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Archaeologies of the Past and in the Present in 2014: Materialities of Human History

2015; Wiley; Volume: 117; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.12249

1548-1433

Christopher T. Morehart,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

Research from the past year demonstrates archaeologists’ diverse contributions to the anthropological study of human experience and social relationships in time and space. I divide literature published from late 2013 to late 2014 into five themes. First, archaeological research on space focuses on the persistence and materiality of landscapes, the creation and dynamics of communities and cities, and the mobility and migration of people. Second, studies of climate change and environmental interaction stress that organizational relationships and their long-term legacies are fundamental to ecological sustainability. Third, archaeologists offer anthropology the ability to contextualize the causes and the manifestations of violence and conflict through longitudinal cases studies and material analysis. Fourth, work on objects, bodies, and identity emphasizes that social subjectivities are not only variable but are historically connected to material worlds. Finally, fifth, archaeologists engaged with the present offer critical understandings of heritage policies and promote an activism that seeks more ethical practices with descendent communities and within the discipline itself. Despite differences, the recent literature reveals archaeologists’ contributions to these significant anthropological topics by studying long-term, historical legacies and the materiality of human relationships. [archaeology, anthropology, materiality, history, year in review] Investigación del año pasado demuestra contribuciones diversas de los arqueólogos al estudio antropológico de la experiencias humana y las relaciones sociales en tiempo y espacio. Divido la literatura publicada desde finales del 2013 a finales del 2014 en cinco temas. Primero, la investigación arqueológica sobre espacio se enfoca en la persistencia y materialidad de los paisajes, la creación y dinámica de comunidades y ciudades, y la movilidad y migración de personas. Segundo, estudios de cambio climático e interacción ambiental enfatizan que las relaciones organizacionales y sus legados de largo plazo son fundamentales para la sostenibilidad ecológica. Tercero, arqueólogos le ofrecen a la antropología la habilidad de contextualizar las causas y las manifestaciones de la violencia y el conflicto a través de estudios de caso longitudinales y análisis material. Cuarto, trabajos sobre objetos, cuerpos, e identidad enfatizan que las subjetividades sociales no son solamente variables, sino que están históricamente conectadas a los mundos materiales. Finalmente, quinto, arqueólogos comprometidos con el presente ofrecen entendimientos críticos de las políticas hereditarias y promueven un activismo que busca prácticas más éticas con comunidades de descendientes y dentro de la disciplina en sí misma. A pesar de las diferencias, la reciente literatura revela las contribuciones de los arqueólogos a estos temas antropológicos significativos al estudiar legados históricos de largo plazo y la materialidad de las relaciones humanas. [arqueología, antropología, materialidad, historia, año en revisión] Archaeology is the only subfield of anthropology that consistently has dealt with both the material world and with history. Approximately 30 to 40 years ago, cultural anthropology began to develop this historical framework (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Falk Moore 1987; Mintz 1985; Roseberry 1989; Wolf 1982). But cultural anthropologists have had a much shorter investment in the tangible study of material phenomena in time and space than archaeologists (see Miller 1998:4). However, the mutual concern with history and material worlds benefits from the collaboration between archaeologists and other anthropologists (Brumfiel 2003:206). Archaeology's diverse genealogy in investigating the materiality of history increases our relevance to the study of both the past and the present and our fundamental contribution to anthropology. What Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips (1958), and later Lewis Binford (1962), meant when they argued that “archaeology is anthropology” continues to change (Gillespie and Nichols 2003). This relationship always has developed in dialogue with other anthropological subfields, especially cultural anthropology, from transformations in the culture concept to current challenges to understand the diversity of the human condition in historical perspective (e.g., Comaroff 2010). In pursuing these challenges, archaeologists work transdisciplinarily with other social and physical sciences (Kintigh et al. 2014:6). The ability and desire to reach out across diverse terrain represents a fundamental strength of archaeology as anthropology. As Charles Cobb (2014:593) notes, this eclecticism is built into the