “settlement”. The entry also covers key issues of the genesis of cultural layers, looking at specific cases of research on various open-air sites of the Early Paleolithic, Middle Paleolithic and Upper Paleolithic.
Introduction Most generally speaking, open-air archaeological sites are systems of artifacts and objects located in their buried or exposed state in a certain sequence in the open, in such a way that they are not associated with natural shelters such as grottoes, rock shelters, or caves. Open-air sites can be confined to the marginal areas of watersheds, river or sea terraces, dunes, and ravine erosion sites. For the Upper Paleolithic sites and later primitive campsites, these topographic features, as a rule, follow earlier, ancient ones (Fig. 1). In the case of earlier sites, a typical situation is that the modern terrain in the areas of their location will not correspond
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Fig. 1 Examples of the location of Upper Paleolithic sites in areas showing ancient relief elements: (A) the site of Yudinovo 1; (B) the site of Khotylevo 2. Photo by E.V. Voskresenskaya.
to the ancient terrain, since it will have been largely transformed by various natural processes, such as erosion, aggradation, tectonic uplift or subsidence, etc. (Fig. 2). However, in any case, ancient settlements were located on terrain spots characterized by a stable surface and proximity of water sources. In addition, factors such as the availability of lithic raw materials, as well as oversight of migration routes of fur-bearing animals, could have a significant impact on the choice of campsite. In the archaeological research of sites, we are dealing with cultural layers if the site is in a hidden or buried state, or with a combination of artifacts, manuports and natural objects lying on the modern daylight surface, as in the case of exposed-artifact research. As a rule, hidden cultural layers, if preserved in situ, have the maximum informational potential as a specific archaeological source. Therefore, this entry pays more attention to the methodological approaches to the study of this type of sites.
Overview The Cultural Layer as an Object of Research In this entry, we use the definition of a cultural layer as a structural unity of “items, objects and other remains of human activity lying in a hidden state” (Amirkhanov, 2000, p. 43). An archaeological site or settlement is understood as a territory of continuous distribution of cultural deposits that are common in terms of their stratigraphic position and contain goods with common typological characteristics. Based on this understanding of a cultural layer, we may conclude that one site corresponds to one cultural layer. In the case of multi-layer settlements, each layer has to be considered as a separate archaeological site with its own structure (structural unity of items, artifacts, etc.). Therefore, since such a structural unity forms part of a particular geological body, it becomes necessary to use and, in some cases, to specially develop a set of procedures that can be used to study both anthropogenic and natural factors
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Fig. 2 Examples of the location of Early and Middle Paleolithic sites in landscapes that do not reflect the ancient relief: (A) the site of Muhkai II (according to: Ozherelyev, 2019); (B) the site of Khotylevo I. Photo by K.N. Gavrilov.
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in the formation of this system (Leonova and Vinogradova, 2004). It is important to distinguish between cultural layers occurring in situ, and cultural deposits, where artifacts are in a suspended form due to the exposure to various natural processes. In archaeology, such concepts as “a cultural layer (horizon) preserved in situ” and “a partially or completely redeposited layer” are widely used. In some cases, planigraphy and microstratigraphy data, along natural science data make it possible to distinguish signs of in situ occurrence of a layer and signs of layer disturbance. The disturbances can chronologically correlate with a certain period of formation and existence of the layer. The main signs of redeposition, or displacement of cultural material (remains), include: (1) absence of a clear-cut surface of occurrence of the majority of finds, their certain “suspended distribution”, as evidenced by fluctuations in the find elevations (levels); (2) a large number of inclined and upright finds, while their inclinatory direction and degree are totally haphazard; (3) presence of rounding or traces of polishing on the surface of stone items, indicating intensive exposure to water flows, or (if polished) to sand carried by the wind; (4) uneven, “ragged” or “creasy” nature of the occurrence of the lithic layers containing cultural remains; and (5) discovery of finds within layers that had been formed as a result of intense river bed evolution or slope formation processes. It is always possible to discern a non-disturbed cultural layer located on some stable surface slope, because often surfaces of the ancient terrain would not be leveled by the ancient inhabitants of campsites, on the contrary, they tended to use the terrain in its natural condition. In this case, all the slopes of the finds will be consistent with the surface of the ancient terrain, and the integrity of the meaningful and quantitative composition of the finds collections will not be violated. In addition, the range of fluctuations of finds’ occurrence elevations in undisturbed layers will be different from that for redeposited layers. The “suspendedness” of redeposited finds, and the absence of a clear-cut stratum of their occurrence, are both emphasized by the great range of leveling differences, while in the case of an integral stratum, finds are normally localized more tightly. In some cases, open-air sites whose items and artifacts remain exposed, may also be a fairly rich source of information. This is possible if the artifacts (and objects) were not moved, or were only slightly displaced after they appeared on the daylight surface. As a rule, such situations are possible in rocky deserts, with archaeological sites situated on high parts of plateaus. An example of such sites is the Acheulean site of Al-Gabr VIII in South Arabia (Amirkhanov, 2006, pp. 146–147). When studying open-air sites, characterized by exposed artifacts, it must be considered that in the vast majority of cases they contain material from various periods, occurring together at the same level. Their study must be accompanied by 3D spatial recording of all finds, as if it were a matter of studying a hidden or buried cultural layer (Korobkov, 1971). One of the primary goals of analysis of a site’s cultural layers is to identify the levels/grades of habitation, the so-called “inhabited surfaces”. This was not immediately formulated as a research problem, nor the technical ways of solving it. Thus, in the Soviet school of Paleolithic studies during the 20th century, various approaches to the study of the cultural layer coexisted, which differed significantly in terms of ideology and techniques for excavation (Alexandrova, 1990; Alexandrova, 1998). The realization was gradually individually formalized as to what exactly could become a source of additional information from among the masses of cultural deposits in various types of archaeological sites, and for experts in various related disciplines. It is not technically possible to identify the genuine levels of ancient inhabited surfaces for all instances of archaeological sites. This, in effect, depends on multiple factors, including the type of adjacent deposits, the presence of post-depositional processes, various types of displacements, cryoturbations, bioturbations, excavation techniques, and fixation of material, etc. Also, there is no correlation with the age of the sitedhabitation tiers may be identified at Oldowan campsites, while they may be missing at Upper Paleolithic ones. The application of an integrated approach to the study of cultural layers must serve the particular research goals that an archaeologist sets for themselves when studying a particular site. This point does not exclude, of course, the inherent value of natural scientific research carried out within the framework of archaeological projects, however, from the applied archaeology point of view, they hold a subordinate position. Their application is aimed, in the first place, at the reconstruction of the natural environment of the population of the studied site, the external conditions of adaptive strategies, the mechanisms of biological response to changes in the external environment, the reconstruction of the degrees of kinship of the members of the group, etc. The modern level of study of any archaeological site is unthinkable without a complex of natural scientific works: radioisotope dating, spore-pollen analysis, the entire spectrum of paleogeographic, geochemical, soil science, paleogenetic, paleozoological and other studies (see, for example, Natural Science Methods ., 2004; Panin, 2014; Renfrew and Bahn, 2016; Kuzmin, 2017). The natural component of the cultural layer is the substrate formed by natural geological and soil formation processes, transformed by human activity during the formation of a cultural layer. These transformations include changes in the texture due to various anthropogenic processes, such as compacting and trampling, digging, thermal impact, etc., in the course of which mineral, organic and chemical neoplasms are introduced into the surrounding formations, and the natural structure of the layer is breached. Anthropogenic factors in the formation of the cultural layer are identified via research techniques involving the study of the spatial arrangement of finds and artifacts. With this approach, it is possible to identify a variety of types of human activity, depending on specific environmental and economic situations, the duration of use of a particular site, the specifics of the economic development of the settlement area (spatial planning), etc. The cultural remains themselves are studied by conventional archaeological methods: typological, technological and traceological. Natural factors affect the various conditions of formation of the layer containing the remains of human activity, as well as subsequent deposits, and their mutual influence. They are extremely varied. It should be emphasized that the duration of their action is unrelated to the length of time of direct deposition of the material residues, i.e. during the actual life of the campsite or settlement, but they affect the location and relocation of the latter and the degree of their state of conservation. Therefore, in archaeological research it is of paramount importance to distinguish as much as possible the various factors of the formation of a particular cultural layer. Experience suggests that the most complete and objective results are obtained by a thorough microfacies analysis, which makes it possible to identify, trace, and partially interpret the different features of a cultural layer.
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Key Issues This entry considers some examples of cultural layer research on Paleolithic open-air archaeological sites. Such field research cannot be successful without a clear understanding of the theoretical concepts of Paleolithic site formation, and the specific ultimate goals of the study of a particular cultural layer. The second important point to always keep in mind is the importance of a thorough documentation of the maximum possible number of details, lithological features of the layer, objects, etc., not limited to the obvious material remains of the people’s life in the form of artifacts, pits or other visually “readable” objects. When studying a cultural layer, it is critically important to be able to combine accurate documentation of the spatial structure of the layer over the entire area under study and control of stratigraphydnot only lithological deposits, but also the levels of accumulation of archaeological material, habitat surfaces, depositional levels of buried objects, etc. This kind of documentation of finds should also accompany the selection of samples for an array of natural science research. Doing this will eventually allow the researcher not only to reconstruct the spatial structure of a cultural layer, but also to identify the stages and rates of its formation, which can be complemented by appropriate chronological and natural features.
Stages in Site Formation Three main stages can be identified in the formation of a cultural layer, which affect the final form of its structure (Leonova and Gavrilov, 2012).
The First Stage The first stage of site formation is associated with the direct deposition of various cultural remains onto the ancient inhabited surface. This process is accompanied by the deposition of natural material of diverse origin, which also underwent some anthropogenic processing. The intensity and specific features of this processing depend on the size of the group that lived on the campsite, the duration of the habitation, the range of economic and other types of activities, and on the prevalent climatic conditions of the period. As a rule, discarded, lost, or broken items become embedded in the natural sediment, with the exception of some special areas where the formation patterns of the layer are different, for example, building structures, industrial sites or worshipping complexes. Objects falling on wet ground interact with it differently than with dry, dense or cracked ground, or with dry frozen surfaces, etc. The mechanical composition of the rock is also of importance. Cultural remains are subject to taphonomy features which are different for frozen, dense and loose soils. Being thrown out, certain objects may be additionally fragmented as they get trampled and compacted. In addition, small particles can move easily, and the nature of their relocation at this stage is closely related to human activity, such as the cleaning of hearths, removal of garbage, and “plumes” of small particles at exits of buildings (Leroi-Gourhan and Brézillon, 1972; Leonova, 1983; Leroi-Gourhan, 1984). The most significant texture variance in the adjacent hosting sediment is associated with the same formation stage: soil firing in hearths, soil compaction at industrial/working areas, in dwellings and on pathways (Pidoplichko, 1976), soil saturation with phosphorus, changes associated with digging of various kinds of pits, and other anthropogenic effects. An example of the features of the distribution of archaeological material within cultural layers is the study of knapped flint agglomerations on the sites of the Kamennaya Balka culture (Kevorkova and Leonova, 1981). In the area of a production center during the first stage, a range of knapping debris fell onto the ground and was then compacted. In the retouching area smaller and lighter particles fell directly to the ground and were not relocated thereafter, while relatively heavy fragments and debris flew off to a distance of 60–80 cm located on a curve originating from the knapping point.
The Second Stage The second stage is the time of the primary archaeology of the site after its abandonment, when the structures disintegrate and artifacts get “immersed” in the hosting rock. The duration of this stage depends largely on the intensity of precipitation of the various geological and atmospheric agents. This intensity depends on the mechanical composition of the parent rock, environmental conditions, the nature of the soil formation process, which in turn depends on the type of vegetation, species diversity, abundance and behavior of certain animal species, etc. Cultural remains are now exposed to ground and surface waters, and the lightest material moves farthest from the original place of its deposition, and may even be deposited at higher elevations as compared to their source areas, in contrast to heavier and larger objects (Isaak, 1967). There may be situations on the site of a deliberate removal of items, for example, industrial waste, to middens or other refuse areas. Such agglomerations, being buried at the first stage of the formation of the cultural layer, are more likely to be preserved in an undisturbed state; however, their internal structure will differ from the structure of agglomerations formed directly at the site of stone knapping, featuring greater density, compactness, and also the so called “reverse stratigraphy” of occurrence of finds. A variety of faunal remains can occur in the cultural layer due to human activity, including kitchen leftovers and traces of bone carving workshops, and potentially linked to specific building structures. Initially, each group of cultural remains is marked by its specific features. But at the second stage, this specificity may be lost due to natural factors such as erosion, wind deflation, redeposition, and the destructive activity of animals. Both carnivores and ungulates love to gnaw on bones. The probability of destruction and relocation of bone remains at an abandoned site that are not yet “immersed” into the cultural layer or into a younger natural conservation layer is very high. Therefore, the discovery of large agglomerations of faunal material (Fig. 3) may indicate both the rapid process of natural burial of cultural remains, and the deliberate creation of the agglomerations by humans, as, for example, in the case of the Anosovo-Mezin type of bone-and-earth structures, the so-called “dwellings” made of mammoth bones (Fig. 4),
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Fig. 3
The Khotylevo 2 site, a cultural layer with accumulations of animal bones, flint artifacts and charred bone. Photo by K.N. Gavrilov.
(Gavrilov, 2015; Khlopachev and Gavrilov, 2019). In the first case, the exposed surface of the bones will be eroded to some extent, while deliberate backfilling may keep them in an undisturbed state. Disintegration in this case will be associated with the activity of plants, burrowing animals, as well as various chemical processes caused by the groundwater. All animal bone remains should be investigated using zooarchaeological methods, as done for instance on sites of the Center of the Russian Plain by M.V. Sablin, E.N. Mashchenko and N.D. Burova (Amirkhanov et al., 2009).
The Third Stage The third stage covers the cultural layer in its buried state. During this period, the main processes significantly affecting the preservation of the cultural layer are soil formation, the activity of burrowing animals, the impact of groundwater and its chemical composition, the general geochemistry of the hosting rock, the rates of seasonal temperature changes, water erosion, neotectonic processes, and other factors. For example, cultural layers of Mesolithic sites located in sand dunes are characterized by poor preservation or complete absence of animal bone remains. Poor preservation of faunal remains is also characteristic in carbonatized rocks, as for example in the cultural layers of Kamennaya Balka campsites. As a rule, faunal material is preserved at these sites in buried objects. However, the cultural layers of the campsites occurring in sandy or carbonatized loams are, as a rule, weakly colored by humus or carbonaceous-ashy material, making it difficult to study their archaeological stratigraphy. To solve this problem, the most efficient method is the construction of microstratigraphic profiles, requiring accurate 3D spatial documentation of all artifacts. For the same type of sites, especially important are planigraphic methods, creating accurate find distribution maps to identify agglomerations of artifacts and, on this basis, to reconstruct the layout of the campsite. For sites whose cultural layers were exposed in their buried state to permafrost processes in the Pleistocene, vertical movements of archaeological remains are also possible. However, these disturbances do not lead to redeposition of cultural layers and their contents, but to en-block relocations of the layers together with the artifacts. Thus, similar relocations occur to the rocks containing the finds, along with the underlying and overlying layers, while inside such blocks, the cultural layer remains in situ (Fig. 5). The following text presents case studies of the study of open sites, using some of the known sites of the Early Paleolithic, Middle Paleolithic, and Upper Paleolithic.
Early and Middle Paleolithic Open-Air Sites The methodology for excavating Lower and Middle Paleolithic open-air sites (various multilayer complexes, for example: Khotylevo I, Biryuchiya Balka 2, Rozhok I or single-layer sites such as Sukhaya Mechetka) initially adopted the stratigraphic principle of research, which consists in the continuity of the study of the cultural layer/horizon and its adjacent deposits (Otcherednoy et al., 2019). Any area of the site is uncovered by lithological layers, whose numbering is the basis of the stratigraphic nomenclature
Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
Fig. 4 Bone-earth structures of the Anosovo-Mezin type: (A) the site of Yudinovo 1; (B) the site of Kostenki 11, cultural layer 1a. Photo by K.N. Gavrilov.
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Fig. 5 The site of Khotylevo 2, block discharge through a permafrost crack (indicated by an arrow). The cultural layer on both sides of the crack remained in situ.
of the site. The removal of each cultural layer or culture-containing horizon is done depending on the particularities of the position of the adjacent lithic layer. In practice, two options for studying the cultural layer or cultural horizon are most often used: the first one can provisionally be called the lithological or stratigraphic approach, and the second one, which can be called the archaeological approach or the method based on the identification of artifacts, objects and faunal remains that form individual levels (the method of following the finds). Both methods are actively used in the study of Pleistocene open-air sites, especially if they are deeply buried. After removal of the mass of deposits covering the upper cultural layer, all the walls of the excavation or trench must be prepared for geological description and removal of the necessary samples, carefully evened out and properly marked. After that, one can proceed with the uncovering of the cultural layer, using one of the above methods, depending on the prominence of the layer. Thus, if the cultural layer lies within deposits that are significantly different from the layers overlying them, then one can start with the careful removal of the hosting adjacent rock using the stratigraphic method. In this case, the cultural layer will be prepared through the removal of all parts of the deposits which do not contain any cultural remains. The removed parts of the deposits should be panned to ensure detection of small-size artifacts. If the cultural layer lies within sediments only slightly or not at all different from the overlying layers, for example, the cultural layer of the Sukhaya Mechetka site (Fig. 6, see also: Ocherednoi et al., 2021) or the cultural layers of the Biryuchya Balka 2 complex, then the identification of the original shape of the cultural layer and its preparation will depend on the locations of the finds, which have to be used as a marker of any habitation horizon. The removed loose deposits can be panned. Both methods can and should be combined depending on the area of the site, on the specific situation at the layer, on the features of its location and degree of preservation. The combined application of these methods makes it possible to completely eliminate the removal of the cultural layer by tentative horizonsdthe method that was often used in the middle of the 20th century. This approach neutralizes the concept of the preservation features of the cultural layer and, therefore, does not allow for identification of the most adequate way of its study. In general, the great antiquity of Early and Middle Paleolithic sites determines many of the problems that researchers are faced with. First of all, this concerns the preservation of the cultural layer, often relocated, fractured, and only represented by its fragments. The presence of various complex objects within ancient cultural layers that were recorded in the 20th century (especially in the 1960s) requires verification using modern-day methods of documentation. Another feature of the cultural layers of great antiquity is an almost direct relationship between the discovery of wellpreserved sections of cultural layers, for example, with various objects (hearths, remains of some structures, etc.) and the area of a separate cultural layer uncovered at the same time. A glaring example is the Sukhaya Mechetka site, which was studied almost simultaneously on a total area of about 650 m2, which made it possible to discover a series of well-preserved artifacts. Thus, the in situ concept, actively used in the archaeology of the later eras, has a specific use in relation to cultural layers of great antiquity: if a cultural layer rests in one lithic layer (in situ in the Early and Middle Paleolithic), then the probability that it is well preserved is much higher than in the cases where the finds are confined to different lithic layers (different degrees of disintegration of the once single cultural layer and redeposition of the campsite artifacts). In addition, the cultural layer could accumulate under dynamic
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The site of Sukhaya Mechetka, stratigraphic position of the layer with archaeological material. Photo by A.K. Otcherednoy.
sedimentation conditions, which may often lead to such a seemingly mutually exclusive “neighborhood” as the cultural layer and the alluvial or deluvial genesis of its adjacent deposits, as can be seen in the example of Khotylevo I (Fig. 7). Thus, the features of sedimentation and post-sedimentary changes may not have a direct impact on the processes of accumulation of the cultural layer, and will always affect the layer after its formation is completed, and after it is buried by the overlying deposits. In this case, the postsedimentation changes already occur with individual sedimentation units, where the cultural layers are included at different levels.
The Upper Paleolithic Open-Air Zaraysk Campsite Complex The Zaraysk campsite complex is a group of sites situated in close proximity and even partially overlapping each other (Fig. 8). There are currently six sites known of this type; they are coded by the letters of the Latin alphabet (from A to F), and belong to the KostenkiAvdeevo archaeological culture (Eastern Gravettian). Most of the sites are multi-layer, and vary significantly in their layout and dating. The earliest are 22–23 thousand years old, the latest are 15–16 thousand years old (uncalibrated dates). Years of studying materials from Zaraysk campsites led to the development of a new method for cultural layer analysis, combining archaeological data with a scientific approach to deposit formation (Lev, 2016). The term “cryostratigraphy” used by the team of researchers, along with the proper archaeological, geological, lithic, paleopedological, palynological and paleozoological methods, fully characterizes the overarching approach to the analysis of the cultural layers. Within the framework of this technique, equal attention is paid to the study of both, the cultural layer itself and the natural factors of deposit formation. The latter are understood as the taphonomic features of cultural remains and natural structures of diverse, primarily cryogenic, genesis, which, in one way or another, affected the site formation. Such impacts on the sites of the Kostenki-Avdeevo culture may have preceded the construction of settlements, have been simultaneous with them, or occurred later, after the end of the campsite habitation life. For the Zaraysk campsites, all three variants were identified. The relationship between the natural factors of deposit formation and archaeological finds from the cultural layer made it possible to distinguish two generations of natural factors associated with permafrost and other natural processes. The formation of the first generation of natural disturbances precedes the settlement of people at the site, therefore their genesis requires further clarification (Fig. 9A); and the second generation formed before the deposition of the third stratigraphic layer (Fig. 9B). The cryostratigraphic indicators associated with these natural deformations serve as clear markers of the archaeological and stratigraphic division of the cultural deposits. In the absence of clearly sterile interlayers, this turned out to be one of the most significant factors establishing the pattern of stratigraphy formation on the site. Identification of the structures
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Fig. 7
The site of Hotylevo I. Stratigraphy of sediments containing cultural layers. Photo by A.K. Otcherednoy.
and objects within a layer is possible even in the absence of such clear markers as sterile or barren interlayers by microstratigraphic analysis, a technique that has strongly augmented the methodology of Paleolithic sites research. This technique is usually implemented as an analysis of vertical distribution of layers, creating a vertical plan or elevational view of the finds (Leonova, 1990).
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Fig. 8
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View of the Kremlin hill, the valley of the Osetr River and the points of the Zaraysk site. Photo by S.Yu. Lev.
In the course of research on the multi-layered site of Zaraysk A several approaches were developed to mark the elevations of the “habitable surfaces” during the excavation, as well as their relation to the finds and other objects of the cultural layer, including the ones buried deep (Fig. 10). The initial premise “is formulated as a regularity: the synchronism of the functioning of one object along with another should not be an a priori assumption, but should be tested and proven. In other words, the geological simultaneity of objects (allocated to the same lithic horizon) is not proof of their synchronous existence per se .” (Amirkhanov, 2005, p. 94). A careful selection of samples for radiocarbon dating helps to understand the duration of the accumulation of cultural remains. “Each sample (and, consequently, the date)” must have “clear stratigraphic, planigraphic and contextual characteristics” (Amirkhanov, 2005, pp. 97–98). To date, researchers have at their disposal almost 60 dates related to different points of the Zaraysk site and to different layers of the multi-layered sites. As a result, Zaraysk’s newest chronology builds upon the results of radiocarbon dating, according to which four stages of the functioning of the site are determined within the limits of 23–16 thousand years ago (Man and Mammoth 2019, 36–40). In the meantime, inversions and direct contradictions have been brought to their minimum. Instead of discarding the “inconvenient” dates as flawed, at the current stage the goal is to find the reasons for such inconsistency. The results of spatial analysis are also indicative, in particular, the materials of layer 1, associated with the primary settlement of the modern Kremlin cape. For a long time, microstratigraphic markers were the only basis for its identification. However, it now was complemented by expressive planigraphic data. The key element of the structure of the site at this stage was a group of same-type hearths, lined up along the northwest–southeast axis, sloping down from the mainland level (Fig. 11). Before the settlement was abandoned, its inhabitants deliberately covered each hearth with ochre, providing us with evidence of a clearly symbolic activity. Of the greatest interest from the planigraphic point of view are the artifacts from the second cultural layer, which corresponds to the line of large hearths of the Kostenki type, preceding the formation of a system of permafrost cracks of the second generation (Fig. 12). The natural disturbances of the first generation were partially filled by that time, and evidence of their active use and adaptation to various economic needs was identified on the site. Among the most indicative artifacts of the second cultural layer are five similar large recessed hearths with burned walls, with abundance of “hearth” stones in the filling, surrounded by “near-hearth” pits. The hearths are about 1 m in diameter and up to 50 cm deep (Fig. 13A). The line of hearths is oriented in northwest-southeast direction, which is traditional for housing and utility complexes of the Kostenki-Avdeevo culture. They are located parallel to the hearths of layer 1. The second layer also includes objects described as “large pits”. Traditionally, at the sites of the Kostenki-Avdeevo culture, such objects are usually regarded as the remains of semi-dugout shelters (Fig. 13B). The limits of the objects can be traced from the level of the already accumulated (approximately 5 cm thick) cultural layer. In plan view, they are 2.5–4.5 m southwest of the line of the contemporary large Kostenki-type hearths. The objects have elongated outlines in the direction perpendicular to the hearths axis; the width and depth of the pits are about 1 m. The length of the only fully excavated object (pit A) is 460 cm. The bottom is even, flat, in some cases a “step” is revealed, an elevation in the bottom part toward the side closest to the hearths. Usually, a dense spot of 50 cm
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Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
Fig. 9 (A) The site of Zaraysk A, natural disturbances: two permafrost cracks of the second generation; (B) The site of Zaraysk E, a permafrost crack of the second generation passed through the center of Pit 9. Photo by S. Yu. Lev.
Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
Fig. 10
The site of Zaraysk A. (A) charred bone lenses mark the level of the habitation surface; (B) storage pits.
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Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
Fig. 11 The site of Zaraysk A. Plan of the first cultural layer’s objects: (1) cracks of 1st generation; (2) trenches, destroying cultural layer; (3) presumable borders of objects; (4) hearth; (5) pit.
in diameter, consisting of charcoal and ochre, is found at or near the entrance. A total of six confidently identifiable pits of this type were found, and were named with Latin letters. In addition to the sunken objects, most of which are some type of storage pits (Fig. 10B), there are carbonaceous “lenses”, consisting of fine crumbs of charred bone. They are associated with the functioning of large hearths of the Kostenki type and in some places overlap the natural disturbances of the first generation, partially ‘sinking’ into them. Apparently, the lenses are the result of the removal of carbonaceous masses from the hearths during their regular cleaning.
Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
Fig. 12 The site of Zaraysk A. Plan of the second cultural layer’s objects: (1) cracks of 1st generation; (2) frost cracks of 2nd generation; (3) trenches, destroying cultural layer; (4) presumable borders of objects; (5) borders of big pit earth-dwellings; (6) hearth; (7) pit.
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Fig. 13
Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
The site of Zaraysk A. (A) large hearths of the second cultural layer; (B) big pit earth-dwellings.
Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
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No less indicative are the materials of layer 3 associated with the lithic horizon of the brownish (sometimes reddish) sandy loam. The objects related to it overlap layer 1, layer 2 (typical residential area of the Kostenki type) and two generations of natural deformations, including those associated with the then active permafrost processes. The most expressive structural elements of layer 3 are large shallow structures characterized by an increased concentration of faunal remains, ochre at the bottom, and a number of other features. This layer is associated with small pits, a hearth, lenses of ochre-colored coal, and a significant number of flint finds. Layer 4 lies in the upper part of the cultural layers. At Zaraysk A, clusters of flint artifacts and one lenticular hearth were documented within this layer. This material is most clearly presented at the Zaraysk B campsite (Fig. 14A). Since this site is a single-layer settlement, it is possible to trace in detail the specifics of the household activity and, with a high degree of certainty, identify the areas where the particular types of activities were performed. The essential characteristics of the site are the undisturbed cultural layer and the structured planigraphic distribution of the finds. The layer occurs exclusively in the upper cultural layer deposits, and can be correlated with layer 4 of Zaraysk A, which has a similar stratigraphic position and dating. The underlying layers documented at Zaraysk A are absent here; instead of sandy loam and sand, the cultural layer deposits are underlain by loamy deposits with two more sterile humus horizons (Fig. 14B). The study of the cultural layer implies an analysis of the ratio between cultural horizons containing objects, artifacts, etc., and lithic filler, which we propose to focus on in greater detail. The upper cultural layer 4 is lithically associated with the upper buried soil. At Zaraysk A, it is clearly identifiable as humus-filled horizon at the base of loess-like loam, the thickness of which in some places reaches 10 cm. The paleosoil is most pronounced on the one-layered Zaraysk B. The thickness of the horizon reaches 20 cm, brownish-gray humus, grayish sandy horizons can be discerned, underlain by yellowish-gray sandy loam (the eluvial horizon). The underlying three cultural layers are included in the horizon of the brownish sandy loam. It acquired a brownish tint due to its saturation with cultural remains, such as charcoal, ochre, faunal material, and the unpreserved organic matter. Its thickness reaches 35–40 cm in the central parts of the site. In its natural occurrence beyond the boundaries of the cultural layer, this horizon occurs in the form of barren reddish sandy loam, up to 10 cm thick, underlying the buried soil. Such significant increase in the thickness of this lithic horizon is also due to the fact that the central part of the habitable area is rich in sunken objects. These are pits of various types, including deep storage pits, hearth pits, and housing pits. The latter are known as semi-dugout shelters, for the creation of the subterranean part of which it was necessary to excavate 4–5 m3 of soil. The pit of a large hearth of the Kostenki type has standardized dimensions with a width of 1 m and a depth of 0.5 m; the storage pits can be up to 1.5 m deep with a diameter of 0.5–0.6 m. Thus, the volume of the excavated soil ranged from 0.3 to 0.5 m3 per pit. Considering that the number of hearths on the Kostenki habitable area sometimes reaches eight, there can be several dozen storage pits, and the number of the semi-dugout shelters is up to ten, the volume of the rock processed and extracted to the daylight surface was at least 65 m3 only for layer 2 of Zaraysk A. It is unlikely that the ancient dwellers of the site put additional effort into long-distance transportation of the excavated soil. In some cases, an agglomeration of extracted soil was recorded in the central part of the site. This is due to the fact that continuous deposits in Zaraysk A have a layered structure with Cenomanian sands at the base, which have a characteristic structure and a greenish tint. Lenses of this sand have been repeatedly observed in the cultural layer, outside their natural stratigraphic position. It seems that such soil relocation led to significant increase in cultural layer formation and modification. Natural deformations, erosion and partial washout had a serious but not critical impact on the preservation of the cultural layer of the site (Amirkhanov, 2000, p. 102). These factors require a separate detailed study. The stages of accumulation of the cultural layer on the site alternated with periods of erosion and/or demolition that occurred during the periods of abandonment of the settlements. The demolition of cultural deposits is especially evident in the filling of “semi-dugout” shelters. Another significant factor of the cultural layer increase is noteworthy. A large volume of faunal remains of large mammals was brought to the site, mostly mammoth bones. At the main excavation site of Zaraysk A, remains of at least forty individual mammoths have been recorded across all identified cultural layers, and this number will possibly increase with an expansion of the excavation areas (Burova and Mashchenko, 2009, p. 381). The use of large bones and tusks for various household needs was also reported. Thus, in more than a dozen cases, mammoth blade bones with a hole deliberately made in the center were used as covers for storage pits. Tusks and long bones of the limbs served as structural elements in the construction of the semi-dugout shelters. In the third cultural layer, bones were found as well, including several mammoth jaws and tusks, apparently associated with the above-ground residential structures (Amirkhanov et al., 2009, pp. 31, 35). In addition to the functions named above, animal bones played another, no less important role, serving as the main type of fuel. When the inhabitants of the second cultural layer left the Kostenki-type site with hearths and dugout shelters, large hearths were left full of charred bones, towering over them as a sort of “caps” which could be identified in the overlying deposits as well. At the same time, as we were able to record, these hearths were used repeatedly, sometimes with seasonal breaks (Amirkhanov, 2000, pp. 119–121). The carbonaceous mass was regularly cleaned out and removed from the hearths, however, it was never moved very far away. The maximum distance of the carbonaceous lenses is marked behind the line of the dugout shelters and is 15 m in a straight line from the line of the hearths. Usually, the lenses of charred bone are located between the semi-dugout shelters. The farthest edge of such lenses is located at a distance of 7–10 m from the hearths, and the nearest one reaches the entrance part of the semi-dugout shelters, that is, 3–4 m from the line of the hearths. Of course, around the hearths themselves, the charred bones form thick lenses. Taking into account the volume of the hearths containing up to 0.5 m3 of charred bones, and the regular cleaning of the hearths, it is possible to obtain some estimates of the volume of the charred bones, which became one of the factors affecting the increase of the cultural layer thickness. It also seems possible to experimentally calculate how much bone is required to completely fill the hearth pit with ash and charred bone, and how long it could take.
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Fig. 14 The site of Zaraysk B. (A) the cultural layer, artifacts lie in the buried soil; (B) the geological profile, three soil horizons are visible: 1. Zaraysk upper buried soil containing a cultural layer; Bryansk soil; Mezin soil.
Open-Air Sites (Paleolithic)
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The lithic finds encountered within the cultural layer also affect the increase in the thickness and the volume of deposits. Most of them are artifacts, from nodules to small scales. The number of flint items in Zaraysk A exceeded two hundred thousand. A significant part in weight and volume is made up of manuportsdlarge unprocessed stones brought to the campsite and used in the hearths. Several dozens of such stones could come from a single hearth, bearing traces of thermal exposure, and their total weight could reach 20–30 kg per hearth. The “hearth stones” can also be found outside the hearths, for example, at the bottom of the semidugout shelters of layer 2. It can be assumed that the stones were brought into the dwellings after being heated in a hearth and served as a source of heat. In a single case, a storage of such stones is recorded, at the side of a ground object (possibly a dwelling) within layer 3. Wet sieving of the cultural layer provides an objective idea of its contents. Brownish sandy loam is quite easily washable and does not require additional mechanical action when rinsed with a stream of water. In addition to charred bone, faunal remains, and split flint, there are many small rounded stones (2–5 mm in diameter), ochre in the form of small rounded lumps and ferruginous nodules (limonite geodes with goethite crusts). The latter are quite large, up to 10 cm, have irregular outlines, although most often their shape is rounded. They have dense walls and a cavity with loose filling in the central part. During wet sieving, such concretions are identified in the cultural layer along with other artifacts, while smaller ones are washed away.
Summary and Future Directions The methodological approach to identify in the field and then carefully document ancient surfaces and habitation levels, both in plan views and in elevations, allows to trace features of the accumulation of cultural deposits and to correlate various parts of the layer with their anthropogenic and natural origin, even in the absence of sterile interlayers. This, in turn, leads to the next level of analysis - a comparison or juxtaposition of the various stages of layer formation, each of which can turn out to be a separate site with its own complex structure of organization of inhabited spaces. The study of the history of the settlement includes determining patterns of spatial distribution of cultural remains in its area, in plan view and vertically in the elevation. It is necessary to analyze the features of the structure of settlements, for each type of buried objects, and their representation of one or another stage of the functioning of the site. At the same time, the task is to identify the specifics of household complexes, to find out the reasons for their variability and, in fact, to directly analyze their constituent components. An analysis of these patterns makes it possible to identify features of space use and the specifics of the various sections of the settlement. In some cases it even makes it possible to identify an individual act of economic activity, which makes it possible to get at least a little closer to understanding the motives of the actions, and the psychology of the inhabitants of the site. The cultural layer as an object of independent analysis raises questions about its genesis, accumulation, and various modifications, including both natural and anthropogenic factors. The search for and attention to the documentation of the ancient inhabited surfaces, reflecting the short-term stages of accumulation of cultural remains, should form the initial attitude of the researcher. Among the most promising future areas of study of Paleolithic settlements is the reconstruction of the daily activities of their inhabitants. As a rule, the greatest opportunities in this area of research are provided by a combination of planigraphic and process analysis of the largest category of artifactsdobjects made of worked stone. Great progress in this direction over the past decades has also been made by zooarchaeological studies determining the species, age, gender, and other characteristics, from animal bones, as well as the reconstruction of use and consumption of this type of life support resource. This includes the determination of the seasonality of sites based on faunal remains, the reconstruction of hunting methods, and the processing of raw bone and tusk. In the field, there is continuous progress in documenting both the material remains of the life of the inhabitants of the campsites, and the smallest details of the surrounding rock that contains these remains. This process is accompanied by a constant increase in the range of natural science methods to study the physical, chemical and organic components of the cultural layer (or layers). One of the fundamental areas of research in this area is an increasingly thorough approach to sampling for radiocarbon dating and, at the same time, the widespread practice of sampling of rocks from the sediment column for the dating by other methods: optical luminescence, paleomagnetic, etc., depending on specific characteristics of the archaeological site. Ultimately, the entire complex of the field studies of open-air sites is aimed at creating an archaeological resource that enables its subsequent full-fledged, comprehensive study in laboratory conditions using the ever new, modern day methods of analysis, both archaeological and natural science ones.
Acknowledgments The research was carried out within the framework of the state assignment N 122011200271-7 (K.N. Gavrilov, S.Yu. Lev) and FMZF-2022-0012 (A.K. Otcherednoy).
See Also: Classification of Archaeological Sites; Paleolithic Raw Material Provenance Studies.
