Archaeologies of Place

Of Rocks and Water: Towards an Archaeology of Place, 2014

2014

Place, Memory and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments investigates the complex and deep histories of places, how they served as sites of memory and belonging for local communities over the centuries, and how they were appropriated and monumentalized in the hands of the political elites. Focusing on Anatolian rock monuments carved into the living rock at watery landscapes during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, this book develops an archaeology of place as a theory of cultural landscapes and as an engaged methodology of fieldwork in order to excavate the genealogies of places. Advocating that archaeology can contribute substantively to the study of places in many fields of research and engagement within the humanities and the social sciences, this book seeks to move beyond the oft-conceived notion of places as fixed and unchanging, and argues that places are always unfinished, emergent, and hybrid. Rock cut monuments of Anatolian antiquity are discussed in the historical and micro-regional context of their making at the time of the Hittite Empire and its aftermath, while the book also investigates how such rock-cut places, springs, and caves are associated with new forms of storytelling, holy figures, miracles, and healing in their post-antique life. Anybody wishing to understand places of cultural significance both archaeologically as well as through current theoretical lenses such as heritage studies, ethnography of landscapes, social memory, embodied and sensory experience of the world, post-colonialism, political ecology, cultural geography, sustainability, and globalization will find the case studies and research within this book a doorway to exploring places in new and rewarding ways.

Of Rocks and Water: Towards an Archaeology of Place, 2014

Places are small, culturally significant locales that exist within a landscape. They are meaningful to specific cultural groups through everyday experience and shared stories associated with them. Places therefore gather a vast range of things in their microcosm: both animate and inanimate entities, residues, materials, knowledges, and stories. The material residues and cultural associations that cluster around places run deep in their temporality. Places are then generated and maintained by a spectrum of locally specific practices, from the situated activities of daily users of space, on the one hand, to the grandiose interventions of the political elite on the other. Combined, these social practices continually produce hybrid material forms and spatial configurations over time, and anchor communities to particular locales with a sense of cultural belonging. They become assemblages of shared memories, always pregnant for improvised events, despite the common essentialist notion of local places as static or conservative. Places thus serve as meaningful nexuses of human interaction, and as sites of immediate everyday experience. This edited volume is the outcome of a workshop/colloquium that tookplace at Brown University in March 2008, with the title Drawing on Rocks, Gathering by the Water: Archaeological Fieldwork at Rock Reliefs, Sacred Springs and Other Places. That event was intended to bring together academics who worked on similar questions concerning archaeological landscapes across the globe and specifically to focus on the making and unmaking of places of human interaction such as rock reliefs, sacred springs and lakes, cairns, ruins, and other meaningful places. The colloquium also provided a platform to discuss the experiences, the challenges, and the theoretical implications of working in the field and specifically at such unusual sites and landscapes. The intention was to bring to the table new archaeological perspectives on working at geologically and culturally distinctive locales where the particular geologies are encountered and uniquely reworked by local practices. This chapter is an introduction to the anthology of articles gathered under this topic.

2014

People are drawn to places where geology performs its miracles: ice-cold spring waters gushing from the rock, mysterious caves which act as conduits for ancestors and divinities traveling back and forth to the underworld, sacred bodies of water where communities make libations and offer sacrifices. This volume presents a series of archaeological landscapes from the Iranian highlands to the Anatolian Plateau, and from the Mediterranean borderlands to Mesoamerica. Contributors all have a deep interest in the making and the long-term history of unorthodox places of human interaction with the mineral world, specifically the landscapes of rocks and water. Working with rock reliefs, sacred springs and lakes, caves, cairns, ruins and other meaningful places, they draw attention to the need for a rigorous field methodology and theoretical framework for working with such special places. At a time when network models, urban-centered and macro-scale perspectives dominate discussions of ancient landscapes, this unusual volume takes us to remote, unmappable places of cultural practice, social imagination and political appropriation. It offers not only a diverse set of case studies approaching small meaningful places in their special geological grounding, but also suggests new methodologies and interpretive approaches to understand places and the processes of place-making.

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean, 2015

In this chapter, I explore practices of rock carving on the Anatolian peninsula from a diachronic perspective, with special emphasis on the Late Bronze Age and Early–Middle Iron Ages (ca. 1600–550 BC). Linking together the materiality of monuments, rock-carving technologies and issues of landscape imagination, I focus first on the commemorative rock reliefs across the Anatolian landscape, sponsored by the Hittite , Assyrian and Syro-Hittite states . Rock reliefs were carved at geologically prominent and culturally significant places such as springs, caves, sinkholes, rivers sources or along the river gorges. They constituted places for communicating with the underworld, the world of divinities and dead ancestor s. I then venture into the Urartian and Paphlagonian rock-cut tomb-carving practices and Phrygian rock-cut sanctuaries of the Iron Age to argue for the broader dissemination of the idea of altering karstic landscapes for cultic and funerary purposes. I maintain that rock monuments can only be understood as always being part of a complex assemblage in the long-term history of places. Using a limited number of examples, this chapter contributes to studies of landscape and place in Mediterranean archaeology by promoting a shift of focus from macro-scale explanations of the environment to micro-scale engagement with located practices of place-making.

