考古学与"全球变化研究"

国际组织为应对各种环境危机而组织的“过去全球变化计划” ,以 1万年和数千年以来的研究为重点。考古学在研究对象和年代学等方面的特点与优势 ,决定了其在此研究领域可以发挥独特的作用。     

Maritime Archaeology and Climate Change: An Invitation

Maritime archaeology has a tremendous capacity to engage with climate change science. The field is uniquely positioned to support climate change research and the understanding of past human adaptations to climate change. Maritime archaeological data can inform on environmental shifts and submerged sites can serve as an important avenue for public outreach by mobilizing public interest and action towards understanding the impacts of climate change. Despite these opportunities, maritime archaeologists have not fully developed a role within climate change science and policy. Moreover, submerged site vulnerabilities stemming from climate change impacts are not yet well understood. This article discusses potential climate change threats to maritime archaeological resources, the challenges confronting cultural resource managers, and the contributions maritime archaeology can offer to climate change science. Maritime archaeology’s ability to both support and benefit from climate change science argues its relevant and valuable place in the global climate change dialogue, but also reveals the necessity for our heightened engagement.     

Landscape Archaeology of Nubia and Central Sudan

The paper examines the regional scale research in the Middle Nile Valley within the context of historical development of archaeology of Nubia and Central Sudan. This historical overview is put in the context of archaeological theory, especially the concept of landscape archaeology. A discussion of various theoretical issues is followed by the presentation of the natural, economic, political, cultural and sacred landscapes of Nubia and Central Sudan. Past field research is presented and the emerging trends are identified.La présente communication examine la recherche à l'échelle régionale dans la vallée du Nil Moyen dans le contexte du développement historique de l'archéologie de la Nubie et du Soudan central. Ce survol historique est situé dans le contexte de l'archéologie théorique, particulièrement l'archéologie du paysage. Une discussion des problèmes théoriques est suivie d'une présentation des paysages naturel, économique, politique, culturel et sacré de la Nubie et du Soudan central. Les recherches antérieures sont aussi présentées et les nouvelles tendances sont identifiées.     

Recent Landscape Archaeology in South America

South American archaeologists use the term landscape to analyze a broad range of relationships. Examples include intensive agriculture and political power, myth and place, and climate change and cultural development. Landscape archaeology is necessarily spatial analysis, but scholars work at different scales and use different methods. This essay highlights the influence of geography, anthropology, and new methodologies on four definitions of landscape: ecological habitat, built environment, a stage for performance, and integrating subsistence and settlement. In a number of cases, landscape archaeologists, stakeholders, and researchers from different traditions work at different scales to meaningfully share information, clarify their differences, and compare their analyses and conclusions.     

The Archaeology of Baseball: Landscape and the Power of Place

That material culture is constitutive of culture as well as being one of its outcomes plays out especially strongly when one looks at the relationships between human communities and their landscapes. Cultural landscapes are created by communities, which in turn adapt to the landscape’s physical and social dimensions. This paper explores the dynamics of the landscape of American baseball through the eyes of the archaeologist, thereby creating an archaeology of baseball.     

On the Particularism of English Landscape Archaeology

The aim of this paper is to explore the question: why is the archaeology of English historic landscapes apparently so provincial? Inevitably the response must be that matters are more complex. In this paper, I examine the work of W. G. Hoskins, the “father of English landscape history,” and draw attention to: the complex way in which landscape is embedded in nationalism; the relations between locale, province, and nation; and the way wider tensions, in particular of colonialism are embedded within Hoskins's own discourse. In conclusion, I examine ways in which this problematic continues to structure enquiry into the English landscape today and to inhibit a genuinely international and comparative approach to historic landscapes.     

Of Other Scapes: Archaeology,Landscape, and Heterotopia in Fascist Sicily

Foucault’s concept of the “heterotopia” has been applied broadly throughout the humanities and social sciences. Archaeologies of the recent past are well-suited to examine these “other spaces”: blurring the line between past and present while juxtaposing archaeological, archival, and ethnographic data, they can draw attention to the gaps, contradictions, and alternate orderings that make up the world around us. Using the extensive agricultural land reforms and building programs undertaken by Italy’s Fascist government in Sicily in the 1940s as an example, I extend the heterotopia concept to an analysis of archaeological landscapes, critically exploring the benefits and limitations of a heterotopic perspective in archaeological contexts.     