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References Alexandrova, Maria V., 1990. Nekotorye zamechanija po teorii paleoliticheskogo kul’turnogo sloja [Some Remarks on the Theory of the Paleolithic Cultural Layer] KSIA, Issue 202. Nauka Publishers, pp. 4–8. Alexandrova, Maria V., 1998. «Ideologija» raskopok i prioritety arheologicheskogo Issledovanija [The Excavation “Philosophy” and Archaeological Research Priorities] Oriental gravette. Nauchnyi mir Publishers, pp. 142–150. Amirkhanov, Khizri A., 2000. Zarajskaja stojanka [The Zaraysk Campsite]. Nauchnyi mir Publishers. Amirkhanov, Khizri A., 2005. K metodike issledovanija paleolita: uroki Zarajska i Avdeevo (po povodu odnoj recenzii) [On the Methodology of Paleolithic Research: Lessons From Zaraysk and Avdeevo (Regarding One Review)] Russian Archeology 2005, pp. 93–101. Amirkhanov, Khizri A., 2006. Kamennyj vek Juzhnoj Aravii [The Stone Age of South Arabia]. Nauka Publishing House. Amirkhanov, Khizri A., Akhmetgaleeva, Natalia B., Buzhilova, Alexandra P., Burova, Natalia D., Lev, Sergey Yu, Mashchenko, Evgeniy N., 2009. Issledovanija paleolita v Zarajske [Paleolithic Studies in Zaraysk] 1999–2005. The Paleographer. Burova, Natalya D., Mashchenko, Evgeniy N., 2009. Arheozoologicheskiye issledovaniya paleoliticheskoy stoyanki Zaraysk A [Archaeozoological studies of the Zaraysk A Paleolithic site]. In: Amirkhanov, Khizri A., Akhmetgaleeva, Natalia B., Buzhilova, Alexandra P., Burova, Natalia D., Lev, Sergey Yu, Mashchenko, Evgeniy N. (Eds.), (2009) Issledovanija paleolita v Zarajske [Paleolithic Studies in Zaraysk] 1999–2005. The Paleographer, pp. 350–401. Gavrilov, Konstantin N., 2015. «Zhilishha» anosovsko-mezinskogo tipa: proishozhdenie i interpretacija [“Dwellings” of the Anosovo-Mezin Type: Origin and Interpretation] STRATUM Plus 1, 187–203. Isaak, Glynn L., 1967. Towards the Interpretation of Occupation Debris; Some Experiments and Observation. The Kroeber Anthropological Society. California, Berkeley. Papers N 37. Kevorkova, Nadezhda V., Leonova, Natalya B., 1981. Metodika issledovanija skoplenij kremnja/Opisanie i analiz arheologicheskih istochnikov [The methodology for the Study of Flint Accumulations/Description and Analysis of Archaeological Sources] Irkutsk, pp. 43–64. Khlopachev, Gennady A., Gavrilov, Konstantin N., 2019. Paleoliticheskie zhilishha anosovsko-mezinskogo tipa: konstruktivnye osobennosti i problema interpretacii [Paleolithic Dwellings of the Anosov-Mezin Type: Design Features and the Problem of Interpretation]. Russian Archeology, 4, 27–42. Korobkov, Igor I., 1971. On the Problem of Studying the Lower Paleolithic Settlements of an Open Type With a Destroyed Cultural Layer/Paleolithic and Neolithic of the USSR. Nauka Publishers, pp. 61–99. Kuzmin, Yaroslav V., 2017. Geoarheologija: estestvennonauchnye metody v Arheologicheskih issledovanijah [Geoarchaeology: Natural Science Methods in Archaeological Research]. Publishing House of Tomsk State University, Tomsk. Lev, Sergey Yu., 2016. Vyjavlenie urovnej «zhilyh poverhnostej» v kul’turnom sloe (na primere Zarajskoj stojanki). Kamennyj vek Severnoj Evrazii: aktual’nye problemy i issledovanija [Identification of the levels of “inhabited surfaces” in the cultural layer (on the example of the Zaraysk site). In: Stone Age of Northern Eurasia: Current Problems and Research] Materials of Scientific Conferences Held by the Department of Stone Age Archaeology of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2016. Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, pp. 30–31. Leonova, Natalya B., 1983. O metodah izuchenija struktury verhnepaleoliticheskih stojanok. Voprosy antropologii [On the Methods of Studying the Structure of Upper Paleolithic Sites. Questions of Anthropology] issue 71, pp. 104–110. Leonova, Natalya B., 1990. Vozmozhnosti planigrafii i mikrostratigrafii pri sovremennyh polevyh issledovanijah [Planigraphy and microstratigraphy Implications for modern Field Studies] KSIA. Issue 202. Nauka Publishing House, pp. 13–17. Leonova, Natalya B., Gavrilov, Konstantin N., 2012. Metodika issledovanij kul’turnyh slojov kamennogo veka na stojankah otkrytogo tipa. Metodika issledovanija kul’turnyh slojov pamjatnikov kamennogo veka (paleolit) [Technique for Studying the Cultural Layers of the Stone Age at Open Sites. Methods for Studying the Cultural Layers of the Stone Age (Paleolithic) Sites]. Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, pp. 6–27. Leonova, Natalya B., Vinogradova, Ekaterina A., 2004. Mikrostratigrafija kul’turnogo sloja. Vozmozhnosti intepretacii. Problemy kamennogo veka Russkoj ravniny [Microstratigraphy of the Cultural Layer. Possibilities of Interpretation. Problems of the Stone Age of the Russian Plain]. Nauchnyi mir publishers, pp. 157–174. Leroi-Gourhan, André, 1984. Pincevent: Campement magdalénien a chasseures de rennes. Ministère de la culture, Direction du patrimoine, Paris. Leroi-Gourhan, André, Brézillon, Michel, 1972. Fouilles de Pincevent. Essai d’analyse ethnographique d’un habitat magdalénien, 7 Suppl. Gallia Préhist. Man and Mammoth, 2019. Chelovek i mamont v paleolite Evropy: Chast’ II Dnepro-Donskaja istoriko-kul'turnaja oblast’: Pamjati Mihaila Vasil'evicha Anikovicha: Kollektivnaja monografija [Man and Mammoth in the Paleolithic of Europe: Part II: Dnieper-Don historical and cultural region: In memory of Mikhail Vasilyevich Anikovich: Joint Monograph]. Ars Longa Publishers, St. Petersburg, p. 388. Natural Scientific Methods for Studying the Cultural Layers of Ancient Settlements, Moscow: NIA - Priroda Publishers, 2004. 161 pages. Ocherednoi, Alexander K., Yanina, Tamara A., Romanis, Tatiana V., Kurbanov, Rejep N., Taratunina, Natalia V., Eltsov, Maxim V., Kazakov, Evgeny V., Ivanov, Yaroslav D., Kupriyanova, Maria D., Klimenko, Pavel G., Remizov, Stanislav O., 2021. Geoarheologicheskie issledovanija na srednepaleoliticheskom pamjatnike Suhaja Mechjotka v 2021 godu. Problemy arheologii, jetnografii, antropologii Sibiri i sopredel’nyh territorij [Geoarchaeological Research at the Middle Paleolithic Site Dry Mechetka in 2021. Problems of Archaeology, Ethnography, Anthropology of Siberia and Adjacent Territories], vol. XXVII. Publishing house IAET SB RAS, pp. 201–208. Otcherednoy, Aleksandr K., Voskresenskaya, Ekaterina V., Stepanova, Kseniya N., Vishnyatsky, Leonid B., Nehoroshev, Pavel E., Kolesnik, Aleksandr V., Zaretskaya, Natalia E., Larionova, Alisa V., Blochin, Egor K., 2019. Etudes géoarchéologiques pluridisciplinaires des sites du paléolithique moyen de la Plaine Russe L’Anthropologie, vol. 123, pp. 310–318. Ozherelyev, Dmitriy V., 2019. Orudiyniy sostav kamennogo inventarya stoyanki epohi oldovana Muhkai II, sloy 80 (Severo-Vostochniy Kavkaz) [Stone tool inventory of the Oldowan station Muhkai II, Layer 80 (Northeastern Caucasus)]. Russian Archaeology 4 (2019), 10–26. Panin, Andrei V., 2014. Metody paleogeograficheskih issledovanij: chetvertichnaja geohronologija [Paleogeographic Research Methods: Quaternary Geochronology]. Faculty of Geography of Moscow State University. Pidoplichko, Ivan G., 1976. Mezhirichskie zhilishha iz kostej mamonta [Mezhirich Dwellings Made of Mammoth Bones] Kiev. Renfrew, Colin, Bahn, Paul, 2016. Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, seventh ed. Thames & Hudson, London (Revised & Updated).
Further Reading Driskell, Boyce N., 1986. The Chipped Stone Tool Production/Use Systems Potential in Activity Analysis of Disturbed Sites. BAR Int. Series 305, Oxford. Foley, Robert, 1981. Off-Site Archaeology and Human Adaptation in Eastern Africa. BAR Int. Series 97, Oxford. Lewarch, Dennis, O’Brien, Michael, 1981. The expanding role of the surface assemblages in archaeological research. Adv. Archaeol. Method Theor. 4, 297–342. Olszewski, Deborah I., Dibble, Harold L., McPherron, Shannon P., Schurmans, Utsav A., Chiotti, Laurent, Smith, Jennifer R., 2010. Nubian complex strategies in the Egyptian high desert. J. Hum. Evol. 59, 188–201. Schick, Kathy Diane (Ed.), 1986. Stone Age sites in the Making. BAR Int. Ser. 319, Oxford. Whallon, Robert, 1983. Methods of controlled surface collection in archaeological survey. In: Keller, Donald, Rupp, David W. (Eds.), Archaeological Survey in the Mediterranean Area, BAR Int. Series 155, Oxford, pp. 78–83.
Site Formation in Caves and Rockshelters Dominic Stratford, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Autogenic Site Formation Processes Geogenic Processes Biogenic Processes Allogenic Site Formation Processes Geogenic Processes Biogenic Processes Anthropogenic Processes Key Issues Process Identification and Analytical Approaches Interdisciplinarity in Cave and Rockshelter Studies Integrating Scales of Process, Evidence and Analysis Integrating the Landscape Into Cave and Rockshelter Records Summary and Future Directions References Further Reading
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Key Points
• • •
To describe significant geogenic, biogenic and anthropogenic activities in caves and rockshelters To summarize some of the methods and techniques utilized to decipher site formation histories in caves and rockshelters To explore the integration of scales of analyses and dimensionality in the study of cave and rockshelter sediments
Glossary Allogenic (also referred to as allochthonous or exogenic) Clastic and chemical sedimentary components deriving from outside the rockshelter or cave and accumulated through geogenic, biogenic or anthropogenic processes Anthropogenic Processes of human derivation, including any and all active and passive activities that accumulate, modify and remove material from sites. This includes combustion-related activities and their effects on all components of the archaeological and sedimentary record Autogenic (also referred to as authigenic, autochthonous or endogenic) Primary and secondary clastic and chemical sedimentary components deriving from inside the rockshelter or cave. Clastic and chemical contributions are largely determined by the lithological composition of the host rock. Some biogenic clastic and chemical components can be autogenic, e.g., bat guano Biogenic Processes of a biological derivation, generally including any and all plant and animal active or passive activities. In theory, it includes human-associated processes but these are often considered independently Geogenic Processes of a geological derivation, generally including colluvial, alluvial and aeolian processes and their variations in different geomorphological and climatic contexts Karst A landscape and associated subterranean zone dominated by soluble rocks like limestone and dolomite and their metamorphic states Phreatic zone The area in a cave or rockshelter that is below the water table level Primary site formation process A process responsible for the initial accumulation of sedimentary components. This could be anthropogenic, biogenic or geogenic in nature, or a combination of these Secondary site formation process (also generally referred to as post-depositional processes) A process responsible for the physical or chemical modification of sedimentary components. This could be anthropogenic, biogenic or geogenic in nature, or a combination of these
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Sedimentary component Any particle or mineral incorporated within a sediment, including anthropogenically- and biogenically-derived materials (e.g., stone tools, ochre, faunal and botanical remains, coprolites) Speleothem A secondary mineral precipitate formed in a cave. Most commonly, these include calcium carbonate-based formations in rockshelters and caves hosted in karst landscapes and calcareous sandstones Vadose zone The area in a cave or rockshelter that is above the water table level
Abstract Caves and rockshelters are found all over the world in a wide variety of topographical, environmental and geomorphological contexts. As cavities, caves and rockshelters have the potential to act as sediment traps, protecting deposits from erosive landscape processes, and create spaces that are attractive to a wide range of organisms, including vertebrates, invertebrates, fungi and bacteria. The clastic and chemical sediments that accumulate in these spaces are used to reconstruct nuanced interpretations of human behavior as captured moments in time, or regional reconstructions of landscape, ecological and environmental change. Clastic and chemical sedimentary components can be introduced from outside (allogenic) or generated within (autogenic) by natural sedimentary processes (geogenic), or by animals (biogenic) and humans (anthropogenic). Once inside the cave or rockshelter, sediments can be modified over time through a wide range of secondary geogenic, biogenic and anthropogenic processes, creating complex sedimentary sequences with unique suites of mineral modifications. Through multidisciplinary, multiscale and multiproxy investigations, these processes can be identified and their implications for the clastic and chemical records that are so often drawn on in archaeological investigations understood. This entry aims to summarize the most significant of the site formation processes contributing to the formation of cave and rockshelter deposits. The entry samples pertinent and contemporary review and primary literature focusing on deposits, their formation and analysis from a geographical and temporal range that spans five continents and more than three million years.
Introduction Cave and rockshelter sediments have provided some of the world’s best-preserved records of our biological, cultural, technological and cognitive evolution. Clastic and chemical deposits from caves and rockshelters also document the geomorphological, environmental and ecological evolution of the surrounding landscape over scales of hundreds to millions of years. Most caves and rockshelters are found in karst landscapes or form in sandstones through various erosive processes. The pervasiveness of these rock types means that caves and rockshelters are found all over the world. The very nature of caves and rockshelters as cavities that extend below ground, or into rock faces, means that they operate as sediment catchments, or traps. Consequently, they potentially accumulate externally-derived (allogenic) sediments (and incorporated artifacts) in long sequences protected to some degree from destructive external processes. Physical and chemical processes within caves and rockshelters can also help preserve biological materials like bone, seeds, and bedding, while speleothems can provide long, unbroken records of local environmental conditions. As great as the opportunities are for caves and rockshelters to preserve exceptional archaeological, palaeoanthropological and palaeoenvironmental records, there is a broad suite of geogenic, biogenic and anthropogenic site formation processes particular to caves and rockshelters that affect sedimentary components and structures in complex ways. Through multidisciplinary, multiscale and multiproxy investigations these processes can be identified and their implications for the clastic and chemical records that are so often drawn on in archaeological investigations understood. This entry aims to summarize the most significant of the site formation processes contributing to the formation of cave and rockshelter deposits. The entry samples pertinent and contemporary review and primary literature focusing on deposits, their formation and analysis from a geographical and temporal range that spans five continents and more than three million years.
Overview Autogenic Site Formation Processes The nature of caves and rockshelters as cavities in soluble and/or mechanically vulnerable host rock means that they are prone to a wide range of internal (autogenic) depositional, modifying and erosive processes (e.g., Osborne, 2002; White, 2007). Many of these processes continue to shape the cavity after it has formed and opened to the landscape as it evolves in response to hydrological and geomorphological conditions (Davies, 1949). If cavities are open to the landscape then biological activities taking place inside their space may also play a role not only in the contribution and accumulation of varied sedimentary components, but also in the speleogenetic process (e.g., Kitagawa et al., 2012; Lundberg and McFarlane, 2012; Dandurand et al., 2019).
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Geogenic Processes Geogenic processes are generally driven by the hydrological and geomorphological evolution of the landscape and are fundamentally influenced by host rock lithology. Sediments are generated through the breakdown or dissolution of the host rock and are consequently composed primarily of clastic or chemical sedimentary components deriving from the host rock, or, less frequently, exotic rock types and minerals accumulated through karstic fluvial activity (Audra, 2017). Following the diverse initial processes of cavity development or rockshelter formation, most geogenic site formation processes relevant to palaeoscientists occur under vadose conditions in the epikarst, or open and de-watered rockshelter. However, significant hydrological fluctuations resulting from single flood episodes, climate change, tectonic activity or human influence (e.g., mining) may cause fluctuations in the water-table, during which deposits can be eroded, reworked, mixed or decalcified (or all of the above) (e.g., Van Gundy and White, 2009; Polk and Brinkman, 2013). Under vadose conditions, site formation processes are locally highly variable within caves and rockshelters and include both chemical and mechanical primary and secondary processes accumulating and modifying deposits (e.g., White, 2007; Hunt et al., 2010; Goldberg et al., 2015). In caves and rockshelters, breakdown is a significant mechanical sedimentation process and can occur throughout the cavity. Collapses, as a form of breakdown, represent punctuated periods of increased roof- and wall-spall production and can release megaclasts, boulders or very high numbers of unsorted clasts (Osborne, 2002; White, 2019a). In cave systems, collapses may open or close entrances, or facilitate articulation or isolation of chambers and passages. A significant and common area of regular collapse and breakdown and associated deposit accumulation is at entrances or under the dripline (White, 2007). Here, autogenic talus deposits often develop below receding entrance vaults that are more significantly affected by external environmental conditions like freeze-thaw action, and precipitation (e.g., White, 2019b; for example see abri Pataud, France; Farrand, 1995). Sedimentologically, entrance taluses can be diverse and range from steep, clast-supported, open-structured and unorganized scree slopes to matrix-supported, finely stratified deposits with linear or planar clast organization (e.g., Bertran and Texier, 1995), and grade vertically and laterally between these, reflecting changes in the conditions and rate of cavity decay (e.g., Mallol and Roura, 2008). This is a particularly stratigraphically complex area of site formation because it is the interaction point between autogenic and allogenic primary and secondary processes. Breakdown (excluding collapse) represents fluctuating but more gradual production of spall particles, normally comprised of pebble to single grain sized material (White and White, 2000). The shape, size and condition of spall particles is governed by host rock lithology and the process by which spall particles are released (e.g., gradual in situ weathering releasing single, insoluble grains as pebbles, sands, silts and clays; freeze-thaw fracturing releasing a wide range of clast sizes). In most cases, breakdown location is governed by faults and fracture zones or lithological changes in the host rock causing differential vulnerability to mechanical and chemical weathering (Osborne, 2002). These areas are often prone to greater influence of percolating water, which can lead to localized erosion, calcification, speleothem growth and decalcification of sediments, or infiltration of fine sediments through cracks (White, 2007). Speleothems as secondary chemical sedimentary deposits represent major sources of evidence for cavity and landscape evolution (e.g., Kourampas et al., 2015) and are used widely to date autogenic and allogenic deposits through Uranium series methods when they interbed clastic deposits (e.g., Woodhead and Pickering, 2012). Speleothem records provide some of the best inland palaeoenvironmental proxies and have been heavily drawn on to understand climate change at multiple scales (e.g., Lorrey et al., 2008; Cheng et al., 2012). Speleothem form and mineralogy is diverse and largely governed by host rock mineralogy and the hydrology of the system. In addition to providing useful stratigraphic calibrators to clastic sequences, speleothem precipitation can facilitate the calcification of clastic sediments, cementing clast- and matrix-supported deposits and creating breccias (e.g., Duringer et al., 2012). This process can create stratigraphically complex sequences when underlying uncalcified sediments are preferentially eroded under changing hydrological conditions - forming stratigraphically lower cavities that are filled by younger sediments or speleothems, or leaving cemented remnants of older deposits on walls (e.g., Stratford et al., 2014; O’Connor et al., 2017).
Biogenic Processes Autogenic biogenic processes are restricted to organisms that live in caves and rockshelters and facilitate primary and secondary site formation processes. Although globally cave-borne flora and fauna is diverse and includes species that live in both phreatic and vadose zones, for archaeologists and palaeoscientists vadose zone species found in the epikarst have the greatest potential impact as sediment accumulators or modifiers. Here, only a few of the major agents are briefly introduced but the range of organisms present in caves varies across the world and includes vertebrates, invertebrates, fungi and bacteria (e.g., Vanderwolf et al., 2013; Simões et al., 2015; Jimenez et al., 2022). Bats are probably the most significant autogenic biological contributor of sediments and minerals to caves and rockshelters. Bat guano is capable of accumulating in enormous volumes and, depending on the species, can contribute significant nitrates, phosphates and ammonia to cave and rockshelter floors and walls (e.g., Audra et al., 2021; Barriquand et al., 2021). Guano can lead to biocorrosive modification of passages and speleothems (e.g., Dandurand et al., 2019), mineralogical modification of autogenic and allogenic sediments (e.g., Shahack-Gross et al., 2004), including anthropogenicallyaccumulated components (e.g., Karkanas et al., 2000; McAdams et al., 2021) and structures such as combustion features, and, in extreme instances, spontaneously combust (Lundberg and McFarlane, 2021). Other species that occupy caves and rockshelters include porcupines, badgers, hominins and non-hominin primates and several species of carnivore, e.g., owls, bears and hyena. These animals are well known to accumulate allogenic clastic and biological components, like bones, to the sedimentary record and alter components previously accumulated (e.g., Braillard et al., 2004)dthis will be discussed in more detail below. Their spoor and scat, however, can contribute physical and chemical components to spaces extending deep into cave systems.
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Allogenic Site Formation Processes Geogenic Processes Externally-derived sedimentary components can be diverse in composition and mineralogy. Their granulometry, structure and distribution within caves and rockshelters are governed by both primary and secondary site formation processes. Primary processes of accumulation are colluvial, alluvial and aeolian (White, 2007). The proportion of each in deposits is determined largely by the geomorphological context of the site. The immensely broad range of cave and rockshelter geomorphological and ecological contexts (e.g., arid to tropical; alpine to coastal) means that each site accumulates a unique suite of allogenic geogenic sediments through its history. Colluvial processes can cause rapid or slow accretion of a wide range of sediments in caves and rockshelters. Allogenic colluvium most frequently accumulates close to entrances but can be reworked through secondary colluvial processes deep into cave systems, sorting, grading and filtering sediments into complex overlapping and merging or interdigitating talus deposits (e.g., Adams et al., 2007; Stratford et al., 2012). Clast-supported or clast-rich colluvium can be inversely or regularly vertically and laterally graded depending on the talus steepness, granulometry and fluid content. Matrix-rich colluvia settle at shallower angles of repose and fluid interactions can spread allogenic fine components, including anthropogenic or biogenic particles (e.g., ash, charcoal, microfauna, fragmented bones, seeds, phytoliths, soil aggregates) deeper into the cave or rockshelter (e.g., Bruxelles et al., 2019). The implications of particle sorting on all sedimentary components should be considered when sampling colluvial deposits. The majority of caves and rockshelters are closely associated with karst landscapes, river valleys and coastal landscapes. Consequently, fluvial processes are often responsible for shaping cave systems and rockshelters and depositing and eroding sediments (White, 2007; Iovita et al., 2020). Where caves are conduits for karstic water flow (e.g., Mas d’Azil; Pallier et al., 2018), deposits can form in terraced structures and, during flood events, or periods of major hydrological activity, can be flushed of sediments. Water entering a cave or rockshelter as rivers, streams or the sea also deposit, erode and saturate sediments causing winnowing, sorting, deformation, and decay of certain components. In deep caves, water table fluctuations and descending or ascending water, can saturate and erode the base of deposits, creating complex, inverted stratigraphic sequences as cavities are filled by younger deposits (e.g., Stratford et al., 2014). Aeolian processes contribute sands to both inland and coastal sites (e.g., Krajcarz et al., 2016; Namen et al., 2022). Coastal sites accumulate aeolian salts and sands and are also susceptible to periodic closure by dune migration (e.g., Marean et al., 2010), a potential issue in arid interior basins too. Recent advances in tephrochronology have stimulated greater focus on aeolian components in caves and shelters (e.g., Bruins et al., 2019).
Biogenic Processes Caves and rockshelters are attractive spaces for both humans and animals to occupy. While some anthropogenic contributions can be easily attributed to humans (i.e., stone tools), even sites with the finest stratigraphic and assemblage integrity may have biogenic and anthropogenic contributions in the same stratigraphic units. Animals can introduce fine clastic sediments, botanical material (including grasses, fruits, seeds, pollen and phytoliths), faunal remains, and a broad suite of minerals associated with fecal matter (e.g., Miotti and Marchionni, 2011; Cremaschi et al., 2014). Through their activity, animals can modify sediment composition and structures through trampling, den-making, burrowing (bioturbation), and contamination by dung and urine. It is not always simple to distinguish anthropogenically vs. biogenically accumulated fauna and botanical remains, and these forms of evidence are generally subjected to dedicated taphonomic analyses (e.g., Hockett, 1991). The result of these studies is a growing corpus of general and specialist literature and an increasing sensitivity to the highly variable, and geographically- and environmentally-specific nature of animal behavior in archaeological sites.
Anthropogenic Processes The majority of studies of geogenic and biogenic site formation processes result from a need to distinguish and contextualize human behavioral proxies preserved in deposits. Identifying human-specific behavioral evidence, other than stone tools, can be challenging in sites with multiple biological signals or in sites with low stratigraphic integrity due to mixing of sediments. Humans are capable of accumulating, and creating in situ, a wide array of sedimentary components ranging in size and chemical composition. These can include: incidentally accumulated organic or inorganic remains (e.g., phytoliths, pollen, seeds, soils, ochre); components accumulated or created as a byproduct of occupational activities (e.g., shells, ochre, faunal remains, stone tool manufacture debris, ash, charcoal, botanical remains); deliberately accumulated components (e.g., vegetation for bedding, fire wood, bone, stone tools, ochre); or a combination of all in mixed activity contemporaneous spaces. Understanding the intentionality of accumulation or creation (e.g., burnt bones, burnt stone tools, bedding, ash dumps) is not simple and microstratigraphic studies are often the best approach to understanding the sequence and context of specific formation processes (e.g., Goldberg et al., 2009; Mentzer, 2014; Brodard et al., 2016). For example, combustion feature creation, use, modification and dispersion encompasses complex macro- and micro-scale formation processes that are manifested in innumerable ways in the archaeological record (e.g., Mallol et al., 2017). ’Accurate’ interpretation of combustion feature-related processes is crucial in understanding this uniquely hominin behavior and its development and integration with other technological and occupational activities. As a result, a large body of literature focuses specifically on combustion features and their preservation in the archaeological record (see Mentzer, 2014; Mallol et al., 2017; and Karkanas, 2021 for additional literature).
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Key Issues Process Identification and Analytical Approaches From an archaeological perspective, the cumulative nature of depositional and post-depositional site formation processes and inherent effects of time on material preservation and assemblage and stratigraphic integrity makes it challenging to distinguish the many processes discussed above in all their spatial and temporal variability. At any single point in time, multiple primary and secondary processes are contributing to the sedimentary record. Multiple components may be contributed, and sedimentary structures are formed, through a range of processes active during the formation of individual units. Over time, components, structures and strata may be mixed and conflated, creating units that contain averaged evidence that document multiple geogenic, biogenic and anthropogenic activities (i.e., palimpsests) (e.g., Discamps et al., 2019). Averaging of evidence has profound implications on the archaeological and fossil record, resulting in interpretations of mosaicism in environment, ecology, hominin morphology, technology, and the behavioral repertoires of humans and animals, or erroneous temporal and spatial association of proxies (Bailey and Galanidou, 2009). The nature of caves and rockshelters as sediment traps and spaces attractive for intermittent and long-term occupation exacerbates this phenomenon, and sedimentary sequences often require dedicated geoarchaeological research to decipher the stratigraphy and impacts of different processes. To do this, concepts adopted from sedimentary geology are often applied in the study of stratigraphy. The goal of detailed stratigraphic research is twofold: (1) to control vertical and lateral change and continuity in a sedimentary sequence so that assemblages (including sediments) can be isolated and/or associated across space in a manner that reflects their order of deposition; (2) to assess the integrity of assemblages, i.e., to assess how close assemblages (including sediments and their structures) are to their primary depositional location and condition, and whether components associated within stratigraphic units reflect primary associations, or contain materials from multiple depositional phases or processes. In many archaeological sites, stratigraphic research involves dividing up sequences into hierarchies of units that can be packaged in several ways to help archaeologists aggregate or separate samples of artifacts for analysis, either by contact (e.g., allostratigraphy) (e.g., Arriolabengoa et al., 2018), or type of sediment (e.g., facies) (e.g., Kourampas et al., 2009), or a combination of both (e.g., Ghinassi et al., 2009; Stratford et al., 2022). Stratigraphy is integrally tied to process in that what is seen in stratigraphic profiles is the cumulative result of all the processes acting over time. Deposit geometry, contact type and morphology, and basic sedimentary characteristics are fundamentally influenced by process. However, to distinguish and identify primary and secondary site formation processes, focus generally falls on multi-proxy analysis of sedimentary components and structures at micro- and macroscopic scales. These include, but are not limited to, the application of micromorphology, geochemistry, archaeobotany, taphonomy of fauna, fabric analysis, detailed sedimentology, and GIS spatial analyses (e.g., Reidsma et al., 2021; Hensel et al., 2022).
Interdisciplinarity in Cave and Rockshelter Studies The potential for primary process interaction and cumulative modification of sediments within complex environments like caves and rockshelters requires a dynamic approach to their analysis. Principally, cave or rockshelter shape, lithology, geomorphological setting and hydrology have to be understood as major factors in primary and secondary geogenic, biogenic and anthropogenic processes. For example, cave or rockshelter opening shape and geomorphological context will affect which animals can access the space. Opening shape and geomorphological context may change over time (due to collapse, blockage, erosion, tectonic activity, groundwater and sea level change), altering possible primary and secondary biogenic and anthropogenic activities. The acknowledged potential site formation complexity found in caves and rockshelters has cultivated a sensitivity to interdisciplinary studies and modern analyses rarely look at single components in isolation of other proxies. Most studies strive to collect suites of complementary data that are coherent in their stratigraphic or spatial resolution, providing opportunities for intra- and inter-unit, and cavity-wide, comparative and spatial analyses (e.g., Anderson and Burke, 2008; Revelles et al., 2022). For example, faunal remains often represent abundant components and can be utilized for in situ fabric analysis, through GIS for spatial analyses, and in the laboratory for taphonomic, geochemical and isotopic analyses.
Integrating Scales of Process, Evidence and Analysis Site formation processes occur at many scales and due to their cumulative nature, even minor processes can, over time, impact the structure and composition of sediments significantly. From a sedimentological and taphonomic perspective, every component and structure tells part of the story of the formation of a deposit and ideally all are studied and integrated into a cohesive, nuanced interpretation of both major and minor processes and their changes through space and time. Major processes (e.g., colluvial, fluvial, and many turbative processes) and stratigraphic contacts may be macroscopically characterized, allowing spatial correlations and changes to be understood across larger areas. Low energy or intermittent processes (e.g., intermittent aeolian contributions, water percolation, ephemeral biogenic activity) may only leave spatially and temporally limited structural, mineral or clastic evidence observable at microscopic scales (e.g., rounded sand particles, cryptotephra, clay and phosphatic particle coatings, decayed burrows, coprolites). As deposits get older, the integrity of the evidence of a process reduces, deposits are eroded or deformed, evidence is conflated or mixed (homogenizing sediments), and the primary proportional contributions of different processes may be modified (e.g., winnowing of ash, decay of botanical remains). Although recognizable at the macroscopic scale, it is often the microscopic analysis of the sediments that provides nuanced interpretations of multiple processes (Goldberg and Berna, 2010). Facies analysis
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can be applied at both macro and micro scales and forms the foundation of many process interpretations in archaeological sites. Similarities in observed variables makes facies analysis an ideal integrative multiscale approach that encompasses broad trends over space and time calibrated with nuanced interpretation of primary and secondary processes that can be augmented with componentspecific analyses (e.g., taphonomy of fauna, lithics and phytoliths; geochemical analysis; spatial analysis).
Integrating the Landscape Into Cave and Rockshelter Records Archaeologists are generally interested in interred anthropogenic proxies and their implications, the palaeoenvironmental records that caves and rockshelters can preserve, and the interaction between these through time. The value of most caves and rockshelters lies in their ability to preserve records that are poorly represented in sedimentary sequences on the open landscape. Consequently, many research projects have focused on compiling regional scale reconstructions of human behavior and environmental change from cave and rockshelter-derived evidence (in addition to the speleothem records discussed above; e.g., Woodward and Goldberg, 2001; Hunt and Fiacconi, 2018; Sanchez de la Torre et al., 2020). However, caves can be both susceptible to broad landscape-scale changes (e.g., major hydrological changes in karst landscapes or sea level changes resulting in major erosive events) (e.g., Newman et al., 2022), and insulated from landscape-scale processes over significant periods for several reasons, including periodic entrance obstruction due to entrance blockages (by sediments or speleothems) or geomorphological isolation. The records in caves and rockshelters therefore, although potentially preserving remarkably diverse and complete sedimentary sequences at specific points in time, are never complete, and landscape-scale studies of environmental change and human behavior should attempt to integrate cave, open landscape and marine records wherever possible. These multi-proxy records include but are not limited to speleothems, marine cores, alluvial and colluvial deposits in various landforms, calcretes and tufas, and dung middens (e.g., Scott et al., 2020; Stone, 2021).
Summary and Future Directions Caves and rockshelters provide opportune receptacles for the deposition of a wide range of sediments accumulated by a broad suite of agents. Isolation of these spaces from landscape processes has resulted in the preservation of remarkable sedimentary records across the world that document millions of years of biological, cultural, ecological and environmental evolution. Geogenic sediments can accumulate through primary external (allogenic) or internal (autogenic) processes, and secondary processes related to the lithology, hydrology, geomorphology, and changing climatological context of the cave or rockshelter can modify the physical (including structures) and chemical composition of sediments. Biogenic sedimentary components can be allogenic and autogenic in derivation and include a wide range of primary and secondary processes related largely to faunal occupation of caves and rockshelters. Badgers, bats, bears, birds, hyenas, monkeys, porcupines, snakes and insects are some of the many animals that regularly occupy caves and rockshelters, contributing significantly to deposits (e.g., guano, dung, seeds, clastic sediments, bones, coprolites, microfauna) and modifying the structures and chemistry of deposits through burrowing, nesting, prey consumption, and guano and dung input. In deep caves, bat guano can represent a significant factor in the geomorphological evolution of the cave and its environment and ecology. Anthropogenic activities are even more diverse in their capacity to accumulate sediments (including artifacts), create structures, and incidentally or deliberately modify the space or deposits through a wide range of behaviors. A rapidly growing body of literature drawing on myriad analytical methods, techniques and experiments explores in increasing detail the evidence of the processes that form and change cave and rockshelter deposits. As methods applied to cave and rockshelter sediments diversify to integrate smaller components, genetic evidence, stable isotope analysis, GIS-based spatial modeling, and a wide spectrum of macro and microscopic geochemical techniques, the challenge is to incorporate this evidence into broader pictures of site formation over long time scales and to create coherence between geoarchaeologically identified stratigraphies and the units actually excavated. There is often a disconnect between the stratigraphic and spatial resolution achieved during an excavation and the extremely high resolution information that geoarchaeological evidence can provide (but generally only after the excavation of the sampled sediments). Excavation is the final anthropogenic process that ultimately dictates the maximum stratigraphic and spatial resolution of interpretations of the artifacts in deposits and enables (or prevents) associations to be made between artifacts and sediments. Close collaboration between geoarchaeologists and excavators during the planning and execution of excavations provides opportunities for more sensitive in situ documentation and reflexive excavation strategies that capture, or acknowledge and mitigate through sampling, sedimentary and stratigraphic complexity (e.g., Croix et al., 2019). Deposits and the processes that form and modify them are inherently three-dimensional. This dimensionality is amplified in caves and rockshelters where sediments are formed, trapped and concentrated in dynamic cavities. Conventionally, archaeological documentation, analysis and presentation of evidence is conducted in two dimensionsdin plans and profiles. This also forms the basis of most geoarchaeological documentation, analysis and presentation. Three-dimensional spatial analyses generally focus on artifacts, not sediments. Advances in three-dimensional in situ documentation of excavation contexts through handheld LiDAR, laser scanning and photogrammetry (e.g., Marín-Buzón et al., 2021) are providing new opportunities to integrate sedimentary and stratigraphic data with artifact spatial data in dynamic, multidimensional and multiscale digital analytical environments (e.g., Psarros et al., 2022; Sjölander, 2022). Three-dimensional GIS environments are constantly developing but require more work to refine multidimensional analytical and visualization tools to integrate additional data, like sedimentological information, and integrate
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advanced spatial statistical tools (e.g., Gavryushkina, 2021). Multidimensional sediment spatial analysis can be explored at the site scale and at the microscopic scale by scanning unembedded micromorphology block samples with micro-computed tomography and synchrotron radiation technologies.
See Also: Classification of Archaeological Sites; Rock Art and Petroglyphs.
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Goldberg, Paul, Miller, Christopher E., Schiegl, Solveig, Ligouis, Bertrand, Berna, Francesco, Conard, Nicholas J., Wadley, Lyn, 2009. Bedding, hearths, and site maintenance in the Middle Stone age of Sibudu cave, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 1, 95–122. Goldberg, Paul, Berna, Francesco, Chazan, Michael, 2015. Deposition and diagenesis in the earlier stone age of Wonderwerk cave, excavation 1, South Africa. Afr. Archaeol. Rev. 32, 613–643. Hensel, Elena A., Kehl, Martin, Wöstehoff, Luisa, Neumann, Katharina, Vogelsang, Ralf, Bubenzer, Olaf, 2022. A multi-method approach for deciphering rockshelter microstratigraphiesdthe role of the Sodicho rockshelter (SW Ethiopia) as a geoarchaeological archive. Geosciences 12, 92. Hockett, Bryan, S., 1991. Toward distinguishing human and raptor patterning on leporid bones. Am. Antiq. 56, 667–679. Hunt, Chris, Fiacconi, Marta, 2018. Pollen taphonomy of cave sediments: what does the pollen record in caves tell us about external environments and how do we assess its reliability? Quatern. Int. 485, 68–75. Hunt, Chris, Davison, John, Inglis, Robyn, Farr, Lucy, Reynolds, Tim, Simpson, David, el-Rishi, Hwedi, Barker, Graeme, 2010. Site formation processes in caves: the Holocene sediments of the Haua Fteah, Cyrenaica, Libya. J. Archaeol. Sci. 37, 1600–1611. Iovita, Radu, Varis, Aristeidis, Namen, Abay, Cuthbertson, Patrick, Taimagambetov, Zhaken, Miller, Christopher E., 2020. In search of a Paleolithic silk road in Kazakhstan. Quatern. Int. 559, 119–132. Jimenez, Elodie-Laure, Germonpre, Mietje, Boudin, Mathieu, 2022. New insights into cave hyena ethology and the implications for territorial competition with hominins in Late Pleistocene north-west Europe: the case of Caverne Marie-Jeanne (Belgium). J. Quat. Sci. 37, 593–611. Karkanas, Panagiotis, 2021. All about wood ash: long term fire experiments reveal unknown aspects of the formation and preservation of ash with critical implications on the emergence and use of fire in the past. J. Archaeol. Sci. 135, 105476.
