Applications of integrated geophysical method in archaeological surveys of the ancient Shu ruins

The Jinsha site is one set of excavated ruins of the ancient Shu state, late Neolithic, early Bronze Age. The archaeological survey of the site is especially important for study of Shu culture, because there is hardly any written record of this period. As technology progresses, more and more advanced techniques and equipment have been used to conduct archaeological surveys. In this study, four nondestructive methods of geophysical detection were used to locate ancient relics at the site. The validity of these different types of archaeological detection methods (method of high-density resistivity, induced polarization, multi-frequency electromagnetic, ground-penetrating radar and so on) and techniques were analyzed. And a multi-scale, multi-method detection system to non-destructive detection of cultural relics was established.     

Sovereignty and territoriality in the city–state: A case study from the Amuq Valley,Turkey

This article investigates the relationship of state authority and territory in the city–state, using the Iron Age Syro-Anatolian culture of the ancient Near East as a case-study. Although more sophisticated spatial modeling of political authority has appeared in the past decade, archaeologists are still prone to assume that territoriality in ancient city–states operated according to a “container model” principle in which, like the modern state, political power is evenly distributed across the landscape within clear boundary divisions. The present work examines both the historical record from the Iron Age on the one hand, and regional settlement pattern data on the other, to evaluate the appropriateness of this conception of territory and power in the Syro-Anatolian city–state of Patina, located in southern Turkey. Textual accounts and gravity modeling of settlement distributions point toward a pattern of territoriality in which power was present inconsistently across the geographical extent of the city–state, and in which borderlines as conventionally drawn did not apply. I refer to this flexible relationship of authority and space as malleable territoriality.     

考古发掘现场智能预探测系统的统计与应用

鉴于考古工作中发掘现场情况的不确定性,为改进我国古墓葬遗址等发掘现场的传统探测方法,探讨利用自动化技术,设计开发一套考古发掘现场智能预探测系统,在无考古人员进入墓葬发掘现场的情况下实现预探测功能。该系统主要面向古墓葬遗址的发掘考古需求,由远程监控端、机器人及传输线缆组成。采取分体模块化设计小尺寸机器人,使其可简便拆装成直筒式或车体式两种外形,以适用小直径手工探洞或大直径盗洞两种不同形式的发掘入口。机器人本体集成视频采集及气体传感等环境检测功能模块．实时采集数据并通过传输线缆发送至远程监控端。远程监控端提供窗口化的监控界面软件,该软件在Micro Visual Studio 2005开发平台下完成,在显示并记录采集所得图像和数据的同时,可对机器人的部分模块进行控制。该考古发掘现场智能预探测系统设计制造后在陕西省三个古墓葬遗址进行了实地测试。研究结果显示,数据采集准确及时、视频图像清晰可靠、整体系统运行稳定、可操作性强,基本满足了考古发掘现场的实际需要,推进了考古发掘工作的科技化进程。     

Ethnicity in complex societies: Archaeological perspectives

It is often difficult to identify ethnic groups in the archaeological record, yet archaeology has much to contribute to understanding the long-term social and political dynamics of ethnicity. This review considers recent anthropological perspectives on ethnic groups and their boundaries, emphasizing the role of state formation in their creation and maintenance. It then reviews recent archaeological studies of ethnicity in complex societies and discusses current questions facing archaeological research on these topics.     

The “War on Terror” and the Military–Archaeology Complex: Iraq, Ethics, and Neo-Colonialism

The archaeological response to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq is often portrayed as a crusade to rescue antiquities, destroyed either directly by the military action itself or indirectly by the looting of archaeological sites and museums. I argue in this paper that this narrative is awfully inadequate, and masks the ethical and political dimensions at the core of this historical episode. I contend that, in their often well-intended attempts to rescue antiquities, most archaeologists involved have projected a professionalized, apolitical and abstract response, devoid of the social and political context, and based on the fetishisation of a narrowly and problematically defined archaeological record. I argue further that the increasing collaboration of many archaeologists with the invading militaries and occupation authorities since 2003, assisted by the “cultural turn” especially within the US military, have laid the foundations for an emerging military-archaeology complex. I trace the contours of this phenomenon by examining various archaeological and museum discourses and practices. This new development (with historical resonances that go as far back as the 18th century, if not earlier) is linked directly with the ontology and epistemology of archaeology, and deserves further close scrutiny and analysis. The thesis advanced here does not advocate inaction and withdrawal in situations of warfare, but a critical engagement that safeguards the autonomy of the scholar; critiques the political agendas and power structures of contemporary warfare; deconstructs its discursive basis and its ideological overtones; and shows its catastrophic consequences for people and things alike, past and present.     

