Extra! Extra! Read All About It: Newspaper Archives as Archaeological Site Survey

Relative to other historic documents, newspapers have received little attention from researchers as a source of archaeological data. Now that many historic newspapers have been digitized and placed online, this traditionally underutilized resource has the potential to yield new information about archaeological sites, especially those in heavily developed urban areas where sites are inaccessible or have been destroyed. In this article, a methodology is proposed by which archived newspapers might be searched for data about archaeological sites. A case study using newspapers from Allen County, Indiana and its principal city, Fort Wayne, demonstrates the utility of the methodology by producing evidence about many previously unrecorded archaeological sites.     

Towards an Archaeology of Disentanglement

The impact of connectivity in past societies has long been a focus of archaeological studies. Well-established approaches have been developed over the years to understand emergent connections and entanglement between distant communities, including world system, culture contact, post-colonial theories and network analyses. Our understanding of connectivity remains partial, however, because researchers have focussed on the establishment and consequences of contact and largely ignored the dynamics that often led to its interruption. Yet these processes of ‘disentanglement’ are just as complex and far-reaching as their converse and need to be understood in their own right. This paper shows that a thorough analysis of disentanglement processes can contribute to our understanding of the very nature of the interrupted contacts, as well as shed light on the social dynamics that engender long-term changes in contact patterns. The concept of disentanglement is discussed in the light of current theories of connectivity and explored through regional case studies in Late Bronze Age Italy (Salento) and Greece (Achaea).     

Mississippian Plazas,Performances, and Portable Histories

Although plazas have a lengthy and variable history in southeastern North America, by the Mississippian period (ca. 1000–1500 CE), they had assumed some degree of conformity: they were square to rectangular in shape, anchored the approximate center of a settlement, often had additional inclusions such as public buildings or earthen monuments, and were the arenas of secular and religious public activities. We suggest that the importance of these architectural features to Mississippian life ways can be attributed to two characteristics that are widely shared with other cultures that also employed plazas as a form of axis mundi. First, their construction represents an event that arrests temporality and draws attention to their pivotal role in synchronizing ritual life. Second, their relatively open architecture confers them a relational flexibility that allows for the linkage of a wide variety of spaces, things, and beings. A quantitative and qualitative study of 35 Mississippian plazas demonstrates discrepancies from a linear relationship between plaza size and site size that may be related to variation in the kinds of performances that were conducted in these public places at different types of settlements. Despite this variation, the ubiquity of plazas suggests that they were pivotal to the founding of Mississippian places, and may have been important for reestablishing a sense of cosmological order for migrating communities.     

No Compensation Needed: On Archaeology and the Archaeological

The archaeological is regularly perceived in negative terms as lacking and deficient. It is fragmented, static, and crude, a residue of past living societies. Accordingly, much of archaeologists’ efforts are directed toward the amendment of these flaws. The present paper, however, argues that these so-called deficiencies are in fact constitutive absences. Whatever the archaeological lacks, it lacks by definition. It thus follows that working to render the archaeological “complete” is in fact an effort to undo it, to convert it into something else. For the sake of discovering the past, archaeological practice is a sustained effort to rid itself of the very phenomenon that defines it, consequently setting in motion self-perpetuating circularity predicated on deficiency and compensation. The reason for this, it is suggested, is the otherness of the archaeological, being at one and the same time a cultural phenomenon and a fossil record, a social construct and a geological deposit. This condition is so baffling that it is approached by transforming it into something familiar. The paper argues that understanding the archaeological should be archaeology’s first priority. Insofar as it is also the study of the past, this should be predicated on the understanding of the archaeological present.     

Regional Demographic Dynamics in the Neolithic Transition in Iberia: Results from Summed Calibrated Date Analysis

This paper assesses long-term trends in human activity across the Iberian Peninsula associated with the spread of agriculture. In order to improve our understanding of regional trajectories within the two-way and multiple-velocity model proposed by Isern et al. (Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 21:447–460, 2014), we consider summed calibrated radiocarbon dates of a large audited dataset from across Iberia. To assess the role of different analytical units, two alternative peninsular divisions at different spatial resolutions were used: one, with three generalized study areas, and the second, with eight biogeographic regions. This comparison of spatio-temporal variability provides a more in-depth inter-regional reading of the Neolithic transition in Iberia than more generalized approaches. The southwest, Mediterranean coasts and interior portions of Iberia all showed significant demographic expansion with the onset of the Neolithic, as observed across Western Europe. By contrast, northern Iberia featured a close adherence to a null model of exponential growth and a longer continuation of hunter-gatherer strategies.     