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Karkanas, Panagiotis, Bar-Yosef, Ofer, Goldberg, Paul, Weiner, Steve, 2000. Diagenesis in prehistoric caves: the use of minerals that form in situ to assess the completeness of the archaeological record. J. Archaeol. Sci. 27, 915–929. Kitagawa, Keiko, Krönneck, Petra, Conard, Nicholas J., Münzel, Susanne C., 2012. Exploring cave use and exploitation among cave bears, carnivores and hominins in the Swabian Jura, Germany. J. Taphon. 10, 439–461. Kourampas, Nikos, Simpson, Ian A., Perera, Nimal, Deraniyagala, Siran U., Wijeyapala, W.H., 2009. Rockshelter sedimentation in a dynamic tropical landscape: late Pleistocene– early Holocene archaeological deposits in Kitulgala Beli-lena, southwestern Sri Lanka. Geoarchaeology 24, 677–714. Kourampas, Nikos, Shipton, Ceri, Mills, William, Tibesasa, Ruth, Horton, Henrietta, Horton, Mark, Prendergast, Mary, Crowther, Alison, Douka, Katerina, Faulkner, Patrick, Picornell, Llorenç, Boivin, Nicole, 2015. Late Quaternary speleogenesis and landscape evolution in a tropical carbonate Island: Pango la Kuumbi (Kuumbi Cave), Zanzibar. Int. J. Speleol. 44, 8. Krajcarz, Maciej T., Cyrek, Krzysztof, Krajcarz, Magdalena, Mroczek, Przemysław, Sudoł, Magdalena, Szymanek, Marcin, Tomek, Teresa, Madeyska, Teresa, 2016. Loess in a cave: lithostratigraphic and correlative value of loess and loess-like layers in caves from the Kraków-Cze˛ stochowa Upland (Poland). Quatern. Int. 399, 13–30. Lorrey, Andrew, Williams, Paul, Salinger, Jim, Martin, Tim, Palmer, Jonathan, Fowler, Anthony, Zhao, Jian-xin, Neil, Helen, 2008. Speleothem stable isotope records interpreted within a multi-proxy framework and implications for New Zealand palaeoclimate reconstruction. Quatern. Int. 187, 52–75. Lundberg, Joyce, McFarlane, Donald A., 2012. Post-speleogenetic biogenic modification of Gomantong caves, Sabah, Borneo. Geomorphology 157, 153–168. Lundberg, Joyce, McFarlane, Donald A., 2021. The impact of burning on the structure and mineral composition of bat guano. Int. J. Speleol. 50, 6. Mallol, Carolina, Roura, Eudald Carbonell I., 2008. The collapse of Gran Dolina cave, Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain: site formation processes of layer TD10-1. Geoarchaeology 23, 13–41. Mallol, Carolina, Mentzer, Susan M., Miller, Christopher E., 2017. Combustion Features. In: Cristiano, Nicosia, Georges, Stoops (Eds.), Archaeological Soil and Sediment Micromorphology. John Wiley & Sons, pp. 299–330. Marean, Curtis W., Bar-Matthews, Miryam, Fisher, Erich, Goldberg, Paul, Herries, Andy, Karkanas, Panagiotis, Nilssen, Peter J., Thompson, Erin, 2010. The stratigraphy of the middle stone age sediments at Pinnacle point cave 13B (Mossel Bay, Western Cape Province, South Africa). J. Hum. Evol. 59, 234–255. Marín-Buzón, Carmen, Pérez-Romero, Antonio Miguel, León-Bonillo, Manuel J., Martínez-Álvarez, Rubén, Mejías-García, Juan Carlos, Manzano-Agugliaro, Francisco, 2021. Photogrammetry (SfM) vs. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) for archaeological excavations: mosaic of Cantillana (Spain) as a case study. Appl. Sci. 11, 11994. McAdams, Conor, Morley, Mike W., Roberts, Richard G., 2021. The acid test: an experimental microarchaeological study of guano-driven diagenesis in tropical cave sediments. J. Archaeol. Sci. 37, 102947. Mentzer, Susan, M., 2014. Microarchaeological approaches to the identification and interpretation of combustion features in prehistoric archaeological sites. J. Archaeol. Method Theor. 21, 616–668. Miotti, Laura, Marchionni, Laura, 2011. The study of archaeofauna at middle Holocene in AEP-1 rockshelter, Santa Cruz, Argentina: taphonomic implications. Quatern. Int. 245, 148–158. Namen, Abay, Varis, Aristeidis, Lindauer, Susanne, Friedrich, Ronny, Taimagambetov, Zhaken, Radu, Iovita, 2022. Nazugum, a new 4000 year old rockshelter site in the Ili Alatau, Tien Shan. Archaeol. Res. Asia 30, 100370. Newman, Kim, Hakim, Budianto, Oktaviana, Adhi Agus, Burhan, Basran, McGahan, David, Brumm, Adam, 2022. The missing deposits of South Sulawesi: new sources of evidence for the Pleistocene/Holocene archaeological transition. Archaeol. Res. Asia 32, 100408. O’Connor, Sue, Barham, Anthony, Aplin, Ken, Maloney, Tim, 2017. Cave stratigraphies and cave breccias: implications for sediment accumulation and removal models and interpreting the record of human occupation. J. Archaeol. Sci. 77, 143–159. Osborne, Robert, A.L., 2002. Cave breakdown by vadose weathering. Int. J. Speleol. 31, 37–53. Pallier, Céline, Jarry, Marc, Bon, François, Camus, Hubert, Rabanit, Manon, Bruxelles, Laurent, 2018. Evolution karstique, enregistrements sédimentaires et occupations humaines de la grotte du Mas d’Azil (Ariège, France). Karstologia 68, 31–38. Polk, Jason S., Brinkmann, Robert, 2013. Climatic influences on coastal cave and karst development in Florida. In: Lace, Michael J., Mylroie, John E. (Eds.), Coastal Karst Landforms. Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 317–345. Psarros, Doukas, Stamatopoulos, Michail I., Anagnostopoulos, Christos-Nikolaos, 2022. Information technology and archaeological excavations: a brief overview. Sci. Cult. 8, 147–166. Reidsma, Femke H., Sifogeorgaki, Irini, Dinckal, Ada, Huisman, Hans, Sier, Mark J., van Os, Bertil, Dusseldorp, Gerrit L., 2021. Making the invisible stratigraphy visible: a gridbased, multi-proxy geoarchaeological study of Umhlatuzana Rockshelter, South Africa. Front. Earth Sci. 9, 520. Revelles, Jordi, Allué, Ethel, Alcolea, Marta, Antolín, Ferran, Berihuete-Azorín, Marian, Expósito, Isabel, Garay, Blanca, Mas, Bàrabara, Piqué, Raquel, Obea, Laura, ValPeón, Christina, Burjachs, Francesc, 2022. Site formation processes, human activities and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions from archaeobotanical records in cave and rock-shelter sites in NE Iberia. Rev. Palaeobot. Palynol. 299, 104612. Sanchez de la Torre, Marta, Utrilla, Pilar, Domingo, Rafael, Jiménez, Luis, Le Bourdonnec, François-Xavier, Gratuze, Bernard, 2020. Lithic raw material procurement at the Chaves cave (Huesca, Spain): a geochemical approach to defining Palaeolithic human mobility. Geoarchaeology 35, 856–870. Scott, Louis, Sobol, Magdalena, Neumann, Frank Harald, Gil-Romera, Graciela, Fernández-Jalvo, Yolanda, Bousman, C. Britt, Horwitz, Liora Kolska, van Aardt, Andri C., 2020. Late Quaternary palaeoenvironments in the central semi-arid region of South Africa from pollen in cave, pan, spring, stream and dung deposits. Quatern. Int. 20, 84–97. Shahack-Gross, Ruth, Berna, Francesco, Karkanas, Panagiotis, Weiner, Steve, 2004. Bat guano and preservation of archaeological remains in cave sites. J. Archaeol. Sci. 31, 1259–1272. Simões, Matheus Henrique, Souza-Silva, Marconi, Ferreira, Rodrigo Lopes, 2015. Cave physical attributes influencing the structure of terrestrial invertebrate communities in Neotropics. Subterr. Biol. 16, 103–121. Sjölander, Mattias, 2022. Non-spatial data and modelling multiscale systems in archaeology. Open Archaeol. 8, 578–593. Stone, Abi, 2021. Dryland dunes and other dryland environmental archives as proxies for Late Quaternary stratigraphy and environmental and climate change in southern Africa. S. Afr. J. Geol. 124, 927–962, 2021. Stratford, Dominic, Bruxelles, Laurent, Clarke, Ronald J., Kuman, Kathleen, 2012. New stratigraphic interpretations of the fossil and artefact-bearing deposits of the Name Chamber, Sterkfontein. S. Afr. Archaeol. Bull. 67, 159–167. Stratford, Dominic, Grab, Stefan, Pickering, Travis R., 2014. The stratigraphy and formation history of fossil-and artefact-bearing sediments in the Milner Hall, Sterkfontein Cave, South Africa: new interpretations and implications for palaeoanthropology and archaeology. J. Afr. Earth Sci. 96, 155–167. Stratford, Dominic, Clark, Jamie L., Wojcieszak, Marine, Wadley, Lyn, D’errico, Francesco, de la Peña, Paloma, Esteban, Irene, Sievers, Christine, Banks, William E., Beard, Thomas, Horn, Maryke, 2022. Geoarchaeology and zooarchaeology of Border Cave, South Africa: initial multiproxy considerations of stratigraphy and site formation processes from the Backwell et al. excavations. Quat. Sci. Rev. 107618. Vanderwolf, Karen J., Malloch, David, McAlpine, Donald F. Forbes, Graham, J., 2013. A world review of fungi, yeasts, and slime molds in caves. Int. J. Speleol. 42, 77–96. Van Gundy, James J., White, William B., 2009. Sediment flushing in Mystic cave, West Virginia, USA, in response to the 1985 Potomac valley flood. Int. J. Speleol. 38, 2. White, William B., 2007. Cave sediments and palaeoclimate. J. Cave Karst Stud. 69, 76–93. White, Elizabeth L., 2019a. Breakdown. In: White, William, Culver, David, Pipan, Tanja (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Caves. Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 187–194. White, William B., 2019b. Entrances. In: White, William, Culver, David, Pipan, Tanja (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Caves. Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 380–386. White, Elizabeth L., White, William B., 2000. Breakdown Morphology. Speleogenesis, Evolution of Karst Aquifers. National Speleological Society Bulletin, Huntsville, AL, pp. 427–429.
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Woodhead, Jon, Pickering, Robyn, 2012. Beyond 500 ka: progress and prospects in the UPb chronology of speleothems, and their application to studies in palaeoclimate, human evolution, biodiversity and tectonics. Chem. Geol. 322, 290–299. Woodward, Jamie C., Goldberg, Paul, 2001. The sedimentary records in Mediterranean rockshelters and caves: archives of environmental change. Geoarchaeology 16, 327–354.
Further Reading Courty, Marie-Agnès, 2001. Microfacies analysis assisting archaeological stratigraphy. In: Goldberg, Paul, Holliday, Vance T., Ferring, C. Reid (Eds.), Earth Sciences and Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA, pp. 205–239. Courty, Marie-Agnès, Vallverdu, Josep, 2001. The microstratigraphic record of abrupt climate changes in cave sediments of the Western Mediterranean. Geoarchaeology 16, 467–499. Delannoy, Jean-Jacques, David, Bruno, Geneste, Jean-Michel, Katherine, Margaret, Barker, Bryce, Whear, Ray L., Gunn, Robert G., 2013. The social construction of caves and rockshelters: Chauvet Cave (France) and Nawarla Gabarnmang (Australia). Antiquity 87, 12–29. Farrand, William R., 2001. Sediments and stratigraphy in rockshelters and caves: a personal perspective on principles and pragmatics. Geoarchaeology 16, 537–557. Goldberg, Paul, Sherwood, Sarah C., 2006. Deciphering human prehistory through the geoarcheological study of cave sediments. Evol. Anthropol. 15, 20–36. Haaland, Magnus M., Miller, Christopher E., Unhammer, Ole F., Reynard, Jerome P., van Niekerk, Karen L., Ligouis, Bertrand, Mentzer, Susan M., Henshilwood, Christopher S., 2021. Geoarchaeological investigation of occupation deposits in Blombos Cave in South Africa indicate changes in site use and settlement dynamics in the southern Cape during MIS 5b-4. Quat. Res. 100, 170–223. Henry, Donald, 2012. The palimpsest problem, hearth pattern analysis, and Middle Paleolithic site structure. Quatern. Int. 247, 246–266. Mallol, Carolina, Goldberg, Paul, 2017. Cave and Rock Shelter Sediments. In: Nicosia, Cristiano, Stoops, Georges (Eds.), Archaeological Soil and Sediment Micromorphology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 359–381. Marcazzan, Diana, Miller, Christopher E., Conard, Nicholas J., 2022. Burning, dumping, and site use during the middle and Upper Palaeolithic at Hohle Fels cave, SW Germany. Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 14, 1–26. Mondini, Mariana, 2002. Carnivore taphonomy and the early human occupations in the Andes. J. Archaeol. Sci. 29, 791–801. Sasowsky, Ira D., 2007. Clastic sediments in caves - imperfect recorders of process in karst. KIP Articles 830, 143–149. Springer, Gregory S, 2019. Clastic sediments in caves. In: White, William, Culver, David, Pipan, Tanja (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Caves. Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 277–284. White, Elizabeth L., White, William B., 1969. Processes of Cavern Breakdown. National Speleological society Bulletin 13, 83–96. Woodward, Jamie C., Bailey, Geoff N., Foster, Ian D.L., 2000. Sediment sources and terminal Pleistocene geomorphological processes recorded in rockshelter sequences in Northwest Greece. In: Foster, Ian D.L. (Ed.), Tracers in Geomorphology. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, pp. 473–501.
Rock Art and Petroglyphs Viktor A. Novozhenov, International Dialog Department of UNESCO, Center for the Rapprochement of Cultures, Almaty, Kazakhstan © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues Key Problems in the Study of Rock Art Interpretation: Typology, Structure, Functionality and Deciphering of Content Altars Altars for Sacrifice Functionality Deciphering Content Summary and Future Directions References
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Key Points
• • • • •
Main Rock Art concentration in the Eurasian continent and in the World; Research methods for documentation, dating and chronology of Rock Art; Interpretation of Rock Art: typology and structure of sites, functionality and deciphering content; Unification of terms and definitions important for mutual understanding of researchers across the World; Current trends and future prospects.
List of Abbreviations IAE SB RAS Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of SciencesdNovosibirsk. IICAS International Institute of Central Asian StudydSamarkand. IIMC RAS Institute of the History of Material Culture of the RASdSt. Petersburg. XUARICEA Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region International Cultural Exchange AssociationdUrumqi, Xinjiang, China.
Abstract Monuments of rock art are complexes of petroglyphs (figurative images and symbols) and other archaeological objects concentrated in a single landscape; the boundaries of such monuments are identical to the territory containing all traces of habitation and activity of ancient collectives associated in the landscape. Together with other archaeological objects (settlements, burial grounds, roads, etc.), rock carvings indirectly reflect in the landscape the way ancient communities lived, their attitude to the environment and the functional significance of its individual components, depending on the level of social and technical development in a particular period of history. Rock art is a stable tradition, a phenomenon of visual activity, historically determined by the characteristics of the natural landscape, methods of cultural adaptation, communication and other factors that influenced and partly retain their impact on the way of life, traditional forms of economic activity, and social and religious practices of ancient and modern peoples. The content and artistic form of a number of identified pictorial traditions reflect the mutual influence and cultural synthesis of settled agricultural and mobile pastoral cultures of Eurasia, as the most important features of historical and cultural development.
Introduction The term rock art monuments refers to ancient and historic figurative images and symbols drawn with paint, carved, scratched or polished on the surface of rocks and stones that are in the open air, under shelters or in caves and are interconnected by a certain narrative structure (content). Rock art can be perceived as a collection of symbols of different eras in the form of paintings or carved images, through which their creators conveyed their knowledge, beliefs and ideas about the outside world, and made contact
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with supernatural forces. Artistic, religious, socio-political, ethno-cultural and other aspects of the life of the communities that created them are reflected in rock art monuments (Bednarik, 2001; Rogozhinsky and Novozhenov, 2018). The term petroglyphs describes all types of rock carvings, but is more commonly applied to engraved rock carvings. The modern scientific approach, based on the study of rock art in the context of the associated paleo-cultural (relic) landscape, prefers the term the archaeology of rock art. Rock art is a stable tradition, a phenomenon of visual activity, historically determined by the characteristics of the natural landscape, methods of cultural adaptation, communication and other factors that influenced and partly retained their impact on the way of life, traditional forms of economic activity, and social and religious practices of ancient and modern peoples. The content and artistic form of a number of identified pictorial traditions reflect the mutual influence and cultural synthesis of settled agricultural and mobile pastoral cultures, as the most important features of historical and cultural development. Monuments of rock art are complexes of petroglyphs and other archaeological objects concentrated in a single landscape; the boundaries of such monuments are identical to the territory containing all traces of habitation and activity of ancient collectives associated in the landscape. Together with other archaeological objects (settlements, burial grounds, roads, etc.), rock carvings indirectly reflect in the landscape the way ancient communities lived, their attitude to the environment and the functional significance of its individual components, depending on the level of social and technical development in a particular period of history. As a rule, accumulations of rock carvings are located in conspicuous places in mountain-steppe, taiga, desert and semi-desert landscapes: on rocky outcrops along the tops and slopes of hills, on the steep banks of small and large rivers, on mountain passes and near places of winter or summer camps of nomads, in a worddin various, but quite noticeable locations in the surrounding landscapes. They arose on the paths of traditional, including transcontinental, communications: along the paths of nomads and migration routes, in places of mass constant or seasonal gatherings, on ancient trade roads, at water crossings, that is, in landscapes especially actively used by people. Petroglyphs, as a special information channel, performed their main communicative function most effectively in such landscapes.
Overview Images on rocks and in caves, grottoes, and shelters are known in all parts of the World, in the Americas, Africa, Australia, but most of them are in the Eurasian continent. This entry will focus on the latter as examples of some of the better and longer studied objects. In total, more than a dozen large centers of distribution of rock art have been recorded in the Eurasian continent only. Petroglyphs of the western and northern regions of Europe have been better studied both due to their combination with well-dated archaeological objectsdaxes, daggers, etc (which gave a fairly accurate dating), and due to long-term systematic archaeological research in these territories. Classifications of rock art and petroglyphs of Scandinavia, Italy, and the Sahara have already been developed (Lewis-Williams, 2002; Lorblanchet, 1995; Malmer, 1981; Anati, 1977; Lhote, 2006). In the Northern Black Sea region and in the Caucasus, such pictorial monuments as Kamennaya Mogila, Gobustan, Gemigaya, Syunik, Ukhtasar and many others are known. In the Mediterranean on the slopes of Mount Pangaion (Greece), rock engravings of dogs, deer, archers, figures of horsemen and carts of different times were found, along with images of intertwined lines in combination with various signs, including solar ones. In addition, there are petroglyphs in the south of the Mediterranean and in North Africa. In the Sahara, on the Tassili n’ Anjer Plateau (Atlas Mountains) members of a French expedition led by Henri Lhote (2006) discovered multi-figure polychrome rock frescoes. Rock carvings and paintings are also known in other parts of Africa. In northern Italy, in the spurs of the Alps and river valleys, many thousands of rock carvings from different historical periods have been discovered. Large-scale research has been carried out in Val Camonica for several decades and the site was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1969 (Anati, 1977). A significant corpus of petroglyphs is represented in the north of the European part of the continentdin Scandinavia and Karelia. A wide variety of rock carvings have been found in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Large accumulations concentrate mainly on the territory of Sweden: in the province of Bohuslän (Bottna, Svenneby, Kville), in the province of Skåne (Gryt, Frennarp), in the southeastern and western parts of Sweden, in the province of Osterjetland and in Ostfold in Norway (Malmer, 1981; Bertilsson, 1989). In Karelia and adjacent regions, rock carvings have been recorded on the shores of lakes, sea bays and rivers: Besov Nos; Besovy Sledki; Zalavruga; east coast of Lake Onega; lower reaches of the Vyg River, White Sea coast ect. (Lobanova, 2019). Rock carvings are also common in the east of the Eurasian continent. On the border between Europe and Asia, in the foothills of the Ural Mountains, rock art has been recorded (Shirokov and Chairkin, 2011), including paintings in the Shulgan Tash (Kapova) Cave in Bashkiria. Petroglyphs of the taiga zone and Eastern Eurasia were discovered in the valley of the Amur River, Transbaikalia and Far East. The rock carvings found here differ from the petroglyphs in other parts of Asia, which is obviously associated with a different habitat of local tribes (Nelson, 1993:154; Rock Art in East Asia, 2019; Tashak and Antonova, 2020). Rock art is known as well in East Asia (O’Sullivan, 2018), for instance in Sulawesi, Borneo, Indonesia (Aubert et al., 2018). Central Asia is one of the most saturated with ancient rock art regions of Eurasia and our planet as a whole: the number of pictorial monuments here as well as the number of petroglyphs themselves, still cannot be accurately calculated, however, today one can confidently speak of thousands of large sites of petroglyphs, cumulatively numbering millions of images (Figs. 1–14). Such a huge number of different images, signs, and inscriptions here makes this type of historical source one of the biggest and most informative in historiography (Rozwadowski, 2020). In the historical and cultural context, this vast part of Eurasia, often called Turkestan, in
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Fig. 1
Zaraut Kamar, Uzbekistan. Humans. Late Stone Age (Rogozhinskiy and Novozhenov, 2018).
Fig. 2 Grotto Tesiktas, Kazakh steppe. Central Kazakhstan. 1dgeneral view; 2dBulls and signs. Paintings. Late NeolithicdEarly Bronze Age (4th3rd mill. BCE). Photos by author.
Fig. 3 Olenty, Kazakh steppe. North Kazakhstan. 1dgeneral view; 2dHumans. Carved images. Late NeolithicdEarly Bronze Age (4th-3rd mill. BCE). Photos by author.
Rock Art and Petroglyphs
Fig. 4
Akbidaik, Kazakh steppe. North Kazakhstan. Horses and bulls. Early Bronze Age (3rd-2nd mill. BCE). Photo by author.
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3
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Fig. 5 Sarmysh, Uzbekistan. 1dbulls, human and sign. Bronze Age (2nd mill. BCE); 2dHorses and human. Bronze Age (2nd mill. BCE); 3dAntelope. Iron Age; 4dHorse rider. Turkic period (Rogozhinskiy and Novozhenov, 2018).
Fig. 6
Saimaly Tash, Kyrgyzstan. Bulls, draught carts and drivers. Early Bronze Age (3rd-2nd mill. BCE). Photo by author.
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Fig. 7
Soi Sobag, Tadjikistan. Multifigure composition. Bronze Age (2nd mill. BCE) (Rogozhinskiy and Novozhenov, 2018).
Fig. 8
Shunak, Balkhash Lake. Kazakhstan. Feline predator. Early Iron Age. Photo by author.
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Fig. 9
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Kulzhabasy, Southern Kazakhstan. 1dHumans. Late Bronze Age; 2dHorse rider with banner. Turkic period. Photos by author.
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Fig. 10 Arpauzen, Karatau ridge, Southern Kazakhstan. 1dHumans, group 3. Bronze Age (2nd mill. BCE); 2dPalimpsest: Elks (Early Iron Age) and horses (Bronze Age), group 5 (Novozhenov, 2020).
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Fig. 11 Tamgaly, Kazakh Steppe. 1dSunheaded Deity on the bull. Bronze Age (mid. of 2nd mill. BCE); 2dElk, foot print, archer. Early Iron Age; 3dHuman and animals. Bronze Age (mid. of 2nd mill. BCE). Photos by author.
combination with large adjacent territories, from ancient times played the role of a contact zone connecting civilizations, cultures and peoples of Western and East Asia, Siberia, the Mediterranean, Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. In the western part of Central Asia (Western Turkestan), more than five hundred rock art sites have been recorded and partially documented (Uzbekistandover one hundred fifty sites, Kyrgyzstandabout ninety, Tajikistandabout one hundred, Kazakhstandmore than two hundred), which are located in the mountainous and flat areas of the region (Devlet and Devlet, 2005; Sher, 1980; Molodin, 2009; Rogozhinsky and Novozhenov, 2018; Novozhenov, 2012, 2020; Rock Art in Central Asia, 2011; Sher and Francfort, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2001; Rock art monuments of Central Asia, 2004). The largest locations of petroglyphs in Kazakhstan are concentrated in the east and in the south of the country: Eshkiolmes, Kylzhabasy, Arpauzen and Sauyskandyk are potential world cultural heritage sites and are included in the UNESCO Tentative List; petroglyphs of the Tamgaly complex were included in the World Heritage List in 2004. In Kyrgyzstan, rock carvings are concentrated on the northern coast of Lake Issyk Kul; in the Ferghana Valley in the north-west of the country and in the Talas River Valley in the south. According to their geographical location, the monuments are divided into two groups: located in the low-mountain beltdfoothills (Sulaiman-Too, Aravan rock, Sahaba, etc.) and located in the high-mountain zonedSaimaly-Tash, Suuk-Debe, Baichechekey, etc. (Sulaimanova et al., 2016).
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Konyrzhon, Kazakh Steppe. Multifigure composition. Early Iron Age. Photo by author.
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Fig. 13 Eshkiolmes, Valley of Koksu river, Southern Kazakhstan. 1dBattle composition with horse-drawn chariots. Bronze Age; 2dElks. Early Iron Age; 3dWolf. Turkic period; 4dHorse rider with banner and animals. Turkic period and Bronze Age. Photos by author.
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Tamgalytas, Valley of Ili River, Southern Kazakhstan. Buddhas 16–17th cent. CE Photo by author.
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Three geographical zones with concentration of rock art monuments are distinguished on the mountains of Tajikistan: Eastern and Western Pamir (Badakhshan), Gissar-Alay, and Western Ferghana. The total number of drawings at all known locations exceeds ten thousand. The largest ones are Vybistdara (ca. 1200 images) and Langar (ca. 6000 images). In the Eastern Pamirs, the paintings of the Shakhty grottoes and the engraved drawings of Akdzhilga are the most famous (Ranov, 2016). In the mountainous and foothill regions of Uzbekistan, petroglyphs are concentrated in the central, northeastern, northwestern and southern parts of the country. The most famous are the drawings of the Zaraut-kamar grotto (Kugitang ridge), Sipantosh shelters (southern slope of the Zerafshan ridge), Varzik, Khojakent, Karakiyasay, Aksakalatasai and Sangizhumasay (Nurata ridge). Three monumentsdSarmishsay, Zarautsoy Rock Paintings and Sipantoshdare included in the Tentative UNESCO World Heritage List (Khujanazarov, 2018; Kholmatov, 2018). The eastern and northeastern borders of the range (Eastern Turkestan) include the territories of states adjacent to Central Asia in total, in China about two hundred monuments have been recorded, in Mongolia a few hundred and in the south of Siberia (Sayano-Altai mountains) more than three hundred. Petroglyphs were found in the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, in the area of Lianyangan, on the coast of the Yellow Sea, but the largest concentration of monuments is noted in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Ningxia and Qinghai, located along the route of the Silk Road and its branches (Guy, 1995; Chen Zhao-fu, 2008). In Mongolia, a significant part of the monuments is concentrated in the west of the country, in the foothills of the Altai Mountains and in the river valleys: Yamany Us (mountain Khanyn Khad), Tsagaan Gol, Chuluut, Bichigtyn Am, Khovd Somon (mountains Tevsh Uul), etc. (Novgorodova, 1984; Jacobson Tepfer, 2020; Rock Art in East Asia, 2019). The Sayano-Altai mountain-steppe region is one of the richest provinces in rock art in the entire range of Asia. There are about five dozen sites in the Kazakh Altai, more than three dozen in the Russian Altai; in Western Mongolia over four dozen sites, and in Tuva over four dozen monuments have been found. The most studied include: Elangash, Kalbak-Tash, Kok-Uzek, Kuyus, Bichiktu-Bom, Tepsei, Oglakhty, Sukhanikha, Shaman Kamen, Mugur Sargol, Chinge, Ortaa Sargol and others (Kilunovskaya et al., 2020; Jacobson Tepfer, 2020; Kubarev et al., 2005; Sher and Francfort, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2001). In the south and southwest, the Central Asian hotbed of rock art extends to the Western Himalayas, the Karakorum, the Tibetan plateau and the Hindu Kush, where more than a hundred rather poorly studied and insufficiently documented pictorial monuments have been recorded. Part of the caravan route passed through northern Pakistan; as the road belonged to the ancient state Bolor, which patronized pilgrims and travelers, they carved images and inscriptions of gratitude on the rocks, fixing the roads (Khalhoro, 2010/ 2011; MANP, 1994, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007). Petroglyphs from Ladakh, Swat in Tibet have also been published (Bruneau and Bellezza, 2013). On the territory of India, more than two dozen areas have been identified, where there are pictorial monuments, usually located in several grottoes. Fifteen such districts have been identified in North India, and five in South and Central. In total, there are about a hundred monuments of rock art in the country, where images of animals, signs, people, etc. were painted in grottoes in red, green, white, black and other colors. Occasionally there are engraved images (Brooks and Wakankar, 1976:1–32). Rock paintings of different periods were found in the grottoes of Bhimbetka, Eda Kalkave, Chatur Bhu Nash, Chibbarnala, Dharampuri (Wakankar, 2005).
Key Issues Key Problems in the Study of Rock Art Problems of chronology, periodization, and cultural attribution of petroglyphs, as well as their interpretation are the most complex and debatable in the archaeology of rock art (Sher, 1980; Guy, 1995; Bednarik, 2001; Molodin, 2009; Savinov, 2021). In general, the interpretation of rock art comes down to solving two fundamental issues: the definition of chronology and the disclosure of semantics. In the process of studying petroglyphs, such concepts are used as: figurative invariants, plan of expression, content plan, mythopoetic formulas (mythologemes), art traditions, and pictorial series. At the same time, petroglyphs are considered as an example of ancient folklore (Savinov, 2021:240; Sher, 1980:170–287). Documentation is the means of registering the changing state of an objectdsite with rock art as a cultural landscape, including its archaeological, ethnographic and natural components. The purpose of documentation is to register the current state of the object. The ideal type of monument documentation is 3D models of surfaces and imagesdan interactive version or a digital reconstruction of the entire site. In practice, documentation is structured according to a hierarchical principle in accordance with the idea of the integrity of a rock art monument as a cultural landscape: complexdlocal areadpictorial surfacedimage. Important types of scientific documentation are also graphic or multimedia reconstructions of the destroyed parts of monuments, based on reliable data from archaeological research. Along with other documentary materials, such reconstructions make it possible to successfully solve many management problems of creating a tourist site on the basis of a fine monument that meets all known safety and environmental standards, as well as for the conservation and use of monuments in the development of conservation plans, excursion routes, landscaping and transformation to an open-air museum in national parks. There are contact and non-contact methods of copying petroglyphs from rocky surfaces (Novozhenov, 2020). The first ones are related to making copies by transferring images onto transparent polymer films or by tracing on oil-soaked tracing paper, or rice or cotton long-fiber paper by stuffing (stamping) technique, and involve direct contact with a rocky surface, while the second ones are
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focused on digital ways to input and process images using photo-video cameras or digital scanners, lidars and thermal imagers without any contact with the surface on which the images are located. Despite more than a century of scientific research of petroglyphs in Eurasia, there has not yet been a fast, accurate and simple way to mass copy and document images from rocks. As a result, hundreds of thousands of petroglyphs remain outside the scope of scientific analysis, are not published, and very often are simply destroyed as a result of anthropogenic impact, natural causes or disasters. A huge corpus of unique historical sources in Central Asia for example (according to our estimatesdat least a million different images) is still inaccessible to researchers. The dating of rock art remains a top priority in rock art archaeology. The main methods of classifying and determining the age of petroglyphs are based on comparative analogies with dated artifacts from archaeological sites. On the basis of sub-regional chronological schemes, the periodization of the rock art of the continent has only began to take shape (Malmer, 1981; Anati, 1977; Sher, 1980). Subjects such as wagons, chariots or certain types of weapons are dated on the basis of their limited practical existence in very specific historical periods (Novozhenov, 2012, 2020; O’Sallivan, 2021). The study of surfaces with overlapping younger images with more ancient ones, the so-called palimpsests, allows to isolate in petroglyphs images of different periods. Cave paintings of the Franco-Cantabrian region of the Paleolithic era in the European part of the continent are fairly well dated (Pettitt and Pike, 2007). Cave paintings in Central Asia (or engravings on open surfaces of the Upper Paleolithic), with the exception of rock paintings in the Shulgan Tash cave in Bashkiria and the grottoes of Shakhty in the Pamirs, have not yet been discovered. Despite some similarities in the repertoire and themes of the murals, the currently known materials do not allow to speak of any connections between the western and eastern centers of cave art on the Eurasian continent in the Stone Age. The paintings of several grottoes discovered in the south of Central Asia are considered the earliest: the grottoes of Shakhty I and II are located in the Eastern Pamirs (Tadjikistan) and are among the highest monuments of cave art in the world. The lithics industry here shows that the grottoes could be a short-term shelter of the Mesolithic era. On the contrary, the possibility of human habitation in the shallow rocky canopies of the Zarautsoy Rock Paintings in the Kugitang mountains (Uzbekistan) is excluded, and the drawings are open for viewing from the outside. The paintings are monochrome, made with red-brown mineral paint. The repertoire is limited to images of wild animals and anthropomorphic figures in hunting scenes, as well as complex schematic figures or objects. There have been assumptions about the Paleolithic dating of some sites in Mongolia (Rashan Khaad) (Novgorodova, 1984; Jacobson-Tepfer, 2020), however, they are still not supported by significant evidence and remain an assumption. The rock art of the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age (approximately 4th-3rd mill. BCE) remains poorly understood, although a significant number of images may date from this time, when proto-urban and urban culture flourished in the settled agricultural regions of Asia; for example, rock carvings in the so-called bi-triangled style, some images of Bactrian camels, carts pulled by oxen, etc. The period of the Middle and Late Bronze Age (2nddthe beginning of the 1st mill. BCE) became the time of the widest distribution of rock art and the time of its heyday. Paintings on closed surfaces are less common, and engravings on open rocks from this time dominate. Along with traditional animal and hunting scenes, scenes of pastoral, military and ritual human activities with a corresponding variety of realities occupy an important place in the subject of rock art. The objects depicted in petroglyphs (transportdhorse-drawn chariots, weapons, household items) are well recognizable and find many archaeological parallels, which makes it possible to identify cultural and chronological pictorial traditions. Their ranges generally agree with the distribution map of the archaeological cultures of the Bronze Age of Eurasia and sometimes clearly reflect the direction of subregional connections and external impulses. In the rock art of this era, together with realistic characters, fantastic anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images, solar symbols and astral signs are created, indicating the existence of a developed mythology, cult and ritual practice of the pastoral and agricultural tribes of the continent, obviously associated with Indo-European (Indo-Iranian) mythology (Kuzmina, 2010). Having finally developed in the Bronze Age, the tradition of rock art continued to develop in subsequent historical periods as an important element of the culture of the successive ancient tribes and peoples of the continent. The vast majority of rock art sites of the Early Iron Age (late 9th-8th cent. BCEd2nd cent. CE) are an integral part of the locations of petroglyphs of the previous historical period; murals of this time have not been identified, but petroglyphs carved on closed rock surfaces are known. Locations of Early Iron Age petroglyphs are common in all landscape zones where rock carvings are found, but their range is wider than in the Bronze Age, due to greater territorial development of middle and high mountains. The most significant difference in the content of rock art is the return to animal and hunting themes, which reflects profound changes in the economy, social structure and ideology. Many pictorial traditions of this era are convincingly identified due to the relatively good knowledge of archaeological cultures, the abundance of pictorial analogies to petroglyphs in dated art products from archaeological complexes, as well as the presence of narrative sources. Fine traditions and styles are distinguished that have a transcontinental, Eurasian distribution (e.g., the style of Deer stones, the Saka-Scythian animal style). Another important feature of the rock art of early nomads is the activity in the transformation of works of art from previous eras (renovation, alteration and overlapping of ancient drawings), caused both by the desire to assert their own aesthetics and cultural self-identification, and by the real conditions of frequent change of habitats and the permanent process of landscape development. Medieval rock art (2ndd16th cent. CE) is marked by significant changes associated with the spread of statehood (primarily TurkicMongolian), writing and world religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Manicheism and Islam. Two complementary directions coexist in rock art: secular, associated with nomadic tradition, heroic epic, military aesthetics and tribal (ethnic) symbols and religious, due to missionary activities, the adaptation of traditional holy places to new confessions. A common innovation for both areas is the organic combination of figurative visual activity with the creation of written (epigraphic) texts of various contents.
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In the territory of Eurasia, rock art of the Middle Ages heroized the image of a warrior-rider (often with a banner), and images of the ancestral tamgas of the Turkic tribes form the main elements of the rock art of this era, propagandistic in content. Among the late manifestations of the Eurasian phenomenon of rock art are the pictorial traditions of the modern indigenous peoples of Central AsiadKazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmens, Khakasses, Tuvans and Uzbeks as well as Western Mongols (Oirat, or Dzhungar traditions 17th–18th cent.). Figurative activity on the rocks faded away in the industrial era (second half of the 19th–20th cent.), but among the populations that preserve forms of traditional economy and life, it continues to exist to this day.
Interpretation: Typology, Structure, Functionality and Deciphering of Content The main types of landscapes in which rock art monuments are common are desert-steppe plains, small hills (up to 200 m), low (from 200 to 1500 m), medium (1500–2500 m) and high (more than 2500 m) mountains. In addition, rock art occurs on closed rock surfacesdcave, grotto, canopy; open surfaces of sedimentary rocksdshales, carbonate rocks, and open surfaces of intrusive rocksdgranites, diorites, etc. As cultural landscapes, rock art monuments are distinguished by a wide variety of types in terms of relief form, the nature of the substrate, the area of the occupied territory, the structure of functional zoning, the composition of cultural components, the number, as well as the historical and artistic representativeness of petroglyphs. At the same time, two main types of monuments can be distinguished: small and large (Rogozhinsky and Novozhenov, 2018; Novozhenov, 2020). Small ones are monuments limited in area with separate open surfaces of rocks/boulders or closed surfaces of grottoes/canopies with a relatively small number (up to several hundred) of images (engravings or paintings), mainly related to one historical era. The physical dimensions of the monument are limited in relief so that they can be perceived as a whole as a structure-forming dominant part of the cultural landscape. Large monuments cover landscapes of considerable area, in which rock carvings are associated with various forms/elements of relief (plain, bottom or slopes of a valley, mountain, dike), inscribed on surfaces of various types; they belong to several historical periods and characterize various traditions of rock art. Such monuments are located in the foothills of the main mountain systems of Central Asia, in Eastern Turkestan, Altai, Inner Mongolia, Pamir, Tibet and further south. In the Avestan Hymn to Anahita (Ardvi Sura), the patroness of cattle, it is noted that sacrifices and rituals of her veneration should be conducted on the banks of a river or in the mountains [Avesta, Yasht 5]. Accumulations of rock art were found in such places throughout Asia. Together with numerous monuments of other types (necropoles, settlements, etc.), such sites form complexes united by an internal functional structure. The structure of these rock art sites is comprised of open-air temples composed of main sections with the most archaic multifigure pictorial surfaces and cultic content compositions (so-called altars of the site), and peripheral ones depicting hunting, as well as other scenes containing animals and symbols. Such petroglyphic accumulations with large multifigure compositions are adjacent to spacious areas which always have a pronounced acoustic echo effect. It is noteworthy that such an acoustic feature is recorded on many pictorial monuments with petroglyphs among the Native Americans of North America, which confirms the universal communicative function of these monuments (Garfinkel and Waller, 2012:37–60).
