Site Abandonment (Archaeology)

Göbekli Tepe is well-known for its monumental buildings with anthropomorphic T-shaped pillars, decorated with reliefs of wild animals which have been featured prominently in earlier works. The abandonment which occurred some 1500 years after the initial occupation of the site, however, remains virtually unexplored. This paper attempts to reconstruct abandonment practices and routines within and parallel to phases of occupation. A crucial source of data for the abandonment of Göbekli Tepe
is provided by considerations relating to site formation, including the topography of the site with its mounds, steep slopes, and hollows where strong winter rainfalls potentially favoured erosional processes. I clearly oppose the widespread yet outdated interpretation of ‘ritual backfilling’ of the monumental buildings. Instead, I propose that the inhabitants of the Neolithic settlement were strongly intertwined with their landscape and built environment, which is reflected by the continuous rebuilding of structures as a response to slope slide events, the use of ruins for extracting recycled building material, and the creation of memory spaces by following a specific habitus. I argue that by applying microarchaeological approaches and the social sphere of ‘detachment from place’ the heterogeneity of settlement layout can be reconstructed by including the engagement of ancient people with ruins, abandonment, and memory.

Historical sources indicate Turks came into
Anatolia starting from the middle of the 11th
century. This must have had critical short- and
long-term impacts on various aspects of life in
the region. Based on the archaeological evidence,
it can be suggested that the settlement
dynamics started to change during the period
of confrontation between the Byzantines and
Turks as a result of the shifting political authority
on a regional scale. This article will try to
identify changing settlement dynamics through
the 11th-13th centuries at Komana and its territory
with a comparison of other contemporary
settlements in the inland Black Sea region and
central Anatolia. Thus, archaeological data that
shed light on our understanding of abandonment,
continuity and transformation are discussed
and categorized as indicators.
Keywords: Middle and Late Byzant ine
Anatolia, transition period, Black Sea region,
Komana

The Blackwater River in Santa Rosa County, Florida, is host to numerous ship sites, many of which relate to Pensacola’s historic brick and lumber industry. Since the 1980s, the University of West Florida and Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research have been documenting these sites, which are generally preserved well as a result of the low-speed hydrodynamics and high-tannin content of the river. In this thesis I examine the site formation processes of these sites, including a thorough analysis of natural and cultural forces. The data include previous historical and archaeological research, environmental data, side-scan sonar imagery, and diver reconnaissance. In addition to providing a greater understanding of sites in the Blackwater River, I hope this information plays an integral role in future site management strategies.

Site and scene: Evaluating visibility in monument placement during the Bronze Age of West Penwith, Cornwall, United Kingdom Chelsee Arbour (In)visible cities: The abandoned Early Bronze Age tells in the landscape of the Intermediate Bronze Age southern Levant Sarit Paz 'All that we see or seem': Space, memory and Greek akropoleis Robin Rönnlund Becoming visible: The formation of urban boundaries in the oppidum of Manching (Bavaria) Thimo Jacob Brestel

Este trabajo de investigación no hubiese sido posible sin la enorme ayuda del Dr. Ernesto González Licón y de la Dra. Walburga Wiesheu Forster, de quienes sus comentarios, críticas y anhelos fueron siempre una motivación constante en la elaboración de la presente tesis. También un agradecimiento en especial al Maestro Enrique Méndez Martínez por el aceptar comentar y criticar de manera muy constructiva la misma; así como a los doctores Judith Zeitlin, Robert Zeitlin, Marcus Winter y Arthur Joyce por sus comentarios, materiales y apoyo brindados a lo largo de esta investigación.

Before/After explores various aspects related to transformation and change in the Roman and Late Antique world through the archaeological and historical evidence. The seven chapters of the volume range from the evolution of settlement patterns to spatial re-configuration after abandonment processes. Geographically the volume aims to cover – through case studies – the enlarged Roman world from Spain, to Cyprus, from the Rhine area borderland t the Red Sea. The book is the result of a workshop held at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, in Rome, in March 2016.

