Archaeology of Place

This final volume of my PhD thesis (Appendix G) is the Gazetteer, divided up into a few Iron Age and Romano-British sites from North Yorkshire; but with the majority from West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Many of these sites have never been published before; and are so-called 'grey literature' - the client or archive reports produced by commercial archaeological units and held in the relevant Historic Environment Records office for each county. In a few instances not even reports exist, just archive records.

This chapter and the larger body of work on which it builds focuses on what I characterize as the environmental, spatial, and visual bases of Iranian iden- tity and royal power: that is, landscape, architecture, the built environment, and the ritual activities they hosted. These, I argue, played a complementary, and no less central role in establishing and changing Iranian identity as that of textual or oral discourse. I have argued in several places that royal engage- ment with natural, urban and architectonic space was not merely a reflection or trapping of imperial power, but a fundamental tool by which sovereigns created and transformed royal identity and continually instantiated it with ritual practice.

En este artículo exploramos la organización espacial y la arquitectura de los principales asentamientos que los Inkas establecieron en el valle Calchaquí Norte (Argentina) desde el punto de vista de las experiencias corporales y sensoriales vividas por quienes allí residían o concurrían para participar de actividades especiales, ya sea representantes del Imperio o personas locales; dominadores o dominados. Demostramos que estos centros imperiales no fueron simplemente loci para la administración de los territorios conquistados, o su explotación económica, sino que formaron parte de las tácticas de dominación inkaicas. Los Inkas emplearon activa y estratégicamente la arquitectura y el diseño espacial para producir y reproducir un orden social específico, dramáticamente distinto al que se vivía en las comunidades locales. En los centros Inkas, el ambiente construido promovía identidades contrastantes, nuevas relaciones y prácticas sociales, clausurando otras, y creaba una narrativa sobre el nuevo orden de las cosas y las relaciones de poder en el valle Calchaquí Norte.
In this article we explore the spatial organization and architecture of the main settlements that the Inkas established in the Northern Calchaquí Valley (Argentina) from the point of view of the corporeal and sensorial experiences lived by those who resided or visited these places for special occasions, either imperial representatives or local individuals; rulers or subjects. We show that these imperial centers were not simply places for the administration of conquered territories, or their economic exploitation, but rather they were integral part of the Inkaic tactics of domination. The Inkas actively and strategically employed architecture and the spatial design to produce and reproduce a specific social order, dramatically different from that lived within local towns. In these Inka centers, the built environment promoted divergent identities and new social relations and practices, while closing others off, and created an especial narrative about the new order of things and power relations in the Northern Calchaquí Valley.

Famous as the homeland of Odysseus, Ithaca has been a preferred research area for archaeologists. However, the archaeology of Ithaca has been severely biased by its Homeric focus. As a result, Late Archaic and Classical Ithaca remains poorly understood. This biased research agenda combined with the lack of visible remains of monumental public architecture have created the impression that Classical Ithaca was an isolated backwater. This thesis aims to partially redress the balance. At Polis valley, northern Ithaca, relatively rich deposits of Late Archaic and Classical occupation have come to light. Six assemblages of fine ware pottery, Ithacan and imported, provide important insights on the hitherto unknown local pottery production and development, its relations to the Western Greek pottery tradition as well as the influences from the well-known pottery production centres of Athens and Corinth. The contexts of behaviour in which the pottery participated likely represent activities of communal feasting in the open and during daylight, followed by an arranged exposure of the leftovers on the surface. The social significance of the pottery is then investigated and it is argued that the local elite largely regulated pottery production and imports of foreign ceramics as strategies for maintaining the established social hierarchy. Furthermore, the depositional practices of the pottery may reveal a complex negotiation of social behaviours and concepts, such as insularity, acculturation, identity and connectivity. The final conclusion is that the local widely-connected seafaring elite deliberately cultivated a culture of austerity and traditionalism in order to maintain its power over the community, and the manipulation of fine ware pottery played a major role in the success of this strategy.

