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Abstract: Despite its importance, exploring prehistoric community formation presents significant epistemological and methodological challenges. In Korean archaeology, these issues have rarely been addressed primarily due to the longstanding dominance of the culture-historical paradigm. However, extensive archaeological investigations and the accumulation of radiocarbon dates in recent decades have led to the gradual emergence of new research trends. This paper introduces and reviews recent studies on community formation during Korea’s Chulmun (Neolithic) and the subsequent Mumun (Bronze Age) periods. While community and the village should not be equated, in order to archaeologically approach community formation, we examine the formation, growth, and dissolution of villages and their relationship with broader spatio-temporal population dynamics by analyzing a large radiocarbon dataset from Korea. We then discuss current conceptual and methodological issues related to the study of prehistoric community formation in Korea. Our discussion reveals the fluidity and flexibility of communities in the hunter-gatherer societies of the Chulmun period and the emergence of large villages and multilevel communities in the Mumun period following the transition to a sedentary agricultural economy and increasing social complexity. Finally, we highlight current research trends and future directions for the study of communities in prehistoric Korea. PubDate: 2025-01-27
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Abstract: This article examines the articulation between archaeology and ideology in Nazi Germany, specifically the ideological content in archaeological narratives. We analyze German archaeology of this period in light of 19th century pan-Germanism and the German thinkers who helped shape the notion of a German national identity. Archaeology was utilized to strengthen Nazi ideology, with a particular focus on promoting ideas related to ancestry, homeland, militarism, and nationalistic fervor. The idea of Nordicism, whether pertaining to spirituality or geography, had a substantial influence on the interpretation of archaeological findings and the development of ideological narratives. The approach of Gustaf Kossinna can be viewed as the culmination of this archaeological connection to Nordicism, and it can be better understood by examining the scholars who shaped the contemporary understanding of the German national identity. Kossinna’s version of prehistory—a convoluted story of a Germanic origin—gained dominance and exerted influence over official publications and archaeological methodologies at the time. In this perspective, German was the mix of two Nordic races. This idea of a mix helped explain certain differences among populations in the Third Reich, making them part of the origin story itself. Although archaeology was not a central component of Nazi ideology, officials still showed a preference for it and employed it in many ways. Valuable knowledge obtained through a deep analysis of the Nazi case regarding the connection between ideology, warfare, and archaeological methods can help in future studies on the articulations between archaeology, ideology, and warfare. PubDate: 2025-01-09
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Abstract: In this paper, I review archaeological evidence for shifting human–avian interactions. Many species of birds, altering their behavior in response to anthropogenic niche construction, experienced an increased encounter rate with humans. Intensification of this relationship led to management and domestication of some taxa. An examination of the methods zooarchaeologists employ to study this changing interaction illustrates the limitations of evidence. Art history, architecture, historical sources, evidence based on modern distributions, and DNA analysis fill in some gaps in our knowledge. It is necessary to develop novel methods to investigate the earlier history of bird–human interactions. We also need to consider other taxa behaviorally amenable to domestication, as there was probably a diverse array of past human–bird relationships that remain unknown. Archaeologically, the relationship between people and birds is fundamental to understanding many symbolic and economic practices central to human societies. This review highlights the varied relationships between humans and birds globally allowing cross-regional examination. PubDate: 2025-01-07
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Abstract: In recent decades, the value of hieroglyphic texts to Maya archaeology has become increasingly clear. Texts provide precise chronologies and insights into the Maya worldview. They also link artifacts to individual agents and social categories and help us to understand the roles and interactions of historical individuals. Historical texts engage with other archaeological datasets in specific ways, suggesting comparative interpretations of events in the past. Even though the Maya script remains incompletely deciphered, linguistic variation within the script offers a way to explore ethno-linguistic diversity among the ancient Maya. Cultural diversity can also be explored through examination of formal aspects of the script from the perspective of paleography and graphemics in general, both of which provide evidence of scribal interactions and script evolution. Digital technologies are particularly valuable for visualizing and encoding texts with relation to time, space, and other archaeological datasets and, when combined with a social networks perspective, can be used to map other dimensions of sociocultural diversity in the Maya world. PubDate: 2024-10-26
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Abstract: The Syrian oasis city Tadmor, better known as Palmyra, has received by far the most attention within scholarship on the Roman Near East over recent decades. New evidence and recent research allow us to better understand many aspects of Palmyra on its own terms, but it also has highlighted the lack of synthetically published data from Palmyra itself and from broader comparative settings. In this review article, we discuss the contributions of recent research on urban development, material culture, religion, environment, economy, identity, and heritage in Palmyra, as well as the implications for our understanding of wider dynamics in the Roman Near East and beyond. PubDate: 2024-10-11