Dealing with Tribes and States in Ancient Palestine

This paper offers a critique on state formation theories used in the explanation of the rise of the biblical United Monarchy. The last three decades of archaeological and biblical research have shown that there is no firm evidence for speaking of a kingdom or empire of David and Solomon in ancient Palestine. Thus what is proposed here is to evaluate the archaeological record through the data provided by the ethnological record of the Middle East, keeping the biblical stories apart from this interpretation. The analysis of the dynamics and structure of Middle Eastern “tribal states” and “chiefdom societies”, including here the practice of patronage bonds, gives us important keys for understanding Palestine's societies. The historical perspective that appears then is one different from the Bible's stories and from modern ideas such as “states” and “nations”, offering us instead a better methodology for reconstructing ancient Palestine's historical past.     

GEOCHEMICAL ANALYSIS AND SOCIOCULTURAL COMPLEXITY: A CASE STUDY FROM EARLY IRON AGE MEGIDDO (ISRAEL)*

Few archaeological sites can claim a more celebrated position than Megiddo, the Armageddon of biblical revelation. Guardian to a strategic pass on the ancient land bridge that traverses the region, it has long been known that Megiddo played a prominent role in the emergence of the Iron Age nation‐states of biblical fame. Given its pivotal location, Megiddo provides an ideal opportunity to examine the experience of a community that found itself at the centre of these developments. The archaeological and textual evidence indicates a community that enjoyed extensive contact with an array of culturally distinct sociopolitical groups emerging in its hinterland. To further explore the nature and extent of this interaction, an assemblage of 86 ceramic sherds was analysed by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). This paper presents the results of this analysis, together with an evaluation of potential geochemical and archaeological interconnections. Based on this comparative analysis, implications are drawn regarding Megiddo's role in the changing cultural and political landscape of this formative period in the history of the region.     

Regional perspectives on Wari state influence in Cusco,Peru (c. AD 600–1000)

The archaeological reconstruction of ancient states requires consistent regional measures of state-directed power and influence. This paper presents data from a series of systematic archaeological surveys in the Cusco region of highland Peru to evaluate patterns of influence by the Wari state during a period of colonization from ca. AD 600–1000. We discuss interpretive debates over the nature and intensity of Wari social power, suggesting that site-based studies can be contextualized meaningfully using our large-scale dataset, which offers settlement patterns at varying distances (0–70 km) from Pikillacta, a Wari administrative center. We discuss local settlement patterns before and during Wari colonization, as well as the distribution of Wari pottery and local Wari-influenced wares. We then use a geographic information systems analysis of travel time from key sites to evaluate the broad regional distribution patterns of local and Wari ceramic styles. Although the regional survey data do not inform us reliably about all kinds of social power, we conclude that the Wari cultural, economic, and political influence over the Cusco region was limited and discontinuous—an example of colonization that resembles the practices of other early states.     

Conflict and State Development in Ancient Tonga: The Lapaha Earth Fort

Warfare is often considered as a key factor in the formation complex societies, but in the Pacific archaeological evidence for inter-group conflict during political centralization is rare. Most earthwork forts in Tonga are assumed to have been built in the nineteenth century when the traditional system of rulership collapsed, yet few forts on Tongatapu have been excavated or 14C dated. A fort in the chiefly center of the ancient Tongan state was mapped with theodolite and LiDAR, and excavated. Radiocarbon and traditional history indicate the fort known as the Lapaha Kolotau was made in the fourteenth century AD at the same time that chiefly architecture was being built at an unprecedented scale at the new elite center. The construction of an earthwork fort provides the first evidence that political centralization in Tonga was likely to have been contested.     