This article examines Butrint under Venetian and Ottoman rule during the period of its final settlement and subsequent abandonment, before the start of archaeological excavations (a.d. 1386–1928). On the basis of excavated Venetian houses and later burials at the site of the Roman forum, it is argued that the Republic of Venice abandoned the Butrint headland after Süleyman the Magnificent sacked the city in 1537 and that Butrint was never resettled thereafter due to environmental adversities posed by malaria and emergent wetlands. Plague, border-zone dynamics, and state decay also exacerbated local conditions. Throughout its abandonment, however, Butrint and its environs remained economically active and strategically important, primarily to Corfu.

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This edited volume originated in a 2006 Leicester conference that highlighted new research into the latest phases of occupation of Roman towns that failed in, or soon after, late antiquity. It therefore joins the extensive body of recent literature on the archaeology of late and post-Roman urbanism in Europe and the Mediterranean.

Abandonment is the process by which a structure is transformed from systemic context – when it is occupied - to archaeological context. It is both a single event or moment in time when a structure’s context changes and all of the conditions and events preceding and following that moment. Abandonments can be categorized by why they occur and how long a structure remains abandoned. Causes of structure abandonment are varied, including natural disaster, warfare, change in the structure’s purpose, and challenges to social hierarchy. Only rarely is an abandonment caused by only one thing, it is more often a combination of multiple factors. When a structure is permanently abandoned, it is acted upon primarily by nature rather than people, and its collapse is dictated by the force of gravity and rates of weathering. These forces act on the structure as a whole and can be quantified based on principles of physics and geology. In comparing a stone structure to a natural cliff, I am able to apply the concept of hillslope diffusion to the formation of mounds from an abandoned structure. By applying this concept I propose to calculate the length of time since a structure was abandoned using a quadratic equation representative of the shape of the mound. Utilizing this method could provide an upper limit for the occupation of a site that could be calculated during survey prior to excavation, providing information on settlement patterns and regional abandonments, as well as informing future excavations to answer the classic question: where should I dig?

Supplemento di ArcHistoR 13/2020 a cura di Annunziata Maria Oteri Giuseppina Scamardì u n pa e s e c i v u o l e Studi e prospettive per i centri abbandonati e in via di spopolamento o n e n e e d s a t o w n S t u d i e s a n d p e r s p e c t i v e s f o r a b a n d o n e d o r d e p o p u l a t e d s m a l l t o w n s

The concept of abandonment is often framed within a biographical perspective where the house has the possibility to be understood in different ways throughout its use-life. Previous studies of abandonment mostly problematized how abandonment depositions were indicative of how abandonment itself was conducted, but hardly engaged with how the house-site was re-used afterwards. This results in a view of settlements where the abandonment of almost all houses is something that cannot be commented upon. Consequently, continuity and change in the use of settled landscapes cannot be viewed in relation to how people dealt with their own pasts. In contrast with this approach, the central problem discussed here revolves around  how the structured analysis of abandonment practices can help to define the house during and past its abandonment in order to add temporality to our interpretations of the settled landscape. This means that the ability of past places to be of influence on future actions is investigated, particularly pertaining to the prehistoric house-site.
The resulting study dealt with abandonment from a practice-theory perspective,
and attempted to highlight changes in use of the house-site between the house’s
use-phase, abandonment phase and post-abandonment phase. Specific attention is
awarded to how the house itself was treated through the detailed study of soil features. The case-study employed to demonstrate this approach is focussed at the Westfrisian Bronze Age. This is a region where multiple large-scale settlement  excavations have been performed, but where our understanding of continuity in landscape use does not go beyond general statements regarding differences between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. The subsequent study first focussed on the house during its use-life, which leads to these houses as being characterised as structurally rigid buildings who were both entangled with the lives of people and cattle. However, in the case of the Westfrisian house, it seems apparent that all houses were dismantled upon abandonment. Furthermore, after abandonment most houses were dismantled and reincorporated into a network of ditches. Yet at the same time, there are indications that some houses did retain some importance after abandonment. The detailed study of the use-lives of individual features within the house has pointed out that some houses were re-used as depositional places after abandonment. Further research is needed to understand how these practices relate to the more widespread practice of reincorporating houses into the landscape. Overall, this case-study shows us not only how in this case continuity was guided by large scale settlement structures opposed to individual households, the occurence of some houses which were used as depositional sites also shows us how the  creation of the past in the past could have been a politicised event where some pasts were preferred over others.