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Abstract: Despite major advances in archaeological coverage of West Africa over the past several decades, interpretations remain hampered by the analytical bifurcation of the region’s past into northern (active) and southern (reactive) economic and political trajectories. Building on the expanding corpus of scholarship, I argue that northern origins models centering the arid zones have limited our ability to see broader economic and political processes. The region has been intricately interconnected for millennia, and a dispersed network of culturally diverse farmers (and larger nodes) is visible by the second millennium BC. The network shaped the development of diverse cities, influenced statecraft and governance in regional polities, and supported a centrally located autonomous region. I integrate data from West Africa with emerging archaeological research foci on diverse forms of urbanism and the agencies of nonelite and local settings within kingdoms and empires. I highlight the distinctive contributions of the complex historical autonomies found along the central Mouhoun/Black Volta commercial corridor. An egalitarian ethos had a transformative effect in societies in this region, and communities may have viewed inequalities as an impediment to exchange systems for critically important goods. PubDate: 2024-09-30
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Abstract: Interdisciplinary teams investigating the origins of agriculture in the Eastern Fertile Crescent in the 1950s through 1970s considered the region a primary center of initial domestication and agricultural emergence. Political events then shifted the focus of archaeological investigation on agricultural origins to the Western Fertile Crescent. Decades of subsequent research appeared to indicate that the west was the earliest and most important center of agricultural origins in Southwest Asia, with the Eastern Fertile Crescent portrayed as a backwater that lagged behind transformative innovations from the west. The resumption of investigations in the east in the early 2000s, coupled with new scientific methods for documenting agricultural emergence, has reestablished the region as a heartland of domestication of both crop and livestock species. Part One of this two-part paper traced the history of this work from the 1950s through the early 2000s. Part Two presents a synthesis of recent work in the east, evaluating the continued relevance of early work in light of modern explanatory models for agricultural origins. PubDate: 2024-07-20
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Abstract: Silver exchanged by weight for its intrinsic value was the most important measure of value and means of payment in the southern Levant, starting from the Middle Bronze Age II–III through the Iron Age (~1700/1650‒600 BC). Since silver is not available locally in the Levant, its ongoing use as currency in the region triggered long-distance trade initiatives, and its availability or lack thereof had a direct impact on the economy. The continued use is evidenced in 40 silver hoards found in various sites across the region. A comprehensive study of lead isotopes and chemical analyses of samples obtained from 19 hoards enabled us to trace the origin of silver in the millennium during which it was extensively used as currency in the southern Levant and to identify constantly changing silver sources and concomitant trade routes. The results indicate that silver originated initially in Anatolia and Greece (~1700/1650–1600 BC) and shortly after from an unknown location in the Aegean/Carpathian/Anatolian sphere (~1600–1200 BC). After the collapse of Late Bronze Age Mediterranean trade routes, during Iron Age I (~1200–950 BC), there was a period of shortage. Silver trade was revived by the Phoenicians, who brought silver to the Levant from Sardinia and Anatolia (~950–900 BC), and later from Iberia (~900–630 BC). Further change occurred after the Assyrian retreat from the Levant, when silver was shipped from the Aegean (~630–600 BC). Following the devastation caused by the expanding Babylonian empire, silver consumption in the Levant practically ended for a century. Considering the isotopic results, combined with a detailed study of the context, chronology, and chemical composition, we demonstrate that all these factors are essential for the reconstruction of developments in the supply of silver in the southern Levant, and more generally. The changes in trade routes closely follow political and social transformations for over a millennium; exchange in this case was not only, not even mainly preconditioned by the environmental/geographic circumstances, as has often been argued for the Mediterranean. From an analytical point of view, we offer a protocol for the provenance of silver in general. PubDate: 2024-07-01
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Abstract: Wari is sometimes described as the first empire of the Andes, conquering and controlling a broad region during the Middle Horizon (600–1000 CE). This article synthesizes archaeological research to offer a new perspective on Wari’s rise, expansion, and collapse. Wari emerged in a rapidly urbanizing environment as a set of ideas about the world and how it should work that blended foreign ideas with local traditions. Heartland cities were organized around elite kin groups who competed for followers by hosting small-scale gatherings. Wari-related ideas, objects, and people circulated far more widely, creating a dynamic cultural horizon of considerable heterogeneity. Efforts to centralize decision making in the ninth century CE may have led to the polity’s decline. Although this reconstruction of Wari politics differs from previous models, it is in keeping with contemporary interpretations of collective and low-power early expansive polities in other parts of the world. PubDate: 2024-06-15