This book is a set of reflections about the archaeology and cultural heritage history of a twenty-year odyssey in south-west Albania as we aimed to protect and enhance Butrint’s spirit of place – in ancient terms, its genius loci - for future generations. It has four themes. Chapters 2 and 3 review Virgil’s long influence on Butrint, and the archaeology of inventing a new identity. Chapter 4 considers the struggle of placemaking in Albania during the early post-communist era. It is a personal history of sorts. Finally, recognizing our generation of archaeologists is a pivotal one in the shaping of cultural heritage as a global industry, Chapter 5 asks, in the light of the Butrint Foundation’s experience, who matters in the shaping of a place – international regulations, the nation, the archaeologist, the visitor, the local community or some combination of all of these stakeholders?

At the heart of landscape archaeology lies a fascinating disjunction between how we experience the landscapes that we explore as archaeologists and what we record and ultimately write about them. We experience these landscapes by being in and moving through them. We are moved by stunning vistas and take in new, and -as field seasons progress -more familiar smells, sounds, and events. We experience the physical exhaustion that comes with scaling mountains and the exhilarating feelings of arrival. We become familiar with wind and weather patterns, and before then occasionally the victims of sudden changes in the weather. We associate and create memories of these experiences while interacting with our colleagues and students and with the people we encounter in their fields, gardens and pastures. Our archaeological minds are fascinated by how features and artefacts are situated in particular locales and wonder about the significance of these places in their past social and cultural landscapes. Yet, when we sit at our desks a few years on and write about our archaeological findings, much of this landscape context that made them so interesting in the first place, as well as our own memories of these places are either lost or do not fit easily within the conventions of archaeological data presentation.

Greece is a country awash in antiquities. Yet, archaeological sites leave many of those who live near them indifferent, confused, antagonistic, or resentful. In this essay, we trace the origins of such disconnection, (landscape dissonance as we call it), to the ways European travelers from the 17th century onward experienced, described, and depicted ancient sites as separate from the local living landscape. The ways sites have been developed and archaeological fieldwork practiced in Greece has perpetuated this disconnection. We argue that to reconnect the dots archaeologists should not only engage local communities in a collaborative process of site investigation and development, but also show genuine interest in local lives and concerns, beyond any connection to the past and to archaeology.

This article is about the landscape comprehension using concepts as a technic-scientific period and the informational media and the interfaces between technology and the infrastructures, becoming necessary the review the recent accumulated layers on the landscape. The cultural landscape transforming, the urban landscape layers, processed at the time. This new methology has an important role for the urban projects future applications. 1 An archeology (from Greek archei -ancient, plus logia -discourse, ordering) The landscape archaeology as an environmental project instrument Principles and Concepts for development in nowadays society -The landscape archaeology as an environmental project instrument 1480 In the late eighteenth century, from the pioneering excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Europe plunged into a fever of archaeological discoveries, motivated by the birth of modern scientific procedures and the richness of the legacy of the peninsula civilizations, the Greeks and Romans. Archeology, which according to PERINETTI:1975:13, was called by Plato "the history of the ancient heroes and races and of the origins of the city", was linked from then on to the monuments and artifacts of the ancient civilizations, whose search began to touch the Mediterranean, then Africa and later the Americas. As research progressed, deeper into remote time was entered and scientific possibilities allowed for more and more distant times to be specified. Overlapping archaeological layers began to be identified more precisely, and the idea of civilizational overlaps was finally proven in the 20th century. (TRIGGER:2004) Wars, forced domination of one city over another, trading interests and architectural typologies were revealed in successive layers, demonstrating the processes of reuse and subjugation of the weaker cultures, of the vanquished. Regionalisms started to be identified in time and Geography, discussed philosophically since ancient times, by the Greeks (MORAES: 2005: 49-58). It was now necessary to explain more concretely the spatialization of the finds. First, a physical geography, of a deterministic nature, and then, in the reading of the landscape, the discovery of the evolution of the view of nature, fruit of the discussion of the relations between society and its environment, bringing new parameters for the establishment of the so-called Human Geography, today an important basis in the discussions about Landscape. However, another phenomenon occurred, almost concomitantly: industrial civilization rushed to profoundly alter the geographical environments of its existence, causing urban agglomerations never before seen in the history of settlements. Cities, social artifacts, thus became an inexhaustible source of daily transformations of a landscape that starts to suffer overlaps of layers that are increasingly rapidly configured. Then the recognition of new forms of urbanization, through the implantation of large manmade geographical objects. It is unquestionable, then, the need for a new archeology of the landscape, based on the visible present, that finds the closest testimonies of the transformations and processes materialized and superimposed in a society of velocities. This is an industrial archeology of the landscape in the cities and urban extensions.