RMA Thesis Leiden University, 2016.

Shortly after 1300 A.C. small dispersed pueblos in the Grasshopper region of east-central Arizona were abandoned and succeeded over a short period of time by a settlement system characterized by large nucleated pueblos. This transition followed expansion of agricultural productivity and development of an extensive exchange network. This subsistence-settlement system, at first successful, was ultimately abandoned as groups failed to intensify agricultural production through technological improvements or changes in sociopolitical organization in order to counter short-term resource variation. These findings support the hypothesis that as population size and density of interdependent communities increase without adaptive socio-cultural changes, the likelihood of regional system collapse is enhanced by environmental fluctuation.

This preliminary report describes the first two seasons of work at the abandoned farm-site known as Háls, on the lands of the farm Kollslækur in Hálsasveit, Borgarfjarðarsýsla, western Iceland. Work at the site in 1987 involved a short, three-hour reconnaissance involving surface examination and limited coring, followed by one overnight, on-site stay to do further survey of the surroundings. Work in 1988 included coring and test excavation the main structural ruin at the site, Háls 1. These investigations, coupled with off-season documentary research, provided information on the stratigraphic complexity of Háls 1 , suggested that features and floor deposits were well-preserved and informative, allowed a better assessment of the potential of the site for further investigations, and neither provided definitive information on the ages of the stratified deposits within the structure nor ruled out a medieval age for some, all, or most of them.

Due to the small scale of the 1988 test trench at Háls 1, only three phases of use were identified. These were refined in later seasons at the site. Thus, the "stekkur" level discussed in this report became Phase 6 after the 1989 field season; "Phase 2" - the upper floors in this report - became Phase 3 after the 1989 field season; and this report's "Phase 1" - the lower floor deposits - became Phase 1 after the 1989 fieldwork.

The fieldwork in 1987 was conducted as part of the National Museum of Iceland's first exploratory field season at Reykholt, located 10 km west of Háls. The 1988 project was supported by the local community, Hálsasveitshreppur, with a small travel grant from the Graduate School at the University of Michigan, and from wages I drew as a crew member on the National Museum of Iceland's field project that year at Reykholt.

A detectorist found a gilded bronze disc in Hellwege, Germany (13th century). The find was published as an accidental loss of a rider loosing part of his horse gear. A comparison with a Dutch find from the province of Drenthe undoubtedly proves that the German disc was intentionally trimmed. This damaging makes it much more likely that the disc from Hellwege has to be interpreted as a ritual deposition on the occasion of the abandonment of the settlement ('Wüstung').

The stressors associated with the amount of water available to a society and its engineered landscape are shown to affect cultural longevity in a region. The long-term affects of aridity may actually accommodate occupation and reoccupation of a previously established human niche constructed and built by a significantly different cultural group following the abandonment of that setting by the earlier colonizers. Cultural turnover can be rapid and turbulent. On the other hand, wetter semitropical regions are suggested to be yet more vulnerable to cultural ''cycling'' and result in extended periods of fragmentation and abandonment if an occupying population does not maintain a previously altered or human niche constructed setting. Here, the longevity of a society is maintained through deep time and space, with the original colonists responsible for continuous and frequently a low-density residency. What is then identifiable as Maya or Khmer has a less interrupted culture history than that of a Near Eastern Assyrian or Babylonian culture history.