In this paper, I used theories of embodiment, identity, materiality and landscape dwelling to write an interpretative archaeology of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age periods on Cranborne Chase in Dorset.
The paper also featured fictional vignettes intended to provide possible insights into very different past lives, world views and understandings of landscape. It was also illustrated with imaginative drawings by Cornelius Barton and Erica Hemming. The paper was an avowedly experimental exercise in interpretative narrative, to try and create a bridge between sometimes dense theoretical treatments, and more populist accounts. Inspired by some of Mark Edmonds' fictional accounts of working wood and flint, I tried to portray something of people's beliefs and cosmologies, a difficult task in which I was only partly sucessful. I was particularly keen to try and envisage a Mesolithic world of animist, relational ontologies. I also wished to focus on ideas of identity, including possible multiple genders; and the activities and taskscapes of women and children, which the illustrations too supported. I would love to continue these fictional thought experiments at a future date, perhaps in a graphic novel set during the British later Iron Age.
This paper represents the final Word text, with some remaining typos, but not the final paginated typeset Archaeopress formatted article. I have also removed the illustrations, but have retained the glossary of theoretical terms included at the rear of the book, one of the aims of which was to try and explain complex theoretical concepts in more accessible terms. There is also a bibliography for suggested further reading, though of course this is only valid up to 2004, and there have subsequently been many important contributions to landscape archaeology, cultural geography and archaeological discussions of identity.

This paper uses evidence from aerial photography and commercial developer-funded excavations to investigate the different social and temporal ‘scales’ of mnemonic practices that may be detectable in the Iron Age and Romano-British settlement evidence from central and northern England. These varied scales range from more generalised referencing of much older monuments within the landscape, through to more specific depositional, spatial and temporal links established between features such as roundhouses and ditches. Some activities suggest a concern with ancestry, identity and lineage; others were perhaps deliberately structured attempts to create long-term myths. Identifying such connections has important implications for understanding mnemonic practices within Iron Age and Romano-British communities, and for archaeological practice.

This edited volume featured 22 papers by landscape archaeologists and historians - Oscar Aldred, John Barnatt, Bill Bevan, Eleanor Breen, Adrian Chadwick, Lee Elliott, Helen Evans, Chris Fenton-Thomas, Peter Herring, Bob Johnston, Jon Kissock, David Knight, Helen Lewis, Richard Muir, Susan Oosthuizen, Maria Petersson, Ian Roberts, Hannah Sackett, John Thomas, Helen Wickstead and Tom Williamson. It investigated land allotment and land division in British archaeological periods from later prehistory through to the early modern period; along with Iron Age and early medieval Sweden and early medieval and medieval Iceland. 

My introduction to the book is reproduced here - I would like to thank David Davison and Rajka Makjanić at Archaeopress for supplying me with the pdf of this.

This paper examines the archaeological and faunal evidence from Wattle Syke near Wetherby in West Yorkshire, where developer-funded excavations revealed part of a large Late Iron Age and Romano-British settlement. The archaeological work uncovered close spatial references between features such as roundhouses and ditches, reflecting tangible links back to past households and structures. It was the prosaic practices, materials and movements of everyday life that allowed social memories to be carried forward across the generations, yet the evidence also suggests the reworking, forgetting or deliberate negation of memories and the past. The exceptionally well-preserved animal and human skeletal evidence allowed the construction of contextual biographies of depositional and ritualised practices over many centuries. Many of these acts seem to have reflected a concern with seasonality and with genealogy, and material culture, human and animal remains were strategically used to create, reinforce or even negate collective and individual identities and memories. Buildings, material culture and human and animal remains were all caught up in these meshes or networks of everyday 'memory work'.

My PhD thesis was an interpretative study of rural landscapes and communities of Nottinghamshire and South and West Yorkshire during the Iron Age and Romano-British periods. It challenged dominant narratives of the Iron Age and Romano-British periods by focusing on the regional evidence for inhabitation, evidence that was relatively unknown until the late 1970s and that consisted mainly of cropmarks of field systems and enclosures. Whilst additional aerial photography and developer-funded survey and excavation work have now significantly expanded the data available, this evidence had not been interpreted from a social perspective, and these landscapes and their inhabitants had been rarely discussed outside of the region, especially in wider syntheses of the Iron Age and Romano-British periods in Britain. This thesis was therefore a rather different account of people and places in northern England during the study period.
My PhD thesis assesses the current known extent of these enclosures and field systems within the region, and suggests reasons for their physical layout and purpose. I discuss the ways in which changing patterns of fields and enclosures affected movement through the landscape, and traditions of tenure, land use, animal husbandry and human-animal relations. This thesis explores the materiality of land divisions and settlements, the social practices involved in their construction and their possible symbolic connotations; through theoretical approaches to identity and relational agency informed by ethnographic analogies and a poetics of landscape.
This thesis also discusses changes in identity, production and consumption practices amongst these small-scale rural communities preceding and following the Roman invasion of the north; and issues concerning Roman imperialism and acculturation or ‘Romanisation’ within the region.