History in Prehistory: The Oral Traditions of the Rarotongan Land Court Records

The records of the early 20th century Rarotongan land courts are an invaluable source of ethnohistoric information regarding pre-contact land tenure, social and political relations, and historical processes affecting tenure and relations. They are analysed here from the point of view of contextualising the archaeological record of the island. Pre-contact Rarotongan society is shown to have been fluid and flexible, although one notable trend is the gradual aggrandisement of ariki power. This trend continues into the missionary and early colonial periods, where political unity and ariki hegemony become established. European intervention was a single, though defining, episode in a long history. Although it transformed the political order, Rarotonga remained resolutely Rarotongan.     

The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology

The Phoenicians played ambivalent roles in Western historical imagination. One such role was as a valued predecessor and prototype for the industrial and maritime enterprise of nineteenth‐century imperial Britain. Explicit parallels were drawn in historical representations and more popular culture. It was widely believed that the Phoenicians had been present in Britain, especially in Cornwall, despite a lack of convincing historical evidence, and much importance was placed on supposed archaeological evidence. Ideological tensions arose from the need to reconcile ancient and modern Britain, and from the Semitic origin of the Phoenicians. This example shows the power of archaeological objects to provide material support for national and imperial constructions of the past.     

The Siting of Medieval Castles and the Influence of Ancient Places

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the ways in which the siting of castles in England was influenced by the remains of monuments and landscapes from the prehistoric and Romano-British periods. It explores the character, distribution and scale of ancient monument reuse as evidenced through the archaeological and documentary record, in an attempt to discern patterns in peoples’ responses to monuments from the ancient past. It considers the ways in which these places were perceived by both the ruling elite and the local community: exploring how inherited landscapes were used in castle building to structure concepts of belonging, constituted through memory and genealogy. The conclusion is that ancient places were reused by castle builders from the 11th to the 14th century as part of an evolving narrative aimed at enhancing rights to people, place and power.     

Authorisation and the Process of Power: The View from African Archaeology

African prehistory has a unique contribution to make to our understandings of the ways that power and authority were constituted and enacted in the past; a combination of anthropological, historical and archaeological approaches to the issue provide a powerful heuristic for thinking through the ways that authority was legitimised. In this introductory paper we focus on the divide between power and authority, and argue that a process-based approach is necessary to understanding the ways that each was created in societies of the past. Such an approach, we argue, can offer a mediation between practice-based perspectives on social power, and those that focus on the operations of the state. We make a fundamental distinction between twin aspects of the exercise of power, imposition and composition, and demonstrate how the incorporation of the latter into our understandings of prehistory can allow archaeologists to consider the materials with which they work as residues of the performance of power. The African archaeological record has a key role to play in our understandings of the operation of power, the creation of legitimacy and the exercise of authority.     

Centripetal settlement and segmentary social formation of the Banpo tradition

Creating a spatial environment to facilitate social operation is a common practice among human groups. Segmentary social formations have limited regulatory capacity due to the lack of formally sanctified authorities. The pressure is on the emergency of atternative mechanisms that regulate the practice of segmentary principles. The Neolithic site at Jiangzhai in North China is a classic archaeological example of using the centripetal plan and demarcated space to support the working of segmentary organization. The occupation was partitioned into three concentric divisions of the central plaza, residential and burial zones. The later two zones were further demarcated into spatially discrete areas for allocating the social segments comprising the community. The arrangement translated the abstract segmentary principles into tangible space where everyday practices played out. It created a spatiality that placed individual acts under the watch of the entire community, thus enabling the effective policing against deviated practices by public opinions. Analyses of the material remains distributed in the highly ordered built environment indicate that food sharing was practiced in the communal level, and craft production of the ceramics was likely organized in the household level. Patterns of monochrome paintings and etched signs on the ceramics suggest the sharing of symbolism in a pan-community network. The study also isolates the budding of non-conforming acts that would one day fracture the segmentary community.     