fabric of anthropology. Anthropology has a rich multidisciplinary history. As anthropologists, archaeologists look to other fields and theoretical domains to enhance their understandings of particular societies, processes, and historical trajectories. In this endeavor, archaeology plays a role not only in anthropology but also in educating and responding to a larger and changing audience. In two recent publications, Keith Kintigh and colleagues (2014) and Cobb (2014) provide distinctive visions of archaeology. Although they differ, the challenges they delineate demonstrate the diversity of anthropological archaeology. Kintigh and colleagues emphasize the archaeological contributions to our understanding of emergence, communities, and complexity; resilience, persistence, and transformation; mobility and migration; cognition, behavior, and identity; and environmental interactions. Cobb advocates the archaeological study of historical contingency; the relationships between power and practice; activism and engagement; and the materiality of places, people, and things. When reading these recent statements with archaeological research published in the past year and in annual reviews from the last two years (i.e., Harrison-Buck 2014; Kahn 2013), their views reinforce one another in productive ways. Where Kintigh and associates outline themes, Cobb offers a vision of how to conceptualize these important anthropological and archaeological issues in dynamically historical and material ways. The goal of this essay is to review and recognize research published within the past year, from late 2013 to late 2014, not to offer a program of research. It is an endeavor that reveals our fundamental dialogue with the wider field of anthropology. With an increasingly global world, cultural anthropologists have intensified their study of space. Archaeological research from the past year participates in this conversation via research on landscape and place, urban and nonurban settlements, and mobility and migration. Similarly, archaeologists’ access to long-term datasets and our focus on materiality offer important historical perspectives to the anthropological study of violence. Archaeological research on the relations between objects, bodies, and identities directly engages with anthropological interest in material worlds and social subjectivities. Even the conventional theme of climate change and environmental interaction encapsulates historical contingency and the consequences of organizational relationships. The final section of this essay stresses archaeology's growing engagement with contemporary issues and within our discipline. These studies show archaeologists’ commitment to foster more ethical practices and just social institutions. Overall, the organization of this review emphasizes the anthropological advancements archaeologists are making by studying historical legacies and the materiality of human relationships. Our attention to the practices and processes that mark these phenomena pushes archaeology to capture both the common and the unique elements of human experience. Technological innovations and advanced capitalism allow people to interact globally and progressively “compress” our perceptions of time and of space (i.e., Harvey 1991). Within this milieu, anthropology stresses multiple histories and the materiality of social and physical space (e.g., di Leonardo 2008). Archaeology provides access to this project by providing time-depth that cultural anthropologists cannot approximate. Indeed, the anthropology of space is a pervasive thread from the past year in archaeology and integrates several distinctive yet overlapping studies. These works demonstrate archaeology's important role in understanding how humans’ engagement with the physical world unfolded across time to create social spaces that were lived and inherited. Archaeological research in late 2013 and 2014 bridges multiple perspectives on the past, elucidating how people created, navigated, and inherited landscapes. Archaeological research in the deep past also demonstrates that mapping of spatial worlds may be particular to anatomically modern humans. Michelle Langley (2013) proposes that Neanderthals in Middle Paleolithic Europe engaged in few recurrent landscape practices compared to the elaborate place-making activities of modern humans. Several additional studies on the European Upper Paleolithic also focus on landscape engagement in early human life. Landscapes inscribed with art and objects inscribed with salient features of the landscape show variations in social relations, resource use, and information exchange (Cruz Berrocal et al. 2014; Fuentes 2013; Rivero and Sauvet 2014). Three years ago, Timothy Ingold (2012:428) criticized the segregation of material culture studies from research in ecological anthropology. Overcoming categorical distinctions between humans and nonhumans is an important way to bridge these areas (e.g., Latour 2004). Current archaeology on anthropogenic landscapes confronts this issue directly via interest