Altars (Fig. 15) Researchers of rock art identify the most archaic altar places in the topography of petroglyph’s sitesdkind of open-air temples, both in terms of natural and ecological conditions and in the content of multi-figure compositions in such places. Obviously, these are the altars of these sanctuaries, which distinguish any temple in the classical religious-dogmatic sense from any other place of worship. The petroglyphs of the Tamgaly (South Kazakhstan) and Kangzhiashmienzi (Xinjiang, China) sanctuaries unambiguously show some ritual actions. Here figures of sun-headed, two-headed anthropomorphic creatures are depicted surrounded by dancing mummers, obviously performing some kind of ritual act. Moreover, the act of creation itself on the rocks, on the mountain, undoubtedly had a magical meaning and was itself a miraculous ritual, similar in its semantic significance and emotional impact to the sacrifice.
Altars for Sacrifice (Fig. 16) Obviously, along with cult worship scenes, there were special placesdstones for the sacrificial rite. They could be large with convenient horizontally located surfaces, like a table, special stones or slabs, on which the bloody ceremony of sacrificing and the separation of significant parts of the body of the sacrificial animal or even a human being took place. Probably, such altar stones should have been located within the sacred zones of the sanctuaries (rock art site) and marked/decorated uniquely. Similar surfaces with small rounded cup-shaped dimples are quite common in petroglyphs of Scandinavia, Altai, Karakorum etc. (Kubarev, 2010; Kalhoro, 2011:79–96).
Functionality Rock art sanctuaries established and used petroglyphic channels of communication by the members of the clan, with a series of pictures as a tradition that, like any information system, influenced the participants in various social events. These events included theatrical mysteries, ritual sacrifices, Bacchic orgies, and initiation rites, all available and known ways of influencing human consciousness.
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Fig. 15 Altars of Rock Art Sanctuaries. 1; 2; 3dKangjiashmientzy, Xinjiang, China. Photo and drawing (Qi and Wang, 2008); 4; 5dTamgaly, Kazakh Steppe. Photo by author.
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Fig. 16 Altars for sacrifice, Mirki, South Kazakhstan. 1dDumbbell-shaped signs, pits, circles in the form of separate pairs of wheels on the axles. Map of Journey between Worlds; 2dAltar for sacrifice with pits. Photos by author.
The main moderator of this events was the Shaman, probably the leader of the clan. The obvious goal of these rituals was the formation of the clan’s own identity, the implementation of the main idea of friend or foe, the impact on its members in order to form the correct public opinion, which, in turn, was generated by the elders of the clans, priests-shamans and other leaders of these communities. The Vedic and Indo-Iranian traditions describe in detail some of the rituals: rajasuyadascension to Heaven, ashvamedhadanimal sacrifices, above all horses. It seems that part of these rituals took place in petroglyphic sanctuaries, which most optimally provide the intermediary function of direct contact with Heaven and the opportunity to ascend to it. This meditative function of the sanctuary was combined with the perception of it as a place for sacrificedthe most important element of any ritual and mythological system, which in later periods took shape in stable religious canons and dogmas (Kristiansen, 2010). The functions of such sanctuaries were: teaching, information, education, entertainment. It is also noteworthy that these sanctuaries-temples could be used by different social groups and clans, since they were open for viewing and were not specially guarded. A special place is occupied by monuments of rock art, integrated into the modern religious and cult practice of the indigenous population of the Asian part of the continent. As a rule, rock carvings on these monuments do not have independent cult significance, but are included as significant components in the system of revered cultural and natural objects united by religious tradition or Holy placesdaulie. Some of the holy places known today with revered objects of rock art in Muslim Asia are associated with the cult of Caliph Ali and his horse Dul-dul. In connection with this cult, a relatively small circle of images was selected from the vast repertoire of ancient petroglyphs: a horse, a horse’s hoof or figures resembling a hoof in shape (for example, the arcuate horns of a goat), as well as some others, including prints of the foot or palm and cup-shaped recesses.
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In some cases, revered objects are rocks or individual blocks with anthropomorphic images and/or inscriptions of the lamaist cult of the 17th–18th century, as well as rock carvings associated with characters of the pre-Muslim ancient Turkic pantheon and Buddhism. An important feature of these rock art sites is that messages (pictures and compositions), the images of communication themselves, developed on a single miraculous mythological basis, which stems from the traditional economy and the mythical-poetic nature of perception, surrounding the world of ancient people. The stages of this evolution are recorded by the iconographic and stylistic changes in the imagesdthe pictorial series, styles and art traditions. It is unlikely that this has been a fast process. In the art history of the North Eurasian and Central Asian rock art several main art traditions stood out. These were directly related to key stages in the history of the local population: the Pre-Okunevo and Okunevo fine art tradition for Saiano-Altai and South Siberia (Kagulty and Minusinsk styles) in the 4th-3rd mill. BCE; the Yamnaya-Afanasyevo fine art tradition in the 3rd mill. BCE (including statues and megalithic traditions); the Andronovo in the 2nd mill. BCE: the early Andronovo (SeimaTurbino style) and the Andronovo proper (late, classic stage and its bright ornamental tradition); the Karasuk or BegazyDandybai in the (15th) -12th -7th cent. BCE; the Saka in the 9th cent. BCEd2nd cent. CE (Scythian-Saka animal style), as well as the unique Turkic (5th–8th cent. CE) and any local ethnic art traditions (14th–19th cent). Since the petroglyphs themselves or pictorial series/traditions and compositions in them are only part of any communication channel, it is important not only to decipher them, but also to try to reconstruct the ways of their impact on the community within the framework of existing mythological concepts. In other words, the message in the form of pictures always acts as part of a certain ritual, tradition or ceremony. It is impossible to read any image without reconstructing the entire communication channel in which it is used. The development of petroglyphic traditions demonstrates specific economic and cultural adaptation forms: wide regional contacts, co-existence of various cultures (kind of multiculturalism) and ethnic groups and predominance of mobile forms of animal husbandry over settled agriculture. In return, the main economic and cultural activities of the local population were oriented toward the permanent extensive development of the landscape. The content and artistic form of this tradition of rock art reflects the mutual influence and cultural synthesis of settled agricultural and mobile pastoralist cultures. Rock art sites will be considered as markers of migrations and relocations of the ancient inhabitants of Eurasia due to their geographical position fixed in space and time on the motionless rocks. The territorial distribution of similar signs, images, styles, same pictorial series, artistic traditions and, as a result, similar mythological concepts, beliefs, and rituals may indicate the geographical movements of their carriers. In turn, the determination of the chronological position of the distinguished graphic series, traditions, styles, images, and their comparison with archaeological finds, allows to date eventual migrations and population movements. Rock art sites have become an important element of mobile culture and the entire communication infrastructure that has been forming (Fig. 17). Population genetics today confirmed the assumptions of archaeologists about the possibility of a very long-distance migration of the carriers of Yamnaya (Pit’s Graves) traditions (late 4th-3rd mill. BCE) within the Eurasian steppes (Mallory et al., 2019). The mineral wealth of the Ural-Kazakhstan and Altai region naturally identified it as one of the main copper ore, tin and other metals production centers, as well as a site for smelting bronze objects of complex shapes. These activities engaged the inhabitants of the site in a wide network of cultural relations and migrations of Trans-Eurasian scale from China to the Balkans and back (Kuzmina, 2010). A necessary condition for the emergence and maintenance of such communications was the domestication of camels and horses, as well as the development of land transport (Piggott, 1992).
Deciphering Content The concept of pictorial mythologemes combines such definitions as mythopoetic formulas, semantic knots and blocks, mythological plots and mythologemes and reflects the separation of a group of interrelated figures in the total mass of images, the association of which can be based on a certain narrative structure or mythological plot, sometimes suspected or even unknown.
Fig. 17 Scene of clan migration, wagons, hunting and animals. Baikonur River valley, Kazakh Steppe (Betpakdala Desert). Bronze Age (Beg. of 2nd mill. BCE). Sketch by author.
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Prof. Yakob Sher proposed a number of such plots as: Grandmother of Universe; horses at the World tree (Master of horses); Earthly and heavenly chariots (carts); Goad-attribute of a Deity (Sher, 1980: 256–287). Devlet and Devlet (2005) identified 16 basic mythological subjects presented in the petroglyphs of Asia. At the heart of each such plot lies one or another mythologeme, which, subject to its repetition, turns into a myth. The extent to which each of them corresponds to samples of verbal art and ritual practice that actually existed can be judged by distant ethnographic correspondences. As the earliest example of folklore, myth is not limited to repetition or a set of some formulas. This is a collection of myths, epic works, historical traditions and genealogies. Each of these works has its own beginning and end, development, forming some kind of narrative structuredsome kind of developing plot. In petroglyphic complexes, a single mythologeme can reflect only a part of a large, extensive pictorial text, the beginning and end of which can only be guessed. The most recent (early medieval) images are already simply narrative and most likely have memorative and visitor content or represent a kind of record of some important events in the life of their creators (Savinov, 2021: 245).
Summary and Future Directions As an immovable object of world cultural heritage, petroglyphs cannot be comprehended outside of their natural and cultural environment, archaeological, historical and religious content, and therefore must be studied by interdisciplinary methods as unique complex monuments, both of the material and spiritual culture of mankind. No matter how different the reasons for creating rock art, their repertoire, esthetic merits, inner content, significance and role in the life of the individuals and groups that created them, the very nature of rock art and its wide distribution speak of the importance of this cultural phenomenon in the history of mankind. At the same time, the wide variety of sites, and the unequal chronological and historical representativeness of rock art areas in the world testify to the versatility of this phenomenon and the specificity of its manifestations. Ancient pictorial monuments or sanctuaries, in comparison with burial structures, are more complete in terms of preserved narrative structures, since they are less susceptible to the destructive influence of time. Petroglyphic communication channels are interconnected by a single narrative idea, both within the boundaries of a separate surface and by the general internal topography of these monuments. The peculiarity of such communication centers lies in the fact that they functioned in different historical epochs, while with the change of epochs the message of such communication changed, but not the communication channel itself. For a more effective impact of such communication channels on fellow tribesmen, systems of various rituals, sacrifices, customs and systems of taboo were formed. Of the many hundreds of monuments known in Asia, only a few have been partially published, in an abbreviated version, due to known limitations in printing production. With extremely rare exceptions, not a single monument in Central Asia is properly documented. The lack of a verified dating technique and the general state of documentation of the sites make it difficult to carry out an analysis. In particular, the dating of the painting of grottoes and other ancient monuments needs additional justification. The typology and dating of petroglyphs remains poorly developed, especially for Stone Age sites. There is pressing need to develop relative methods (stratigraphic methods) for dating the images. Important toward developing dating methods is the excavation of archaeological objects close to rocks with petroglyphs, especially if the excavated artifacts can be radiocarbon dated (AMS). An additional dating method could be based on lichenometry, that is, dating using the size of lichen colonies on the rock surfaces. New digital methods for documentation and creating 3D models, Big Databases and portals with Artificial Intelligence image recognition systems for petroglyphs could lead to new levels of documentation, classification and typology of sites, images and compositions, styles, iconography changes and art traditions.
See Also: Classification of Archaeological Sites.
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Jacobson-Tepfer, Esther, 2020. The Anatomy of Deep Time: Rock Art and Landscape in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia (Elements in Environmental Humanities). University Press, Cambridge. Kalhoro, Zulfiqar Ali, 2010. Rock art of Islamabad. Ancient Sindh 11, 27–35. Kholmatov, Azbiddin N., 2018. New rock paintings of Beklarsoy. Theor. Appl. Sci. 11, 153–156. Khujanazarov, Mukhiddin, 2018. Sarmishsay: Rock Art, Scientific Research. Nurfayz Nashriyotti, Tashkent (in Uzbek). Kilunovskaya, Marina E., Semenov, Vladimir A., Semenov, Aleksei V., Chadamba, Larisa D., 2020. Petroglyphes of Tuva. In: Jacobson-Tepfer, Esther, Novozhenov, Victor A. (Eds.), Rock Art Chronicles of Golden Steppe: From Karatau to Altai, vol. 2. UNESCO Center for Rapprochement of cultures, Almaty, pp. 214–259. Kristiansen, Kristian, 2010. Rock art and religion: journey of the sun. In: Fredell, Åsa, Criado, Felipe, Kristiansen, Kristian (Eds.), Representation and Communications: Creating an Archaeological Matrix of Late Prehistoric Rock Art. Oxbow, Oxford, pp. 93–115. Kubarev, Vladimir D., 2010. Petroglyphs of Kalbak Tash 1 (Russian Altai). IAE SB RAS, Novosibirsk, 444 p. (in Russian). Kubarev, Vladimir D., Tsewendorzh, Dadmyi, Jacobson, Esther, 2005. Petroglyphs of Tsagaan-Salaa and Baga-Oygur (Mongolian Altai). IAE SB RAS, NovosibirskdUlan BatordEugene. Kuzmina, Elena E., 2010. The Background of the Great Silk Road: Dialogue of Cultures EuropedAsia. KomKniga, Moscow (in Russian). Lewis-Williams, David J., 2002. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. Thames & Hudson, London. Lhote, Henry, 2006. A la découverte des fresques du Tassili. Arthaud, Paris. Lobanova, Nadezhda V., 2019. Petroglyphs of Karelia. Northern pilgrim, Petrozavodsk (in Russian). Lorblanchet, Michel, 1995. Les Grottes Ornées de la Préhistoire: Nouveaux Regards. Editions France, Paris. Mallory, James Patrick, Dybo, Anna, Balanovsky, Oleg, 2019. The impact of genetics research on archaeology and linguistics in Eurasia. Russ. J. Genet. 55 (12), 1472–1487. Malmer, Mats P., 1981. A Chorological Study of North European Rock Art. Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm. MANP, 1994; 1997; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2005(2); 2007. Materialien zur Archäologie der Nordgebiete Pakistans, vols. 1–8. Mainz. Molodin, Vaycheslav I., 2009. Rock art of North Asia: problems of study. Archaeol. Ethnogr. Anthropol. Eurasia 66–79. Nelson, Sarah Milledge, 1993. Archaeology of Korea. University Press, Cambridge. Novgorodova, Eleonora A., 1984. Petroglyphes of Mongolia. Nauka, Moscow (in Russian). Novozhenov, Victor A., 2012. Miracle of Communication and the Earliest Wheeled Transport of Eurasia. Ed. by Elena Kuzmina. Taus, Moscow. Novozhenov, Victor A., 2020. The Rock Art Chronicles of Golden Steppe: Model of Communication in Antiquity and Middle Ages, vol. 1. 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Rock Art in East Asia, 2019. In: Clottes, Jean, Smith, Benjamen (Eds.), A Thematic Study. ICOMOS, Paris. Rock Art Monuments of Central Asia: Public Participation, Management, Conservation, Documentation, 2004. Iskander, Almaty. Rogozhinski, Aleksey Ye., Novozhenov, Victor A., 2018. Cultural Landscapes With Petroglyphs of Central Asia: Questions and Answers. IICAS, Samarkand. Rozwadowski, Andrzej, 2020. Rock art as a source of history in central Asia. In: Encyclopédie des historiographies: Afriques, Amériques, Asies: Volume 1: sources et genres historiques (Tome 1 et Tome 2). Presses de l’Inalco, Paris, pp. 1520–1535. Savinov, Dmitry G., 2021. On the way to revealing the content of rock art monuments. In: Ancient Art in the Context of Cultural and Historical Processes in Eurasia: To the 300th Anniversary of the Scientific Discovery of the Tomsk Pisannitsa. KRIPKiPRO, Kemerovo, pp. 238–249. Sher, Yakov A., 1980. Petroglyphs of Central Asia. Science, Moscow (in Russian). 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Shell Middens Harry K. Robsona, Niklas Hausmannb, and Nicky Milnera, a Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, United Kingdom; and b Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), Mainz, Germany © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Definition and Terminology History of Research Chronology and Distribution General Research Themes The Exploitation of Aquatic Resources and Social Complexity Reconstructing Palaeoenvironments Through the Implementation of a Range of Methodologies Key Issues Differential Preservation, Degradation, Disturbance, Destruction and Visibility of Shell Middens Misidentification and Misinterpretation Appropriate Sampling Strategies Calculating Rates of Accumulation, Processes of Formation and Deformation of Individual Shell Middens Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References Further Reading
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Shell middens are intentional anthropogenic shell accumulations, which have been, and continue to be, constructed by humans worldwide. They are a unique type of deposit and are typically found on or near the coast as well as in lacustrine and riverine settings. When calcium carbonate leaches from the mollusks, it combines with groundwater often creating an alkaline environment, favorable for preserving organic materials. Such accumulations can inform us about the relationship between communities and mollusk populations and help us reconstruct past ecologies. This entry defines shell middens, synthesizes their research history and describes the general research themes, key issues and directions for future research.
Abstract Shell middens are intentional anthropogenic accumulations in which marine or terrestrial mollusks play an important role. In many such accumulations, shell remains provide the structure for all or some of the deposits and thus provide a preservation environment predominantly influenced by the chemical buffer and shelter the hard carbonate mollusks provide. For these reasons, such accumulations contain valuable records of not only shellfish consumption and ecology but also a variety of other archaeological materials that would not be preserved otherwise.
Introduction Shell middens are “intentional anthropogenic shell accumulations” (Balbo et al., 2011, 147), which have been, and continue to be, constructed by humans worldwide. They are a unique type of archaeological deposit and are typically found on or near the coast, including estuaries, fjords, inlets, islets and lagoons, as well as in lacustrine and riverine settings from subarctic to tropical (Fig. 1) latitudes (Álvarez et al., 2011; Andersen, 1989). Shell middens are often located in prominent positions and are easily identified and accessed in the terrestrial landscape. They tend to form when communities procure and process mollusks for bait, consumption, trade, raw materials, and to manufacture artifacts. As deposits, shell middens have increased porosity, permeability and alkalinity. Briefly, calcium carbonate leaches from the mollusks and combines with weakly acidic groundwater, creating an alkaline environment (Stein, 1992). This acts as a chemical buffer that is favorable for the preservation of organic remains, providing high-resolution
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Fig. 1 Shell middens in El Oro, southwestern Ecuador. The deposits are exploited by the local population as a source of lime for construction and road surfacing. They date to the Ecuadorian late Formative (mid-1st millennium cal BC) and Ecuadoran Regional Developmental (3rd century AD) periods. Photographs by E. Currie in 1976 and 1980.
sequences for examining: (i) the exploitation of aquatic resources and social complexity; (ii) their antiquity in relation to human dispersal and group diversification; and (iii) palaeoenvironments (Álvarez et al., 2011, 1–3). Given their frequency in some world regions, they provide “opportunities for comparative analysis of site locations and contents, including coastal sites that lack shells, and the investigation and interpretation of socio-economic trends in subsistence and settlement mobility” (Bailey and Hardy, 2021, 6). Underwater investigation of these deposits is in its infancy. Nevertheless, submerged shell middens are being recognized (e.g., Astrup et al., 2021).
Overview Definition and Terminology Since communities worldwide have constructed shell middens for millennia, a number of labels to describe such deposits exist, likely influenced by the evident variation in terms of content, form, function, location, origin, size and use. For instance, the mid-7th to late 6th millennium cal BC shell middens of the Muge and Sado valleys in southwestern Portugal often contain inhumation burials interspersed with marine mollusks (Fig. 2E), attaining heights of 5 m (Gutiérrez-Zugasti et al., 2011). In contrast, inhumation burials are rarely recovered from the somewhat contemporaneous, mid-6th to late 5th millennium cal BC, “Køkkenmøddinger” (Danish for “shell middens”, literally “kitchen waste heaps”) located in northern and northeastern Denmark (Fig. 2B). Here, they tend to be elongated/oval in form and can stretch as far as 750 m along prehistoric coastlines (Andersen, 2000). In Japan (Fig. 2D), many of the “Kaizuka” (Japanese for “shell midden(s)”) distributed throughout the Kanto region dating from the Middle (mid-4th to mid-3rd millennium cal BC) to Late (mid-3rd to late 2nd millennium cal BC) J omon periods, possess a “horseshoe” shape and are often associated with pit-dwellings as well as human and dog inhumation burials (Habu et al., 2011), while the “Sambaquis” (Brazilian for “shell mounds”, derived from the Tupi language) of southeastern Brazil (Fig. 2A), which primarily date from the late 3rd to late 1st millennium cal BC, were used for both domestic and mortuary purposes (Gaspar et al., 2008). Elsewhere, the shell middens on the Farasan Islands off the southwestern coast of Saudi Arabia, are largely devoid of anthropogenic materials and features despite their height of 3 m and above (Fig. 2F). They were constructed between the mid-5th and mid-3rd millennium cal BC (Hausmann et al., 2019). Although shell middens are usually associated with coastlines, they are increasingly being recognized in lacustrine and riverine settings as well, such as the late 4th millennium cal BC shell midden of Rin¸n¸ukalns in northern Latvia (Fig. 3) (Brinker et al., 2020). Since the terminology to describe “shell accumulations” varies throughout the literature, for instance shell-bearing habitation site, shell-bearing midden site, shell-matrix site, shell mound, shell midden and shell midden site have all been used, often interchangeably (Claassen, 1998), some clarity is required. In this contribution a shell midden is defined as a particular type of “archaeological site” in which at least 50% of the deposits are composed of marine or terrestrial mollusks or their fragments, including a continuous horizon over 10 m2 (Andersen, 2000). Despite this, it is worth noting that “shell middens are not necessarily a discrete and distinctive type of deposit or site, but rather one element in a range of deposits” (Bailey and Hardy, 2021, 4) in which sand, soil and shell as well as other anthropogenic materials and features, including hearths, inhumations, pits, post-holes and pit-dwellings should be considered (e.g., Gaspar et al., 2008). Equally, not every shell deposit has the function of a “midden”, but instead can be a highly valued construction related to inhumation burials or other symbols of importance for which the term “midden” would be inadequate.
History of Research The early study of shell middens was largely influenced by prehistoric research in Denmark, including excavations undertaken in the mid-19th century. In turn, the term Køkkenmøddinger was coined, spreading internationally (Morlot, 1861). Although this research provided a common name, the phenomenon was already widespread and had some recognition in English, German and Spanish, among other languages (Morlot, 1861). The following sections will primarily focus on research undertaken in Denmark.
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Fig. 2 A selection of shell middens and accumulations found worldwide. (A) Pre-Columbian (mid-to late 1st millennium cal BC) Sambaqui, Cubatão 1, Santa Catarina, southeastern Brazil. The shell midden is located on the Palmital River and measures ca. 10 m high by ca. 80 m long. (B) Overview of one of the trenches through the Late Mesolithic-Early Neolithic (late 5th to early 4th millennium cal BC) Visborg Køkkenmødding, northeastern Jutland, Denmark. Note the curvature of the shell heap. (C) Modern shell accumulation in the intertidal zone at Tai O on the western side of Lantau Island, Hong Kong. Since a local oyster fishery is present in the area, it was likely formed by shore processes. (D) Preserved section of the Natsushima Kaizuka at Meiji University Museum, Japan. Although the majority of Jomon shell middens date from the Early through Late Jomon periods (late 6th to late 2nd millennium cal BC), Natsushima dates to the Initial Jomon (late 9th to late 6th millennium cal BC). (E) Exposed section at the Late Mesolithic (early to mid-6th millennium cal BC) shell midden, Cabeço da Amoreira, Muge, southwestern Portugal. (F) One of the largest Neolithic (late-4th millennium cal BC) shell middens, KM1057, in Khur Maadi bay, Farasan Islands, southwestern Saudi Arabia. (A) Photograph by N. Hausmann in 2014; (B) Photograph by H. K. Robson in 2018; (C) Photograph by H. K. Robson in 2011; (D) Photograph by H. K. Robson in 2018; (E) Photograph by H. K. Robson in 2013; (F) Photograph by H. K. Robson in 2009.
Fig. 3 The freshwater shell midden of Rinnukalns is located on an outflow of Lake Burtnieks, the River Salaca, northern Latvia. The prehistoric levels are dated to the late 4th millennium cal BC and have been disturbed by medieval inhumation burials. Photograph by M. Kalnins in 2017.
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Although the discovery and interpretation of shell middens as archaeological deposits is often attributed to Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae (Álvarez et al., 2011), based in part on a diary entry made in September 1850 and the subsequent characterization of the prehistory of Denmark (Worsaae, 1859) that gained international prominence at the time, this is probably not the actual or only origin of shell midden research. Worsaae identified that the shells themselves were anthropogenic, but it was already known before then that they were part or even the very fabric of archaeological sites. As early as 1832 artifacts were recovered from the Krabbesholm I shell midden in northern Jutland, Denmark. However, it was the biologist and archaeology enthusiast Johannes Japetus Smith Steenstrup who coined the term Køkkenmøddinger. Whilst initially doubtful of the anthropogenic nature of the shell middens themselves, Steenstrup had been aware of their archaeological value since 1837 (Petersen, 2015). To this end, and as a result of Steenstrup’s lectures on shell middens at the Royal Danish Academy, The First Kitchen Midden Commission was formed, along with the scientists Worsaae and Johan Georg Forchhammer. Remarkably, Steenstrup wrote to Charles Darwin in April 1852, emphasizing the similarities between the Danish shell middens and those found elsewhere: “For the last years I have been much engaged with the observations, I have made in company with Professor Forchhammer and Mr. Worsaae, inspector antiquitatum danicarum, of the remarquable mounds of shells, which are found on our coasts, and which were formerly regarded as raised beaches, but which we now with certainty can prove to be leavings from the meals of the eldest inhabitants. Likewise as in the mound of shells, derivating from the wild Indian tribes savages in America, we found these intermixed with haches, knives and other instruments of flint and bone, fragments of pottery, and many bones of quadrupeds, birds and fishes, which had been eaten [.] I pointed out at the meeting of the scandinavian naturalists held at Stockholm last Summer, and there I also stated the result, that might be got, if similar researches of the remaining Indian heapes in America or in New Holland, cet. might be undertaken. I have already examined more than 30 of these ancient monuments, derivating from the eldest inhabitants and more than 3000 years back. More than 4000 bones and fragments of bones of quadrupeds I have already examined, and more than 300 of birds, many thousand of fishes.d Trough these and other researches it is proved, that the border of Dennemarck to that time consisted of many small Islands, which now are connected with the more continental parts of the Land, and therefore we now find shellheaps at a distance of 4–6 english miles from the coast” (Darwin Correspondence Project, https:// www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId¼letters/DCP-LETT-1478A.xml). Based, in part, on this letter, it would seem that Steenstrup was already familiar with the shell middens of other continents (i.e., Australia and the US). The question therefore arises whether the interpretation of the Danish shell middens as archaeological “sites”, is based on the recorded observations that seafarers made of people worldwide who actively used shell middens. Darwin wrote about the shell middens in Chile and the local fishers who used them as early as 1839 (Darwin et al., 1839). In a subsequent publication (Darwin, 1845) he elaborates on the findings of others in Australia (George Frankland and Captain Gray) and New Zealand who attribute shell middens to the local populations. Darwin’s source in New Zealand is unclear but Joseph Banks pointed out the antiquity of Maori shell middens as early as November 1769 (Banks, 2012). Steenstrup himself writes to Peter Wilhelm Lund in South America who responds in 1852, agreeing that the results align with his observations on shell middens there (Petersen, 2015). Indeed, these details indicate that Steenstrup knew exactly the types of deposits The First Kitchen Midden Commission were investigating. Around the same time Lardner Vanuxem published on oyster “shell deposits” near the Atlantic coastline of the US (Vanuxem, 1843), while Ronald Campbell Gunn describes his findings on recent “shell heaps” along the coastlines of Tasmania (Gunn, 1846). Previously, Pehr Kalm saw links between abandoned North American shell middens and the indigenous population as early as 1748 (Kalm, 1770). Overall, the “discovery” of the Danish shell middens can therefore be regarded as a description of a phenomenon, which was already known, but by an internationally recognized institution, the Royal Danish Academy. The summary of the commission’s results by Adolph von Morlot (1861) was of particular importance to English-speaking scholars in this regard, and led to the wider spread of the term Køkkenmøddinger (Fig. 4), which nowadays is almost exclusively used by the Danes. From here, great advances in shell midden research were made toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For instance, William Healey Dall estimated accumulation rates of shell middens in the Aleutian Islands (Dall, 1877), and Edward S. Morse excavated the Omori Kaizuka in Japan, noting the abundance of shells, their species, size changes and metrics (Morse, 1879). Shortly thereafter Isao Iijima and Chujiro Sasaki published on the Okadaira shell midden (Fig. 5), describing the recovered pottery, stone implements, worked horn and bone and molluscan fauna (Iijima and Sasaki, 1883). Furthermore, Statham (1892) calculated the quantity of mollusks in an Australian shell midden, while The Second Kitchen Midden Commission (Fig. 6) was established in 1893, which undertook a series of excavations at several Danish Køkkenmøddinger (Madsen et al., 1900). Although the focus of prehistoric research in Denmark had shifted from shell middens to wetland sites, between the 1930s and 1940s The Third Kitchen Midden Commission was formed. Similarly, a number of excavations were conducted while the publication of the Dyrholm shell midden is perhaps the most important output of these campaigns (Mathiassen et al., 1942). Over the last 60 years shell midden research has continued to grow exponentially with many new methodological approaches. Notably, Geoff Bailey has tackled the issue of distinguishing between anthropological shell middens and natural accumulations, quantified the dietary contribution of mollusks to prehistoric populations, and undertaken comparative analysis to reconstruct exploitation territories (e.g., Bailey 1975, 1978). Simultaneously, Betty Meehan studied and quantified recent shell middens, the socioeconomic patterns of their accumulation, thereby bringing a unique and useful perspective into archaeologists’ toolboxes
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Fig. 4 Harper’s Weekly dating to August 9th, 1873 showing the “shell mounds of Denmarkdbelonging to the Stone Age”. The article describes Steenstrup’s role in the designation of “raised beaches” as shell middens (in possession of H. K. Robson).
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Fig. 5 Publication of the Okadaira Kaizuka, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. The shell midden dates to the Late Jomon period (mid-3rd to late 2nd millennium cal BC) and was excavated by Isao Iijima and Chujiro Sasaki, students who received training by excavating the Omori shell midden with Edward S. Morse (in possession of H. K. Robson).
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Fig. 6 Shell middens at Fannerup (left), and next to Ørum Å (right). Both Køkkenmøddinger are located in northeastern Jutland, Denmark, and were painted by Captain Andreas Peter Madsen in 1860 and 1891. Captain Madsen was a member of The Second Kitchen Midden Commission and undertook excavations at numerous shell middens throughout Denmark. Photographs by Arnold Mikkelsen, Nationalmuseet, CC-BY-SA.
(Meehan, 1982). After a pause in Køkkenmøddinger research in Denmark, Søren H. Andersen resumed investigations in the 1960s that have continued to the present day (Andersen, 2000); some have acknowledged this research as The Fourth Kitchen Midden Commission (Kristiansen, 2002). Moreover, Hiroko Koike undertook pioneering research using sclerochronological analysis to determine individual shell gathering events and valve-pairing to determine accumulation patterns, deposition activities and site-types across a range of archaeological periods (e.g., Koike, 1979). Elsewhere, Julie K. Stein published an up-to-date account of research on shell middens, including their formational histories as well as providing procedures and analyses in their excavation and understanding (Stein, 1992). Building on their own research, Cheryl Claassen published a volume on “Shells”, and can be considered a major influence in the quantitative analysis of their remains (Claassen, 1998). Since Álvarez et al. (2011) provided a general review of research, numerous special issues or edited volumes have been published on shell middens (see Further Reading). Currently, the major themes in shell midden research focus on the “taphonomic, formational and deformational histories of archaeological deposits, materials and landscapes, and the variable impact of sea-level change” (Bailey and Hardy, 2021, 1).
Chronology and Distribution Shell middens have been constructed by communities worldwide (Fig. 7) and exhibit great variation in terms of content, form, function, location, origin, size and use (Figs. 1–3). Indeed, their age can be useful for ascertaining human dispersal and maritime adaptations as well as group diversification (Álvarez et al., 2011). Despite this, sea-level change in particular has affected the preservation and visibility of much of the Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological record, including shell middens. Whilst our current understanding is that marine mollusks have been exploited for at least 200,000 years (Álvarez et al., 2011), the majority of known archaeological shell middens date to the mid-Holocene (Bailey, 1978). Their increased visibility during this period may be partly explained by intensive coastal and marine resource exploitation or perhaps as a consequence of the 8.2 kyr cold event (though see Bicho et al., 2010). Although it has been shown that a reduction in the consumption of aquatic resources, including mollusks, took place across the agricultural transition in some world regions, notably Europe (e.g., Richards et al., 2003), elsewhere, for instance on the Korean peninsula (e.g., Crawford and Lee, 2003), shell middens continued to be constructed and in some world regions continue to form to the present day.
General Research Themes The Exploitation of Aquatic Resources and Social Complexity Initially shell midden research primarily focused on the exploitation of aquatic resources, including their dietary contribution to human diets and palaeoeconomy, while mollusks in particular were analyzed to calculate calorific values and assess their role in the subsistence economy of past societies based on the ranking of resources (Bailey, 1978). Nevertheless, it seems likely that the astonishing numbers of molluscan remains at shell middens reflect a dietary supplement and were not of primary nutritional importance (Andersen, 1989; Meehan, 1982). Subsequent research has since debunked theories concerning “the conventional view of hunter-gatherers as small, egalitarian and stable societies” (Álvarez et al., 2011, 3), showing that mollusk consumption would have sustained an ever-increasing human population and one that was sedentary prior to the agricultural transition. Despite overwhelming evidence supporting the consumption of aquatic resources at shell middens, research has often highlighted the importance of terrestrial foodstuffs to past communities. For instance, both botanical and osseous remains are frequently well-preserved and indirect evidence comes from the application of stable isotope analysis of human bone collagen in particular and the organic residue analysis of ceramics from shell middens, often demonstrating that terrestrial resources were consumed and processed (Robson, 2015).
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Fig. 7 Distribution of shell middens worldwide based on Balbo et al. (2011), Ruiz et al. (2020), Taylor and Bell (2017) and Zhao (2019), among others.
Another theme in shell midden research has been to assess site function and use. For instance, excavations at the Visborg Køkkenmødding in northeastern Jutland, Denmark, uncovered several hearths surrounded by lithics, demonstrating that flint knapping and tool production had taken place by the shell midden inhabitants (Andersen, 2001). At the Kasori Kaizuka in Japan, many cylindrical pit-dwellings were recovered which were surrounded by post-holes, while pits within and around the pit-dwellings for food storage were also identified (Robson personal observations). Moreover, by calculating the shell-to-meat-weight ratio, some have investigated the role of the so-called “megamiddens” of South Africa, showing that they had a specialized function (Parkington et al., 2021). In sum, via a combination of careful excavation and the refitting of artifacts, among other techniques, it is possible to delineate former living surfaces at shell middens (Andersen, 2000). Shell-to-meat-weight ratios and size variation of molluscan remains can also be assessed to explore the intensification of harvesting (e.g., García-Escárzaga and Gutiérrez-Zugasti, 2021) and the resilience and reliability of mollusk populations (e.g., Hausmann et al., 2021). Similarly, the use of shell middens to infer sustainable harvesting strategies that remain valid today, has recently opened up as a new avenue of research, often interlinking marine historical ecology. Evidence of diminished mollusk sizes in the UK (e.g., Thurstan et al., 2013) and the US (e.g., Rick et al., 2016) have shown the value of near-shore harvesting as opposed to trawling and archaeological evidence from shell middens provides the necessary comparative dataset. The study of shell middens resulting from clam gardens in Canada has also pointed toward the use of traditional harvesting methods that could be employed today (e.g., Toniello et al., 2019).
Reconstructing Palaeoenvironments Through the Implementation of a Range of Methodologies Reconstructing environmental change, palaeoclimate, palaeoecology and palaeotemperature has been made possible through the excavation of shell middens and subsequent analysis of mollusk remains and their carbonate shells. Depending upon individual and species-specific growth rates, their temporal resolution and span of past environmental change can range from sub-daily data to multi-centennial archives (e.g., Butler et al., 2013). Within these archives are records on changes in salinity and temperature, but also the primary productivity of the surrounding water (e.g., Estrella-Martínez et al., 2019). In the context of freshwater shell middens, they can inform us about changes in riverine systems and rainfall patterns (e.g., Gaillard et al., 2019). In turn, short-term environmental change recorded in the shells, either through geochemical records or microscopic growth increments, can be used to characterize the time of deposition of archaeological material associated with the shell in relation to seasonality (e.g., West et al., 2018). This information then lends itself to the description of site types, short-term mobility or changes in the subsistence economy. For instance, it has been shown that many Late Mesolithic-Early Neolithic (late 5th to early 4th millennium cal BC) Køkkenmøddinger in Denmark were occupied throughout much of the year based on the incremental growth line analysis of Ostrea edulis (Robson, 2015). Similarly, by ascertaining the biological ages and hinge sizes of molluscan remains, it is possible to explore the impacts of past communities on mollusk populations (e.g., Milner, 2013). Moreover, geochemical data is usually provided by oxygen isotope ratios of shell carbonate, which are linked to the ambient water temperature and salinity recorded in the shell increments (e.g., West et al., 2018).
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Key Issues Differential Preservation, Degradation, Disturbance, Destruction and Visibility of Shell Middens The preservation of shell middens can often be hindered by their location. They are prone to degradation, disturbance and destruction or indeed the subject of redeposition through human behavior. For instance, agricultural practices, notably plowing, are destroying some shell middens (e.g., the Visborg Køkkenmødding in northeastern Jutland, Denmark) (Milner, 2002), while others are being discovered and disturbed due to infrastructure-based development (e.g., the Vestre Strandalle Køkkenmødding in eastern Jutland, Denmark). Furthermore, the mollusks themselves have been extracted for use as raw materials in both agriculture (e.g., chicken feed) and construction (e.g., oyster shell aggregate) (Fig. 8) (e.g., Andersen, 1989). Added to this are the effects of coastal erosion and sea-level rise (Dobson, 2014). Between 17,000 and 6000 years ago, sea-level rise inundated ca. 22,000,000 km2 of the world’s coastlines (Dobson, 2014). Consequently, numerous shell middens on or near to prehistoric coastlines were likely submerged or exposed to coastal erosion and in some cases completely destroyed, while those further inland are likely to have been better protected. These factors have undoubtedly had an impact on their modern day distribution and explain, in part, the notable increase in their frequency during the mid-Holocene from ca. 6000 years ago (Andersen, 1989; Bailey and Hardy, 2021). Recently, however, Astrup et al. (2021) have shown that submerged shell middens exist and offer a range of techniques for future discoveries and research agendas.