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Abstract: The study of collapse in archaeology and history has continued to grow and develop in the last decade and is a respectable target of investigation in and beyond these fields. Environmental determinism and apocalyptic narratives have become less acceptable and collapsology has matured into a more nuanced, self-critical, and sophisticated field. This review explores recent work on collapse in archaeology between 2012 and 2023. It demonstrates how collapse, and associated concepts such as resilience, fragility, and vulnerability, are studied in the light of present-day threats, how collapse studies are increasingly recognized to have application in the present day, where they can contribute to discourses of resilience and sustainable development, and shows the diversity present in collapse studies. It also discusses the language and concepts of collapse. I explore these areas with reference to general works on collapse and to six specific historical episodes of collapse: Old World collapse, eastern Mediterranean collapse, the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Classic Maya, Tiwanaku, and Rapa Nui. PubDate: 2024-03-09
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Abstract: Interdisciplinary teams investigating the origins of agriculture in the Eastern Fertile Crescent in the 1950s through 1970s considered the region a primary center of initial domestication and agricultural emergence. Political events then shifted the focus of archaeological investigation on agricultural origins to the Western Fertile Crescent. Decades of subsequent research appeared to indicate that the west was the earliest and most important center of agricultural origins in Southwest Asia, with the Eastern Fertile Crescent portrayed as a backwater that lagged behind transformative innovations from the west. The resumption of investigations in the east in the early 2000s, coupled with new scientific methods for documenting agricultural emergence, has reestablished the region as a heartland of domestication of both crop and livestock species. This broad topic is covered in two papers, beginning here with the history of this work from the 1950s through the early 2000s. The second paper will present a synthesis of recent work in the east, evaluating the continued relevance of early work in light of recent explanatory models for agricultural origins. PubDate: 2024-02-26
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Abstract: The processes of long-term urbanization in southern Mesopotamia are still insufficiently investigated, even though recent studies using large datasets and focusing on neighboring regions have paved the way to understanding the critical role of multiple variables in the shaping of settlement strategies by ancient human societies, among which climate change played an important role. In this paper, we tackle these issues by analyzing, within the new FloodPlains Web GIS project, a conspicuous amount of archaeological evidence collected over the past decades at approximately 5000 sites in southern Mesopotamia. We have measured modifications over time in a variety of demographic proxies generated through probabilistic approaches: our results show that the rapid climate changes, especially those that occurred around 5.2, 4.2, and 3.2 ka BP, may have contributed—in addition to other socioeconomic factors—to triggering the main urban and demographic cycles in southern Mesopotamia and that each cycle is characterized by specific settlement strategies in terms of the distribution and the dimension of the urban centers. PubDate: 2024-02-14
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Abstract: Perspectives on human–animal relationships are changing in archaeology and related disciplines. Analytical models that distinguish foraging from food production remain popular, but scholars are beginning to recognize greater variability in the ways people understood and engaged with animals in the past. In southern Africa, researchers have observed that wild animals were economically and socially important to recent agropastoral societies. However, archaeological models emphasize cattle keeping and downplay the role of hunting among past farming groups. To address this discrepancy and investigate human–wild animal interactions over the last ~ 2000 years, we examined zooarchaeological data from 54 southern African Iron Age (first and second millennium AD) farming sites. Diversity and taxonomic information highlights how often and what types of animals people hunted. Comparisons with earlier and contemporaneous forager and herder sites in southern and eastern Africa show that hunting for social and economic purposes characterized the spread of farming and rise of complex societies in southern Africa. The long-term cultural integration of wild animals into food-producing societies is unusual from a Global South perspective and warrants reappraisal of forager/farmer dichotomies in non-Western contexts. PubDate: 2023-11-04
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Abstract: For 40 years, political collapse has been increasingly prominent in anthropological archaeology. Throughout that period, scholars have grappled with defining collapse and asked why sociopolitical systems fragment. In this article, I explore emerging research on the aftermath of collapse. Focusing on the Americas, I consider the development of theoretical models and expanding analytical scope. Highlighting key themes, I propose that although cross-cultural archaeological data do negate narratives of apocalypse and disappearance, an overemphasis on post-collapse continuity also obscures the heterogeneity and dynamism of post-collapse periods and the creativity and resilience of populations who live through them. PubDate: 2023-11-01
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Abstract: Throughout the history of archaeology, researchers have evaluated human societies in terms of systems and systems interactions. Complex systems theory (CST), which emerged in the 1980s, is a framework that can explain the emergence of new organizational forms. Its ability to capture nonlinear dynamics and account for human agency make CST a powerful analytical framework for archaeologists. While CST has been present within archaeology for several decades (most notably through the use of concepts like resilience and complex adaptive systems), recent increases in the use of methods like network analysis and agent-based modeling are accelerating the use of CST among archaeologists. This article reviews complex systems approaches and their relationship to past and present archaeological thought. In particular, CST has made important advancements in studies of adaptation and resilience, cycles of social and political development, and the identification of scaling relationships in human systems. Ultimately, CST helps reveal important patterns and relationships that are pivotal for understanding human systems and the relationships that define different societies. PubDate: 2023-10-30