Landscape Archaeology and the Medieval Countryside: Settlement and Abandonment in the Nemea Region

This paper examines the processes of settlement and abandonment of the medieval countryside as revealed by archaeological surveys undertaken in southern Greece. The Nemea region, the focus of an intensive archaeological survey, serves as a case study. Early archaeological surveys approached this time period primarily from a historical point of view. Political history provided the textual frame while the archaeological data were expected to “fill in” the gaps of the historical record. In contrast, in the last twenty-five years the second generation of surveys has taken an active interest in the archaeological documentation of the medieval countryside. The settlement trends observed in Nemea are viewed as manifestations of a variety of political, social, and economic processes.     

Landscape Archaeology,Heritage and the Community in Devon: An Oral History Approach

In the context of recent media, governmental, academic and popular attention and enthusiasm for debates surrounding the construction and meaning of the British countryside, this paper outlines the potential for oral history to make a contribution. Working in Devon, the authors outline how an oral history methodology can engage with the fields of landscape archaeology and heritage studies. As well as augmenting and supporting more traditional approaches to landscape, oral history techniques can be used to challenge and destabilise existing knowledge, thereby moving the process of ‘democratisation’ in knowledge construction of the rural landscape from practices of scientific ‘complicity’ towards one of critical engagement.     

Land Tenure, Archaeology, and the Ancestral Pueblo Social Landscape

Archaeology relies upon evidence of past human modification of the natural landscape in order to infer past human social dynamics on the site, local, and regional levels. Given the inferential linkages between past landscape use and social relationships, archaeology can benefit from an approach that more explicitly delineates relationships between systems of land use and land tenure, the social means through which people define and assert land use rights. This research outlines a set of methods for modeling prehistoric land tenure systems and developing a middle range theory of land tenure relationships that may assist archaeologists in their investigations of prehistoric resource access systems. Land tenure systems are complex risk-buffering strategies that are conditioned by the labor invested in food production, the size of groups holding direct access to productive lands and resources, and the temporal duration of land access rights. The role of these variables is supported by cross-cultural data from a worldwide sample of food-producing societies. The land tenure model is applied to data from the prehistoric Southwest to help explain local and regional changes in food production, settlement size, and community organization in southwest Colorado between 900 and 1300 A.D.     

Historical Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change in Mesoamerica

This essay outlines recent archaeological research on post-Columbian (c. A.D. 1500–1925) indigenous sites in Mexico and Central America. Historical archaeology is a growing field in Mesoamerica, and over the last 20 years investigations of native culture change have increased, especially in rural areas. Contemporary research contributes new insights on indigenous responses to Spanish colonization over a long period. This work also is reassessing chronologies and examining the diversity of indigenous behavior from late preconquest to historic times. Indigenous adaptations to culture contact and social change are characterized by three general stages: conquest, colonization, and independence. Although I do draw on other regions, the focus of the article is the Maya area and Central America, where more investigations have taken place.     

Caribou Crossings and Cultural Meanings: Placing Traditional Knowledge and Archaeology in Context in an Inuit Landscape

Meaning is conveyed by context. Northern landscapes associated with oral traditions provide rich contexts for understanding archaeological features and their spatial and temporal distribution. At the same time, traditional knowledge, including place names, is supported by the persistence of an integral archaeological landscape. The lower Kazan River, Nunavut Territory, Canada, preserves a record of land use for a hunting-trapping society in archaeological remains and traditional knowledge. The record shows that traditions of knowledge are manifest in the archaeological landscape. These traditions include commemoration of people and events in monuments, enduring practices (land skills) that are associated with a traditional time, and principles of spatial differentiation and orientation based on relations between people and caribou.     