Misidentification and Misinterpretation Differentiating between anthropological shell middens and natural accumulations (Fig. 2C) can prove challenging. Given the proximity of shell middens to water bodies, natural mollusk shells have often been incorporated into anthropogenic shell deposits, for instance at the Ertebølle Køkkenmødding in northern Jutland, Denmark (Andersen, 1989). Thus, excavation and post-excavation analysis have proven useful in their differentiation. One should bear in mind the presence of: (i) anthropogenic materials; (ii) evidence of shell modification; (iii) the taxa present, some of which may not have been exploited for consumption; (iv) the minimum size of shells and their use for consumption; (v) stable isotope analysis as an indicator of the environment; and (vi) radiocarbon dating to either confirm or refute the hypothesis, taking in account stratigraphical relationships (Jazwa and Mather, 2014).
Appropriate Sampling Strategies “It should be mentioned that it is rarely possible, let alone rewarding, to excavate a shell midden totally. In most cases the method is either to cut a section through the layers or sampling, both horizontal sampling across the entire area of the midden, as well as vertical column-sampling through the midden” (Andersen, 1989, 22). Shell middens tend to have extremely complex stratigraphies that are confounded by the sheer quantity of molluscan remains. This is often the result of repeated depositional events of mollusks interspersed with anthropogenic materials over a substantial period of time. For instance, more than 20–25 individual shell horizons, interpreted as “meal heaps” (Madsen et al., 1900, 25– 28), were identified at the Ertebølle Køkkenmødding in northern Jutland, Denmark, which represented a 1000-year period of use between the late 6th and late 5th millennium cal BC (Andersen and Johansen, 1986). Nevertheless, these heaps can often be identified in section or through stratigraphic analysis and column sampling. Whilst column sampling can help us understand how shell middens were formed, its deployment can also offer further research opportunities, including the diachronic analysis of molluscan and fish remains (Milner, 2002; Robson, 2015). Despite the utility of the technique, it is, however, also beneficial to sample from multiple locations from across a shell midden, ensuring that as many of the depositional events are incorporated. If mollusks are sampled from one discrete area alone, it is possible that the biometric, geochemical records and microscopic growth increments reflect a single collection episode, which will be unrepresentative of the
Fig. 8 The “Indian Shell Mound at Mound Park Hospital”, St. Petersburg, Florida, US, which attained a height of ca. 20 ft. and a circumference of 283 ft. Unfortunately, it has now been totally destroyed. The message on the back of the postcard on the left, dated December 21st, 1919, states that “the material is quarried for road building” (Mr and Mrs A. G. Hall; in possession of H. K. Robson).
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surrounding shell deposits or the shell midden as a whole. In short, the sample strategy should take into account a variety of contexts, including, for instance, molluscan remains in features (Claassen, 1998). For the majority of older seasonality studies in particular, sample size was dictated by budgetary and time constraints as well as the availability of mollusks at that time (Milner, 2002). Consequently, significant variability in sample sizes between sites exists (Robson, 2015). Claassen (1998), however, has suggested a sample size in the region of between 20 and 100 mollusks from one area alone should be obtained to examine a collection event in which the mollusks had likely been harvested at the same time, resulting in a reliable dataset. Nevertheless, cultural (e.g., heating, trampling and the movement of shells), natural (e.g., soil, water and wind) and taphonomic (e.g., abrasion, chemical conversion, dissolution, encrustation, fragmentation and perforation) processes should be considered when both sampling mollusks and analyzing and interpreting shell middens more generally (Claassen, 1998; Stein, 1992). Regardless of the sampling methodology, one is, however, likely dealing with a fraction of the overall shell deposits, reflecting an individual event or “time-averaged” assemblage and subsequent palimpsest (Bailey and Hardy, 2021).
Calculating Rates of Accumulation, Processes of Formation and Deformation of Individual Shell Middens It is difficult to ascertain the function and use of a site, but sites of similar size are often attributed a similar use. There are, however, many ways in which sites gained their current size, including different functions or changes in their functions through time. Thus, macro- and micro-analyses of the recovered anthropogenic materials throughout the individual shell deposits are sought. Added to this are the immediate surroundings, often areas to the rear of the “midden proper” or the “pre-midden layers”, for the recovery of pit-dwellings and inhumations. Another means of identifying how shell middens form are accumulation rates, which quantify the size or weight of shell deposits at specific times or between two points in time. These can then point toward a more or less specialized use of shells and other resources within the layer. There are, however, a variety of cultural factors (e.g., group size, length of occupation, frequency of visits, percentage of total diet) that influence accumulation rates and their wide range has been criticized since the beginning of their quantification (e.g., Dall, 1877). Additional methods can be used to address some of these factors. Commonly, radiocarbon dating is applied as well as a suite of analyses, including seasonality analysis (e.g., Koike, 1979) or particle size, organic content and rates of shell fragmentation (e.g., Zangrando et al., 2021). Despite these advances, accumulation rates still reflect a combination of many cultural, natural and taphonomic processes that prevent a conclusive answer. Nevertheless, the efforts that have been made to develop the required comprehensive quantification of shell accumulation have also led to improvements of more targeted questions regarding shellfish economy, dietary changes and preservation issues (e.g., Thompson et al., 2016).
Summary and Future Directions To summarize, shell midden research offers a great opportunity for exploring both the relationship between communities and mollusk populations and for reconstructing past ecologies. Multidisciplinary research is increasingly being conducted, while novel analytical methods continue to be developed. In light of their generally threatened nature, for example by agriculture and infrastructure-based development as well as sea-level rise and coastal erosion, it is essential to both recognize the importance of these unique archaeological deposits and offer protection from further damage. Given the complexity, cost of excavation, size and abundance of shell middens, archaeological survey and excavation techniques as well as sampling methodologies are constantly evolving. It is crucial that archaeologists working on shell middens are aware of these changes. Predictive modeling and remote sensing have proven useful in their detection, while the application of geophysical surveying methods, including magnetometry, can map buried features at shell middens and determine the extent of deposits. Similarly, ground penetrating radar has enabled some to “determine the internal structure” of a shell midden and “the links with its substrate” to “obtain insight on the manner of the construction” (Cariou et al., 2018, 186), and geophysical analysis of mound architecture has been used to describe societal structures and identify site use and rates of accumulation. Sampling for archaeoparasitology is increasingly being undertaken at shell middens, yielding information on the palaeoenvironment as well as the diet, mobility patterns and infections of their inhabitants, while sampling for anthracological analysis may be a future line of enquiry for improving chronologies. Equally, a range of post-excavation analyses can be performed on legacy or recently excavated shell midden material. For instance, amino acid racemization dating of mollusk remains has shown to be a rapid, “reliable and cost-effective alternative to radiocarbon dating” (Demarchi et al., 2011, 123), while the emerging field of “palaeoshellomics” has recently demonstrated that shell ornaments from a Danish Køkkenmødding had been manufactured from either Unio or Margaritifera (Sakalauskaite et al., 2019). Although oxygen isotope analysis has, for almost five decades, been undertaken to ascertain seasonality, source provenience and reconstruct environmental change, palaeoclimate, palaeoecology and palaeotemperature (e.g., West et al., 2018), laser induced breakdown spectroscopy has the potential to increase the resolution of palaeoenvironmental reconstructions by dramatically expanding sample sizes (e.g., Hausmann et al., 2017). Ancient DNA analysis of mollusk shells can also be used to both reconstruct palaeoenvironments and mollusk populations, including material from ca. 100,000 years ago (Der Sarkissian et al., 2020). Moreover, SEM analysis has been undertaken to determine relative changes in sea surface temperature, and the provenance of mollusk shells is a recent line of enquiry made possible through the application of LA-ICP-MS (Mouchi et al., 2021). Biological ages and hinge sizes as well as growth rates can be assessed to explore both the resilience of mollusk communities to environmental
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change or harvesting pressures (Hausmann et al., 2021; Toniello et al., 2019), while changes in shellfishing seasons can be identified by examining shell-to-meat-weight ratios (García-Escárzaga and Gutierrez-Zugasti, 2021). Overall, it can be seen that shell midden research has contributed significantly to our understanding of human life-ways around the world. The vast accumulations of molluscan remains can be studied in many different ways and exciting developments in scientific applications provide new avenues for future studies.
Acknowledgments We thank Dmitriy Voyakin for the invitation to contribute to the volume. We are grateful to Xavier Terradas for helping us with South American literature. We thank Elizabeth Currie and Marcis Kalnin¸s for providing us with the photographs used in Figs. 1 and 3 respectively. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 856488dERC Synergy project “SEACHANGE: Quantifying the impact of major cultural transitions on marine ecosystem functioning and biodiversity”). NH received funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)–439799406.
See Also: Classification of Archaeological Sites.
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Further Reading Allen, Michael J. (Ed.), 2017. Molluscs in Archaeology: Methods, Approaches and Applications. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Andrus, C., Fred, T., 2011. Shell midden sclerochronology. Quat. Sci. Rev. 30, 2892–2905. Antczak, Andrzej, Cipriani, Roberto (Eds.), 2008. Early Human Impact on Megamolluscs. British Archaeological Reports International Series 1865, Oxford. Bailey, Geoff, Hardy, Karen, Camara, Abdoulaye (Eds.), 2013. Shell Energy: Mollusc Shells as Coastal Resources. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Bar-Yosef Mayer, Daniella E. (Ed.), 2016. Archaeomalacology: Molluscs in Former Environments of Human Behaviour. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Bicho, Nuno, Detry, Cleia, Price, T. Douglas, Cunha, Eugénia (Eds.), 2015. Muge 150th: The 150th Anniversary of the Discovery of Mesolithic Shellmiddens. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne. Çakırlar, Canan (Ed.), 2011. Archaeomalacology Revisited: Non-dietary Use of Molluscs in Archaeological Settings. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Ceci, Lynn, 1984. Shell midden deposits as coastal resources. World Archaeol. 16 (1), 62–74. Gutiérrez-Zugasti, Igor, Cuenca-Solana, David, Colonese, André Carlo, de Pablo, Javier Fernández-López, 2016. Time for the tide. New perspectives on hunter-Fisher-gatherer exploitation of intertidal resources in Atlantic Europe and Mediterranean regions. Quat. Int. 407 (Part B), 2–5. Milner, Nicky, Craig, Oliver E., Bailey, Geoffrey N. (Eds.), 2007. Shell Middens in Atlantic Europe. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Parkington, John, 2006. Shorelines, Strandlopers and Shell Middens: Archaeology of the Cape Coast. Krakadouw Trust, Cape Town. Roksandic, Mirjana, de Souza, Mendonça, Sheila, Eggers, Sabine, Burchell, Meghan, Klokler, Daniela (Eds.), 2014. The Cultural Dynamics of Shell-Matrix Sites. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Szabó, Katherine, Dupont, Catherine, Dimitrijevic, Vesna, Gastélum, Luis Gómez, Serrand, Nathalie (Eds.), 2014. Archaeomalacology: Shells in the Archaeological Record. British Archaeological Reports Publishing, Oxford. Thomas, Kenneth D., 2015a. Molluscs emergent, Part I: themes and trends in the scientific investigation of mollusc shells as resources for archaeological research. J. Archaeol. Sci. 56, 133–140. Thomas, Kenneth D., 2015b. Molluscs emergent, Part II: themes and trends in the scientific investigation of molluscs and their shells as past human resources. J. Archaeol. Sci. 56, 159–167.
Hunting Traps, Jumps, and Kill Sites Matthew E. Hill, Jr., Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview and Key Issues Components of a Kill Grazing Area Drive Lanes Kill Area Processing Area/Camp Type of Traps Natural Traps Artificial Traps The Acts of the Hunt: Labor and Cooperation Organizing and Preparing for the Hunt Conducting the Hunt After the Kill Ritual Activity and Ceremonies for the Kill Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References
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Traps are used by hunting groups across the globe to confine and kill many large-bodied, social herbivores Traps are specifically designed for select prey species and frequently take advantage of key landscape features or hunting architecture Coordinated efforts of large numbers of people are necessary to construct and successfully use hunting traps Hunting success depends on the performance of appropriate rituals and ceremonies
Abstract Modern human hunters from across the globe have been using traps to hunt large herbivores for tens of thousands of years. While substantial investments in terms of labor and resources, traps significantly increase efficiency and yield from communal hunting of multiple prey. While the physical construction of traps is important, hunting success requires highly coordinated and ritualized actions of large numbers of people.
Introduction Humans have practiced communal hunting for 400,000 years (Rodrígues-Hidalgo et al., 2017). The 44,000-year-old rock art in Leang Bulu‘ Sipong 4 cave in Indonesia depicts a group of hunters actively driving prey to a kill (Aubert et al., 2019). The famous cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira illustrate traps and drive lines for hunting bison and horse over 15,000 years ago (Kehoe, 1990). On every continent except Antarctica, archaeological evidence for jumps and traps dates to at least 13,000 years ago (Lemke, 2022). Trap refers to any human-made structure or modified landscape feature used for hunting multiple animals. These features are human niche construction efforts that substantially increase hunting reliability and yields. Hunter-gatherers without formal agriculture are the groups most willing to make the substantial investment of time and labor to construct and maintain these features (Lemke, 2022; c.f. Zeder et al., 2013). Traps usually target particular prey species. Traps worldwide have been used to hunt a variety of different social herbivore species, including bison, sheep, goats, antelope, deer, pigs, gazelle, caribou, horses, and camelids (e.g., Lemke, 2022). Individual animals or small groups of animals more easily avoid traps because they see danger coming or are agile enough to avoid being driven into an
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enclosed space. Traps are successful because they tightly pack herds of animals together, reducing their ability to see or escape danger (Frison, 2004). Traps are a classic example of convergent evolution, used effectively by many different groups for an enormous diversity of prey species. The convergence lies not only in broadly comparable features but also in group behavior. These groups have all chosen to coordinate the labor of scores of people for weeks or months at a time, drawing on deep traditional knowledge of landscapes and animal behavior and establishing alliances with powerful spiritual beings, to obtain large quantities of meat, fat, bone, hides, and sinew for consumption, storage, and trade. Although communal hunting of small-bodied prey such as fish, eels, grasshopper, and rabbits frequently uses traps, nets, and landscape features (Forbis, 1978), the focus here is on traps used in mass kills of large-bodied prey. Large scale or “mass” kills are defined here as kills in which a single band or multiple groups of hunters kill large numbers (>50) of animals in one event (Kornfeld et al., 2010). Most examples below are from the archaeological and ethnohistoric record on bison, pronghorn and big horn sheep hunting in the Great Plains and adjacent Rocky Mountains of North America. This region has one of the best written and physical records of large mammal hunting anywhere in the world (Kornfeld et al., 2010: 207). Any formal trap or jump (fence, jump, corral) is part of a landscape of activities, each of which must work in tandem for a hunt to be successful.
Overview and Key Issues Components of a Kill When people imagine a hunting trap or jump kills, they may picture a large concentration of animal bones mixed with weapons and butchery tools, perhaps within a stone or wooden structure or located at the base of a steep cliff. Such a “bonebed” is the most recognizable component of a landscape-scale network of interrelated activities and features. A kill has four components: (1) the grazing area, (2) drive lanes, (3) kill spot, and (4) processing and camping localities (Oetelaar, 2014:14) (Fig. 1).
Grazing Area Any mass kill must have suitable natural resources and topography. First, there must be a large existing prey population in a grazing area near the intended kill location so that hunters can target a subset of animals (Brink, 2016; Crow, 1978). The grazing area must be large, offering protection and access to good forage and water to a large prey population. Such grazing areas are often intentionally managed to make them attractive to prey (Oetelaar, 2014). For example, in the ancestral lands of Blackfoot (Niitsítapi) people in the foothill regions of Montana, hunters burned grazing areas to control grass communities and provide fresh growth, which attracted large numbers of bison around key kill sites (Barsh and Marlor, 2003; Grinnell, 1920: 167–168).
Fig. 1
Stylized representation of four key components of a kill. Adapted from Gordon (1990).
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Drive Lanes Drive lanes are the preplanned routes used to move prey from the grazing area to the kill. They are usually unobstructed stretches of land, or a natural swale or channel oriented toward the kill area. Hunting groups often construct artificial markers along drive lanes to better define the lanes and to restrict the movement of prey to within the markers. In some cases, only one side of the lane was marked, and hunters would use a natural barrier, such as a steep cliff face, to mark the other side (Crow, 1978:250). Historic accounts commonly describe these lane markers as wooden or stone fences, bush piles, tipi (a portable conical tent made of skins) lodge poles, snow, blankets, dung piles (sometimes burning) or small rock cairns (e.g., Barsh and Marlor, 2003; Gordon, 1990; Grinnell, 1920; Verbicky-Todd, 1984). In the Great Plains, the classic lane marker were small rock cairns made of 3–10 rocks (Brink, 2016; Zedeño et al., 2014). In North America and elsewhere, the classic drive lanes are large V-shaped areas marked with stone or brush markers that end at the kill spot (Lemke, 2022; Zeder et al., 2013). Drive lane markers may be large continuous walls made of stone, wood, or combinations of the two (e.g., Hockett et al., 2013), but are usually spaced at intervals through the entire length of the drive lane. The drive lanes may begin more than a kilometer wide but narrow to maybe 10 to 30 m wide at the kill (Oetelaar, 2014). The drive lanes frequently make a sharp turn just before the kill site to conceal the final location of the kill (Crow, 1978:252; Frison, 2004; Lubinski, 1999; Verbicky-Todd, 1984). The length of the drive lanes varies depending on landscape and prey. Ethnographic accounts of Native American bison hunting describe long lanes (up to 12 km-long) (Crow, 1978; Ewers, 1949; Wissler, 1910); however, detailed archaeological mapping indicates a large system might be 4–5 km-long (Zedeño et al., 2014). In North America V-shaped drive lanes were also used to drive pronghorn into a small corral but these drive lanes were generally shorter than those used for bison (0.5 km to 5 km long) (Lubinski, 1999). The Near Eastern Kites, used to hunt gazelle, horses and oryx, have an identical V-shape, but their arms, usually consisting of large stone walls, are at most a few hundred meters long (Zeder et al., 2013). In the Arctic, caribou hunters constructed single lines made of stone, brush, or sod that could range from 8 to 60 km long (Gordon, 1990:296). When cairns mark the drive lanes, their spacing is often uneven. For bison drive lanes, cairns are more closely spaced (2 m apart) near the kill and consist of more rocks (>5 rocks) compared to far from the kill area (3.5 m apart and 3 rocks) (Brink, 2016:372). The cairns may have been embellished with additional material like sod, burning sage, or brush to make them seem more imposing or to allow them to sway or flutter. Away from the kill they would often be smaller and spaced farther apart. Sometimes small fires, piles of dung, or burning sage might be utilized between the widely spaced cairns to keep the herd from escaping the lane (Brink, 2008; Verbicky-Todd, 1984). Outside the Great Plains, rock markers are sometimes constructed in a different manner. For example, in the Rocky Mountains cairns placed in alignments were utilized, but so are vertically stacked tabular stone slabs (leaning slabs), low single course rock lines, and multicourse rock walls that can be a meter tall. In the Great Basin so-called drift fences were built as continuous walls 1 m tall and 1 m wide (Hockett et al., 2013). Arctic and subarctic caribou hunters would build similar stone walls 30 cm to 1 m high (Gordon, 1990).
Kill Area As stated previously, the kill locality, or bonebed, is frequently viewed as the defining component of a kill. Large masses of jumbled bones often intermixed with lost weapons or butchery tools are the typical conception of a kill area, although due to taphonomic conditions or the prey species targeted, presence of bones at the kill area is frequently lacking (Zeder et al., 2013). This is particularly true for smaller-bodied prey, such as pronghorn, deer, or bighorn sheep, whose carcasses can be removed entirely from the kill (Sundstrom, 2000). If animals were dispatched with clubs instead of projectiles, there might be limited artifactual material at the kill area. But well-preserved large prey kills, such as multicomponent bison kills, often contain multiple layers of bones and artifacts (Cooper, 2008; Kornfeld et al., 2010). Frequently, at these sites, lower layers of bone were intentionally burned, likely to maintain sanitary conditions and facilitate future use of the kill (Brown, 1932; Frison, 2004). However, Oetelaar (2014: 23) notes that burning could also be a ritual act of respect and reciprocity to the prey.
Processing Area/Camp Because the goal of any mass kill was to acquire large quantities of meat, fat, and hides, it is arguable that the most important component of any kill is the processing area. It is here where the heavy, easily spoilable animal carcasses are transformed into light, storable and transportable food packages (Verbicky-Todd, 1984; Schaefer, 1978). This is likely the most laborious aspect of any kill and required the effort of entire groups conducting the kill. While archaeologists do not always identify the camp or processing locale near a kill (e.g., Meltzer, 2006; Wheat, 1972), it is frequently located nearby (within 100 m), often near a water source and a good source of wood (for cleaning and cooking) or fuel (wood or dung for boiling water or heating rocks). Because most of the processed food (pemmican, dried meat) and other by-products (tanned skins, sinew, bone tools) resulting from a kill are rarely preserved archaeologically, processing activities are generally recognized through direct and indirect archaeological evidence, such as meat drying racks (i.e., post-hole), pitted hammerstones for crushing bone, boiling pits or cooking pots associated with thermal features (Bethke et al., 2018; Brink, 2008). In addition, because extracting within bone fats is often a key goal from carcasses processing, processing areas often contain large quantities of broken bones, charcoal and ash, and fireaffected rock. Finally, as hunters often remain around the kill for extended periods of time, temporary structures, marked by stone circles or other simple huts, can be found nearby. At a Great Plains bison kill site which was repeatedly used for generations, archaeologists have identified more than 600 temporary structures (Zedeño et al., 2014: 37).
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Type of Traps Across the globe, hunters have used a variety of natural and artificial features (or a combination of the two) to help them redirect, trap, and kill large-bodied prey (Frison, 2004; Lemke, 2022) (Table 1). Below examples of the most common types are described.
Natural Traps Hunters often use simple natural landscape features to confine a group of fast and agile animals into a tight space giving hunters time to dispatch the animals. More than 13,000 years ago the earliest big game hunters of North America drove herds of bison into steep sided dry gully (arroyos) or the face of high parabolic sand dunes to kill them (Frison, 2004). The goal of these natural features was to concentrate many animals into a tight space and then stop the forward progress of the herd giving the hunters time to dispatch the animals. The steep walls of the arroyo were frequently high enough to keep the animals from escaping the channel and provided hunters an elevation from which to shoot the animals. The head cut of the arroyo formed a steep barrier to prevent further movement of the prey. Some of the oldest North American mass bison kills occurred in arroyos, including bison kills such as Clovis-age Jake’s Bluff (22 bison) (Bement, 2003) and Folsom-aged Lipscomb (55 bison) (Todd et al., 1990), Cooper (78 bison in three kills) (Bement, 1999) and Folsom sites (32 bison) (Meltzer, 2006). Several millennia later an even more impressive arroyo kill happened at the Cody-Complex age Olsen-Chubbuck site in eastern Colorado (Wheat, 1972). Here more than 190 bison were killed within a 50 m long 2 m wide arroyo, which was nearly 4 m deep. The fact that much later groups also found arroyos highly effective traps for hunting bison is evidenced at the 2500-year-old Mavrakis-Bentzen-Roberts sites and 1600-year-old Ruby sites (Kornfeld et al., 2010). A few of the sites mentioned above are so well preserved that it is possible to reconstruct how the bison body was positioned at the time of death. At Lipscomb, Copper, and Olsen-Chubbuck there is evidence that the lead animals entering the arroyo were killed in the process of attempting to turn around (Bement, 1999; Todd et al., 1990; Wheat, 1967). However, the pressure from the movement of the following animals was so great the lead animals were stopped by the rest of the heard moving in the opposite direction. In a few cases, the kill occurred so quickly that the carcasses of following animals were piled on top of the animals in the front of the heard. The steep face of high parabolic sand dunes served the same function as the head cut of an arroyo in creating a steep barrier that could be used to kill a large number of prey. A classic example of a dune trap is the Hell Gap-age Casper sites in eastern Wyoming. Here 100 bison were driven into the windward side of a dune and killed in the deepest part of the trough at the base of the dune (Kornfeld et al., 2010). The trough of the dunes can often be deep, 10 to 15 m, and the windward edges of the dune often have a perpendicular drop of a meter or more. These edges are frequently held in place by plant growth, forming a barrier that animals find difficult to escape. At the Eden-Farson site at least 212 pronghorns were recovered from an ancestral Shoshonean village (Kornfeld et al., 2010). While the animals were not killed on site, the large number of pronghorns preserved and the tight seasonal clustering (late October/early November) of their mortality strongly suggest that nearby dunes, which measured 1–1.5 m high and several hundred meters long, were likely used as a trap. The most classic natural trap is the jump site, also referred to as a fall, where the prey is driven over the edge of a steep, high cliff edge, often falling as much as 7–13 m (Ewer, 1949; Zedeño et al., 2014). A key requirement for the operation of a jump is that the hunters have to handle many animals, perhaps up to 500–1000 animals, moving in very tight formation, and at a high rate of speed, so when the lead animals eventually see the actual jump, pressure from the animals behind them would prevent them from stopping or changing direction (Reher and Frison, 1980; Barsh and Marlor, 2003). With smaller herds, hunters would never be able to direct the animals over the jump. The steepness and height of the cliff face are selected so that during impact at the base or on the talus slope many animals are killed or injured (e.g., Frison, 2004; Reher and Frison, 1980). The bonebeds of many jump sites often produce hundreds or even thousands of projectile points because hunters needed to finish off the prey. Classic bison jump sites, such as Head-Smashed-In in southern Alberta and Vore in eastern Wyoming, are primarily found in southern Alberta, Montana, and Wyoming, with few found elsewhere (Cooper, 2008). This region contained huge residential bison populations and the local geology includes numerous cliffs formed by hard caprock material overlain by softer, more erodible substrate. However, not all jump sites were steep enough to reliably kill the prey. At some bison jump sites, the cliff face was not very steep so a corral was constructed around the base of the cliff, which is a classic example of a mix of natural and artificial traps (Ewer, 1949:358).
Artificial Traps As mentioned above, ancient hunters have constructed artificial pens or corrals, made of wood, rock, or brush, to trap game. For example, Native American bison hunters of the Great Plains, frequently built circular wooden corrals, also known as pounds or parks, to surround and contain bison (Ewer, 1949; Frison, 2004). Both pronghorn and caribou hunters would construct long stone and wooden walls to redirect the movement of herds into massive (hundreds of meters across) corrals where the animals were killed (Gordon, 1990; Lubinski, 1999; Hockett et al., 2013). Gazelle, horse, and oryx hunters during the Bronze Age in Near East followed comparable procedures, constructing massive, curved stone walled Desert Kites (Zeder et al., 2013). Usually, long drive lane walls or rock pile makers form the drive lane to funnel animals into the corral. These lanes and barriers frequently have a sharp turn immediately before the corral, likely to obscure the trap from the view of the animal. Corrals for bison hunting in North America were usually circular or rectangular in shape and made by driving wooden posts vertically in the ground at even intervals around the edge of the proposed kill areas. Then tree logs, brush, hides, or other materials
Hunting Traps, Jumps, and Kill Sites Table 1
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Summary of various types of natural and artificial traps used by communal hunters in different regions.
Trap type
Form and material
Natural traps Erosional gully or ravine
Linear alluvial erosion gully
Prey type
Location
Bison, mammoth; horses; Great Plains; Kyrgyzstan; caribou Arctic Sand dune Parabolic windblown sand Bison Great Plains Water Edge of lake or river. Sometime Caribou; deer; peccaries; Arctic, Virginia, South pole fence or natural feature pigs America, Melanesia used to channel prey to water’s edge Snowbank High snow drift Caribou Arctic Cliff edge Bedrock outcrop with sheer Bison, bighorn sheep; Northern Great Plains; cliff edge. Sometime rock caribou American Southwest; alignment or wall used to Greenland direct prey to cliff face. When cliff edge corral or another trap built at base Artificial traps (hunting architecture) Desert kites V-shaped stone walls Gazelle, horse, oryx, wild Arabian Peninsula, North converging into massive goat, red deer Africa, and Central Asia circular rampart at the base of low cliff Arabian Peninsula Tenijje traps Figure eight shaped stone wall Gazelle 1.5 m high with lower loop left open. Around the upper loop portions of walls are lower than the rest of the wall. Immediately outside these lower sections are 2–3 m deep pits Dzaekha (drive lanes) and Funnel shaped stone or Antelope Tibet khogtse (foot traps) and sediment cairns alignment Gugra (hunting blinds) opening to foot traps and circular pit hunting blinds Chaccu Funnel shaped stone lines Vicuña Argentina, Peru, and Chile opening into large rectangular pit Catch pens Drive lanes leading to wooden Bighorn sheep Rocky mountain pen with dirt and gravel ramp Bison; pronghorn, mule Great Basin, Great Plains, Corrals/Fence V- or U-shaped drive lanes deer, bighorn sheep, elk Arctic, Great Lakes made of rock cairns, rock walls, brush, earth, or wooden fences. Many versions drive lanes opening into wooden or stone corral or an open kill area. Occasional pits located at opening of corral. Inuksuit (cairn) Two or single row rock cairn, Caribou Greenland, Finland moss, sod, willow, or ice alignment converging to either a lake shore, or to an open kill area with hunting blinds Suspension snare Hide snares connected to 2 m Caribou Arctic tall posts or tall rock piles which entangle antlers
References Frison (2004), Matthiassen (1928) Frison (2004) Swanton (1946), Gordon (1990) Gordon (1990) Brink (2008), Gordon (1990)
Zeder et al. (2013)
Musil (1928)
Fox and Dorj (2009)
Moreno (2012) Labelle and Pelton (2013) Brink (2008), Hockett et al. (2013), Lubinski (1999), Gordon (1990)
Odgaard (2018), Gordon (1990)
Gordon (1990)
were placed lengthwise between the posts to form a wall or barrier. The enclosure can be C-shaped. Historic accounts of Native American bison corrals suggest corrals could be between 10 m and 100 m in diameter and have walls ranging between 1.5 m and 2.5 m high (e.g., Ewers, 1949; Grinnell, 1920). Due to the size of bison, the posts and barriers of the corrals would have to be strongly reinforced to handle the pressure of the animals pushing against the barrier (Kornfeld et al., 2010:268). However,
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Grinnell (1920: 231) reports that both the Blackfoot and Cheyenne (Tséstho’e) recognized that if bison could not see through the corral barrier, they generally did not try to press against it; however, if it was see through, they would try to go through it or over it. As a result, the corrals were often covered in dense brush, or blankets, and frequently women and children would gather around the corral shouting and waving to keep the animals away from the barrier. At the opening of the corral, there was often a drop-off, either a natural (cliff edge) or artificial (earthen bank) or wooden ramp that prevented the animals from escaping out the entrance after they entered (Mandelbaum, 1940). Corrals for hunting other prey species used a design like that for bison, with some variations in response to differences in prey body size, behavior, habitat location, or predictable migratory behaviors (Lemke, 2022). For example, few animals can match pronghorns in terms of speed or their ability to broad jump. However, hunters have learned to exploit some of their unique behaviors, including their reluctance to jump vertically, their intense curiosity, poor visual acuity, and predictable movements, and have designed their kill sites to exploit these behaviors. Communal hunting of pronghorn was generally like that of bison in that it often involved driving or enticing pronghorn into an oval or square pen. However, unlike bison pens, historical and archaeological evidence suggests pronghorn corrals were either much smaller in size or substantially larger than those used for bison (Grinnell, 1920; Wissler, 1910). The drive lanes were lined with wooden fences or brush, or in some cases low stone walls and frequently positioned on a slope so pronghorns were driven downhill or over a steep edge toward the kill area (Brink, 2016; Frison, 2004). Hunters were positioned around or in the corral to kill the animals. One key difference with pronghorn and caribou corrals is that deep pits were sometimes dug in the entrance of the corral (Brink, 2016; Gordon, 1990; Sundstrom, 2000). Lubinski’s (1999: 178–181) review of ethnohistoric accounts of pronghorn hunting indicates that when pit traps were used, the animals were actively driven into the small corral. These pits, measuring about 2 m wide and 6 m long and dug to a depth of 3 or 4 m, were traps into which the fast-moving pronghorn would fall. In some excavated pits, it appears that dirt or brush was piled around the edges, likely to make it more difficult for the pronghorn to escape and give hunters more time to kill the animal. Large corrals (often 200–300 m in diameter) involved a more passive hunting technique where animals were more gradually enticed to move into the corral (Gordon, 1990; Lubinski, 1999: 162). In the Great Basin, large corrals were constructed using juniper posts, stacks of sagebrush, or even a rope placed around closely spaced brush, and had a long arching wall (wooden posts or stone) coming off one side (Frison, 2004; Lubinski, 1999; Wissler, 1910). Arctic caribou hunters also used long fences or walls to passively redirect prey movement toward the kill area (Gordon, 1990). The large size and shape of these corrals were such that animals were not startled and perhaps did not notice that they had walked into a trap. Once in the corral, hunters would block the entrance, possibly with nets or brush, and surround and kill the animals. Ethnohistoric accounts suggest that pronghorns were frequently killed with clubs, and the paucity of weapons recovered from many archaeological examples seems to support that observation (Grinnell, 1920; Sundstrom, 2000). In some large corrals, smaller corrals (wing-trap) were located along one side of the corral and probably used to concentrate the animals for them to be killed. In other instances, small walls or pits were commonly located within corrals to hide waiting hunters (Gordon, 1990; Hockett et al., 2013). Bighorn sheep and elk were taken in several varieties of traps in foothill and mountain settings of the Rocky Mountains. At higher elevations, U- or V-shaped drive lanes were used to coerce the animals into progressively smaller spaces until they entered the kill areas. These alignments were in natural passes to intercept migrating animals. Frequently, they were constructed so that bighorn sheep would be driven uphill, their preferred direction to flee when threatened. Here hunters positioned themselves in narrow (1–3 m) and shallow (17–100 cm) rock-lined blind pits from which they shot the passing bighorn sheep (LaBelle and Pelton, 2013). In these mountain sites, rock cairn markers, like bison kills but smaller in size, were sometimes used. More commonly, continuous rock walls or evenly spaced wooden posts were constructed to guide the prey moving upslope toward the hunters. In lower elevations in the Rockies, bighorn hunters commonly constructed the U- or V-shaped drive lanes of wood posts (Frison, 2004). At the ends of these drive lanes were small square wooden pens. These pens were steep walled rectangular log structures, which often incorporated living or dead trees into the walls to increase wall rigidity. Ramps of earth, rock, and wood were often constructed to allow the sheep run up to the pen and then fall in. The pens were wider at the bottom than at the top to reduce the chance of the sheep jumping out.
The Acts of the Hunt: Labor and Cooperation Large scale hunting is not just the physical act of killing numerous animals, but it is a preplanned, highly coordinated, ritualized exercise that involves the labor of large numbers of people. When groups gather for a communal kill, many other activities also happen, such as feasting, networking, mate selection, and trading. In fact, the traditional knowledge necessary to perform the various tasks of a hunt would pass down over generations through stories and songs, and often highlight human hunters’ connections to animals (Barsh and Marlor, 2003; Frison, 2004). As Zedeño et al. (2021:52) state, for many groups, such as the Blackfoot, hunting was not just a normal subsistence or trade activity, but “was (and continues to be) at the center of their spiritual and practical worlds.” A successful hunt depends on coordination and discipline. The term “communal” kill is appropriate because it reflects that multiple groups or bands of people of different ages, genders, and experiences work closely together to ensure a successful result. In addition, as some jump sites were used for hundreds or even thousands of years, their construction and reuse represented generations-long community investments in a location and a resource (Barsh and Marlor, 2003: 575).
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Ethnographic accounts indicate that group cooperation often begins weeks or months before a hunt (Wissler, 1912). First, groups would have to agree on a location to meet at a particular time of the year. Then the days and weeks preceding a hunt was a busy time. Numerous tasks and ceremonies had to be performed or otherwise the hunt would fail. Prior to the hunt, certain normal behaviors or activities were curtailed (e.g., Verbicky-Todd, 1984; Wissler, 1912). For example, in many Native North American bison hunting groups a chief or leader would outline the rules that the group needed to follow. A common one was a prohibition of individuals hunting bison or riding a horse through the herd prior to a planned hunt. Those that broke these rules often faced severe punishment, including loss of personal property or even physical harm. Also, prior to the hunt, dogs would be muzzled and tethered to a heavy object so as not to disturb the nearby herd and ruin the hunt (Schaefer, 1978: 246; Wissler, 1910: 37–38). As described below, groups would frequently preform elaborate pre-kill ceremonies that prepared the prey and humans for the coming hunt (Verbicky-Todd, 1984).
Organizing and Preparing for the Hunt All communal hunts involving traps had a clear hierarchical structure to coordinate the labor of the many participants. Only certain men and women had the appropriate knowledge and leadership skills to organize and direct a successful hunt (Crow, 1978). Barsh and Marlor (2003: 276) indicate for the Blackfoot that the knowledge for a successful hunt was held by certain clans, and the “bison caller” would tell the chief when and where to move camp to conduct the kill. Mandelbaum (1940:190–191) reported that the construction of a Plains Cree (Nêhiyaw-Askiy) corral was done under the careful directions of a shaman who was guided by a spirit helper. Joe Medicine Crow (1978) reports that for the Crow (Apsáalooke) the shaman officiating the hunt would select the participants and assign their position along the drive lanes. Finally, Sundstrom (2000: 121) states that for the Cheyenne (Tséstho’e), “An antelope shaman, who had received his powers through dreams or vision would direct the hunt.” Obviously one of the key tasks before any hunt could occur would be the construction of or repair of the trap itself. Exact estimates of labor investment needed to build drive lanes and corrals are imperfect. Brink (2016:373) and Zedeño et al. (2008) have separately tried to estimate how long it would take to move the approximately 2000 rocks to form a typical rock-lined drive lane structure. While their estimates are not identical, they suggest that 10 people would require between 3 and 6 days to construct a typical drive lane. Lubinski (1999:165), using accounts of Hidatsa and Navajo (Diné) pronghorn hunters, suggests that it took a group of hunters between a few hours to five days to build a wooden corral depending on its size. Hockett et al. (2013), in their discussion of the construction of substantial stone walled pronghorn corrals used in the Great Basin, state that these stone walled structures might take 10 individuals up to 20 days to build. Obviously, an existing corral or fence would require much less time to make functional. Much effort also had to go into gathering and preparing the tools, equipment, and supplies needed to kill the animals and process the carcasses well before the hunt. Uhlenbeck (1912) famously stated that Blackfoot women began processing carcasses by first collecting firewood. This indicates that an adequate supply of fuel and water needed for bone boiling and smoking meat had to be collected and made ready for immediate use after the kill. Likewise, weapons and processing tools such as knives, scrapers, grinding stones, and mortars needed to be made or repaired in preparation of the coming hunt. If pemmican was to be made, a large supply of berries or fruit would have been gathered and stored nearby. If cooking was done in pots or hide covered pits, cooks had to ensure they had adequate supplies in hand, and if not, new cooking containers had to be made.