In this introduction to our edited volume, Catriona and I critically review the nature of landscape and individual and 'collective' or 'social' memory, and assess studies of the subject within archaeology, anthropology, history, cultural geography, cognitive psychology and other disciplines. We also briefly explore some notable case studies of the long-term persistence of memory recorded by archaeological investigations in Britain. Possible explanations for such phenomena may lie in materiality, myth, oral tradition and social practice.

The adoption of theories of social action in Archaeology has opened up the way to consider the mutually constitutive relationship between the social and the material. In this context, Peircean semiotics – a theory of meaning embedded in experience – helps understanding the unfolding of this meaningful relationship in the past and the present. The case of Bronze Age (ca. 2200-825 BC) decorated stelae and statue-menhirs in the Iberian Peninsula is illustrative. They have been generally conceptualized as static containers of symbolic meanings. But understanding stelae and statue-menhirs as an integral and active part of social relations entails addressing them as signs of practices historically situated within a wider complex network of practices structuring social relations in a meaningful way. Stelae and statue-menhirs suggest multiple indexical relations that can be taken as evidence for social practices related to the structuration of collective identities, memories and places. This approach contributes to a renovated understanding of the historicized relationships between people and this type of remains.

This investigation into shipwrecks in the Port MacDonnell region addresses to what extent archaeological signatures inform the impact of shipwrecks, as processes and places, in the community and vice versa. A review of archaeological, archival and oral history data is undertaken to achieve several aims. These include identifying the remains of a wooden shipwreck seasonally exposed in the beach and a group of timbers located at the Port MacDonnell Maritime Museum. Also, the concept of shipwrecks as places in the landscape and local attitudes towards shipwrecks is explored. Finally, the impacts shipwrecks have on rural coastal communities is identified using a framework based around shipwreck response, exploitation and memorialisation landscapes. This research is archaeologically significant as it contributes to the theme of shipwrecks as places; an understudied area which has the potential to reveal meaningful interpretations about human behaviour. Furthermore, it is significant as the behaviours, attitudes and values of a community with a strong maritime identity and a history of responding to, exploiting and memorialising shipwrecks are recorded.

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the house
as such. I propose that such ‘house-making’ by Albanian migrants is not only a simple house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic ‘proxy’ presence for
migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.

Roads and Anthropology is the first collection of road ethnographies, edited by two pioneers in the anthropological explorations of infrastructures, the essays published in this book aim to pave the way for that rising field of anthropological research.

This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Table of Contents
-Dalakoglou D. & P. Harvey. Introduction. Roads and Anthropology: Ethnographic Perspectives on Space, Time and (Im)Mobility
-Nielsen M. Roadside Inventions: Making Time and Money Work at a Road Construction Site in Mozambique
-Campbell J. Between the Material and the Figural Road: The Incompleteness of Colonial Geographies in Amazonia
-Kernaghan R. Furrows and Walls, or the Legal Topography of a Frontier Road in Peru
-Harvey P. & H. Knox. The Enchantments of Infrastructure
-Klaeger G. Rush and Relax: the Rhythms and Speeds of Touting Perishable Products on a Ghanaian Roadside
-Pedersen M. & M. Bunkenborg Roads that Separate: Sino-Mongolian Relations in the Inner Asian Desert
- Dalakoglou D. ‘The Road from Capitalism to Capitalism’: Infrastructures of (Post)Socialism in Albania

Iberian Bronze Age stelae and statue-menhirs reproduce icons and iconographic conventions that in some cases display wide geographical distributions. In this paper I reflect on the social mechanisms that might have played a role in the configuration of this situation. To that end I revise previous interpretations and analyze two complementary aspects that might contribute to the interpretation of this question. On the one hand, I consider the, generally, complementary geographical distribution of metallic referents (specially weapons and necklaces/torcs) and their representations in stelae and statue-menhirs. On the other hand, I examine some of the places in which stelae and statue-menhirs were documented, their context. Brought together, these data lead me to suggest that stelae and statue-menhir were mechanisms through which social ties were reproduced or reinforced at varied temporal and spatial scales, and that they played a relevant role as mechanisms of social reproduction at a local scale.