Understanding how archaeological sites are abandoned is a vital part of archaeology. This paper explores abandonment as a phenomenon in a worldwide context, particularly in relation to sites with evidence of fire, and with a special focus on the South-Central Andes. I evaluate the patterns from an area of the Argentinian Andes and discuss the disappearance of the Aguada Culture, one of the central cultures in Argentinian prehistory, using evidence from the core area the Ambato Valley. I conclude that environmental factors were not the sole or determining source of stress, but rather part of a social–environmental dimension in which several factors combined to push a society into a vulnerable situation. In terms of the abandonment of the Aguada settlements in the Ambato Valley, the study shows that frequent forest fires might have played a role, but based upon the regularity of such events as seen in the sediment history, it is unlikely that these were the only factor in the process of abandonment of the valley.

Houses in classical periods are traditionally studied from an architectural approach. Though other aspects, such as architectural elements, wall paintings, art and pottery are also investigated, these are analyzed from a morphological, functional, and artistic aspect. A holistic approach, which takes into account the different aspects as a whole in a way that can represent the behavior of the inhabitants of the house, was not done until the last decades of the 20 th century. Scholars, mainly American, started to develop a new discipline which changed the focus of the research. These scholars aimed to deal with a number of questions that are related to the human behavior and processes that affects the house, namely, the living experience at the house. This discipline is termed "Household Archaeology" and it embraces a wide variety of topics, from depositional processes, through destruction and abandonment processes, social and economical aspects of the society involved in the activity of the house and others. One of the major tools used in this type of research is the spatial analysis of the artifacts found in the houses.

The abandonment of inhabited places is a phenomenon that concerns many countries worldwide and Italy particularly where a large number of deserted settlements are hosted. Many are the factors driving and conditioning the abandonment of a site, such as natural extreme events (e.g. earthquakes, landslides, and floods) and/or human (not) actions. Once the site is abandoned, the built-up area experiences a progressive physical decay so posing problems about the policies to be adopted to manage and maintain the buildings (or their ruins). That being stated, the article proposes an integrated methodological approach to analyse both the natural/human factors causing the abandonment of settlements and conservation state of deserted places over time. To test the methodology, we considered the old town of Craco (Basilicata, Southern Italy) as a case study. That “ghost town”, whose fascinating urban and natural landscapes have been the set of numerous international films, was gradually transferred to other two places since the 1960s due to the landslides that have affected the site over the centuries. Three were the explicit key aims of the research. The first was to scrutinise the activations/reactivations of the landslides jointly with their effects on the built environment so to critical go over the actions put into the field by the institutions to mitigate the hydrogeological risk. The second was to examine whether and how the landslide occurrences conditioned the urban growth of the Craco over time. The third was to investigate in relation to the vegetation growth in the Craco downtown over the last 15 years or so, to infer clues on future decay trends and conservation strategies of the built environment. The purposes were reached considering a geological-geomorphological, historical, and remote-sensing approach. In detail, the first goal was met (re)considering a cross-correlated analysis, in diachronic key, of edited/unedited archive sources with geological/geomorphological perspectives. The second was followed up performing the analysis of the Craco urban growth over the centuries and correlating it with the history of landslide occurrences. The third target was pursued by means of NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) time series obtained from Landsat TM and Sentinel 2 data along with HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) colour system techniques applied to multi-date Google Earth photos. From the perspective angle, the results of this research can contribute to setup proper resilience strategies for sites subject to hydrogeological hazard similar to that affects Craco, thus helping to identify conservation plans as well as enhancement policies of “ghost towns”.

The North-Western Provinces of the Roman Empire were littered with a broad array of abandoned or reused stone buildings during the immediate post-Roman period. The history of many of these buildings is difficult to discern, and the experience of abandonment has been somewhat neglected in favour of reconstructing the occupation transformations of these structures. Work has traditionally concentrated on the transformation and reoccupation without a significant break of occupation, in what is usually deemed ‘squatter’ occupation. This has demonstrated that reuse and changing circumstances are evident at a wide array of rural (Heeren 2015, Van Ossel 1992, Dodd unpublished), military (Wilmott 1997, Collins 2015) and religious (Henrich 2010, Rahtz 1957) sites. Despite this, little work has been done on the abandonment and sporadic re-use of these buildings, their legacy within the landscape and their meaning to the new early medieval elites of Western Europe. This paper will tie these together by analysing the historical and archaeological perspectives of Roman structures in the early medieval world, as well as advancing a more theoretical model for the abandonment of these building, demonstrating that each building had a unique post-occupation history, and most importantly, that the phenomenon of ‘stone robbing’ need not be as disparaging as suggested. Paper given at the EAA in Maastricht in 2017.