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Abstract: Since the 19th century, the study of shell middens has played an important role in archaeological research. Shell midden and broader coastal archaeology have transformed our understanding of human relationships with aquatic habitats, demonstrating the importance of marine environments to human evolution and ecology, the colonization of islands and establishment of maritime trade networks, changing social and political dynamics, and a variety of other issues. During the past two decades, shell midden research has greatly increased, marking an exciting time for new discoveries and heightened collaboration with Indigenous communities. Several key research trends in shell midden archaeology during the past 10–15 years include research on site distribution and temporality, underwater archaeology, historical ecology, terraforming, landscape legacies, and community collaboration. These research trends demonstrate the ways in which shell midden archaeologists are shaping our understanding of the human past and environmental change around the world. PubDate: 2023-09-26
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Abstract: Aquaculture is the world’s fastest growing food sector and accounts for more than 50% of the world’s fish food supply. The significant growth in global aquaculture since the middle of the 20th century has been dubbed by the Blue Revolution. However, it is not the first Blue Revolution to take place in human history. While historically classified as low-ranking, seasonal, or starvation resources in the archaeological discourse, marine foods were vital resources that ancient communities developed and exploited using a vast array of strategies. Among these aquatic strategies was aquaculture. This first Blue Revolution was initiated during the Early Holocene, some 8,000 years ago in China, with archaeologists now documenting aquaculture across the globe. This review considers the commonalities between ancient aquacultural systems including evidence of ecosystem engineering and the development of domesticated landscapes as production systems. People of the past constructed agroecosystems to not only enhance and diversify aquatic resources, but to control the reliability of key subsistence foods and to meet the demands of ritual practice and conspicuous social stratification. These aquaculture systems were maintained for centuries, if not millennia. Worldwide research conducted on ancient aquaculture can provide critical insights into developing more ecologically sustainable, resilient, and diverse marine production systems for coastal communities today, thus, achieving industry sustainability and limiting negative environmental impacts to the world’s shorelines and overexploited fisheries. PubDate: 2023-09-12
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Abstract: This article synthesizes monumentality, governance, urbanism, and regional statecraft in the Northern Maya Lowlands during the Preclassic and Classic periods. As in some parts of the Southern Lowlands, ceremonial spaces likely predated sedentism and monumental construction predated large-scale inequality. Nevertheless, the process of construction and the resulting monuments facilitated complex societies. In the Late Preclassic, some political centers featured factional competition, and there is less evidence for individual rulers than in the Southern Lowlands. The Classic period exhibits remarkable variation in governance. Both dynastic rulership and collective governance in the form of shared decision making are common in the Northern Lowlands throughout the Classic period, with a shift toward the former in later centuries. Northern Lowland cities, while more densely settled than most Southern Lowland centers, do not follow settlement scaling expectations. Density contributed to neighborhood formation and collective action, yet minimal spatial clustering of households makes neighborhoods more difficult to identify. Intra-household inequality appears not to correlate with forms of governance. Marketplaces facilitated the both leadership strategies and household livelihoods. Scholars debate the nature or governance at Chichen Itza, yet several recent projects in its hinterlands clarify the nature of regional statecraft at Chichen, whose leaders exercised a variety of strategies, enabling the enrichment of some of its neighbors. PubDate: 2023-08-24
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Abstract: Niche construction theory has played a prominent role in archaeology during the last decade. However, the potential of niche construction in relation to agricultural development has received less attention. To this end, we bring together literature on the forms and sources of agronomic variability and use a series of examples to highlight the importance of reciprocal causation and ecological inheritance in trajectories of agricultural change. We demonstrate how niche construction theory can inform on emergent mutualisms in both inceptive and established agronomic contexts, the recursive relationships between humans and their agronomic environments, and bridges between the past and present. PubDate: 2023-05-23
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Abstract: Invented in the 19th century as an allegory for large-scale human interaction across Eurasia, the idea of “the Silk Road” continues to shape archaeological investigations of trade, travel, cultural exchange, and mobility in the region between the Near East and East Asia. Though long used to refer to trade between the ancient and late medieval periods, the framework of the Silk Road has grown increasingly popular and is used to orient research on mobilities of much earlier periods, as well as to frame movement and exchange at the molecular level, including of human genes. This article reviews the shared challenges confronted by Silk Road archaeologists and explores the narratives about human culture that have been tied up in the Silk Road metaphor from the beginning. Through a review of recent work on and along the Silk Road, I trace common narratives and shared scalar challenges across archaeologies of landscape, material culture, gender, mobile lifeways, and isotopic and genetic assemblages, and examine tensions between globality and locality within Silk Road cultural heritage and the implications of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. PubDate: 2023-05-22
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