Islands provide an ideal setting for writing about the ‘archaeology of water’. At a broad level, this paper asks how archaeologists can understand how past communities encultured islandscapes. At a detailed level, it explores a few lesser-known aspects of prehistoric Mediterranean island cultures and how they provide insights into the essence and meaning of water, in terms of both its natural and cultural connotations. While a thriving scholarship on the role of water exists for prehistoric northern Europe, the application of these ideas to the Mediterranean islands has seldom been tried out before. The Mediterranean islands seem to provide just the right opportunity to put all this into practice, through an exploration of an ‘archaeology of natural places’ (Bradley 2000, Harmanşah 2014) and an ‘archaeology of meaningful places’ (Zedeňo and Bowser 2009).

El Período Tardío del Noroeste Argentino ha sido caracterizado como una época de creciente complejidad, desigualdad social y estratificación político-económica institucionalizadas. El objetivo de este artículo es discutir críticamente esta interpretación y la evidencia empleada para apoyarla. Sostengo que si abandonamos las perspectivas externas y a “vuelo de pájaro” al analizar los poblados de esta época y si nos enfocamos en las experiencias subjetivas e intersubjetivas, las prácticas y las relaciones sociales que se desarrollaban diariamente en estos lugares, entonces alcanzaremos una visión distinta de las sociedades tardías, las cuales, argumento, desarrollaron una vida social más cercana a la integración comunal que a la estratificación y segregación.

Northwestern Argentina Late Pre-Hispanic Period has been generally characterized as a time of increasing complexity, institutionalized social inequality and political-economic stratification. This article’s goal is to critically discuss this interpretation and the evidence employed to support it. I claim that if we abandon external and “bird’s-eye view” perspectives when analyzing late-period sites and if we focus on the subjective and intersubjective experiences, practices, and social relations that past people daily developed in this places, then we will be able to reach a different understanding of late-period societies, which, I argue, developed a social life that was closer to communal integration than stratification and segregation.

In this introduction to my edited volume Recent Approaches to the Archaeology of Land Allotment, I critically examined concepts and terms such as land ownership, tenure, territoriality, land allotment, land division and land use, demonstrating how these are not the same as one another, despite the fact that they are sometimes used interchangeably in some archaeological accounts. This remains a problem within British landscape archaeology.
Whilst some recent archaeologies of landscape have been explicitly (and sometimes somewhat opaquely) theoretical and phenomenological, others appear to remain purely empirical in scope, which in some instances is limiting. In this paper, I therefore argue for a more integrated, holistic approach, where detailed mapping, survey and fieldwork is combined with theoretical ideas concerning landscape, place, inhabitation and identity.

In British archaeology, there are apparent tensions between macro-level, landscape-wide analyses, and micro-level, site-based approaches. Macro-level analyses are based on techniques and technologies such as aerial photograph transcriptions, LiDAR data and GIS-based mapping, as exemplified in many excellent National Mapping Programme studies and several large-scale research projects. These studies have proved invaluable in mapping extensive areas of archaeology, and GIS-based data can be interrogated through many forms of spatial analysis. At the same time, developer-funded fieldwork has provided opportunities to excavate and record large-scale areas. Sampling and recording methodologies have improved tremendously in recent years, in conjunction with the emergence of contextual approaches to the evidence. Such investigations are contributing a significant amount of new and exciting information to field system studies, though often at a detailed, localised level. This disparity in the scales of landscape analysis and interpretation is explored through a series of case studies focusing on later prehistoric and Romano-British field systems. Different approaches and methodological, temporal and interpretative scales are examined, and the creative rather than negative aspects of such tensions explored.

In this introduction to my volume Stories from the Landscape, I critically reviewed then current theories of landscape and place, phenomenology, temporality, embodiment and identity and materiality emerging within archaeology, anthropology and ethnography, and cultural geography and critical social theory. I attempted to weave these different theoretical strands together into an interpretative archaeology of practice. This paper was subsequently followed by other more extensive explorations, notably Chris Fowler's 2004 book The Archaeology of Personhood which came out later that year, and stimulating papers by Joanna Bruck.