Conducting the Hunt To find prey animals, after ceremony or blessing, the leaders of the hunt would select a young unmarried man (or group of young men), referred to as runners or drivers, leave the camps, sometimes days in advance, to locate and to begin moving herds of bison toward the intended kill location (Barsh and Marlor, 2003: 576; Brink, 2008; Schaefer, 1978; Verbicky-Todd, 1984; Wissler, 1910). The runners were not always men. For example, in Cheyenne pronghorn hunts, two unmarried girls of “good character, even temperament, and robust health” would act as the drivers (Sundstrom, 2000:121). Runners were not chosen at random. The runner spends years building up the strength, speed, and endurance needed for this job (Schaefter, 1978: 245). The runner would frequently wear disguises (wolf, bison, or pronghorn calf hides), use songs, shouts, animal calls, or sometimes set small grass or incense fires to move herds toward the opening of the drive lanes (e.g., Barsh and Marlor, 2003; Crow, 1978; Schaefer, 1978; Zedeño et al., 2021). At this early phase of the hunt, the cairn or other artificial structures built along the drive lanes functioned as physical markers that allowed the runners to judge the position of the herd in relation to the future kill sites. Getting the herd to initially move toward the drive lanes was not easy and often ended in failure (Ewer, 1949; Wissler, 1910). However, when successful and the herd moved toward the drive lane, a scout or lookout, would inform the rest of the group of the approaching animals (Schaefer, 1978). At this stage, men, women, and children (called hazers, beaters, or hunters) would position themselves along the drive lane to await the approaching prey (Forbis, 1978; Wissler, 1910:37). The cairns that marked the drive lane were too small to hide the hazers, so they would hide under robes or brush (Brink, 2016; Oetelaar, 2014). As the herd entered the lanes, assistants would join the runners and try to increase the pace the animals were driven toward the kill area. As the animals got further into the lane, the hazers would make subtle waives or calls to keep the animals within the lane and move in the right direction (Brink, 2008; Crow, 1978; Schaefer, 1978; Wissler, 1910). Artificial features, such as fences, brush, or cairns, especially if embellished with brush, dung, or small fires, would assist the hazers to keep the herd moving in tight formations within the drive lanes. Once the herd entered the last part of the lane, the hazers suddenly appeared shouting or waiving robes or brush, frightening the herd to increase their speed even further toward the final kill point (Schaefer, 1978:247). While the lead
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animals might attempt to turn at the edge of the kill spot, jump or corral, the pressure from the animals behind them would push them into the kill (Wissler, 1910). Grinnell (1920: 229) describes a Blackfoot story, with a slightly different version of moving bison into a drive lane. In this account the bison caller following the pre-kill ceremony would enter the herd far from the drive lanes disguised as a bison (including wearing the head of a bison). After he gained the attention of the bison, he would begin to slowly walk toward the drive lanes. If the herd followed, he would begin to run faster and faster through the lane toward the kill spot. The hazers located along the lanes would panic the herd to run even faster toward the kill. Fowler (1989) reports that ethnohistoric accounts of Paiute (Nuwuvi) pronghorn hunters used a shaman in a similar way to slowly walk a herd into their corrals. How the prey would finally be dispatched at the kill would depend on the nature of the setting. At a jump kill, the animals falling off the edge of a steep cliff were often killed or seriously injured. In a corral kill, animals were not injured entering the corral, so they had to keep running until they became exhausted (Sundstrom, 2000). The killing of the animals could come in many ways, including using a bow and arrow or lance or even a blow to the head (Wissler, 1910:37; Forbis, 1978; Gordon, 1990; Lubinski, 1999). However, the recovery of large numbers of projectile points at many kill sites suggests that projectile weapons were common (Brink, 2008; Kornfeld et al., 2010).
After the Kill Once the prey was killed, the real work would begin. A feast recognizing the success of the hunt was often held, where choice pieces, such as tongue, heart, and liver, would be removed from a few animals and taken to camp to be cooked and consumed. Frequently, prayers of thanks would be offered in recognition of the success of the hunt (Schaefer, 1978: 247). At this stage, there would be a race for the hunters and others to butcher and process the carcasses to avoid spoilage. This was a chaotic, dirty task requiring a great deal of labor. All members of the group(s) involved in the hunt, perhaps 100 or more people, would take part in the carcass processing phase (Bethke et al., 2018; Schaeffer, 1978). Once the animals were killed, the removal of the hide, organs, meat, and marrow could commence. Based on ethnohistoric accounts, processing was the responsibility of women, although men would assist with many of the necessary tasks (e.g., Binford, 1978). The carcass was dismembered at the kill site, with hides and organs removed, and dismembered units were then moved into the processing area for additional treatment. Meat removed from the carcass would need to be cut into appropriately sized pieces and dried on smoking racks. Bones would frequently be broken to extract marrow. If the final goal was the production of pemmican, the bones of the animals would be broken into small pieces and then boiled to extract within-bone grease. Bone grease was then mixed with pounded meat and berries to form small cakes. Butchers would also have to quickly move on to scraping and tanning hides, which were carefully removed from the carcass before butchering. Finally, all the meat and other by-products would be shared and distributed among the families participating in the hunt. However, distributions were not perfectly equitable. The chief or leader of the hunt, the shaman, or owner of important ritual paraphernalia would often be given the best cuts of meat after the hunt (Grinnell, 1920: 230; Sundstrom, 2000: 126; Wissler, 1912: 27).
Ritual Activity and Ceremonies for the Kill Ethnographic accounts suggest a successful large-scale hunt was not merely the result of a fortuitous setting and the skills of the hunters. Ancient and modern Indigenous groups recognized that there was a close relationship between humans and nature and only through proper daily practice, rituals, and ceremonies can there be a balance in nature and a successful hunt (Oetelaar, 2014; Zedeño et al., 2021; Wissler, 1912). If hunters did not show proper respect or held improperly conducted ceremonies, the hunt would not succeed (Forbis, 1978). To ensure success, hunters had to follow certain rules, clans or societies had to perform certain ceremonies, and powerful medicines were used. In the northern Great Plains, Blackfoot hunters have detailed mythologies and legends that direct how preparations for a hunt are made. Blackfoot bison callers frequently used an Iniskim, or buffalo stone, as part of intricate songs and dances performed prior to the hunt (Grinnell, 1920; Schaefer, 1978). These buffalo stones were often fossil ammonites, vertebrate fossils, or sedimentary concretions and had great powers to attract bison to the kill site (Schaefer, 1978). These stones were often covered in ochre to enhance their power and were components of important ritual bundles. Wissler (1912:204–209) described a Blackfoot ceremony involving a beaver bundle designed to call bison to a winter hunt. It began with a gift of tobacco to the owner of the Iniskim, who then invited a select group of knowledgeable older men and women to assist in the ceremony. They would gather in the owner’s tipi and begin a long and tiring ritual involving highly choreographed dances, songs, and prayers. The ceremony would last through the entire night and only after it ended was the hunt allowed to commence. Other groups would also perform their own ceremonies associated with hunts. Lowie (1913:346–354) described that in Mandan (Numakiki) and Hidatsa villages the White Buffalo Cow Society (pti’take o’xat’e) would perform a buffalo calling ceremony to ensure bison were brought to a hunt. The Kaninai (Blood) performed a 4-day long Motoki (Buffalo Women Society) dance which concluded with the female dancers acting as bison cows and male dancers acting as bison bulls moving through the attending crowd of people, who were positioned in a funnel-shape formation to symbolize a drive lane. Eventually the dancers would move into a circular lodge that symbolized a corral (piskun) (Zedeño et al., 2014: 28–29). The Cheyenne would only begin a pronghorn hunt once the antelope shaman announced his intent to stage a hunt, and would spend all night performing rituals in a specially constructed ceremonial tipi covered in pronghorn hides.
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As discussed by Zedeño et al. (2014), various ceremonial societies conducted ritual performances throughout the year, which ensured continued health and abundance of prey and future hunting success. These hunting-related ceremonies had multiple positive outcomes. They increased the probability of a successful hunt, but they also created social bonds and networks. The powerful ceremonial societies and bundle groups conducting the rituals had members of different ages, genders, and band affiliations. These societies created multigenerational social ties among people across regions and through time, unifying people who might otherwise pursue separate goals and agendas. In the end, groups cooperated in ways that made communal hunts more successful. Often a tipi or temporary structure for ritual use was built next to the kill site (Kornfeld et al., 2010; Sundstrom, 2000). Other ceremonial features were also built. Bison hunters often selected a kill area with a large tree located in the center. If no trees were available, a large post would be constructed. The trees or post were called shaman or medicine posts and around them special ritual offerings were placed. One of the oldest examples of a post in a kill area has been found at the Hell Gap-aged Jones-Miller site in eastern Colorado (Stanford, 1978). In the middle of a kill site of at least 250 bison was a large post that predated the kill. Associated with this feature was a possible antler flute and miniature projectile point, supporting the interpretation of ritual activity. The presence of a pole in the middle of a kill is also seen at the contemporary Lake Theo site in Texas, and at numerous Archaic bison kills, especially in the northern plains (Kornfeld et al., 2010). Elsewhere, specially prepared artifacts or objects would be placed in and around the kill. These are often interpreted as hunters making ritual offerings either before or after a kill. These offerings are frequently unusual artifacts, such as miniature projectile points, or bone items, complete skulls, or articulated bones. At the Cooper site, a Folsom-age bison kill in western Oklahoma, a large bull bison skull with a red zig-zag design drawn on the frontal bone was placed on top of the kill and was interpreted as evidence of such an offering (Bement, 1999). Occasionally archaeologists identify possible ceremonial structures located immediately outside kill areas. For example, at the 1700-year-old Ruby site (48CA302) in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, just outside the bison pound and drive lane was a 12 4.5 m oval structure (Kornfeld et al., 2010). The sides of the structure were marked by an arc of posts and the long axis was oriented north-south. A series of posts were placed across the feature; at its widest point North inside and outside of the structure were a series of very shallow pits filled with articulated vertebral sections and lacking any evidence of posts. A series of six bison skulls were aligned around the southern end of the structure. Very few artifacts and no habitation features were associated with the structure. While the purpose of the structure is unknown, its proximity to the kill and its unusual form suggests it had ceremonial uses and the posts may have supported symbolically significant items. Frison (2004) reported that bighorn sheep hunters constructed small, three-sided roofed structures directly into the wooden drive lanes at sites such as Amos Welty, Bull Elk Pass, Indian Point, and the East Fork sites in Wyoming.
Summary and Future Directions Hunters across the globe have used traps and jumps for killing large prey for tens of thousands of years. Often hunters take advantage of natural features, such as an erosional gully or lake. They also invest substantial amounts of time and labor in sophisticated architectural features made of wood, stone, dirt, or multiple materials. Traps not only increase hunting efficiency but also influence the social and economic lives of the groups using them. These traps anchor hunters to certain places in the landscape and require them to create new socio-political alliances among the multiple groups using them. Although these features are often associated with groups interpreted as equalitarian hunter-gatherers, their construction and extended use (often over generations) require users to confront complex social issues related to territoriality, leadership, labor cooperation, land ownership, and social networking. They require social aggregation for at least a short period of time and become places for important social acts, such as finding marriage partners, exchanging goods and information, and performing group rituals and ceremonies. While more than a century of research has occurred on traps and mass kills, there is still more work needed. One area that needs more archaeological attention is independently dating the construction drive lane features and rock rings associated with nearby camp localities. Lack of organic residues and paucity of artifacts directly associated with rock features make determining their chronological association with the kill ambiguous. Several recent studies show that several techniques, such as luminescence and lichenometry, can be used to date these types of features which allows more precise understanding of the life history of all components of kills (e.g., Meyer, 2021; Feathers et al., 2015). Similarly, there is increasing need to integrate tribal oral histories, knowledge systems and perspectives into the archaeological research of trap and kill sites. While prior archaeological and anthropological study of kill sites on the Great Plains has often been informed through collaboration with Indigenous peoples, future work should involve greater collaborative and community-based research that acknowledges Native knowledge, ethics and participation (Zedeño et al., 2014).
Acknowledgments I thank Jack Brink, Jack Hofman, Edward Knell, Matthew G. Hill, Mary Stiner, and Erik Otárolo-Castillo for many discussions over the years that have helped to shape my thinking on hunter-gatherers and hunting practices. I also thank Margaret Beck for her editorial assistance and her continued support of my work.
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See Also: Classification of Archaeological Sites.
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Antiq. 55, 813–827. Uhlenbeck, Christianus C., 1912. A New Series of Blackfoot Texts From the Southern Peigan Blackfoot Reservation Teton County, Montana. Johannes Müller, Amsterdam. Verbicky-Todd, Eleanor, 1984. Communal Buffalo Hunting Among Plains Indians. Archaeological Survey of Alberta 24. Alberta Culture Historical Resource Division, Alberta. Wheat, Joe Ben, 1967. A Paleo-Indian Bison Kill. Sci. Am. 216, 44–53. Wheat, Joe Ben, 1972. The Olsen-Chubbuck site: a Paleo-Indian bison kill. Memoirs Soc. Am. Archaeol. 26, 1–180. Wissler, Clark, 1910. The material culture of the Blackfoot Indians. Anthropol. Pap. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. 5, 1–175. Wissler, Clark, 1912. Social organization and ritualistic ceremonies of the Blackfoot Indians. Anthropol. Pap. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. 7, 1–298. Zedeño, María N., Ballenger, Jesse, Reitze, William, Laluk, Nicholas, Jones, Robert, 2008. The Kutoyis (Two Medicine) Bison Hunting Locality, Two Medicine River, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Glacier County, Montana: Interim Report of the Kutoyis Archaeological Project (KAP). Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, Tucson: University of Arizona. Zedeño, María N., Ballenger, Jesse A.M., Murray, John R., 2014. Landscape engineering and organizational complexity among late prehistoric bison hunters of the northwestern plains. Curr. Anthropol. 55, 23–58. Zedeño, María N., Roos, Christopher, Hollenback, Kacy L., Erlick, Mary H., 2021. Bison hunters and prairie fires: a view from the northwestern plains. In: Frehner, Brian, Brosnan, Kathleen A. (Eds.), The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s Environmental Histories. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, pp. 48–65. Zeder, Melinda A., Bar-Oz, Guy, Rufolo, Scott, Hole, Frank, 2013. New perspectives on the use of kites in mass-kills of Levantine Gazelle: a view from Northeastern Syria. Quat. Int. 297, 110–125.
Agricultural Fields Robert N. Spengler, III a,b, a Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany; and b Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Agricultural Constructions Remote Sensing In Field Evidence Indirect Evidence Key Issues Social Developments Dating Summary and Future Directions References
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Agriculture has been the main means of production for most of the past ten millennia, making the garden or field the center of labor and resource acquisition. Identifying ancient gardens and fields is notoriously difficult for archaeologists. There are many methods used to map out the parameters of ancient fields, determine what was grown on them and during which seasons, and to clarify how irrigation systems worked. The study of ancient gardens and fields is becoming a well-recognized area of inquiry, and the methods used by experts are increasing in resolution and complexity.
Glossary A Horizon The layer of soil close to the top of a soil column, which is characterized by dark organic-rich sediments Paddies A form of field that relies of standing water to regulate weed germination, nutrient levels, and crops growth Plow zone The layer of soil that is heavily disturbed by the action of plowing a field Retaining wall A wall that is often, but not always, constructed to stabilize a terraced field. It is also known as a riser Ridge-and-furrow field A form of field with parallel rows of troughs formed by plowing, which was common across Medieval Europe Slash-and-burn cultivation A cultivation system that involves cutting and burning plants to clear a field, called a swidden, which is then used until soil-nutrient levels become low, after which the cultivators repeat the process elsewhere Terraced field Any topographic surface that has been artificially flattened for the purpose of planting
Abstract From the dawn of cultivation onward, agricultural fields have been the center of production. Ancient fields took on many forms and involved different levels of labor and time investment. In most cases, homesteads, villages, or urban centers would have been surrounded by land, on which people actively altered the soil chemistry and material composition, as well as regulated what plants and animals existed there. Despite being an important part of the historic and prehistoric human experience, agricultural fields often elude archaeologists. A combination of detailed excavations and scientific approaches can provide evidence for what these fields looked like and how humans engaged with them.
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Introduction Archaeological investigation tends to focus on either occupation sites or burials, and researchers engage with artifacts and ecofacts from these contexts. Excavators tend to target houses and middens, while collecting ceramic sherds, lithics, bones, and carbonized plant material. However, these research foci usually overlook an important aspect of life in the ancient worlddthe agricultural field. The cultivation of plants was and is essential for feeding, clothing, and housing people, and farmers also cultivated plants for ritual, medicinal, and ornamental purposes. While archaeobotanical remains of many of these cultivated plants can be found in occupation sites, the fields where they were grown are often invisible in the archaeological record. Research agendas should include questions about how crops were cultivated, how much labor or time ancient farmers invested into cultivation, and what technology was used. Ultimately, farming is the main driver of human demographic growth and cultural development; hierarchical political systems did not form without complex farming practices and governments could not have fed the populations of cities (Childe, 1936; Rindos, 1984; Spengler, 2022). A garden or a field is an architectural construction, but unlike a house or building, it is not wholly made out of anthropogenic material; a garden is constructed out of living plants and often bound by walls, fences, or ditches. Within the boundaries of a garden, people choose which plants and animals they permit to grow there. The removal of unwanted plants can be performed through hand weeding, hoeing, tilling, burning, grazing animals on fields after harvest, or, over the past century, with herbicides. The field or garden can often be blurred into natural surroundings, and for many peoples the boundaries of the construction are imagined or socially controlled. It is important to recognize that the orderly gardens and neatly lined fields of many European and East Asian cultures are not the global norm. Often gardens or cultivated land are so intermixed with forests or dispersed on the landscape that they are indistinguishable to the untrained eye. A modern example of such a garden could come from the shade coffee plantations of South America; often invisible from the air, they are intermixed with wild tropical forest species. Another classical example of a forest garden comes from the northwest coastal populations of North America (Turner et al., 2011). The study of human impacts on sediments adjacent to or away from an occupation site requires a different set of scientific tools than the study of human activities in an ancient settlement. Anthropogenic alterations of a landscape tend to form palimpsests of cultural constructions, often intertwined together; in many cases, modifications of soil composition and chemistry or the construction of earthen features are cumulative processes. The construction and maintenance of irrigation systems can gradually lead to the development of increasingly larger or more dendritic systems, often erasing aspects of the previous construction with each new expansion. One of the clearest indications of human impacts through agriculture comes from topographic modifications; these cultural changes to the landscape can include the construction of irrigation canals, drainage ditches, terraced hills, and dams or water catchment and diversion structures. Cultivation systems can either be Extensive, spreading out over vast areas and often leaving land fallow for significant periods of time, or Intensive, focusing attention on a single plot of land, usually requiring irrigation and fertilization of soils. Intensive farming is, obviously, more archaeologically visible than low-investment cultivation. While lowinvestment forms of extensive cultivation have been far more common throughout human history, their lasting impacts tend to fade with time; although, vegetation changes can last for centuries after fallow fields are abandoned. Interest in the archaeology of the garden and the field has continually grown since the early 1990s and there is now a complex set of methods available (Elgar, 2008; Brown, 1991; Mac Dougall and Jashemski, 1981; Yamin and Metheny, 1994; Miller and Gleason, 1994a,b). A detailed investigation of ancient gardens or fields can tell an archaeologist about: (1) how humans in the past interacted with the natural environment around them; (2) which plants and animals were more anthrophillic versus anthrophobic; (3) what labor and time investments went into cultivation; and (4) what cultural processes were involved in cultivation. As the archaeology of gardens and fields becomes more popular, it is important to know the methods at hand and what their advantages and limitations are. These issues are briefly presented in this entry.
Overview Agricultural Constructions For roughly 95% of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed, the species has pursued a foraging lifestyle; at various points over the past 10,000 years, a few select groups of humans started to engage in more complex cultural adaptations for plant foraging, i.e., cultivation. For roughly 95% of the time that farming populations have existed, they primarily engaged in lowinvestment forms of cultivation, often relying on swidden or slash-and-burn cultivation. Gradually, over the past 3000 years, a few select groups of people began to increasingly develop more complex ways to maximize harvests, and within the past 250 years the rates of innovation in agriculture have nearly exponentially increased. With each new innovation in farming, people have developed more effective ways to modify the landscape they live on. For example, plows have been used to till land for at least four millennia; prior to the invention of the animal-pulled plow, all land clearing, tilling, and furrowing was done by hand using sticks, ards, or hoes. The plow significantly increased the impact humans could make on a landscape, but until the Industrial Revolution, these were simple plows, such as the Roman aratrum. The switch from ox to horse traction and eventually the introduction of the mold-board plow in the 18th century all led to increasingly longer lasting impacts on the landscape. Similarly, switching from iron to steel and eventually to combustion engines all led to more impressive modifications of agricultural fields. Similar progressions in agricultural technology, leading to increasingly more dramatic impacts on the landscape, can be traced in innovations for fertilizer, from manuring to synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
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The differences in archaeological signals between extensive (swidden or slash-and-burn) and intensive (irrigated and manured, often with crop rotations) agriculture can be immense. Slash-and-burn systems can leave visible changes on vegetation communities, especially in slow-growing tropical forests, which may last for centuries. Slash-and-burn farming on grasslands or in rapidregenerating forests (e.g., riparian forests) may only leave decadal scale impacts, and high levels of mobility may result in little to no traceable signature in soil chemistry. However, intensive farming can leave traces that stretch back as far as humans have engaged in such behaviors. Some examples of agricultural constructions associated with intensive farming include: terraced hill slopes such as those seen in Fig. 1, field walls, hedgerows, lynchets, ridged or raised beds, irrigation canals, aqueducts, wells, water catchments, water diversion systems, dams, black soils, planting pits, or ridge-and-furrow fields. Sometimes wind deflation and/or fluvial erosion leaves nothing more than faint traces of ancient fields. The most archaeologically visible of these intensive farming constructions tend to relate to irrigation. Farmers across South and southwest Asia have been artificially watering their fields using simple irrigation technology since at least the third millennium BC. While small-scale irrigation systems can be maintained by a single household or small community, larger systems often represent collective labor projects and are used as evidence for better understanding political systems. Other extremely labor-intensive forms of ancient field systems also exist, including the raised fields of the pre-European Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia, especially around Lake Titicaca (Erickson, 1992). Hedgerows may involve active living walls that in some parts of the world date back nearly a millennium; these property divisions can directly signify social and political divisions or differences in ideologies between people in the past. Hedgerows may also consist of rock walls that could have been gradually constructed over many human generations. Rock piles on the edges of historical field systems can also represent the by-products of centuries of cultivation, as farmers remove rocks that would damage a plow; these rocks either work their way to the surface or are exposed through deflation of sediments, often a result of poor cultivation practices (Fig. 2). Next to irrigation systems, terraces or leveled fields tend to be the most visible agricultural constructions on a cultural landscape. There are several direct and indirect benefits of terracing a hillslope, such as by deepening the soil, which occurs when soil is deposited behind a retaining wall. Deeper soils often mean a greater concentration of nutrient-rich sediment and water-absorbing potential; they can also provide more area for roots to expand into. A retaining wall can serve to regulate water absorption or runoff, also reducing erosion. The filling in of sediments behind a retention wall can be direct, through human labor, i.e., a back-filled field, or indirect by sediment catchment, i.e., self-filling/accretional fields. As a primary goal, these flattened surfaces provide more area to plant crops; the flattened area of a terrace is often called the tread. A typological classification has been constructed for terraced fields, based on slope, wall type, and contiguity (Spencer and Hale, 1961, Table 1). In Fig. 3 an ancient water-catchment grid system is visible on the surface near the archaeological site of Bash Tepa in Uzbekistan. Plants can serve as more ephemeral signs of anthropogenic impacts left from historic fields and gardens. Obviously, the most visible form of evidence from plants comes from ornamental or non-native species grown on a currently feral landscape. As some examples, parasol pines, pillar Cypress, or olive trees can mark the locations of historical villas or houses in the Mediterranean. Apple trees in the southern UK or the northern half of North America have historically been planted as markers of property ownership and land use. Apple trees or even overgrown orchards often indicate previously cultivated land or roadways, especially seeing that apple trees rarely successfully colonize new areas unless humans, bears, or horses transport their seeds. Citrus trees can be found on hammocks in the everglades and are thought to mark long-abandoned Seminole occupation sites, and date palms often mark abandoned oasis farms in arid southwest Asia. Specific types of trees are often planted at property corners or field intersections, as well as serving as windbreaks along field boundaries. While herbaceous plants in gardens tend to be more transitory and are quickly overrun by succession forest growth within a few decades of abandonment, some exceptions do exist, such as English or Boston ivy and periwinkle vines, frequently marking old gardens in Northern Europe or the New England states. Additionally, given the patterns of successional growth in forests, areas cleared for cultivation can often be seen using remote sensing for centuries after the field is abandoned.
Fig. 1 Parallel examples of slopping terraces in Dagestan, in the northeastern part of the Caucasus; these examples date to the Medieval period, but other earlier ones have also been documented in the region. The terraces are constructed in the driest parts of the mountain range, where there are few forests; in some areas nearly all slopes are covered in terraces. Photo taken by Natalya Ryabogina in 2018.
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Fig. 2 A rock pile marking the edge of an historically documented field that was abandoned about four decades ago and worked for roughly a century prior. The stones have gradually been moved to the perimeters of the field to remove them from the plows. In this case from Upstate New York, the property boundary is also visible in the remnants of barbwire growing out of the tree.
Table 1
A classification system of types of terraced fields used through history by people around the world
Terrace type
Definition
Weir terraces
A shallow sloping terrace that involves short stone piles used to trap sediments for the deepening of soils. These small constructions are usually placed along a stream or seasonally flooded incline. A large cross-channel catchment wall meant to harvest periodic rainwater, which, in hyper arid regions, notably the Negev, come as sheet washes. A form of terrace that retains a slope, which inclines gradually toward the retaining wall. The slope removes excess water. These forms are used in regions with moderate rainfall (see Fig. 1). A series of leveled platforms, often in serial rows, usually using a cut-in-and-fill system of construction, and also most often relying on irrigation. These terraces are sometimes called benches, given their shape. These are similar to linear contour terraces, but with wider treads and sprawling along a valley floor or at a mountain foothill. These are specific to China and southeast Asia, and they rely on pooled or paddy water.
Barrage terraces Sloping terraces Linear contour terraces Valley-floor terraces Wet-field terraces
Fig. 3 Gridded field plots with shallow water catchment walls for collecting irrigation or seasonal flood water, today exposed on the surface a few kilometers beyond the current edge of the Bukhara Oasis. Excavations at the citadel site of Bash Tepa (ca. 400–100 BC) are visible in the background, and are directed by Sören Stark. The photo was taken by the author in 2017.
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Remote Sensing There are two broad categories of remote sensing methods: (1) aerial and satellite photography and (2) geophysical exploration (Kruckman, 1987; Wynn, 1986). Remote sensing, through ground-penetrating radars and magnetometers can identify agricultural constructions even when they are not visible on the surface. Aerial photography can identify features on the landscape and can help map field boundaries; in many cases, larger-scale field constructions can be identified from satellite imagery as well, for example, see Figs. 4 and 5. Viewing a landscape from the air allows for the identification of features and patterns that may not be visible on the surface. Given differences in soil matrices between a field and its adjacent landscape, herbaceous vegetation on ancient fields can be markedly different. For example, if cultivation practices led to the depletion of topsoil and the removal of nitrogen from soils on a field, the plants growing on the remnants of that field may experience drought stress. Often satellite imagery from different seasons can aid in field identification, as vegetation stress may only show up during dry or cold periods of the year. Once field parameters are delineated, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can be used to map out field boundaries and catalog site location and scale (Fig. 6). Aerial photography can be accomplished using a variety of different vehicles, including drones, kites, small aircrafts, and satellites. Drones, in particular, are becoming more effective and less expensive, leading to their commonplace use as archaeological tools. Cultivated fields tend to provide a uniform canvas for identifying developmental changes in vegetation cover; for example, a buried house foundation or wall may provide less fertile or water-absorbing ground for plants to grow, and, therefore, crops growing on top of such a buried feature may become stunted or turn brown during particularly hot summers. The reverse can be true for crops growing over silted-in pits or ditches, which may be rich in organic material. These vegetation signals, marking buried features, are sometimes called crop marks. Crop marks can sometimes be identified with basic photography, or by the use of near-infrared spectrum photography, which can make vegetation appear very bright, aiding in the identification of patterns or features. Similarly, the use of ultraviolet light in remote sensing can make limestone appear very bright. Increasingly, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems are more readily being used to identify archaeological sites through vegetation cover. The method requires special sensory equipment, and relies on the use of light in the form of a pulsed laser, which is then measured as it reflects back to an overhead aircraft. As an example of how remote sensing and aerial imagery can benefit the study of ancient agricultural fields, Figs. 4 and 5 are from the archaeological site of Khar Bukh Balgas in Mongolia (Csiky et al., 2017). The fortified occupation site dates to the Khitan period (AD 388–1211) and the field systems and walled settlement visible in these satellite images likely date to the later part of the Khitan occupation. Archaeologists depict the site as part of a chain of settlements that spanned along the northern periphery of what was perceived as the divide between more mobile pastoralists to the north and farming populations to the south. In this regard, these fortified agricultural sites are located in arid regions, both mandating significant investment in irrigation when the site was occupied, but also leading to the preservation of the ridged field system. Archaeologists have argued that the town would have mostly been occupied by soldiers and their families. Switching between different satellites or imaging programs, such as Google Earth, Bing, and Maxar, as well as comparing images from different seasons with different vegetation cover, can all help identify low-topographic features (see Figs. 4 and 5). Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) sends short radio pulses into the ground; when these radio waves hit something too dense to pass through, they bounce back to the surface and are recorded by a detector. They can reflect off of objects or features. While GPR can detect a greater range of features than other similar methods, its range of depth decreases rapidly with more clayey soils, and it is better for identifying large buried features within a meter or two below the surface. Magnetometry is another similar method that measures the magnetic waves of objects or features, and it can identify burned areas or metal objects well. GPR and magnetometry work well in unison, as they identify different aspects of subterranean anthropogenic remains. Both methods can aid in detecting
Fig. 4 A Google Earth satellite image of the archaeological site of Khar Bukh Balgas in Mongolia, showing millennium-old field systems. Photos provided by Amina Jambajantsan in 2021.
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Fig. 5 Two images from the northeastern area of the archaeological site of Khar Bukh Balgas, with the corner of the fortification visible for scale. The top image is from Maxar and the bottom image is from Bing, showing differences in shading and resolution. Photos provided by Amina Jambajantsan in 2021.
Fig. 6 An ancient field system constructed by piling rocks into shallow walls creating a grid pattern within a seasonal river drainage. These square fields catch water and nutrient-rich sediments from mountain rains, creating shallow weir terraces (see Table 1). This photo was taken by Yuqi Li at the Mohuchahangoukou site (ca. AD 200–500) located in a seasonally active drainage of the Mohuchahan River in the Yanqi Basin of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China (see Li et al., 2019).
buried field boundaries, irrigation structures, and in some cases tillage patterns. In an ideal situation, test units will then be excavated to verify the identifications of features or objects seen through geophysical remote sensing methods.
In Field Evidence There is no single correct way to properly excavate a field. Gleason (1994) notes that by opening a large excavation area, the surface of a cultivated field can be seen in full. This would allow for the identification of ridges, furrows, or planting pits. A wide open excavation unit could also allow for the articulation of post holes from fences or trellises. However, Gleason also notes the importance of baulk or vertical sections through the field or garden, allowing for a three-dimensional view and an indirect understanding of fourth dimensional changes to the field. Transecting a field allows for the identification of the surface of the topsoil from the ancient field
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and any additional phases of use and disuse. Baulk walls can also help to sort out details in stratigraphy that may not be visible when taking an excavation unit down in layers or by depth. Trenching is one of the most commonly used excavation methods by archaeologists, and long trenches with clean profiles are ideal, especially if used in combination with open excavation areas. It is often important to remember that agricultural constructs, in many cases, are commonly reworked, meaning that we only know them from the status of their terminus ante quem. Coring can be highly informative regarding the depth of a field, changes in the field structure over time, taphonomic processes acting on the fields, and the extent of the cultivated area. Often simple augers or split-spoon cores can be quite effective, depending on the depth of the sediments. Simple cores can inform an expert how deep the plow zone is or where the A horizon sits. Simple coring can also provide column samples allowing for tests of differences in chemical signatures at different depths. Notably, archaeologists may be interested in examining the quantities of organic material preserved in the sediments, the presence of microcharcoals, and the levels of phosphates and nitrogen. If a field is bisected during excavation, intact bulk sediment samples can be collected from the profile for micromorphology studies. Permeating the bulk sample with resin allows a specialist to create thinsection slides for analysis at a transecting light microscope. Sediment thin sections can inform on: (1) the processes of sediment accumulation; (2) preservation and weathering conditions; (3) bioturbation and water percolation; and (4) sediment composition and material concentrations. Whether taking split-spoon cores or micromorphology samples, it is always good practice to also collect control samples from an area off the known ancient field. The anthropogenic use of sediments in a field can often be identified by a close study of the sediment composition. For example, soil in a field that is sandy or clayey, whereas the sediments at a similar depth off of the field contain silt or abundant organic material, may suggest overworking and erosion of the soils in the past. Likewise, depletion of nitrogen or high saline content in field soils may suggest heavy use. The opposite is also true, continual fertilization, either through human and animal feces or by throwing domestic trash onto the fields can lead to darker more nutrient-rich soils. Plaggen or dark organic-rich soils can represent extensive labor and time investment by ancient peoples when the application of herd animal dung is used to increase nitrogen levels in the sediments. Nitrogen, on the other hand, can be depleted after humans abandon a site. Phosphates are also concentrated when humans manure a field or through domestic debris, notably bones, on the field. The changes in levels of sedimentary phosphates due to human action can be identified in the sediment column millennia after humans stop interacting in an area. Decomposed phosphates are nearly insoluble and they loosely bind with the soil, which means that the concentrations remain at the stratigraphic levels where they formed rather than percolating down into lower levels. Organic phosphates bind in the soil to calcium, iron, and aluminum and, once this happens, they also cannot be absorbed by plants. In general, areas around ancient occupation sites or fields contain high levels of phosphates and because of the particularly high levels of phosphates in bones, burials and middens contain especially high levels of fixed phosphates (Hamond, 1983). Agricultural fields tend to be poor in artifacts, but in some cases, fields were used to dispose of trash along with organic house waste, serving as fertilizer; ceramic sherds or other artifacts can readily be found in such fields (Miller and Gleason, 1994a,b; Gleason, 1994). These artifacts can assist archaeologists in determining who worked the fields in the past and what their social or political standing was. However, the real artifact of an agricultural field or garden is the anthropogenic soil itself. As Miller and Gleason (1994a,b:25) lament, “Many archaeological traditions treat soil simply as the medium in which artifacts or environmental remains are embedded, the context rather than the object of study”. Evidence in the sediments of a heavily worked field could include Coprostanol (notably 5b-Coprostanol), a group of carbon-based compounds that form in the gut of certain animals. Coprostanols in soils can be measured, and in certain cases used to determine what animals were depositing feces or used as manure on that spot in the past (Bull et al., 2001). The use of biomarkers as sedimentary indicators of past human activity is a growing area of study, and will likely continue to grow in the future (Bull et al., 1999; Bethell et al., 1994). Archaeobotanical evidence is sometimes also gleamed off of sediments from agricultural fields; however, given the continual reworking of these sediments, plant remains are rarely preserved and, when they are, their actual original contexts are unknown. Additionally, there are two very different vectors for carbonized plant remains to enter an ancient field, the first is through burning the field, a common practice in many parts of the world to remove pests and weed seeds, the second is through the disposal of waste, along with ash from cleaned hearths. The same issues of sedimentary turbation and a lack of understanding about the introduction into the field make microbotanical studies of field sediments highly problematic. However, many scholars still choose to conduct pollen or phytolith analyses on field or garden sediments with mixed results. Starch grains are particularly problematic, as their preservation in sediments has yet to be sufficiently explained and scholars are increasingly recognizing the impacts of contamination and poor identification that remain prominent in this area of study (Crowther et al., 2014; Mercader et al., 2018). Pollen grains have highly resistant outer walls called an exine shell, which is extremely resistant to weathering or chemical degradation (Faegri and Iversen, 1975). These exine shells often have morphologically distinct features, especially in their number of pores or colpi (slits). These distinct features allow for identification to family and, in some cases, genus level. However, anthropogenic contexts are notoriously problematic for conducting palynological research, as they are often heavily turbated and pollen is impossible to directly date. Nonetheless, detailed palynological studies of sediments in and around archaeological sites can tell experts about what plants were growing there and what the broader ecology looked like (Dimbleby, 1985). Additionally, most pollen research is conducted on lake or bog cores, as these anaerobic environments tend to ensure that pollen grains preserve at high concentrations. The continual reworking of agricultural fields would likely result in the eventual deterioration of pollen grains; however, in rare contexts, such as a buried soil surface under a constructed field divide, pollen analyses could be possible. Pollen may preserve well in irrigation canals, but the pollen would represent the broader plant community at the period when the canal was silting up and not necessarily the period when the field was in use. There are four other prominent issues that palynologists
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confront when dealing with economically significant plants, such as field crops. First, many crops, notably most fruit trees, are insect pollinated and, therefore, produce low levels of pollen; these plants are often invisible in the palynological record. Secondly, a pollen signal of vegetatively propagated crops is often absent too, making pollen studies in tropical regions less useful. Thirdly, grass pollen is largely uniform across the family; despite nearly a century of research into how to identify Cereal-type or Cerealia pollen, there is simply too much size variation within wild grasses to reliably differentiate between wild grass and wheat. All grass pollen has a single pore and the size and shape of the grain can be dramatically altered over time and through the crushing of its spherical structure, like the popping of a balloon. Nonetheless, many pollen experts still use palynological data to reconstruct cereal fields (see Feeser et al., 2016; Hall et al., 1993). As a fourth prominent issue in pollen work in field sediments, the effects of manuring are not well knowndmanure tends to be rich in pollen and, when spread on fields, it may result in a greater pollen signal than the crops grown in the field; although, wind-dispersed pollen may still override all anthropogenic vectors of pollen introduction into field sediments.