on materiality, persistence, and legacies. The physical permanence of landscape investments and their relationship to historical ecology is the focus of N. Thomas Håkansson and Mats Widgren's (2014) volume on landesque capital, what Harold Brookfield defined as an investment in land that, “once created, persists” (Brookfield 1984:16, cited in Widgren and Håkansson 2014:10). Although landesque capital typically focuses attention to overt modifications, microscale modifications also have long-term consequences, such as the anthropogenic soils in Amazonia that archaeologists continue to study (Schmidt et al. 2014). How people inherit the material landscapes of previous generations is key to long-term landscape legacies. Dmitry Korobov and Alexander Borisov (2013) describe landscape terracing and ecological deterioration with the expansion of the Koban culture in the Caucasus. When the area was repopulated 500 years later, only areas not affected by earlier Koban agriculture were utilized. Similarly, Andrew Bauer (2014) reconstructs the long-term impact of erosion from Neolithic and Iron Age land use on the geomorphology of hills in southern India. His work highlights past humans as powerful agents of ecological change over a millennium. Although pastoralists are commonly viewed in terms of their movements, their investments in the landscape promoted mobility. In a study on pastoral landscape modification in southeastern Turkey over the past 600–700 years, Emily Hammer (2014) recognizes key features as “landscape anchors” that oriented herders’ movement through space across time. Archaeologists studying landscapes frequently employ the metaphor of a palimpsest incompletely wiped clean. Disentangling the relational histories that comprise this palimpsest is a challenging archaeological goal (Robb and Pauketat 2013:28). Some archaeological studies from the past year unweave the materiality of landscape through detailed research on depositional histories and recurrent social practices. Repeated burial in the same locations over time, for instance, may indicate the persistence of places in the social memories of communities, such as Dušan Borić and associates (2014:27) found at the Late Mesolithic site of Vlasac, Serbia, or the significance of re-encountering human remains as an element of mortuary experience, as Liv Nilsson Stutz and colleagues (2013) argue for Mesolithic cemeteries in northern Europe. A continuing thread in the archaeology of landscape centers on the relations between physical places and constellations of power. Peter Johansen (2014) describes the process of spatial appropriation as a mechanism of sociopolitical change in southern India from the Iron Age to the expansion of Buddhism. Constructing monuments on preexisting, symbolically powerful sites legitimized social differences and emergent inequality. Examining the connections between landscapes’ physical properties and political economy also elucidates material legacies over time. For instance, to clarify differing colonial and postcolonial histories in the Caribbean, Jerome Handler and Diane Wallman (2014) contrast the economic landscapes in Barbados and Martinique. With more land suitable for sugar production, plantation owners in Barbados left little area for slaves to cultivate their own provisions. In Martinique, however, more land was set aside for gardens, and slaves attended markets to sell surplus and acquire goods. These conditions played a significant role in the islands’ postcolonial trajectories following emancipation. By tracing disparate legacies and their consequences, this work contributes to anthropology's project to link global processes to local landscapes in historical perspective. By examining long-term interaction of the built environment with social processes, archaeologists are enriching our understandings of how cultural logics and normative structures shaped the ways in which cities developed. In a volume on ancient cities, Kevin Fisher and Andrew Creekmore (2014:8) observe that many archaeological studies of cities risk compressing complex “life histories into a snapshot of an apparently fully formed, static city.” To unravel this urban palimpsest, they advocate efforts to reconstruct cities’ historical biographies by focusing attention to their dynamic social, political, and economic dimensions. For example, James Osborne's (2014) examination of Syro-Anatolian cities and Arthur Demarest's (2013) study of the Maya city of Cancuen stress how urban monumentality and ritual integrated political economic institutions with ideological institutions. Emphasizing the normative rules and resources embedded within social organization, Jason Ur (2014) suggests Mesopotamian cities emerged from the bottom-up practices of actors, whose agency was conditioned by their positions within patrilineal houses. Recent archaeological studies also intertwine tangible practices with human experience. Meredith Chesson and Nathan Goodale (2014) study the distribution of storage techniques at the Bronze Age site of Numayra in