Contributions of GIS and Satellite-based Remote Sensing to Landscape Archaeology in the Middle East

This article explores the coevolution of landscape approaches and geospatial tools in Middle Eastern archaeology. From the first aerial reconnaissance programs, archaeologists recognized the value of a view from above to address overarching human–environmental questions that underpin regional historical narratives. The diversity and density of visible remains in the landscape of the Middle East has required an integrative approach, encompassed in the perspective of landscape as a static artifact, landscape as built features, landscape as a system, and landscape as a dynamic construct, which cuts across modern political boundaries. Recent advances in geospatial tools and datasets have enabled archaeologists to make significant progress on four long-standing questions of how to (1) best document and manage rapidly disappearing ancient landscapes, (2) understand landscape formation processes, (3) identify and interpret economic, environmental, and social influences that result in long-term settlement and land use patterns, and (4) recognize and contextualize the interplay between environment and human agency in the evolution of ancient economies and transformations in socio-organizational complexity.     

Landscape Construction and Long-Term Economic Practices: an Example from the Spanish Mediterranean Uplands Through Rock Art Archaeology

We argue in this paper that Levantine rock art in the Spanish Mediterranean basin allows us to ‘map’ the economic landscape of its makers. Rock art would be the ‘monumental’ side of a dual process of landscape construction: on the one hand, rock art is the first ‘cultural’ action on the landscape beginning in the Early Neolithic; on the other hand, the first evidence of active modification of the Mediterranean vegetation comes from this period. But this evidence as well as other kinds of archaeological remains are still relatively scarce in the uplands; rock art is therefore the most complete type of evidence we can use to support an early use of the Mediterranean upland environment. We use statistical and geographical analysis, together with archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic sources and pollen data, in order to support the idea of early use and exploitation of the Mediterranean uplands since the Neolithic, and into contemporary times.     

Making Change Materialize: An Archaeology of Social Reform in the Age of Obama

The 2008 American presidential election led some to believe that an era of possibility had finally dawned. But change remains elusive, and questions about how to advance social justice causes persist in the age of Obama. Critical examinations of past social movements help answer these questions, and to this end I offer research on Smithfield and North Elba, two New York towns imagined as utopias by reformer Gerrit Smith (1797–1874). While some have emphasized a narrative of utopia realized, research on the artifacts, landscapes, and texts associated with them has revealed past struggles and knowledge of what hinders future imaginaries.     

GIS,Archaeological Survey,and Landscape Archaeology on the Island of Kythera,Greece

Abstract

GIS and quantitative analysis are used to explore a series of simple but important issues in GIS-led survey. we draw on information collected during intensive archaeological field survey of the island of Kythera, Greece, and consider four questions: the relationship between terracing and enclosed field systems; the effect of vegetation on archaeological recovery; site definition and characterization in multi-period and artifact-rich landscapes; and site location modelling that considers some of the decisions behind the placing of particular Bronze Age settlements. we have chosen GIS and quantitative methods to extract patterns and structure in our multi-scalar dataset, demonstrating the value of GIS in helping to understand the archaeological record and past settlement dynamics. The case studies can be viewed as examples of how GIS may contribute to four stages in any empirically based landscape project insofar as they move from the spatial structure of the modern landscape, to the visibility and patterning of archaeological data, to the interpretation of settlement patterns.     

Editorial: Railway Archaeology

Abstract

The following paper argues that archaeological analyses of communities of recent centuries can be as rewarding a means of understanding the past as the examination of the development of particular technologies.     

Introduction: Feminist Theories and Archaeology

This journal issue developed out of a desire to increase the use of feminist theory in archaeology, leading me to ask Laurajane Smith of York University to co-organize a symposium on the topic for the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin in July 2008. The impacts of major feminist theories on constructions of the past and archaeological thinking are discussed, emphasizing how they implicitly or explicitly influenced other articles in this journal issue.     

Cross-Cultural Approaches in Archaeology: Comparative Ethnology, Comparative Archaeology, and Archaeoethnology

Cross-cultural approaches have been used widely in archaeological research. Comparative ethnology has provided a number of archaeological indicators of behavior, but large segments of the archaeological record have not yet been subjected to extensive comparative analysis. Comparative archaeology has aided in exploring variation among societal types (such as chiefdoms) and categories within the archaeological record (such as settlements). Diachronic comparisons have been used frequently by archaeologists, but these have often been based on unique samples and only rarely have employed statistics to aid in the discovery or testing of hypotheses. Archaeoethnology, comparative analyses of archaeological cases employing valid samples and statistical evaluation of theories and hypotheses, is introduced.