This is the study of two fireplaces that were documented beneath the megalithic mound of the funerary monument #7 of the necropolis of Alcalar (South Portugal). Monument #7 is an impresive corbelled architecture that was built during the 3rd Millenium BC. The detailed excavation of the mound revealed the existence of two fireplaces beneath it. One of the interesting aspects of these fireplaces is that C14 dates (charcoal of the fireplaces) take us to the 5th Millenium BC. Another relevant issue is that in the atrium of the 3rd Millenium BC monument there are two -possibly reused- menhirs. Menhirs are a common feature in settlements and "ritual" places known in this sector of South Portugal during the 5th Millenium BC. Therefore, the fireplaces and menhirs of Alcalar 7 were old pre-existences of the place, maybe one of the reasons why, during the 3rd Millenium BC, this location is selected for the construction of a new monument.

In this paper I was trying to explore the social experiences of animal herding amongst Iron Age and Romano-British communities, and how in their daily and seasonal movements through these landscapes the lives, memories and agencies of cattle, sheep and pigs would have been closely entwined with those of people.
For me, when archaeological landscapes of fields and trackways are described I often feel that this presents a very static portrait of them. Instead, I tried to show how they are the settings for much more dynamic experiences of the landscape, where movement, memory and identity were important. Trying to write about the dynamics of memory and movement whilst illustrating such accounts with two dimensional plans still fails to conjure up a ready sense of these lived experiences though, and this is a challenge I hope to explore in future work.

During archaeological fieldwork at Tregarrick Farm, Roche, a group of ten pits were recorded to the north of Roche Rock. The pits were found to contain structured deposits of Neolithic date, which included pottery, flints, a small saddle quern and charred hazelnuts.
A series of radiocarbon determinations ranging over the period 3790-3370 cal BC were obtained from six of the pits, indicating that the site was in use over several centuries. Analysis of charred environmental material indicated that oak and hazel woodland with some clearings existed nearby.
It is suggested that the pits were the result of ritualized activity associated with seasonal gatherings close to the base of a prominent landscape feature. The investigation has given a rare insight into Early Neolithic activity in lowland Cornwall and confirms the significance of Roche Rock as an important place in the landscape several millennia before the construction of the iconic fifteenth-century chapel.

http://www.cornisharchaeology.org.uk/index_htm_files/Cornish%20Archaeology%2041-42-opt.pdf

"Memory and forgetting are fundamental to human existence and experience. Within archaeology, although there has been increasing acknowledgement of the role of the past in the past, to date there has been surprisingly little specific discussion of how such long-term persistence of place and practice was possible; and why this was the case.

The sixteen papers in this collection use detailed contextual evidence and the results of radiocarbon dating to address these questions. Many papers highlight non-monumental practices, the less visible or tangible, where ‘memory work’ can be identified in ‘everyday’ landscapes. This volume weaves recent theoretical considerations of memory, materiality and landscape with exciting evidence emerging from research and developer-funded archaeology. There is a focus on British archaeology from the Neolithic to the early medieval period, but other papers deal with Neolithic Central Europe, ancient Etruscan and Egyptian landscapes, and historic Native American practices.

The contributors are Jocelyn Ahlers, Alistair Barclay, Adrian M. Chadwick, Gareth Chaffey, Chris Fenton-Thomas, Anna Garnett, Catriona D. Gibson, Andrew Hoaen, Daniela Hofmann, Kirsten Jarrett, Andy M. Jones, Helen Loney, Louise Martin, Jane Richardson, Gary Robinson, Lucy Shipley, John Thomas, Mara Vejby, and Alexandra Vieira; and there is also a foreword by Richard Bradley.

Catriona Gibson valiantly did most of the typesetting herself, and we are really pleased with the final overall ‘look’ of the book. We both hope that this volume will challenge existing methodologies, and propose new questions for future research, fieldwork and post-excavation practice, in both ‘academic’ and developer-funded archaeology.

As part of his foreword, Professor Richard Bradley of the University of Reading offers these generous words:

“There are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between structures and artefacts formed at different times. Key elements include memory, myth, the invention of traditions, and the erasure of old ones. The contributors consider these ideas in relation to a series of well researched case studies. What they share are sophisticated ways of thinking about the past in the past. As in all good archaeology, the lessons of this research are both theoretical and practical. That is why this book is so welcome and why it has so much to teach.”