Jordan to examine the dynamics of small-scale urbanism. They suggest that residential storage features reflect practices of concealment in response to centralized accumulation in larger cities. For Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeffrey Fleisher (2014), Swahili city-states along the coast of east Africa were townscapes that formed not only in response to regional networks but also via the life cycles of people. Within this nexus, the public role of the household was the center of the townscape's political and economic life (Wynne-Jones 2013). The emphasis on the experiential dimensions of urbanism also resonates with Aline Magnoni and colleagues’ (2014) analysis of urban space at Chunchucmil, Mexico, where the built environment materialized daily affairs and social investments. A strong trend in current archaeological research seeks to examine cities in comparison with nonurban settlements and communities. As Jennifer Birch (2013:2) notes in a volume on settlement aggregation, this conversation reflects interest in how settlements represent people coming together to create places as they deal with multiple local and extra-local challenges. Oliver Harris (2014) also offers a useful review of the archaeology of communities. He stresses the contributions archaeologists have made in understanding the role of practice and experience, communities’ material and imagined dimensions, and communities’ multiscalar nature. Even new scaling analysis shows that organizational principles related to settlement size in cities also characterize nonurban settlements (Ortman et al. 2014). In other words, the attention to the social dimensions of settlements transcends the study of cities to examine multiple manifestations of people living together. Recently published archaeological research on nonurban communities calls into question anthropology's traditional emphasis on the role of leaders in organizing major social projects (Kowalewski 2013). Using labor estimates for the construction of plazas and ballcourts at Tibes, a pre-Colonial site in Puerto Rico, for example, Joshua Torres and colleagues (2014) argue these public spaces were not the result of aggrandizing elites. Rather, they represent efforts to solidify communal ties. Similarly, Casey Barrier and Timothy Horsley (2014) discuss the construction of monumental structures by small communities in the American Bottom that underwent cycles of fissioning and reaggregation. Both of these studies demonstrate that complexity and monumentality can emanate from bottom-up, local processes. Historical archaeology from the past year exhibits anthropological archaeologists’ commitment to studying the impact of broad, even global, processes on the structure of local life. Elizabeth Newman (2014) describes her archaeological work at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla in Puebla, Mexico. During the 19th century, hacienda owners attempted to erode communal affiliations and produce a more dependent rural proletariat by providing access to “modern” goods. Margaret Beck and Sarah Trabert (2014) examined archaeological data from a 17th-century site in Kansas settled after the Pueblo revolt, documenting continuity in Puebloan culinary and architectural practices during a time of major upheaval. John Chenoweth's (2014) study of the practice of Quakerism and slavery in the British Virgin Islands examines the materialization of cultural logics stemming from religious beliefs in a plantation community. Unlike other plantations, the Lettsom plantation was not structured to facilitate the surveillance of the enslaved but to distinguish Quakers from non-Quakers. Archaeological approaches to cities and other settlements continue to contribute to transdisciplinary dialogues with other fields, such as geography, economics, and urban planning. Much of this research has a comparative blueprint and centers on the role of built environments in fulfilling human needs. Barbara Stark (2014), for instance, shows that green spaces (i.e., urban farms, pleasure gardens, and parks) were services that ancient cities provided to residents, but, as today, inequality shaped the extent to which green spaces were accessible. Archaeologists have also pulled on the insight of urban planners seeking to improve quality of life and social cohesion. Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown (2013), for example, applies “New Urban Design Theory” to assess how the built space of Buenavista del Cayo, Belize, fulfilled integrative functions by increasing interactions and group surveillance, by materializing cosmological and religious symbols, and by fostering a sense of place and community. Several archaeologists use quantitative approaches to evaluate spatial networks in urban and nonurban settings. James Osborne and Geoffrey Summers (2014:297) employ space syntax to model individuals’ perception of space at Kerkenes, an Iron Age city in Turkey. Michael Smith and colleagues (2014) use Gini Indexes on house and field sizes to measure inequality in six cities in central Mexico. They document modest inequality in Aztec period communities but little inequality in Teotihuacan, an earlier city, elucidating how social stratification is contingent on the political-economic structure of state systems. Matthew Pailes (2014) utilizes a Gini Index and network analysis at the Hohokam site of Cerro Prieto and records little inequality at the household level but nascent inequality between housing clusters. Elizabeth Paris (2014) also applies a network analysis of ceramic attributes between sites in highland Chiapas to document different communities of practice that transcended single settlements. These studies demonstrate how anthropologists can understand and empirically document experience, inequality, and community by focusing on their material dimensions in lived space. In a recent overview of mobility in archaeology, Peter van Dommelen (2014) notes archaeology's complicated relationship with migration. For about 30 years, the baggage of diffusionism inhibited discussion of this common process (Anthony 1990). However, archaeologists working throughout the world increasingly recognize the significance and commonality of migration, even in cases of urbanized societies (M. E. Smith 2014). People moved, voluntarily and involuntarily, for many reasons in the past. Mobility was tied to the structure of entire ways of life, to changing economic opportunities, to coercion, to efforts to avoid deteriorating local conditions, or, reminiscent of James Scott's (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed, to the strategic desire to maintain political autonomy. Bioarchaeological research represents an important blending of anthropological subfields (archaeological, cultural, and physical). Bioarchaeologists study migration in relation to multiple historical processes, including political economy, social integration, and identity. Anna Waterman and colleagues (2014) found that migration patterns at the Chalcolithic site of Zambujal in present-day Portugal mirrored exchange routes. Philip Slater and associates’ (2014) strontium analysis of human remains from the Mississippian polity of Cahokia revealed a geographically diverse population. Many individuals who moved to Cahokia during childhood were interred with local individuals, indicating the integration of migrants into Cahokia society. Rather than finding Tiwanaku migrants in the oases of San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile, Kelly Knudson and Christina Torres-Rouff (2014) also document diversity. The mosaic character of strontium data and mortuary goods suggest people pulled on both local and nonlocal traditions as active participants in a pluralistic society. Combining bioarchaeological and archaeological data, these studies offer anthropology insight into heterogeneous social practices as people adapted to new settlements, expressed their identities, and created cultural formations. Recent research on pastoralism reveals the importance of linking mobility to economic, political, and environmental relations. Environmentally, pastoral patterns of movements and settlements can be more persistent than agrarian settlements. For example, pastoralism has been a common strategy in present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan since at least the Middle to Late Bronze Age (Frachetti and Maksudov 2014:208). Pastoral societies are often considered unusual because their mobility and environmental strategies resist typical social evolutionary typologies. The political dynamism of pastoralists often is overshadowed by their comparison with seemingly more complex, settled agrarian settlements or states, what José Capriles (2014) refers to as “agrocentrism” in his study of pastoralists in Formative period Bolivia. William Honeychurch (2014) offers a review of pastoral states’ distinctive economic, political, and social flexibility. Mobility, he argues, allows pastoral states to respond to spatial and temporal diversity in ways sedentary states cannot. Beyond their enigmatic positions in Western historical schemes, pastoralists’ marginalized status has recurred throughout history. Juan Carlos Moreno García (2014), for instance, interrogates second-millennium B.C.E. Egyptian records that characterized Libyan pastoralists as invaders. By questioning the legitimacy of Libyan herders’ history and sovereignty, Egyptian administrators sought to appropriate their exchange networks and sources of political-economic autonomy. Archaeologists analyze space to study fundamental issues in anthropology's commitment to understanding the human experience: constructing, navigating, and inheriting landscapes; creating and experiencing cities and communities; and moving across regions and strategically adapting to new places by developing cultural identities. Space constitutes a tangible medium through which we work. But archaeologists also examine space to assess how people interact with the physical world and with each other. These studies show how complex practices and their consequences, institutions, power, and