State‐Community Relations in Yemen: Soqotra’s Historical Formation as a Sub‐National Polity

Soqotra Island, the remote border outpost of the Yemeni state in the Indian Ocean, is a community of mixed ethnic composition with a non‐Arabic mother tongue. It offers an ideal socio‐political context for the study of state–community relations in terms of polity formation as part of a political incorporation process. This focus provides a corrective to the still dominant segmentary society paradigm and its tribes‐driven state politics in the anthropological discourse on Yemen. Polity formation in Soqotra occurred through a series of acts of political incorporation by a succession of political regimes from the late nineteenth century to the present. The study of this process is pursued through a historical narrative of the state’s politics of administration. This narrative is aptly described as a mesography, as its analytical focus is on the meso‐level institutional web of four different political regimes with their distinctive modes of polity regimentation and their structuring effects on Soqotrans’ communal life.     

'.. Slaying oxen and Killing Sheep,Eating Flesh and Drinking Wine ..': Feasting in Late Bronze Age Hazor

Abstract

Communal feasts, events of ritual activity that involve shared food and drink consumption and display in religious and secular elite contexts, received considerable attention in anthropological and archaeological literature in recent years. In those studies, the focus was on the identification of feasting in the material record of ancient societies, and an attempt was made to decipher the complex social and political meanings inherent in such contexts. In this study, the aim is to identify and interpret traces of feasting activities in the context of Canaanite society of the 14th–13th century BCE. The site of Hazor, the largest Canaanite kingdom, serves as a case study for this discussion. Archaeological correlates of commensal feasts, uncovered in the extensive excavations of the site, are presented and discussed within the general picture of the Canaanite palatial system.     

Political Economies of Predynastic Egypt and the Formation of the Early State

Considered one of the world’s earliest examples of a pristine state, the ancient Egyptian state arose by ca. 3000 BC. State formation in Egypt became a focus of much research in the 1970s and 1980s, as investigations of the Predynastic period in Egypt, when complex society arose there, began to uncover new evidence of the indigenous roots of this phenomenon. More recently, archaeological investigations in the Delta as well as continued work in southern Egypt have provided new evidence for the changes that took place in the fourth millennium BC. But the specific events and processes involved in this major sociopolitical and economic transformation and the resultant state still remain incompletely understood. To better understand the problem in Egypt, this study looks at the contrasting polities in fourth millennium BC Egypt and Nubia from the perspective of the political economy and the strategies to power proposed by the dual-processual theory, which also helps elucidate processes of state formation and the type of early state that developed there. The territorial expansionist model helps explain where and when this state first emerged.     

Archaeology of Northeast Thailand in Relation to the Pre-Khmer and Khmer Historical Records

An earlier study of how the archaeological data from the Khmer period in northeast Thailand confirm and augment the information from historical texts is expanded into an examination of the early historic pre-Khmer and the post-Khmer periods. For these, both the historical and the archaeological data are more limited and problematic. The archaeological record confirms generally the changes associated with the transition from prehistory to history but raises questions about the sources of external influence and the types of political and economic organization which characterized northeast Thailand societies. More robust archaeological data and more precise chronological control will be necessary to test historical models of pre-Angkorian and post-Angkorian political development.     

Some remarks on ethnicity in medieval archaeology

Recent critiques of the culture‐historical approach to ethnicity have denounced the idea that archaeological cultures are ‘actors’ on the historical stage, playing the role that known individuals or groups have in documentary history. But the critique has gone as far as to claim that, because archaeologists supposedly have no access to the meaning of cultural traditions, medieval ethnicity cannot be studied by archeological means. Ethnicity should be banned from all discussions, if medieval archaeology is to make any progress in the future. The paper examines the theoretical malaise at the root of this scepticism verging on nihilism. The understanding of the archaeological record not as an imprint, but as a text allows for much learning about meaning in the past. Symbols, style and power are the key concepts that currently guide anthropological research on ethnicity as a ‘social construction of primordiality’. As several archaeological examples show, medieval ethnicity was a form of social mobilization used in order to reach certain political goals. Ethnic identity was built upon some pre‐existing cultural identity, in a prototypic manner.     

Craft Production, Exchange, and Political Power in the Pre-Incaic Andes

This article explores the relationship between craft production, exchange, and power in the pre-Incaic Andes, with a focus on recent archaeological evidence from Chavín, Nasca, Tiwanaku, Wari, and Moche. I argue that craft production and exchange in concert with materialized ideologies played vital roles in the development of political power in the Andes. In later state societies, craft production, exchange, and materialization were critical in maintaining and legitimizing established political power.