Available from 1st December 2013. ISBN: 9781782973935. Hardback, 336 pages, 166 b/w illustrations. Initial special offer price £28.50."

La arqueología del curso inferior del río Colorado (transición Pampeano-Patagónica Oriental) contó con su primer trabajo sistemático a partir de la excavación del sitio La Petrona (sur de la provincia de Buenos Aires). El registro óseo humano recuperado del sitio fue objeto de un análisis bioarqueológico que es retomado en este trabajo. En este sentido, se re-analizan las modalidades de entierro, la frecuencia de las unidades anatómicas representadas, el NMI, el sexo y edad de los mismos, las paleopatologías y la tafonomía. Los resultados de estas vías de análisis permitieron lograr un nuevo estado de la cuestión para algunas de estas variables, redefinir la cronología del sitio (Holoceno tardío final) y desarrollar un escenario que permite abordar temas referidos a las prácticas de inhumación, a la complejidad en el tratamiento de los muertos y su vinculación con el uso recurrente de ciertos sectores del paisaje.

"Press overview:
How did the American people come to develop a moral association with this land, such that their very experience of nationhood was rooted in, and their republican virtues depended upon, that land? And what is happening now as the exclusivity of that moral linkage between people and land becomes ever more attenuated? In Place and Belonging in America, David Jacobson addresses the evolving relationship between geography and citizenship in the United States since the nation's origins.

Americans have commonly assumed that only a people rooted in a bounded territory could safeguard republican virtues. But, as Jacobson argues, in the contemporary world of transnational identities, multiple loyalties, and permeable borders, the notion of a singular territorial identity has lost its resonance. The United States has come to represent a diverse quilt of cultures with varying ties to the land. These developments have transformed the character of American politics to one in which the courts take a much larger role in mediating civic life. An expanding web of legal rights enables individuals and groups to pursue their own cultural and social ends, in contrast to the civic republican practice of an active citizenry legislating its collective life.

In the first part of his sweeping study, Jacobson considers the origins of the uniquely American sense of place, exploring such components as the Puritans and their religious vision of the New World; the early Republic and agrarian virtue as extolled in the writings of Thomas Jefferson; the nationalization of place during the Civil War; and the creation of post-Civil War monuments and, later, the national park system. The second part of Place and Belonging in America concerns the contemporary United States and its more complex interactions between space and citizenship. Here Jacobson looks at the multicultural landscape as represented by the 1991 act of Congress that changed the name of the Custer Battlefield National Monument to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and the subsequent construction of a memorial honoring the Indian participants in the battle; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also reflects upon changing patterns of immigration and settlement. At once far-reaching and detailed, Place and Belonging in America offers a though-provoking new perspective on the myriad, often spiritual connections between territoriality, national identity, and civic culture."

Reviews:
Jacobson's lucid and insightful analysis is multilayered and interdisciplinary. Along with deft historical interpretation and incisive sociological investigation, he integrates discussions on politics, philosophy, literature, and religion, highlighting their roles in revealing American's evolving sense of place and identity.
(Virginia Quarterly Review )

Paying keen attention to interpretation, textuality, and the social uses of landscape, Jacobson's study engages questions that make it a must read.
(Susan Kollin, Journal of American History )

A thoughtful overview of major events and changes to the American linkages of place and identity to the landscape.
(William G. Holt, Contemporary Sociology )

Modeling the best of interdisciplinary scholarship, David Jacobson demonstrates the ways in which American representations of self, the human, and consciousness are interwoven with shifting American conceptualizations of time, place, and civic life. Grounded in historical analysis, philosophical in tone, and shaped largely by insights derived from the social sciences, Place and Belonging in America recalls Jonathan Edwards's eighteenth-century reflections on the beauty of history as much as the most slashing postmodern depictions of historical irony. This is an impressive work of synthesis, a beautifully-written book that deserves a wide audience.
(John Corrigan, Edwin Scott Gaustad Professor of Religion and Professor of History, Florida State University, author of Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century )

This well-written and well-researched book addresses a topic of particular interest to a variety of disciplines: the symbolic representation of space. Its specific concern is the shifting understanding and experience of 'place' in the history of the United States. In addressing this specific concern, the author has drawn upon material from the disciplines of law, history, art, and architecture. David Jacobson has moved into new areas from those covered in his previous book, and Place and Belonging in America places that earlier, good work in a conceptually richer context.
(Stephen Grosby, Clemson University )