Matter,Places, and Persons in Cahokian Depositional Acts

Artifact caching, soil layering, and other intentional depositional practices—archaeologically defined “ritual deposits” of the past—are especially prevalent during the Mississippian period. Employing a perspective of relational ontology, however, we interrogate the validity of a past partitioned into religious, political, and daily spheres. Rather, this perspective emphasizes the multi-experiential and multi-dimensional aspects of social life. Meaning, intentional depositional acts can no longer be usefully described as simply “sacred” or “ritual” practices. Rather, these deposits should be explored as experiences tied to multiple layers of social life, investigating the relationships constructed through such deposits between humans, nonhuman agents, and the landscape.     

An Experiment in Using Visual Attention Metrics to Think About Experience and Design Choices in Past Places

The influence of the visual properties of a built space or landscape on the behaviors of people within them and the manipulation of these visual properties to cue or constrain behaviors are subjects of long-standing archaeological interest. Advances in cognitive neurosciences and a suite of improved computational modeling tools, combined with the proliferation of detailed 3D models of archaeological complexes and landscapes, offer an opportunity for new approaches to these topics based on models of low-level perceptual cues and visual attention. The approach described here takes aim at the question of where people will look, rather than simply what is visible, with the goal of investigating the intentions of designers of spaces and visual aspects of the experience of a place. In simple terms, our approach involves placing detailed 3D models of built spaces or landscapes into a digital environment. An individual then virtually walks through the space and what is visible at each moment is recorded in the form of a video stream, which may be broken down into a sequence of scenes. This set of scenes is then analyzed using software that calculates and maps the visual saliency of each scene and the path of focuses of attention (FOAs) over time. This set of saliency maps, raw images, and FOA paths provide the basis for further interpretation. This paper presents an initial experiment to illustrate the approach, carried out in the eastern passage at Knowth, one of the main mounds in the Brú na Bóinne in Ireland.     

Seeking a Better View: Using 3D to Investigate Visibility in Historic Landscapes

The examination of historic landscapes at complex, multi-phased archaeological sites is hampered by the limitations of traditional two-dimensional (2D) visibility studies in geographic information systems (GISs). This paper argues for integrating three-dimensional (3D), qualitative methods into the study of visibility of monumental architecture at ancient sites. By transforming 2D GIS data into 3D representations of ancient built and natural landscapes, visibility studies can be greatly enhanced, adding into analysis perspective, monument shape, and color, as well as changing levels of visibility across time and space. The ancient Egyptian site of Saqqara (29° 52′ 16.55″ lat./31° 12′ 59.58″ E long.) is one of a number of cult locations with monumental architecture neighboring the administrative capital of Memphis. The Old Kingdom cult site of Saqqara (2670 bce–2168 bce) is utilized to demonstrate the potential for 3D visibility studies that better replicate such elements of human perception. This method offers new possibilities for more human-centered studies of past landscapes.     

The Enduring Toltecs: History and Truth During the Aztec-to-Colonial Transition at Tula,Hidalgo

Tula, Hidalgo, was an important early Postclassic city that dominated much of central Mexico as well as adjacent regions to its north and west. For many decades, Tula was thought to be the city that early colonial documents referred to as “Tollan,” or “place of the reeds.” It is clear that the Aztec Empire, a later civilization that dominated a much larger area, revered Tollan and connected themselves to the city and its people, the Toltecs, in various ways. Recent research has questioned whether Tula was indeed the Tollan that the Aztecs revered; instead, Tollan may have been a concept that referred to all of the great civilizations that preceded the Aztecs. These two perspectives, which I frame as the “single Tollan/many Tollans” debate, have important consequences for our understanding of the early Postclassic period as well as colonial configurations of power. I argue that to understand the Aztecs’ relationships with their past, and the colonial consequences of those relationships, it is important to shift away from questions of truth. Instead, I concentrate on historical narratives and the social, material, and biological effects that they produced, including the early and late Aztec interventions at Tula. I argue that Jorge Acosta’s data provide evidence for an Early Aztec period termination ritual and a Late Aztec period New Fire ceremony that ushered in a new population boom at Tula. In turn, these connections allowed for the unprecedented rise of the Moctezuma family during the colonial period. This evidence forms part of a broader argument that the two sides of the Tula debate are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they both form part of attempts to control, claim, and revere the past in the inherently unstable fields of power that characterized the late Postclassic and early colonial periods in central Mexico.