Indirect Evidence The best evidence for piecing together cultivation systems found outside the field are agricultural tools, such as stone hoes or iron plows. Additionally, some of the earliest clear historical and art historical sources that go into detail about cultivation practices date to the Classical period in the Mediterranean, when the earliest agricultural manuals and texts on nature were compiled, as well as ancient Chinese accounts of farming, some dating as far back as the Han Dynasty, roughly two millennia ago. In the absence of historical sources and agricultural tools, archaeologists can reconstruct cultivation practices using archaeobotanical remains, often in combination with ethnographic analogy. Macrobotanical remains can be extremely informative regarding cultivation systems, as specific crops have known growing seasons and periods until germination. In some cases, mixed crop assemblages can be used to clarify how and when crop rotation cycles were first implemented; one example comes from the sudden prominence of millet grains in urban sites across Eurasia in the first millennium BC, interpreted by Miller et al. (2016) as evidence for the use of millets as a summer crop. Similarly, the combinations of legumes and arboreal crops found in a site can tell scholars about the level of intensification, concepts of land tenure, and roles of secondary crops in the economy. Additionally, weed assemblages, when they can be differentiated from dung-burning remains, can tell scholars a lot about threshing and other processing activities, as well as what the general cultivation behaviors look like (Bogaard et al., 2005, 2016; Jones, 2002). Archaeobotanical remains are best recovered from contexts within an occupation site and are often in densest concentrations in hearths or middens (Spengler et al., 2021; Spengler, 2019; Fritz, 2005; Watson, 1976). Even if macrobotanical remains are not directly recovered from ancient fields, they have the potential to inform on the nature of irrigation systems, crop processing locations and timing, and the intensity of cultivation. Increasingly, scholars are using stable isotopes in archaeobotanical remains to determine the level of artificial watering or manuring that crops received during their developmental phases. These specialists contrast similarities and differences in d13C and d15N values on similar crop varieties as a way to determine cultivation choices and growing conditions (An et al., 2015; Riehl et al., 2014; Vaiglova et al., 2021; Xinying et al., 2021; Yang et al., 2020). When interpreting such data, it is imperative that scholars recognize the complexities of the processes that lead to distinct isotope ratios. For example, nitrogen-fixing legumes (N2-fixers) will contain different ratios than grasses. Likewise, differences in climatic conditions will dramatically impact the ratios, so comparisons between like crop types grown in similar ecological conditions in the same parts of the world are essential (Flohr et al., 2019). Enrichment of 15N in soils can be caused by a suite of different factors, including overall nutrient status, salinity, aridity, topography, water saturation, and also anthropogenic factors, such as manuring (Szpak, 2014). Hence, experimental studies are essential for each region and each crop to set baselines; ideally, these experiments must be multi-seasonal (over several years), as each season brings new waves of stressors for plants (Fraser et al., 2011). One of the few recent multi-year experimental studies of this sort, sought to test the use of crop carbon stable isotope values (D13C) to reconstruct past water availability (Flohr et al., 2019). The authors used durum wheat, sorghum, and hulled six-rowed barley, grown in an arid eastern Mediterranean region for 3 years under a set of different regulated watering regimes, ultimately determining that there is a large diversity range within crops, even within the same watering regimes, and the isotopic measuring methods may not work for all crops, notably not for sorghum. Future research will likely sort out the usefulness of this method and determine how reliable the interpretations are, taking into account issues such as drought-tolerant varieties of a crop and high rates of developmental plasticity. Nonetheless, scholars continue to use the method to determine how much manure and irrigation water ancient farmers put onto their crops.
Key Issues Social Developments Archaeologists have linked agricultural production and social development together since the seminal writings of Childe (1936). Childe and many subsequent scholars have suggested that food surplus allowed populations of people to set aside a few members of their broader group in order to engage in activities other than food production. This specialization in labor led to the first artists (craft specialists), scholars and medical practitioners, standing armies, political hierarchies, and elite members of the community. Many scholars after Childe developed aspects of this model for social development further. For example, Wittfogel (1957) presented his model of oriental despotism, which suggested that the need for organized collective labor in order to maintain large agricultural fields and irrigation systems in arid regions of West and East Asia facilitated the development of hierarchical political systems and
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social elites. Collectively, he called this form of government the Hydraulic State. While many archaeologists today have rejected the Wittfogelian views (often via reductio ad absurdum), the links between political systems and agricultural constructions in the ancient world are evident. Chinampas in the pre-European Valley of Mexico, the Qanats of early medieval Central Asia, the raised fields near Lake Titicaca, the aqueducts of ancient Rome are all examples of elaborate ancient collective-labor projects. Terracing and large agricultural constructions may embody displays of political strength, engineering prowess, economic prosperity, esthetic choice, or even cosmological belief. In a similar vein, Boserup (1965, 1981, 1990) argued against Malthusian models of human demographic growth, claiming that agricultural surplus drives human reproduction rates, and that population growth also pushes greater rates of innovation in the agricultural sector. Rather than outbreed their environment, Boserup (1965, 1981, 1990) believed that humans have always innovated faster than they reproduce. While Post Processual archaeologists avoided parsimonious models of human social development, the links between farming and culture change are unavoidable. Ultimately, the answers to most of the greatest questions of humanity lay in ancient agricultural fields.
Dating Dating ancient fields remains one of the most challenging issues of their study, as bioturbation and plowing tend to heavily mix sediments. Often organic material and archaeological artifacts appear as a mixed palimpsest of different ages turbated into one large context. While carbonized plant material, sometimes even archaeobotanical seeds and grains, can be found in field contexts, it is often unclear whether this material was burned in the field or if it represents domestic trash disposed of in the field. In either case, the working and reworking of soils often destroys archaeobotanical remains and leaves all material without a discrete context. The best contexts for dating may come from directly below anthropogenic constructions, such as just below a constructed ridge or field wall. Often scholars seek out associated occupation sites adjacent to a field to assist in dating.
Summary and Future Directions The study of ancient agricultural fields and gardens has been a continually growing focus in archaeology since the 1990s. New and increasingly improving methods are making it easier to delineate the boundaries of ancient fields and to determine how humans cultivated crops on those fields. Gathering a full view of the cultural practices that went into the construction of the field requires a combination of on-field and off-field studies; for example, archaeobotanical remains provide the best data regarding which crops might have been grown on a field and what their seasons of growth were. However, archaeobotanical remains are more reliably recovered from settlement sites, as opposed to heavily turbated field systems. Additionally, a combination of remote sensing, material analysis, geochemical, and archaeobotanical methods are necessary to fully extract the information from an ancient field or garden. The study of fields and gardens is important for answering questions beyond the simple question of how humans lived at a specific site in the past. For example, social theory over the past century has closely connected cultural developments, demographic growth, and agricultural intensification. Ultimately, understanding when and where humans began to implement more elaborate cultivation systems and collective labor projects speaks to larger cultural processes.
See Also: Archaeobotany: Crop Husbandry; Archaeobotany: Microscopic and Molecular Techniques; Archaeobotany: Plant Domestication; Archaeobotany: Plant Macroremains; Classification of Archaeological Sites; Human-Landscape Interactions; Social Impacts on Landscapes.
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Settlements, Tell Formation Thomas W. Davis, Lanier Center for Archaeology, Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, United States © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Overview Key Issues Causes of Tell Formation Environmental Defense Networks Ideology Summary and Future Directions References
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This entry explains the nature of tells and discusses how they form Various historical models of tell identity that have guided research are reviewed The variety of field methodologies historically employed to excavate tells are discussed Why tells are only found in certain landscapes, and why tells have a limited diachronic window is discussed
Abstract Tells, the Arabic name for hills or mounds, are the dominant feature in the archaeological landscape of the eastern Mediterranean. Stretching from the delta in Egypt to the Black Sea, tells are unique to this region of the world. Tells are made up of the ruins of ancient towns and villages, a result of repeated occupation in the same location over millennia. Numerous environmental and social factors lead to tell formation. The recognition of tell sites as products of ancient occupation was clarified by the first controlled excavations in the Near East in the late 19th century although it would take nearly a century before the complexity of tells was fully appreciated by archaeologists and appropriate excavation methods became universally employed.
Introduction Tellsdfrom the Arabic name for hill or mounddare the dominant feature in the archaeological landscape of the eastern Mediterranean (Fig. 1). Stretching from the delta in Egypt to the Black Sea, tells are unique to this region of the world. Tells are made up of the ruins of ancient towns and villages, a result of repeated occupation in the same location over millennia. This stubbornness of settlement is driven by a variety of factors, but certain causes are shared across the tell landscapes including water sources, arable land, existing networks, and ideological factors. Resulting from both cultural and natural site formation processes, tells retain a distinctive shape with sloping sides rising to a relatively flat surface, often still occupied by a living community. A tell is a multi-layered mound/hill with each succeeding city being built upon the remains of the previous city shaped by wall systems. Since most landscape features that carry the word tell as part of their name are ancient occupations, it is evident that the local inhabitants had long recognized the sites as being distinct from purely geological formations (Rosen, 1986). Decayed mudbrick from the repeated occupations forms the bulk of a tell’s fill (Fig. 2). When sundried mudbrick is not maintained and protected from the elements, it quickly breaks down into its constituent parts of mud and temper. The remains of large defensive structures such as wall systems made from stone, mudbrick and burnt brick act as barriers to the mudbrick detritus and the material accumulates on the mound. Defense structures such as walls and glacis slopes combine with erosion to shape the paradigmatic sloped sides and overall dune-like shape. By the mid-19th century, some European explorers such as Henry Layard had recognized the cultural/historical nature of the tells that dominated the Ancient Near East. However, not all early explorers were equally sagacious. The Rev. Edward Robinson, an American Hebrew scholar from Andover Seminary, led the first systematic survey of Palestine in the 1830s (Davis, 2004). With the goal of producing a scientific geography of the Holy Land, Robinson brought a new approach to the location of biblical sites. He correctly believed that ancient place names were preserved by the local inhabitants and although corrupted by time, could still be “heard” in
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Fig. 1
Tell Deir Alla, Jordan. Author’s Collection.
Fig. 2
A decaying mudbrick wall at the site of Tell Deir Alla, Jordan. Author’s Collection.
the current names used by the indigenous occupants. Robinson set out in the fall of 1837 for Cairo, where he teamed up with Eli Smith, a Beirut-based missionary who had visited Andover. Eli Smith was fluent in the local Palestinian Arabic, which eased the difficulties of the journey considerably. A clear clue to the nature of tells was presented to Robinson when he started his journey in Egypt. The explorer had noticed that many villages in the delta were built up on mounds which he correctly deduced were the ruins of former dwellings (Fig. 3). Despite this insight, one of the ironies of Robinson’s work is that he did not take this insight from the low delta villages and employ it to grasp the nature of the tells that dot the Palestinian landscape. In his defense, the laws of superposition and stratigraphy were still being hammered out in geology and were not yet totally accepted. Without an understanding of stratigraphy, Robinson did not realize that tells were essentially artificial in nature. As a result, on occasion, Robinson made faulty identifications, or refrained from a correct identification, as in the case of Tell el-Ful where Robinson was looking for the biblical site of Gibeah, capital of Israel’s
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Tell el Farqa, a low-lying tell in the Nile delta, Egypt. Author’s Collection.
first king, Saul. He had already located two sites in the vicinity, Jeba and er-Ram, which he had identified as ancient neighbors of Gibeah. He did not consider Tell el-Ful as a candidate, despite its location between Jeba and er-Ram, because the only visible ruins were a Turkish tower. Also, his own methodology may have misled him in this case, because the name of the site is “hill of the bean”, a name unconnected to the supposed ancient name of Gibeah. W.F. Albright would later excavate Tell el-Ful, demonstrating its antiquity as a site of habitation and the most likely candidate for Saul’s capital (Albright, 1924). This is a curious and rare failure for Robinson who was otherwise a brilliant observer. Yet, fault is not the word; it is no failure to be ahead of one’s time only most of the time and not all of the time.
Overview The recognition of tell sites as products of ancient occupation was clarified by the first controlled excavations in the Near East in the late 19th century although it would take nearly a century before the complexity of tells was fully appreciated by archaeologists and appropriate excavation methods became universally employed. Most early “excavators” employed the sondage methodddigging a long deep trench in the hope of finding something interesting, as had been successful in Mesopotamia. Using trenches at the huge imperial cities of Assyria and Babylonia yielded monumental artwork and entire ancient libraries of cuneiform tablets. This success distorted efforts to grasp the nature of the tell sites. Palestinian archaeology was a ferment of excavation and experimentation in understanding tell sites due to the strong interest in archaeology provided by the biblically-interested public in Europe and the USA. The lack of grand monuments and extensive archives such as in Mesopotamian tells, meant that archaeologists in Palestine were forced to wrestle with the fundamental nature of the tell site, not being distracted by elite remains. Additionally, the close nature of the community of archaeologists centered in Jerusalem, and the geographical proximity of the various excavations ensured that new methods or interpretations were widely shared. Sir Flinders Petrie was a critical contributor to challenging this dominant Mesopotamian methodology and provided further information on the formation of tell sites (Fig. 4). Petrie believed the resulting deep cut of the sondage method prevented the archaeologist from accurately drawing a top plan of the various phases the trench cut through (Petrie, 1904). Petrie revealed his surveyor’s orientation by including the acquisition of top plans and topographical information as the top priority in the goals of excavation. To achieve this aim, Petrie advocated a method of wide exposure and the use of trenches to follow walls; the entire site could be excavated, chamber-by-chamber. Trenching along walls removes the stratigraphic record of the various construction phases, but it is the quickest way to gain a total plan. Petrie was concerned with the preservation of the buildings once they had been uncovered. To protect them, and to facilitate the removal of the covering debris, Petrie advocated a system he called “turning over.” When the
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Fig. 4 The gravestone of Sir Matthew Flinders Petrie in the Protestant Cemetery in Jerusalem. Petrie died in Jerusalem on July 28, 1942. He donated his brain to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, so his head was removed in the kitchen of the American School in Jerusalem (now the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research). Author’s Collection.
excavator began a new section of the tell, he should backfill the previously dug section (once it had been fully planned) with the debris from the new digging. This would preserve the walls as well as unexcavated material in the rooms. Petrie first applied this approach to a tell site in southern Palestine, Tell-el-Hesi (Petrie, 1891). He took advantage of a natural erosional cut into the side of the mound, a natural sondage, to determine the basic stratigraphy. To aid in the recording of the plans, Petrie made avid use of photographyda tool he felt was invaluable for the archaeologist. From Petrie’s methods and his writings, one can deduce his understanding of the nature of the tell. Petrie understood the tell as an architectural product, a series of superimposed layers of houses and public buildings, and his method was geared toward this. Petrie envisioned a tell as a series of datable architectural phases, the product of a succession of destructions and reconstructions. Therefore, the various town plans were the most important information recoverable from a tell; pottery was treated only as a tool for dating the individual phases, or as objets d’art. Petrie’s methods were carried on in subsequent excavations sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund. Frederick J. Bliss, an American, was the choice of the Palestine Exploration Fund to continue work at Petrie’s site in Palestine, Tell el-Hesi. Bliss was a graduate of Union Theological Seminary with no formal training in archaeology. He went to Egypt and worked with Petrie for a few months before starting work at Tell el Hesi in 1891. Bliss made a great cut in the center of the mound, observed the superimposed layers, and recognized them as remnants of distinct occupations. In 1898 Bliss teamed up with R. A. S. Macalister, an Irishman who had his first archaeological training in England. They turned to the Shephelah region of Palestine. After four small excavations, Macalister decided to follow the Petrie method at the biblical site of Gezer, a large, thirty-acre mound (Fig. 5). Macalister believed that only the trench method would provide him with the ability to gain a large exposure in a reasonable amount of time. Beginning at the eastern end of the sizable tell, Macalister dug down to bedrock in wide (40 feet) trenches. When one trench was being excavated, the backdirt would be thrown into the excavated trench to the east. Macalister excavated two-thirds of the tell in this way (Macalister, 1912). The Gezer excavations presented many new problems. Macalister had to contend with a great number of varying stratigraphic phases. He was unable to link up the strata in his different trenches in any coherent fashion. Although the field method used at Gezer was a vertical one, Macalister approached the tell as a horizontal question. He did not make use of the vertical exposure presented by the successive trenches, which would have duplicated the natural cut at Tell el-Hesi from which Petrie worked. Instead, he used the trenches at Gezer as a means of uncovering successive plans. The method did not match up to the goals of the dig, and Macalister was unable to overcome the problems this tension produced. When Gezer was re-excavated in the 1960s, the new team was unable to make sense of the work done by Macalister, and much of his information is now seen as unusable. At the same time as the Palestine Exploration Fund work, a team of German and Austrian archaeologists who had been trained at the classical site of Olympia, conducted excavations at large tell sites in Palestine: Tell Ta’annak, Tell el-Mutesillim (biblical Megiddo), and Tell es-Sultan (biblical Jericho). They approached these sites with the same architectural understanding that they had learned at Olympia, which is not a tell site. The accurate recovery of pottery was not a high priority. The trench system was used, exposing the fortification systems and some of the architectural phasing. When a building was located, the trench would be expanded to allow the full clearance of the structure (Davis, 2004). The trench system fit their flawed view of the nature of a tell. This system was designed to reveal monumental buildings and defense systems and to recover architectural fragments and objects d’art. In such an approach, a tell is understood as the product of activity and action of an elite class. Pottery, for the most part the utilitarian product of the commoner, held little importance in
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Fig. 5
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The so-called “High Place” at Tell Gezer, Israel, excavated by Macalister. Author’s Collection.
this schema (unless it was an art object in its own right). A tell site, the place most likely to reveal the remains of elite activity, is the place of choice for excavation. It is archaeology of the elite. George Reisner, a professor at Harvard who gained his archaeological training in Egypt, was a lone voice with a different understanding of a tell. He was part of an American team at the site of biblical Samaria. Although he was in charge for only a short time, the experience of excavating a tell led him to re-imagine the nature of the site (Reisner et al., 1924). After numerous delays and setbacks, Reisner was finally free to direct the second season at Samaria in 1909. He brought trained Egyptian workmen with him to help control the large workforce. Samaria was to be a showcase excavation, and the workforce was huge. The workers averaged over 200 men at a single time, and on one memorable occasion numbered 450! The professional staff also included experienced personnel, such as Clarence Stanley Fisher, an architect, who had worked with the University of Pennsylvania’s pioneering excavations at Nippur. Thanks to the increased number of supervisory personnel, Reisner was able to exert much better control over the site and achieve a great deal in the two years he excavated at Samaria. In keeping with the original aim of excavating the entire mound, the trench method of “backfilling as you go” was the intended technique. Unfortunately, the rather wasteful first season before Reisner came had used up a large portion of the finances of the excavation, and Reisner had to narrow his sights and use the method of expanding probes. Reisner first dropped a trench to bedrock in order to discover the nature of successive strata. He tried to trace the natural floor levels in the strata he encountered in the various probes. While attempting to follow the varied surfaces his workmen found, Reisner became aware that tells are not simple “layercakes” of superimposed occupations. As a result of the mixture of material present on a tell, Reisner developed a revolutionary concept: the key to understanding a tell lies in the thorough analysis of non-architectural debrisdthe material that makes up over 90% of a tell. He isolated five varieties of “debris”: geological (not deposited by human activity such as eolian sands); mason’s debris (i.e., stone chipsdin which Reisner recognized on-site activity); decay debris; silt; and “dump debris” (i.e., refuse materials such as food remains and dead animals). This material was often intrusive into earlier or later strata, and as a result the excavator of tell debris must pay particular attention to the stratigraphy. Only with a clear understanding of debris formation can intrusive material be separated out. Reisner foreshadowed the post-processual focus on formation processes (Schiffer, 1983). He did not use the terminology of formation processes, but he was astonishingly prescient in being aware of their importance. He noticed the effects of postdepositional activity on the material of a tell. He noted the unnatural smoothness of a surface, which he suspected was the result of trampling; therefore, the surface was a pathway, a conclusion worthy of modern anthropological archaeology. He wrote of the importance of recognizing “sweepings in the corners” of rooms and included a long discussion of “dump formation.” Reisner was aware of the possibility of post-depositional disturbances, which can occur during later non-occupational activity on the site. All of these various activities come together to produce the landmark of Palestine, the tell.
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The truly revolutionary aspect of Reisner’s archaeology was his belief that the tell is the product of human activity and that the archaeologist’s role is the analysis of this activity. He believed that the destruction archaeology unavoidably produces has as its goal “to untangle the series of human actions which have left their mark on the place.” This was a radical change from the previous approaches, which saw a tell as a series of artifacts, or architectural phases. With this theoretical understanding, Reisner was way ahead of his time. Sadly, Reisner’s work was almost forgotten. His emphasis on stratigraphic digging was followed, but only as a “bag of tricks”, not as an element of a complete method and theory package. The questions Reisner asked about human activity and tell formation were not re-stated in Palestinian archaeology until the 1970s. Reisner’s career was one of the great “if onlys” of archaeology, because he never dug again in a tell site. After World War I, the new colonial powers ruling the tell-dominated regions encouraged archaeology. Excavations in Mesopotamia continued to focus on monumental remains and literary recovery, but archaeologists did not ignore non-elite domestic material. At the Sumerian site of Ur, the discovery of the rich royal burials dominated the press attention, but Wooley also undertook systematic work in the non-monumental neighborhoods of the ancient city. The site of Byblos lies on a slight promontory some 25 km north of Beirut. Two natural bays make the site an ideal port. Byblos had been identified with the tell immediately to the south of the modern village of Jebail by the 1860 expedition of Ernest Renan (Fig. 6). In 1924, Maurice Dunand became the director of the Byblos excavations (Dunand, 1939, 1954, 1958, 1973). Dunand excavated Byblos in “rigorously horizontal” layers called levees. At Byblos, each levee had a depth of 20 cm. Excavation by arbitrary levels can be very valuable in sites that have a relatively short occupation history or lack visible cultural stratigraphy. Very successful excavations carried out in the American Southwest the same time as the Byblos excavations utilized similar methodologies. If the tell is understood as the compilation of a series of architectural phases, then the Byblos plans are excellent aids to that understanding. However, like so many other scholars before and since, Dunand approached the tell with a preconceived idea of its structure, and he did not let the material dissuade him. Ultimately, a total of 50 levees were followed on the tell. This was done by careful measurement from an established base point located on a slight rise in the northwest area of the mound. Large squares (25 m. 25 m.) formed a grid over the tell, with each divided into 5 m sub-squares. The function of these squares was purely to give horizontal boundaries for the recording of material finds; they did not function as limited areas for excavation. The plans of the publications are presented in meter levels, with the five levees making up that level indicated on the plans by different colors. Thus, a find was horizontally placed on the plan with its vertical location given in exact figures. Dunand believed that the Byblos publications enabled the reader to reconstruct the site exactly without any “false linkages” made by the excavator. However, in the presentation of the finds to the scholarly community, Dunand completely ignored the stratigraphic relationships between the recorded objects. This is very different from the physical relationship. The reader of the Byblos reports has no way of determining if two objects from the same sub-square and levee are contemporaneous in usage, or if one or both are material from an intrusive feature, such as a pit or burial. Dunand believed this methodology provided the only means of understanding the mass of walls; but tell sites contain more than walls. As Reisner had already argued, no site is just a series of architectural plans. As an example of complete control over the actual excavation, Byblos is praiseworthy. However, the intelligibility of the results is the true test of any method, and by that standard, the excavations at Byblos were a failure.
Fig. 6
The site of Byblos, modern Jebail, Lebanon, with the Crusader castle. Author’s Collection.
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In Palestine, Reisner’s revolutionary ideas were ignored because of the dominant influence of his erstwhile colleague, C.S. Fisher, who became a dominant voice in excavation methodology because he directed two major American excavations, at the tell sites of Beth-Shan and Megiddo. The Fisher method grew out of his architectural training and his experience in Egypt. The non-stratigraphic nature of the Egyptian sites Fisher visited and worked at (cemeteries and temples) oriented his thinking in a horizontal, architectural way. The Fisher method focuses on the recovery of the architectural sequence and associated material, of excavation of areas rather than trenches (Fisher, 1929). To avoid the fragmentation of strata in different plans, Fisher decided to excavate by a wide exposure of one stratum at a time. Fisher claimed to follow the methodology of Reisner, but Fisher saw a tell as a series of strata formed by the superimposition of architectural remains that could be dated by careful excavation. Either Fisher overlooked the questions raised by Reisner regarding debris, or he felt confident enough in the ability of his workers to separate the strata and remove intrusive material as they went along. His Egyptian-trained workers were non-stratigraphic in orientation, but they were highly skilled in building clearance. Fisher became the director of the new American excavations at Megiddo in 1925 (Fig. 7). He utilized the same methodology and removed four complete strata before financial constraints took hold. Again, the Fisher method failed. The key problem was stratigraphic, with intrusive graves often not recognized. This resulted in publishing mixed material as homogeneous. Fisher’s methodology does not account for intrusive material. Unless the daily pottery coming from the stratum being excavated is carefully cataloged, there is no way to check the accuracy of the digging. The dominant voice in American biblical archaeology, W.F. Albright, claimed to follow the “Reisner-Fisher technique” at Tell Beit Mirsim. However, he adapted Fisher’s method to fit the ceramic goals he had set for the excavation. Albright took the area orientation of Fisher and the recording system of Reisner and added the intensive study of the ceramic material from the tell to produce the field methodology of Tell Beit Mirsim. A twenty-meter grid was laid out on the tell, with all finds recorded by day, locus and square. In especially promising loci (which could be rooms or distinctive features, if, in the excavator’s opinion, these warranted a separate label) all of the dirt was sifted. Each day, the pottery was “read” (examined) by Albright and his staff. In keeping with Reisner’s approach, record keeping was very important. Although top plans were made, the focus of the excavation was on the ceramics. He wanted to produce a closely dated corpus of pottery that could function as a type collection for south Palestine. This goal was aided by the fortuitous (in archaeological terms) circumstance of the repeated destruction of the ancient city. This left the basic strata relatively easily discernible, even in the broad horizontal approach of the Fisher method. The tell-wide layers of ash and burnt brick provided vertical separations for the pottery of the various phases. Thus, Albright could be sure of the relative chronological relationships of his material. Albright’s addition of ceramic typology to the Fisher method alleviated some of the interpretational problems connected with this approach. The Albright method with its reliance on ceramic typology contained the seeds of disaster. Stratigraphic study took a secondary role, diverting attention from the pioneering work of Reisner. Albright’s success at Tell Beit Mirsim gave the Fisher method viability that it would otherwise not have merited. The Albright method prevented experiments in stratigraphic excavation, leading to methodological stagnation in Palestine. There was no need to develop field techniques that could expose and clarify micro-stratigraphy, since pottery typology held the promise of pinpointing intrusive material. Unfortunately, the success of the method depended on the excavator having a vast knowledge of pottery. No one else active in Palestine could approach Albright’s grasp of the ceramic corpus, which prevented a repetition of the universally acknowledged success of Tell Beit Mirsim. The Albright method, developed to avoid a methodological dead end, became itself a trap for the unwary.
Fig. 7 The deep cut made by the University of Chicago at the site of ancient Megiddo, Tell el-Mutesellim, Israel. The large stone structure is an Early Bronze Age altar. Photo courtesy of Dr. Stephen Huffman.
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Sir Mortimer Wheeler and his disciples, in particular Kathleen Kenyon, transformed tell excavation. Kenyon (Fig. 8) had gained her initial archaeological experience with Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the late twenties at Verulamium (St. Albans) in England. Wheeler had obtained excellent results through a stratigraphically-oriented method that made extensive use of vertical sections (Wheeler, 1954). Kenyon took the Wheeler methodology and applied it to a tell site at Jericho (Kenyon, 1953). This was achieved by the use of a grid system; however, unlike Fisher’s grid system, the Wheeler-Kenyon grid was used for the actual excavation, not just as a recording tool. The site was excavated in a series of squares, separated by baulks which were left standing, providing a record of the stratification. The baulk grid was the visual distinguishing mark of the new techniques, providing the archaeologist with a clear stratigraphic record. Kenyon stressed the necessity of obtaining a large exposure on a tell, arguing that a sondage should be used only for the purpose of determining the range of occupation. The goal was to gain a stratigraphic understanding of the site, not just the recovery of floor plans. Thus, the excavator of a square did not simply mechanically remove all of the material within the baulks but, when encountering walls, sank probes at right angles to them so that the layers within the square be correlated with the wall, which was in turn linked up with the baulk to provide a complete stratigraphic sequence. This was especially necessary on a tell site owing to the common problem of later pitting and robbing. This stratigraphic methodology was much better equipped to handle a tell than the Fisher method or its modifications, and wrought a revolution in the area, ultimately becoming the dominant excavation mode.
Key Issues The new methodology combined with a revolution in archaeological theory allowed a more sophisticated understanding of tell formation to become dominant. Seton Lloyd warned his colleagues against assuming that an archaeologist, no matter how well trained in a straightforward single period site, could properly excavate a complex Mesopotamian tell site (Lloyd, 1963). He cautioned that the complex fills that resulted from repeated occupations create the necessity for attention to micro-stratigraphy and that each site is a unique product. By the late 1960s, stratigraphic questions were answered on a micro level, for each case had to be examined on its own merits, and decided from its individual context. Without a guiding principle, individual interpretation came to the forefront. Of necessity, the desire to understand micro-stratigraphy required a multi-disciplinary approach. Due to the intensity of recording, this methodology does not allow for more than a moderate exposure of any area under study, and thus more problem-solving archaeology replaced historical/cultural approaches (Dever, 1973).
Fig. 8
Dame Kathleen Kenyon using a trowel to examine the stratigraphy on a visit to Tell Gezer. Photo courtesy of Dr. William G. Dever.
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Archaeologists today have a sophisticated understanding of the nature of a tell site, and tell excavations are at the forefront of new methodological experimentation. Natural formation processes that act upon tell sites are increasingly becoming clear, but archaeologists continue to seek clarity regarding the behavioral processes that lead to tell formation.
Causes of Tell Formation The fundamental behavioral reason for tell site formation is repetitive occupation. Tells form where mudbrick is the main construction material, otherwise the occupational debris will be removed before resettlement occurs. The average life of a mudbrick building seldom exceeds one generation, even if maintained; abandonment leads to rapid disintegration. Stone and burnt brick certainly are used on tell sites, but the leveling process which encourages resettlement is a result of the decay of mudbrick.
Environmental This stubbornness of settlement is driven by a variety of factors, but certain causes are shared across the tell landscapes. These landscapes occupy regions of ecological stress and restricted environmental resources are primary causes for tell formation. Water is a fundamental human need and permanent water sources are a prime cause of settlement in the dry landscapes where tells form (Fig. 9). Human enhanced sources such as aboveground canals or underground water systems (i.e., qanat systems) expand the potential sites for repeated settlement. The presence of permanent water, either enhanced by human activity or not, also permits agriculture in areas where natural rainfall is inadequate for farming, such as southern Mesopotamia. This becomes an additional reason for re-occupying a tell site; a previous occupation site may be difficult to directly farm due to architectural debris. Where arable land is limited, re-occupying the site frees up potential land for agriculture which would otherwise be lived on. Ironically, too much water can also be a cause for tell formation; a built-up tell provides an excellent defense against riverine flooding and this factor encourages repeated occupation. Other natural resources must be of high value, hard to transport and not easily depleted to be a cause for tell formation.
Defense Once a tell has begun to rise above the landscape, it enhances another necessary ingredient for ancient flourishing: defense. The same resources that drive repeated occupation will make the resulting settlement an attractive target for the human predators all societies contain. The defensive value of a tell is normally enhanced by defensive constructions such as walls and glacis. In turn, these walls help channel settlement upward on a site. Even when enemies have conquered a site, the wall lines usually remain
Fig. 9
The natural spring adjacent to the ancient site of Pella, Jordan. Author’s Collection.
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visible and can be re-used with a minimum of rebuilding. When the tell is reoccupied, the new settlement will be higher and perhaps narrower as well.
Networks The inherent conservatism of settlements results in a conservation of trade routes and road networks. Routes have inertia once they are established. Geography “channels” connections. This acts as a reinforcing mechanism encouraging the re-occupation of individual sites, which comprise an already existing network. It becomes easier to stay than move.
Ideology Ideological motivations may encourage re-settlement of a tell. Sometimes, isolated sacred sites are placed on top of deliberately created mounds, to raise them above their surroundings, which can become the nucleus of a tell. A perceived sacredness of place or the location of a temple in the ruined site may encourage re-occupation, despite the destruction of the site. The surviving locals may feel the necessity to re-establish worship on the site for theological reasons. Deities in the ancient Near East tend to be conservative when it comes to location. This may be the spot where the deity dwells and the reconstruction of the temple maybe the first and most important activity undertaken when a site is re-occupied. Even when other factors such as limited land or poor water discourage resettlement, the perceived divine mandate may be too important to ignore. Recent studies of tell landscapes have suggested that tells are formed in an absence of imperial or large polity power (Wilkinson, 2003). Local defense is a core cause of tell formation, and this necessity may be abrogated when outside imperial powers control the landscape. Most tells appear to be settled at the beginnings of the Bronze Age, a time of intense competition among local polities. When international empires dominate the tell landscape, starting with the Persian Empire, local defense systems are not maintained. At many sites, the ancient tells become a monumental acropolis, no longer used for habitation. The sites spread horizontally as settlements become integrated into a larger system and are less dependent on local resources.
Summary and Future Directions The fundamental behavioral reason for tell site formation is repetitive occupation despite destructions caused by both natural and human activity, combined with the dominance of mudbrick as a construction material. Renewed periods of uncertainty can lead to reoccupation, but the ultimate fate of most tell sites is to host either a small hamlet and/or historic-era cemeteries. Recent studies of tell landscapes have suggested that tells are formed in an absence of imperial or large polity power. Local defense is a core cause of tell formation, and this necessity may be abrogated when outside imperial powers control the landscape. Tell sites must remain central to future research strategies. Tells are the dominant feature within their ancient landscapes, and they are the core artifact of advanced cultural development in their regions. Tells function as cultural memory banks, containing the material products of all past residents, elite and non-elite. Many of the major sites have already been excavated, but even the smallest have been only partially excavated. Future researchers should design studies to take advantage of this invaluable window of partial excavation, which allows research questions to be more finely focused and permits researchers to gain extensive new knowledge while helping them cope with the limited economic resources dedicated to archaeology. However, despite technological advances such as robust remote sensing technologies, research at tell sites will still require labor intensive methodologies, yet primary research at tell sites will remain essential. Ignoring tells will skew our understanding of the past and add an unnecessary layer of bias in our reconstructions of ancient lifeways. Tells were integral to the self-understanding of the people that produced them and archaeologists will run the risk of “temporal bias” if we ignore them in our future research.
See Also: Classification of Archaeological Sites.
References Albright, William F., 1924. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 4: Excavations and Results at Tell el-Ful (Gibeah of Saul). Yale University Press, New Haven. Davis, Thomas W., 2004. Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology. Oxford Press, London. Dever, William G., 1973. Two approaches to archaeological methoddthe architectural and the stratigraphic. Eretz-Israel 11, 1–8. Dunand, Maurice, 1939. Fouilles de Byblos. Paul Gauthier, Paris. Dunand, Maurice, 1954. Fouilles de Byblos. Paul Gauthier, Paris. Dunand, Maurice, 1958. Fouilles de Byblos. Paul Gauthier, Paris. Dunand, Maurice, 1973. Fouilles de Byblos. Paul Gauthier, Paris. Fisher, Clarence S., 1929. Oriental Institute Publications 4: The Excavation of Armageddon. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Kenyon, Kathleen, 1953. Beginning in Archaeology, second ed. Phoenix House Ltd, London. Lloyd, Seton, 1963. Mounds of the Near East. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Settlements, Tell Formation Macalister, Robert A.S., 1912. The Excavations of Gezer, 1902–1905 and 1907–1909, 3 vols. Palestine Exploration Fund, London. Petrie, W.M. Flinders, 1891. Tell El Hesy. Alexander P. Watt, London. Petrie, W.M. Flinders, 1904. Methods and Aims in Archaeology. Macmillan, London. Reisner, George Andrew, Fisher, Clarence Stanley, Lyon, David Gordon, 1924. The Harvard University Excavations at Samaria I. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Rosen, Arlene Miller, 1986. Cities of Clay: The Geoarchaeology of Tells. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Schiffer, Michael, 1983. Toward the identification of formation processes. Am. Antiq. 48, 675–706. Wheeler, Mortimer, 1954. Archaeology From the Earth. Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth. Wilkinson, Tony J., 2003. Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
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Cemeteries and Necropoleis Ian Hanson, Bournemouth University, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Poole, United Kingdom © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction Definitions Complexity and Variation Overview Palaeolithic Natufian Bronze Age: Pharaonic Egypt Medieval Europe Key Issues Ethics Osteological Analysis Exclusion and Invisibility Re-evaluation Contemporary and Forensic Comparisons Summary and Future Directions Raising Awareness Genetics Analysis Stable Isotopes Histological Analysis and Preservation Micromorphology and Chemical Analysis of Soil Surface Scanning Radiography Microscopic Imaging Dating Future Potential and Past Experience Acknowledgments References Further Reading
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Key Points
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A wealth of data can be retrieved from cemeteries and necropoleis concerning past societies The complexity of cemeteries and necropoleis requires formal stratigraphic excavation and recording The increasing breadth of case studies over previous decades continues to expand understanding of funerary processes Ethical considerations for the treatment of human remains and the rights of the dead and descendants has evolved The breadth of technical analyses of remains and burials have expanded, providing ever more data for interpretation concerning individuals, families and communities New techniques of analysis can be applied retrospectively to re-assess excavations, records and curated collections of artifacts and remains Improved imaging allows cemeteries and necropoleis to be recorded in increasing detail and virtual collections of artifacts and remains to be established
Glossary Archaeological context In archaeology “context” is used as a technical term referring to the remains of an individual stratigraphic event. Contexts, therefore, are events in time which have been preserved in the archaeological record. By separating a site into these basic, discrete units, archaeologists are able to create a chronology for activity on a site and describe and interpret it. They are recorded as a single identified archaeological unit of excavation, which is referred to numerically, and
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can be any feature, layer or single element of a structure. A grave for example would have a context number for the cut and a separate number for each deposit or fill within the cut. Assemblage An archaeological term meaning a group of different cases of remains or artifacts found in association or related to one another, that is, in or from the same context or contexts. Often used to describe all related remains from a particular time, place or event in the archaeological record. Commingling The mixing of disarticulated and often fragmentary remains from multiple individuals. Cut Also known as a truncation, a context that represents a moment in time when other archaeological deposits were removed by digging or other activity. A cut has zero thickness and no material properties of its own and is defined by the limits of other contexts. Cuts are seen in the record by virtue of the difference between the material it was cut through and the material that back fills it. This difference is seen as an “edge” by the archaeologists on site. Deposit A single context of material, often identified as soil, that is placed, lain, left, dropped, discarded or accumulated to form sequences in the archaeological record. Excavation The exposure, processing and recording of the surviving archaeological record. Phase This describes the grouping of contexts recorded during excavation that are contemporary stratigraphically, into distinct periods or “phases” of land use. Use of phasing often allows association of all features, land surfaces, specific site use and occupation from a particular time to aid interpretation and analysis. Robbing/robbed In archaeological terminology, the words “robbed” and “robbing” are used to describe features such as graves or walls which have had their original filling material intentionally removed. Stratigraphy Stratigraphy is a branch of archaeology and geology which studies strata and stratification to determine the order and relative position of strata. Strata (plural of stratum) are layers of material, naturally or artificially formed; often one of a number of layers one upon another, the layering of which is called stratification. In archaeology, this is the determination of the dynamic superimposition of single units of stratigraphy, or contexts. Cultural remains and natural sediments become buried over time, forming strata. The concept derives from the geological use of the idea that sedimentation takes place according to uniform principles. The principles are described as “The Laws of Stratigraphy” (Harris, 1979, 1989).