Place and Belonging in America should provoke reflection on the importance of issues such as immigration, geographic mobility, and globalization for the viability of politics, properly understood.
(Jeremy Beer, Perspectives on Political Science )

This paper aims to make a contribution to the study of the human circulation in internodal spaces by studying passing places in arid and semi-arid zones. Research focuses in a specific locality: Incaguasi (Antofagasta Region, Chile), a currently uninhabited landscape in the upper ravine of the Loa river, a crossing point to travellers from at least AD 1200. Archaeological and historical records have permitted us to unveil the occupational history of Incaguasi as a transito staging post, the activities carried on this place over eight centuries, and changes and continuities over the Late Intermediate, Late or Inka, Colonial, Bolivian and Chilean periods. Este artículo busca contribuir al estudio de la circulación humana en los espacios internodales investigando lugares de uso pasajero en zonas áridas o semi áridas. La investigación se concentra en una específica localidad: Incaguasi (Región de Antofagasta, Chile), un desértico paraje actualmente deshabitado del valle superior del río...

Does landscape possess agency? Recent theoretical discussions within archaeology have explored notions that objects, animals and plants may be invested with agency, and have drawn upon ideas of relational agency and Actor Network Theory posited within cultural geography, anthropology and other social sciences. Can the same also be said of natural and anthropogenic features within past landscapes? This paper explored such questions, using two principal sets of British examples – firstly, late prehistoric linear earthworks; and secondly, trackways or droveways associated with later prehistoric and Romano-British field systems.

The ditches and banks of linear earthworks and trackways imposed habitual patterns on the embodied movements of people and beasts, but these features also emerged out of the very same activities and taskscapes. People and animals helped shape these landscapes, but in turn such places affected them and their shared movements and memories. Relationships between people, animals, linear earthworks and trackways were thus entangled in complex constraints and affordances within webs of agency, materiality and memory, and the landscape. In this paper, I discussed the agency of these features, and the implications of such ideas for archaeological practice.

Contents:

Chapter 1
Making Ancient Cities:  New Perspectives on the Production of Urban Places 
Kevin D. Fisher (Department of Classical, Near Eastern & Religious Studies, University of British Columbia)
Andrew T. Creekmore III (Department of Anthropology, University of Northern Colorado)

Chapter 2
The social production of space in third millennium cities of Upper Mesopotamia
Andy Creekmore (Department of Anthropology, University of Northern Colorado)

Chapter 3
North Mesopotamian Urban Space at Titriş Höyük in the Third Millennium B.C.
Yoko Nishimura (Department of Anthropology, U. of Pennsylvania)

Chapter 4
Swahili urban spaces of the East African coast
Stephanie Wynne-Jones (Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol
Jeffrey Fleisher (Dept. of Anthropology, Rice University)

Chapter 5
Urban Identities: Social and Spatial Production at Classic Period Chunchucmil, Yucatán, Mexico
Aline Magnoni (Tulane University)
Traci Arden (University of Miami)
Scott Hutson (University of Kentucky)
Bruce Dahlin (Ancient Maya Environmental Studies Center)

Chapter 6
Making the first cities on Cyprus: urbanism and social change in the Late Bronze Age
Kevin D. Fisher (Classical, Near Eastern & Religious Studies, U. of British Columbia)

Chapter 7
Urbanization and the emergence of the Greek Polis: The case of Azoria, Crete
Rodney Fitzsimons (Dept. of Ancient History and Classics, Trent University)

Chapter 8
The rise of a Neopalatial city and the (re)construction of its hinterlands: A view from Galatas
D. Matthew Buell (Dept. of Classics, SUNY Buffalo)

Chapter 9
Cahokia: The Processes and Principles of Creation of an Early Mississippian City
John Kelly (Dept. of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis)
James A. Brown (Dept. of Anthropology, Northwestern University)

Chapter 10
Comparing East and West: Aspects of urban manufacture and retail in the capitals of the Roman and Han Empires
Anna Razeto (University of Copenhagen)

Chapter 11
Ancient Open Space, Gardens, and Parks:  A Comparative Discussion for Mesoamerican Urbanism
Barbara L. Stark (School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University)

Chapter 12
Different Cities
Norman Yoffee (Departments of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas and University of New Mexico and Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University)