social transformation exist through and in space. The importance of the archaeological approach to these processes stems from our deeply historical and, significantly, methodological focus on the long term, on materiality, and on cultural variability. Archaeologists have re-energized work on environmental change to promote transdisciplinary discussions with social and physical scientists. Paul Roscoe (2014) observes that anthropology and archaeology can participate in shaping policy. He argues that the archaeological record demonstrates the reality of rapid growth and increased integration throughout the Holocene, which suggests policy projections of global convergence are probable. By examining variable human trajectories and organizational strategies at differing scales in space and time, however, archaeological research also offers insight into alternative or less inevitable pathways of environmental interaction and change (van der Leeuw 2014). Archaeological research from 2013 and 2014 goes beyond the notion that societal collapse or crises necessarily emanate from climate change. By studying organizational regimes in relation to broader environmental changes, archaeologists are delineating constellations of practices, traditions, and institutions that shape resilience. Two recent volumes in Maya archaeology exhibit multidisciplinary collaborations that examine the role of climate in socioecological transformations (Chase and Scarborough 2014; Iannone 2014). Contributors respond to the tendency to search for universal environmental causes for the Classic Maya collapse, such as drought. They compare regional variation in integration, demography, and the institutional regimes and practices that shaped the resilience of Maya socioecological systems. In delineating organizational dynamism, contributors recognize historical variation in how regions were affected by and responded to ecological change. Without discounting the role of climate change, research from the past year uses multiscalar archaeological and ecological data to situate climate as one of many protagonists in long-term human history. For example, by analyzing radiocarbon and high-precision ecological data, Ian Armit and colleagues (2014) discount the role of climate change as the cause of depopulation at the end of the Bronze Age in Ireland. Population decline began prior to the climatic deterioration that occurred in the mid–eighth century B.C.E. They propose that the availability of iron, rather than climate change, undermined Late Bronze Age hierarchies, causing social destabilization and demographic collapse. Recent research by Neil Pederson and associates (2014) also interweaves environmental change and political history, indicating that climatic shifts played a role in the establishment of the Mongol Empire. Using a suite of tree-ring data, the authors argue that deteriorating climatic conditions in the Mongolian steppe fostered instability, but subsequent climatic amelioration increased the environmental productivity that supported the Mongol Empire's concentration of power. These studies point toward the historical contingency of long-term change as social and ecological processes unfolded over time, shaping the material and organizational legacies of subsequent generations. The idea that ecological diversity is essential to the sustainability of social and ecosystem functions has been around for decades. Researchers argue that diversity enhances the robustness of socioecological systems by increasing peoples’ responsive flexibility (e.g., Iannone 2014; Leslie and McCabe 2013). Even at the household level, anthropologists observe that diversity fosters strategic autonomy (Netting and Stone 1996:54). However, discourse on ecological diversity and sustainability also can reinforce processes that decrease sustainability or increase socioeconomic disenfranchisement. Many policy reports on sustainability, for example, provide guidelines for asset managers and investors to diversify their portfolios and mitigate loss (e.g., United Nations Environment Programme 2009:14). Archaeological research offers ways to assess historically the intrinsic (rather than commercial) value of diversity by documenting peoples’ ways of life throughout time and space. Recent research on foraging societies continues to demonstrate their strategic flexibility to respond to environmental fluctuations. Enrico Crema (2013), for example, documented regular cycles (every 600 years) of Jomon settlement clustering and dispersal in Japan but found little correlation with broader climatic events. Similarly, James Savelle and Arthur Dyke's (2014) examination of hunter-gatherer settlements in the Foxe Basin shows that populations underwent cycles of “boom and bust” over approximately 3,000 years. Alfred Pawlik and colleagues (2014) recorded persistent adaptations among forager populations in the Philippines despite major climatic shifts from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. Jeanne Arnold and Lana Martin (2014) showed how