Abstract Cemeteries and necropoleis provide a substantial body of archaeological material for analysis, allowing interpretation of past cultures. How communities disposed of their dead provides insight into individual lives and social organization. The global breadth of funerary processes revealed by excavation is vast, from the Palaeolithic to recent urban cemeteries. Evolution of technical analyses has expanded what is revealed by excavation and examination, refining interpretation, allowing reassessment of records and curated collections. Evolution of ethical considerations concerning human remains has helped find a balance between benefits to science and accommodation of the rights of the dead and their descendants.
Introduction There is physical evidence that human societies have been burying, interring and disposing of their dead in formal settings following practiced rituals and beliefs from the time of the first recognized cultures. Archaeologists have studied these phenomena in detail for more than 150 years because of the wealth of information that can be retrieved from the material remains of the dead and their communal resting places (Bartel, 1982), producing knowledge concerning human culture around the world and how resting places change over time. Cemeteries and necropoleis are very interesting for archaeologists because of their specific properties, such as: significant numbers of bodies, graves and/or tombs; burials and interments in close proximity in patterns that are not random; burials within a defined area that are either marked by boundaries or by the distribution of burials and structures; and specific and exclusive use of an area, which does not reflect normal living space (Pardoe, 1988). Due to their nature, these spaces provide a source of detailed data on the social, economic, religious, cultural, organizational and demographic nature of communities over time. They are complex in terms of the material archaeological record and exhibit great variation within and across cultural and geographical space and time. They provide a great depth of interpretation about the organization, behavior and beliefs of past communities around the world.
Definitions A cemetery, from the Greek Coemeterium (“resting” or “sleeping place”) (Lewis and Short, 1879) can be defined simply as a communal place where the remains of dead people are interred that are specific for that purpose. Other descriptive terms for cemeteries include graveyard, burial site and burial ground. Cemeteries may incorporate burials in graves as inhumations or cremations
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or as above ground tomb structures. A necropolis, from the Greek nekropolis (“city of the dead”) is specifically a cemetery, often planned and designed, that incorporates formal monumental tombs (Meyers, 2011). The scale of archaeological study of cemeteries and necropoleis has resulted in the evolution of formal academic sub-disciplines to organize and undertake relevant research. The nature of the material encountered means the study of human remains forms a substantial research element. Mortuary archaeology focuses specifically on the data that can be determined concerning individuals from their burial context and analysis of their remains (Larsen, 2002). Funerary taphonomy and archaeothanatology examine the taphonomic changes to remains in the burial environment to assist interpretation of funerary practices (Knüsel and Robb, 2016). Funerary archaeology utilizes many of these research areas to study the treatment and commemoration of the dead (Taylor, 2011). These definitions by necessity involve overlap and a common purpose. The scale and variation of cemetery and necropolis contexts mean their study is by default of a broad multi-disciplinary nature. Within the terminology for burial, there is further variation. A grave is commonly used to describe the cut feature of a burial or interment of a dead body after rights and ritual. While “grave” may imply a single buried body, collective burial is a widespread practice, defined as structures utilized successively to hold multiple bodies as deaths occur (Schmitt and Déderix, 2018). A mass grave can be defined as a demonstrable place of deliberate disposal of multiple dead within the same grave structure (Cox et al., 2009). There are however numerous examples of widespread methods of burial and deliberate post-depositional alteration to graves as part of funerary and other activity that fall outside basic definitions.
Complexity and Variation The complexity and variation of the burial and interment of the dead in cemeteries and necropoleis found in the archaeological record is so varied that the use of ethnographic and contemporary examples to inform recognition and interpretation has been of great benefit. Examples from historic written records, ethnographic case studies from the last 300 or more years, and the expansion of taphonomy research within bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology and archaeology have helped make sense of what is observed at excavation. This has provided an ever-growing data base of published examples that inform a breadth of considerations for interpretation, and temper over-confidence in certainty of explanation. Recognition of the need for such deliberation is a cause for reflection that in past decades perhaps far less has been learnt “than one could about the cultural variation in how humans globally have disposed of the deaddor kept them and continued to interact with them” (Knüsel and Robb, 2016: 2). The study of death and burial is then as much focused on discovering the living and communities who dispose of the dead as it is on the dead themselves (Parker-Pearson, 1999). The complexity and the timespan of cemetery use means excavation and recording methods must by necessity define and capture the details of archaeological stratigraphy. The ability to differentiate the nature of archaeological contexts and deposits, describe them and place them in a chronological order depends on recognition and definition of the stratigraphic record (see Harris, 1979). Thus defined, it allows understanding of the complex relationships of deposition, alteration and change over time in cemetery and necropolis excavation, in an organized, phased way.
Overview Cemeteries and necropoleis and their excavation have a central importance to the archaeology of all regions and across all time periods. Examples include:
Palaeolithic The Palaeolithic provides the earliest examples, though there is sparse evidence in Europe of deliberate use of cemeteries, with low numbers of burials found in cave settings. This may reflect the lack of modern human and Neanderthal funerary practices that have left an archaeological signature (d’Errico and Vanhaeren, 2015) or be due to the scarcity of sites revealed to date, rather than represent a confirmed absence of organized burial grounds (Orschiedt, 2018). The graves do provide insight into social organization, for example care for the dead and for the living. However, the earliest defined cemetery in Taforalt, a cave in northern Morocco, provides great insight into funerary practices in the late Palaeolithic. A re-evaluation of earlier excavation records of this Iberomaurusian culture burial site found it included 28 graves, both primary and secondary burials, containing the remains of 40 adolescents and adults dating to ca 13,000–12,000 BC. Described as a necropolis, the presence of sepulchral structures, deliberate redeposition of remains, grave goods, presence of red ochre and cutmarks on some bones indicate complex funerary practices (Mariotti et al., 2009). Successful DNA sampling of eight individuals provided genetic insight into familial relations and connections to sub-Saharan African and Natufian populations (van de Loosdrecht et al., 2018).
Natufian Excavation of Natufian cemeteries in the Levant, dated to ca. 13,000–9500 BC, has provided dozens of burials that document a wide range of inhumation practices, reflecting increasing group cohesion, territoriality and social organization in a complex preagricultural society. Sites were clearly in use for many generations with carbon-14 dates for Raqefet cave cemetery demonstrating a 2000-
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year use for burials with similar preparation and customs. Graves at the cave were deliberately cut into the bedrock, some with a lining of aromatic spring flowers, reeds and sedges, as revealed by stem impressions and phytolith analysis. They provide the earliest direct evidence for preparation and decoration of graves (Nadel et al., 2013). The complexity of cemeteries such as Nahal Oren, el-Wad, Eynan and Hayonim Cave is indicated by the presence of personal decorative adornment and grave goods in burials, removal of crania, secondary deposition, potential evidence for food preparation and placement of stones, boulder mortars and other objects in and near burials. Specific interpretations are made more complex by similar burials and artifact associations also being found in settlement and internal building settings. Natufian funerary activities are therefore difficult to define, and interpretation must by necessity be open to a number of possibilities (Rosenberg and Nadel, 2014).
Bronze Age: Pharaonic Egypt Bronze Age Egypt provides more straightforward examples for interpretation, with the Pyramids representing some of the most iconic necropoleis. The pyramid complex of Senwosret III (reigning c.1878–1840 BC) at Dahshur provides an example of change in state organization of worship and focus of belief over time, while continuity as a cemetery remained. The pyramid had a mudbrick core cased in limestone, initially built with a small pyramid temple and a stone inner enclosure wall (Fig. 1). An outer wall enclosed six smaller pyramids built for the royal women and a seventh subsidiary pyramid (Arnold, 2002). The complex was later enlarged to the north and south, the southern extension contained a huge south temple (Arnold, 2004a). The officials of the king erected their satellite mastaba tombs to the North of the royal pyramid, and this cemetery remained in use during the reign of Senwosret III’s successor (Arnold, 2004b). Burial chambers lay beneath the pyramids and mastabas. There was no trace of a burial in Senwosret III’s pyramid, suggesting he may have been buried in his other mortuary complex at Abydos. The tomb and those of several royal women contained stone sarcophagi. The principal wife of the king, Queen Weret II, was interred. Excavation found her tomb and others were robbed in antiquity. Each pyramid has associated chapels, linked with cults of the deceased. Fragments of relief from the chapels showed offering and procession scenes, including images of the royal women with their names inscribed (Oppenheim, 2004). The pyramid complex appears to have been looted in the Hyksos period (c.1600 BC). State sanctioned systematic quarrying of the limestone from the complex in the Ramesside Period (c.1295–1186 BC), removed nearly all the stone from pyramids and mastabas for re-use elsewhere. The stone was shaped at the site, leaving a field of fragments radiating from the pyramid. The exposed mudbrick core decayed over time, collapsing and spreading mudbrick debris and erosion deposits downslope. During excavation by The Metropolitan Museum of New York, a section excavated across the slope recorded the remaining pyramid structure, intact mudbrick foundation trenches and the debris field from the stone quarrying, covered with the build-up of mudbrick erosion layers, interspersed with layers of windblown sand, through which several phases of later graves were dug. These graves dated from the Late Period (c.650 BC) through to the late Roman Period (c.200–350 BC), including Christian burials. This was a cemetery of the local communities in the Nile valley below the gravel escarpment on which the pyramid was built. There were several phases of burial over time, revealed by stratigraphic excavation and recording of sections, with hundreds of interments aligned East-West, radiating from the focal point of the pyramid mound, some covered with simple mudbrick tombs. The aridity of the desert gravel environment caused a very rapid desiccation of many of these burials: a natural mummification. This led to incredible preservation of organic material, providing a wealth of information about the community population. The taphonomy of this unique environment preserved human tissue, hair and skin as well as grave goods. Shrouds and wrapping textiles survive, including elaborate embroidery. Shrouds were often padded out with sedge and grass, together with bundles of aromatic herbs. Such is the level of preservation that flowers placed in the grave on top of bodies were found during excavation. The burials appear to be of lower-and middle-class families. The shroud wrapping and padding, as well as clay coffins with incised faces and decoration appear to mimic the richer and more elaborate sarcophagi of the period. Stone fragments from the
Fig. 1 The exposed mudbrick core of the pyramid of Senwosret III. Originally 62 m-high, the pyramid has eroded to a 21 m-high mound. It remained a focus for burial for over 2000 years. Source: Ian Hanson.
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pyramid were used to line graves and as grave markers, some with added Greek inscriptions. Many graves had simple wooden poles as markers, the desiccated bases of which survived underground. The osteological assessment revealed a full population, with many children and infant burials. Pathologies such as dental abscesses could be seen skeletally. The change to the pyramid complex over time shows the expediency of official and illicit economic opportunity outweighing any desire to protect and conserve sacred spaces. This is exemplified by the complete removal of stone, destruction of architecture and robbing of tombs. Despite this, the recognition and use of the pyramid complex as a place of burial remained for over 2000 years. Cemeteries and necropoleis often remain visible for millennia due to their prominence or sacred nature, and may be indicators of settlement when other signatures have disappeared.
Medieval Europe Another example of a long-term cemetery centered around a sacred space that was impacted by state interventions is provided by the excavation of the abbey of St Mary Stratford Langthorne, in Essex, England, a Medieval monastery (Fig. 2). Founded as a Savigniac house in 1135 and incorporated into the Cistercian Order in 1147, the abbey was suppressed in 1538 by the Dissolution of king Henry VIII. One of the largest Cistercian abbeys in England, excavations between 1973 and 1994 revealed 647 burials, the largest sample from a Cistercian monastery in Europe (Barber et al., 2004). The North and East part of the abbey church, including internal and external burials and monastic buildings, were also recorded. The complex stratigraphy revealed phases of activity: the building of the church (including scaffold post-holes, lime and lead smelting kilns), expansion of the church and monastic buildings, burials in the interior of the church including sarcophagi, external burials in several phases and post-dissolution robbing of lead water pipes and stone. The monastic phases had been truncated by later building and railway construction. The constant turning over of soil due to the creation of graves made it difficult to see cuts and differentiate deposits. Stratigraphic excavation using the Museum of London single context recording system assisted with this differentiation, and allowed successful interpretation, phasing and review of the archaeology. Differences were noted in the internal and external graves. The internal burials clustered in the North transept and in the presbytery around the high altar area. The location of the burials makes it likely they were high status individuals, something reflected in the limited Medieval documentary records. The burials were likely marked by wall plaques or floor engravings as they avoid overlap, and included a stone sarcophagus (Fig. 3). There was evidence of other above ground tombs, which were removed post-dissolution. One-third of burials were in coffins. The internal burial environment-most likely due to the stable moisture and temperature levelswas conducive to the survival of organic impressions in the soil. Fine excavation by archaeologists revealed an oval woven basket impression as a dark soil stain, the coffin of a young child. Similar dark soil stains found in several graves represented the timber plank sides and floors of coffins. Most burials were in the external cemetery, consisting of rows of graves. There was limited evidence for grave markers. There were several phases of graves that accumulated over 400 years, rows overlapping through time, the earlier graves truncated by those dug later (see Fig. 4). Graves disturbed by additional burials often had bones moved to one side to accommodate the new interment. In the same way, robbing trenches to remove lead water pipes post-dissolution placed bones from disturbed burials, especially crania, in the backfilled pipe trench. Field ditches that predated the abbey crossed the cemetery area and burials dug into these features suffered more deterioration of bone integrity than elsewhere, likely due to the effects of fluctuating levels of humidity and water movement along the ditch line. Most burials conformed to the standard Christian supine position, head to the West. There were 18 graves dug with head niches, imitating a more ornate and expensive stone coffin. There were far fewer coffin burials by percentage in the cemetery than compared
Fig. 2 Complex stratigraphy. The excavation area of St Mary Stratford Langthorne church showing wall and pillar foundations. Internal and external burial cuts can be seen, as well as kilns and post-holes related to the church construction and extension. Source: MOLA-Museum of London Archaeology.
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Fig. 3 The stone coffin revealed in the North Transept, containing the body of an adult male. Disarticulation of the skeleton is a taphonomic artifact caused by the decomposition of soft tissues in the coffin void, with no soil matrix to hold the skeletal elements in strict anatomical position. Ground water fluctuation during flooding is a likely cause of post-decompositional movement of skeletal elements. Source: MOLA-Museum of London Archaeology.
to the church interior. There were four burials in coffins with chalices as grave goods, likely indicating status as priests. There was one deviant burial, a body lying prone with the left arm under the body. Such positions occur when a body is rolled into a grave. As formal burial did not occur, this individual may have been thought to be contaminated, of low status, unidentified or an executed criminal. Cistercian Corporate Acts of Mercy implied they would undertake burial for bodies found on their land or from other abnormal contexts (Barber et al., 2004). The documentary evidence of the abbey provides insightful evidence to augment what was observed at excavation. The osteological assessment of the cemetery population demonstrated it was typical for a medieval monastic group. The ratio of men to women was 19:1, immature individuals were rare. General health was comparatively good, with an absence of deficiency diseases and low levels of skeletal pathology. There was a high frequency of Diffuse Idiopathic Skeletal Hyperostosis (DISH), often associated with dietary excesses. Certainly, the size of one coffin in the church and the anatomy of the skeleton within were indicative of obesity. There were a few cases of infectious disease including tuberculosis, to be expected in communal populations. Examples of several badly knitted broken bones in the early phases contrast with those that had clearly been treated. Commentary by Gerald Cambrensis in the 13th century criticized the quality of Cistercian care that “brought a speedy end to the disease and to the patient” (Owen, 1904 in Barber et al., 2004:88). The proportion of young adult men dying here was higher than in other equivalent monasteries. The proximity of the Thames marshes and the endemic malaria of the area may have been a high mortality factor. A description of the new monastery in the 12th century notes that the hard work and marshland setting brought disease and death (Coppack, 1998). The majority of Cistercian populations in the 12th-13th centuries were lay brethren, their work described in historic texts, an important labor source for bringing the marshland around Stratford into cultivation through ditching and banking. The osteological assessment demonstrates the population was rather homogenous, so apart from specific graves indicating status, differentiating between monks and lay brethren is difficult. The importance of historic documents that allow comparison with archaeological data can be clearly seen in this example, augmenting context, interpretation and understanding. Though the abbey went out of use in the 16th century and was subsequently built over, the abbey and its population were not forgotten. During the excavation in 1994, brethren from the present-day Cistercian abbey of Mount St Bernard in Leicestershire, England, visited the site and after analysis was complete, accepted transfer of the entire St Mary Stratford Langthorne cemetery population to their abbey for reburial in 2009. The memorial stone is simply inscribed, “St. Mary’s Abbey, Stratford Langthorne” to symbolize for the brethren, the abbey is the people, not the buildings.
Key Issues Ethics The excavation, examination and reburial of the abbey population provides an entry point to considering ethical issues in relation to cemeteries. The values associated with human remains and attitudes to their collection and study have evolved over time. Where human remains are encountered archaeologically, there must always be consideration for populations and communities who have legitimate interests in, and acknowledged relationships to, the dead. Both ethical and legal codes will apply to excavation and examination of remains within cemeteries and necropoleis. Human remains should always be treated with dignity, respect and integrity. While they serve as important sources of scientific information, their treatment should be open, transparent, accountable and in the public interest (Advisory Panel on the Archaeology of Burials in England, 2017). In the past 40 years there has been increasing focus on the rights of descendants and communities for whom ancestral remains are objects of great cultural and religious significance. This has been especially important in communities such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines where the greatest impact has been felt from collection of remains and where great progress has been made in establishing their authority, control and decisions concerning museum collections and ancestral lands, including cemeteries. Specific legislation has been enacted to ensure consideration, rights and protection for remains (for example, NAGPRA, 1994).
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Fig. 4 Cemetery plan of St Mary Stratford Langthorne showing the outline of the church. Distribution of adults and immature individuals. Source: MOLA-Museum of London Archaeology.
A balance has increasingly been found, where the rights of groups are addressed and the benefits of science in providing detailed knowledge of past communities are mutually agreeable, accommodating the ethics of preservation and rights of descendants (Walker, 2008). After excavation, the curation, return and sampling of remains must follow current guidelines to ensure all legitimate interests are considered and the relevant legislation is followed (Mays et al., 2013).
Osteological Analysis Central to research in cemetery and necropoleis contexts are the examination of human remains. This starts with in situ examination in the grave or tomb. Osteological data collection should be part of the excavation design with the use of trained osteologists and due consideration for ethical and legal requirements (see Marquez-Grant and Fibiger, 2013). There is much unique data to be
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recorded before the remains are moved including anatomical positions, taphonomy, associated artifacts and material, and relationships to archaeological deposits. Commingled remains, cremations and collective burials need careful assessment due to their complex nature, with recording of skeletal elements and anatomical associations continuing as remains are moved and recovered. Standard protocols for recovery should be followed (for example see Knüsel and Robb, 2016: 4–5). Analysis of remains in the lab follows standard procedures that have been developed over decades to allow formal and accurate assessment of an assemblage. Each collection of remains is unique. It may be the whole population of a cemetery, a sample, or the collective remains in a specific tomb. Many assemblages have commingled remains. Their assessment is guided by the research questions posed, and normally addresses a number of criteria. These include assessing the minimum number of individuals (MNI), minimum number of elements (MNE) and modifications to the bone (for example using a bone preservation index), including taphonomic phenomena and preservation (such as mummification or signs of scavenging). The inventoried remains of individuals are then assessed for completeness, age at death, sex, ancestry, pathology, and sampling requirements (see for example procedures in Buikstra and Ubelaker (1994) and Mitchell and Brickley (2017)). The examination process provides data about funerary practice, individual and community life and death, demographic trends, social organization and behavior. Examination procedures have evolved over time, with new procedures to assess commingling (see examples in Adams and Byrd (2014)) and to better differentiate individuals from collective remains (e.g., improvements to the measured comparison of pairs of bones or photographic matching; Zejdlik, 2014). New approaches make re-assessment of museum collections from previous cemetery excavations an important avenue of research. For example, review of the curated Lewis Jones Cave Ossuary collection excavated from a cave site in Alabama, USA, (dating 1–500 AD) led to a reanalysis of the assemblage. This recorded age, sex, bone abnormalities, pathological indicators and taphonomic features for nearly 1300 skeletal elements. Results indicated a diverse population including both sexes, all ages, and with varying pathological conditions, providing insights into this prehistoric community (Panakhyo and Jacobi, 2015). The cave is an example of the variety of cemetery and necropoleis settings that have been excavated.
Exclusion and Invisibility While cemeteries with boundaries and necropoleis with standing architecture retain visibility, many cemeteries are lost from view in the landscape, or are excluded from standard cemetery settings, either deliberately or by accident. Breadth of treatment of the dead in many cultures means many are not interred in formal cemeteries, but accumulate in informal spaces. For example, deviant burials of executed criminals and suicides are in European traditions placed at cross-roads or community boundaries. While there are many historical descriptions of these practices, archaeologically it is difficult to link a specific cause of death to burials (Duma, 2019). Topographical assessment may provide ways to assess burials found in such contexts (Hausmair, 2017). The burial areas of neonates, unbaptized infants and others excluded from church ground in Ireland are a typical example. Cemeteries outside consecrated ground, but associated with significant spaces in community memory (such as disused graveyards, ruins or ancient monuments) were developed to hold the excluded. Assessment demonstrated disused graveyards and cemeteries of the excluded are frequently found across this landscape: the “abode of the forgotten dead” (Donnelly et al., 1999: 112). In hunter-gatherer societies, such the Aboriginal cultures of South Eastern Australia, accumulations of burials are found that are not formerly enclosed cemeteries. These “persistent places” demonstrate a communal memory for burial in a specific place that extends through time, but which are not confined or bounded in the landscape, nor are burials grouped with consistent density. Often revealed by soil erosion, such sites would otherwise remain invisible (Littleton and Allen, 2007). Analysis of these burial distributions are as informative as those from formal cemetery and necropoleis settings. There are substantial numbers of burials in many cultures that fall into the informal rather than formal category of cemeteries. Documentary evidence assessment and landscape analysis are important to pinpoint such sites, as are survey techniques including remote sensing and aerial imagery analysis. When large scale development projects take place, the surface stripping of extended areas has often revealed cemeteries that would otherwise have remained unknown. What this tells us is that the dead remain in the landscape, invisible in many cases, but they should not be forgotten but taken into account when discussing demographic and societal organization of past societies from cemetery data.
Re-evaluation The great interest in studying cemeteries and necropoleis and the great amount of information about past cultures they yield has led to many sites being excavated in the last 150 years. Over time the refinement of excavation and recording, formalized processes of examination and breadth of methods of analysis has meant a great deal more data can be retrieved now than was previously possible. This makes the re-evaluation of past excavation records and stored assemblages of remains an important and valid approach. For example, the re-excavation and re-assessment of records of the Taforalt Palaeolithic cave “proved to be a valuable support for the reconstruction of the mortuary behavior of the Taforalt population” (Mariotti et al., 2014: 498). Researchers are also now far more aware of the breadth of funerary phenomena, taphonomic manifestations and potential range of interpretation. For example, it has been common in excavations of early medieval cemeteries in Europe to encounter graves disturbed post-burial, generally interpreted as illicit robbing to remove grave goods. Recent re-assessment of past excavation records, new excavations using stratigraphic methods and archaeothanatological methodologies have provided new insights. Significant numbers of graves lacked clear evidence for post-burial disturbance. More importantly, the pattern of disturbance was similar across
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a large geographical area, from Romania to South-East England. The practice was common and there were local and regional patterns over generations in the removal of certain types of artifacts. Evidence suggests this phenomenon was related to mortuary customs, but not always as a violation of social norms (Klevnäs et al., 2021).
Contemporary and Forensic Comparisons The excavation of more recent cemeteries and necropoleis dated to the last 200 years has provided opportunities to assess taphonomic change of surviving materials (such as wood and textiles), to match results of skeletal analysis to known individuals and to provide demographic analysis of large assemblages from burials of known date and context. Many of these cemeteries have been cleared ahead of urban development, such as St Pancras New Burial Ground, London, England, where 1383 burials of excellent preservation were excavated, providing biographical detail (Emery and Wooldridge, 2011) and some certainty of interpretation for the manifestations observed. Cemeteries and necropoleis are an important element of the evolution of urban environments. The clearance of a Baptist church cemetery ahead of development in South England provided definitive taphonomic insights into burials of known age. The cemetery lay within low-lying Weald clay. There is a noted lack of ancient burials found within this geological zone. The burials dated to the 19th to early 20th century, associated with grave stones. In the majority of graves there was very limited bone survival, with only the degraded shafts of femur, tibia, humerus and radius/ulna and the occipital area of the skull remaining. The rest of the skeleton was represented by soft fragments that could not been recovered intact, and dark staining. In several waterlogged graves, timber coffins had preserved. One coffin contained a series of very fine clay sediment layers, deposited by repeated water action, evidence of a fluctuating water table. Another intact coffin remained filled with water, the skeleton largely intact and in anatomical position, with some vertebrae, ribs and the bones of hands and feet displaced and buoyant in the water. These graves provide taphonomic examples that can be a reference for interpreting what is observed in older cemetery contexts (Fig. 5). Similarly, recent forensic archaeology and anthropology case work has allowed the properties and phenomena of burials observed in the real world to be compared to wider evidence of mortuary practice from cemeteries and other settings. Forensic approaches also promote the establishment of the personal identity from human remains, defined in archaeological applications as osteobiography, pathographie and biohistory (Knüsel, 2010). This includes the recording of the individuation of taphonomic effects, while also encompassing collection of evidence of the living involved in burial, including their motivations and actions toward the dead. For example, graves of suspected victims of crimes against humanity hidden in formal cemetery grave plots were excavated as part of missing persons and war crimes investigations related to the conflict in Bosnia Herzegovina during 1992–1995. Haphazard
Fig. 5 Excavation of a 19th century grave in a Baptist church cemetery in England. The combination of a fluctuating water table, bacterial action and pH impact burials in areas of Weald clay. While coffin sides and floor remain, the skeleton has degraded apart from shafts of the arm and leg bones and the rear of the skull. Source: Ian Hanson.
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placement of bodies of victims that had been dropped or rolled into graves contrasted to formal arrangement of neighboring graves placed as part of standard funerary rites. Taphonomically, there was great variation in the degree of decay between individuals buried at the same time in the same environment. Bodies removed clandestinely from graves were found upon excavation to have left patterns of skeletal elements behind, particularly bones of the hands and feet. The development of highly successful methods and processes to extract DNA profiles from samples of bone to match against familial DNA samples allowed large scale formal identification of missing individuals by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). The processing of thousands of samples also allowed the prioritization of successful sampling by skeletal element, for example the femur, molar tooth and the petrous portion of the skull (Hines et al., 2014). Focus on bones where DNA is most likely to survive has also allowed improvement in successful extraction. During diagenesis, more DNA is likely to be preserved in the petrous bone compared to other bones (Pinhasi et al., 2015).
Summary and Future Directions Raising Awareness The understanding of the myriad variations in funerary rites across cultures and time continues to increase over time. Ethical awareness around the issues of disturbing the dead is evolving through legislation, institutional guidelines and formal academic training (Turner et al., 2018). Sensitivity to the needs of communities has grown, as has the understanding of the potential benefits of indepth scientific analysis: analysis that is developing and will develop in the future to the benefit of cemetery and necropoleis research.
Genetics Developments in DNA analyses have brought new considerations concerning the potential and treatment of remains (Kaestle and Horsburgh, 2002). The expansion in the last two decades of ancient DNA sampling have been rapid, permitted by successful extraction and processing techniques. Analysis has provided ground breaking results about human and cultural evolution, the ancestry of communities and the relationships between communities and regions. The reduction in costs and high through-put of labs means it is now possible to undertake mass testing within a cemetery population and between cemeteries. This is now elucidating familial and community connections within a cemetery population, but also provides insights into social relations and kinship, marriage within and between communities, patterns of movement to marry and live, and changes in populations over the millennia that would otherwise have been invisible. For example, DNA testing of the skeletal remains of 35 individuals demonstrated five generations of the same Neolithic family were communally interred within the Hazelton long barrow, England, around 3700 BC (Fowler et al., 2022). The potential also extends to familial connections between ancient populations and modern communities, for example in demonstrating continuity between pre-Columbian and modern Native Amerindian populations in the Andes (Baca et al., 2012). The new insights provided by genetics have been impactful, sometimes contentious or at odds with accepted archaeological or cultural interpretations (Callaway, 2018). The DNA analysis of other preserved materials from funerary offerings and grave materials and goods is also providing insights into the evolution of material use and domestication of animals and crops. For example, analysis of a museum specimen of Egyptian emmer wheat chaff, dated to the New Kingdom, 1130–1000 BC, demonstrated regional patterns of dispersal of varieties (Scott et al., 2019).
Analysis Stable Isotopes The expansion of other methods of analysis of materials has also allowed an increase in understanding cemetery populations. Stable isotopes have provided great insights into mobility and origins of individuals and populations. Analysis of Beaker Culture burials, for example, demonstrates dietary trends and considerable individual mobility within Britain and with continental Europe (ParkerPearson et al., 2016). As with DNA, recent research on recovery of isotopes and collagen in bone indicates variation in funerary treatment and bone preservation that impacts survival, with benefits gained by prioritizing the sampling of the petrous bone (Kontopoulos et al., 2022).
Histological Analysis and Preservation Recent progress in assessing whether remains were subject to deliberate mummification processes post-mortem have indicated this was far more widespread in prehistory than previously thought. Histological analysis of femur samples using thin section light microscopy has been undertaken to assess bioerosion. Samples not affected by bacterial action may have been preserved from putrefaction through treatments such as drying or smoking (Booth and Madgwick, 2016). Bronze Age burial sites in Britain have yielded bodies consistent with being preserved by immersion in peat bogs or being dried over fires (Booth et al., 2015). A Neolithic example of mummification of a skeleton interred in a long barrow ditch was also identified after recent re-assessment of General Pitt-Rivers 1893–4 Wor barrow excavation (Allen et al., 2017). Combining histological assessment of such prehistoric remains with analysis of their stratigraphic burial contexts and related carbon-14 dates indicated a high proportion of the disarticulated human remains and
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burnt human bone examined were already of some age when they were deposited. This suggests systematic curation of the remains of known individuals by communities during this period. The remains appear to have been kept for several generations, reflecting on-going relationships between the living and the dead (Booth and Brück, 2020).
Micromorphology and Chemical Analysis of Soil Analysis of soil at a microscopic level within graves provides insight into lifestyles and cultural practices, as well as taphonomic processes of burial. Decomposition within the soil produces characteristic microstructures and features according to the type of soil, local climate and external influences, in interaction with coffins, bodies and artifacts (Pickering et al., 2018). In graves with no obvious presence of remains, patterns of voids, bone fragments and mineral aggregations can also indicate where bodies have laid. Identification of the properties and taphonomic causes of crystalline salts and mineralization phenomena such as vivianite assist in understanding the burial environment and assessing preservation, sampling and conservation requirements for buried materials, including bone (Rodriguez et al., 2021). For example, the presence of vivianite in 19th century Australian burials at the North Brisbane Burial Grounds helped protect some skeletal and dental elements and preserved the impressions of metal coffin attachments (McGowan and Prangnell, 2005). Methods to detect and sample fragile materials in graves have been developed, including proteomics to identify protein residues of fibers. For example, silk textiles were detected and confirmed following micro-topographical assessment and identification of fabric impressions in the tomb soil in Dahekou cemetery, China (Li et al., 2021).
Surface Scanning The archaeological use of scanning has developed greatly in recent years, to provide digital data from surface and penetrative imaging, to both provide a visual record and to explore details of burials, tombs and cemeteries. Surface scanning in the grave is especially important when remains are fragile, removal problematical, or there are no options for lab analysis. Cemetery and necropolis landscapes can now be scanned or recorded using photogrammetry during excavation (Siebke et al., 2018). This range of imaging can support interpretation, reporting and public presentation. Scanners are becoming more cost effective and facilitate ever greater data acquisition. Surface scanning of bone has developed to allow three dimensional images of enough detail to permit scientific study even if the original bone is not available (Erickson et al., 2017). Structured light scanning (SLS) allows very detailed scans of bones and objects like grave stones in three dimensions so that virtual collections of artifacts and remains can be collated and analyzed (Guydish and Henson, 2017).
Radiography Over 100 mummies have been scanned using computed tomography (CT) in the last 40 years, providing detailed insight into an individual’s wrappings, funerary artifacts, anatomy and skeletal pathology. There are issues with interpreting taphonomic changes and mummification radiologically due to a lack of data, and more comparison between studies is needed to assess them as a population (Cox, 2015). The ability for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to provide soft tissue contrast makes it a potential complement to CT scanning. However, the normally dehydrated nature of mummified tissues makes them almost invisible to standard MRI techniques. Specialized short-T2 approaches have been tried but have severe resolution issues. This is one area where it is hoped future technical developments will provide solutions to better imaging of mummified tissues (Baadsvik et al., 2021).
Microscopic Imaging Widespread use of microscopic imaging and analysis of remains has grown in recent decades, following developments in forensic and material science, for example using scanning electron microscopes (SEM) with energy-dispersive spectrometers (EDS). Imaging to determine mineral identification, composition and material differences is widely used in archaeology. Microscopic assessment of taphonomic change, cut marks and pathology on bone, of skin, hair, textiles and parasites are possible on skeletal and mummified remains, for example in imaging headlice and their eggs in pre-Columbian Mummies from the Tarapacá Valley, Chile (Prikhodko et al., 2007). The size and cost of imaging units is reducing, and portable equipment will have benefits for speed and practicality of imaging in the future, to assist in addressing questions of past human behavior from funerary contexts.
Dating The stratigraphic complexity of cemeteries and necropoleis and their timespans of use makes precise dating of artifacts within phases an important addition to relative dating sequences, assisting in interpretation of site use and funerary practices over time. Survival of suitable physical materials in tombs and burials such as bone, wood and charcoal that can be measured to calculate their age, makes carbon-14 dating a cost effective and practical dating method. For example, the Mesolithic cemetery of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, northwest Russia, was originally investigated in the 1930s, with 177 graves of a suspected 400 burials excavated. A re-assessment, with detailed additional carbon-14 dating indicates the cemetery was only in use for 100–300 years, c.6250 to 6000 BC, a much shorter span than initially assessed. This narrow time period matched a dramatic climatic downturn in the Northern hemisphere (the 8.2 ka cooling event), with authors suggesting the site was occupied briefly as it was a favorable environment during this climatic downturn (Schulting et al., 2022). Increasing innovation and use of Bayesian analysis enhances chronological interpretation of published carbon-14 dates to determine changes in human activity in past societies (Holton Price et al., 2021). For example, an extensive cemetery with at least 50
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interred individuals at Chelechol ra Orrak, Palau, Oceania, was re-assessed, with previous Carbon-14 dates augmented with new accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) dates on marine shell and human bone. Bayesian modeling was applied to construct probability ranges for the date and duration of activity at the site. This provided a more robust chronology, demonstrating the cemetery was in use from c. 1000 BC for some 1500 years. This confirmed it is one of the oldest in the Pacific, with the individuals interred probably representing descendants of the original colonists (Fitzpatrick and Jew, 2018).
Future Potential and Past Experience The complexity of cemeteries and necropoleis as archaeological phenomena has been demonstrated by increasingly complex research that has required multi-disciplinary teams to undertake the evolving breadth of analysis. The success of re-assessed excavation records and museum collections exemplifies this, and also shows how important it is that integrated research programmes are designed and planned so that the maximum data can be retrieved from excavation and examination by archaeologists, bioarchaeologists/osteologists, archaeological scientists, DNA analysts, radiographers, imaging specialists and material scientists. The results can provide rich data for interpretation. For example, the extensive and innovative excavation from 1964–1969 of the Neolithic necropolis of Ascott-under-Wychwood long barrow in England yielded detailed evidence. Subsequent analysis and reassessment in 2003–2004 allowed substantial refinement of the interpretations. The first phase of tomb building started in 3760–3700 cal BC, and continued for less than 55 years. Deposition of human remains started shortly after initial construction and lasted for 100 years, perhaps representing three to five generations. The population is consistent with a familial group, from neonates to adults, looking after the sick and injured. Evidence of conflict was represented by an arrow lodged in a vertebra. Groups of commingled bones differ in their properties, implying variation in burial practice. The carbon-14 dates allow direct regional and national comparisons with other Neolithic monuments and their populations. There were limitations: for example, in the 1960s there was no use of wet sieving during excavation, and micromorphological analysis was not fully developed (Benson and Whittle, 2019). There was no potential to undertake ancient DNA testing at the time, but “excavations are carried out within the conventions and expectations of their time” (Lucas, 2001 in Benson and Whittle, 2019: xvii). That being the case, the potential for further analysis and re-assessment must be planned for. This excavation showed “how good quality fieldwork can recurrently fuel the needs of changing theoretical perspectives; it is a report whose content will no doubt be used time and again by future generations of scholars working in paradigms not yet defined.” (Darvill, 2007). The more refined methods and techniques of excavation become, the more valid the results and the greater the confidence in subsequent interpretations. Cemeteries and necropoleis provide an archaeological keyhole with which to view past communities and so remain one of the most important ways to learn about the depth, breadth and wealth of human culture. With advances in technology providing evermore detailed data for interpretation, and with the ability to link communities, families and individuals through genetics, there is increasing public interest and engagement in what can be learnt about our ancestors.
Acknowledgments It was a great privilege to have opportunity, camaraderie and unique archaeological experiences when excavating with teams at sites used as case studies in this text. These include the staff of Newham Museum Service with whom I worked at the abbey of St Mary Stratford Langthorne in 1994, including Alison Telfer, now at MOLA. Thanks to her and Tracy Wellman for organizing the use of figures from MOLA Monograph number 18, the publication of the abbey excavation. Th