The most archaeologically visible dimension of the Classic Maya Collapse is the abandonment of monumental royal courts. Yet, in some cases, non-elite populations lived for centuries in and around Classic Maya centers without rulers. Processes of abandonment among Classic Maya commoners are detectable and reflect their own ritual and social practices divorced from the ritual performances undertaken by the ruling elite. We study the abandonment context and chronology of three domestic groups from the Contreras Valley, an agricultural community located on the outskirts of the Classic Maya center ofMinanha, Belize. There, several artifact assemblages were deposited at the time of abandonment, representing termination rituals. This study goes beyond the ideological dimension of termination rituals to examine how these ceremonies helped reshape the identity of social groups who were about to abandon their home. We explore how the last inhabitants of a mostly abandoned landscape lived thro...

My paper today has come out of a research interest in the causation and expression of what is often referred to in the popular media as " blight " ; urban abandonment and the dereliction of structures and sites, often built within living memory. It also engages with another major research interest, being the archaeology of radioactivity, its significance and diagnosticity in the archaeological record. I have recently completed a chapter on the latter topic for a forthcoming volume on Australian Contemporary Archaeology entitled 'The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off', which is due for print next year via CSP. My doctoral research concerns a multi-scalar analysis of episodes of settlement decline and abandonment in the 20 th century, with particular reference toward the relationship that materiality and ideology share in the creation of the archaeological landscape. I am interested in sites of varying sizes and forms, however all are either completely abandoned or in a state of marked decline. The sites which constitute the dataset vary in physical size, but all are either wholly abandoned or suffer quantifiable settlement decline (a value this research states as being at least 30% of the total site area, or a population decrease of at least 30% during the 20 th century). These sites are the Heygate estate in Southwark, South London, the atomograd of Pripyat within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Ukraine, and the city of Detroit Michigan, USA. Today I will be discussing the second of the three in the broader context of the Exclusion Zone itself, the surviving archaeology within the zone and the ways in which Chernobyl has impacted the region, both physically and psychologically. I would like to preface the field material by stating that I adhere to a definition of our discipline wherein archaeology constitutes the evidential product of human interaction with the material. In this sense human archaeology refers to anything with a material expression

This paper discusses the contexts in which material culture related to the production of iron in the Iron Age (e.g. smithing debris, slags, ingots) were deposited. We argue that metalworking 'debris' was used in offerings during the Iron Age, possibly as part of abandoment rituals.

Collapse and abandonment dominate the popular literature on prehistoric societies, yet we know that reorganization is a more common process by which social and ecological relationships change.  We explore the process of reorganization using the emerging perspective of resilience theory.  Ecologists and social scientists working within a resilience perspective have argued that reorganization is an important component of long-term adaptive cycles, but it remains understudied in both social science and ecology.  One of the central assumptions to emerge from the resilience perspective is that declines in the diversity of social and ecological units contribute to transformations in social and ecological systems.  We evaluate this assumption using archaeological data, which offer an opportunity to investigate a time span rarely examined in studies of resilience and reorganization.  We focus on the 11th to 14th century in the eastern Mimbres area of southwestern New Mexico, a period within which a substantial reorganization occurred.  Much is known about the regional-scale changes that resulted in the depopulation of nearly every large village in the Mimbres region, what some have referred to as the "Mimbres collapse."  Our analyses examine both continuity and change in aspects of house- and village-level reorganization.

This paper reports the results of recent investigations of ceramic figurines and musical instruments from Classic Belize River Valley site of Baking Pot, located approximately 8 km northeast of the modern town of San Ignacio in the Cayo District of Belize. Analysis of the iconographic features of the Baking Pot collection indicate that the figurines and instruments are mostly mold-made items, with a division of mostly figurine fragments, fragments of musical instruments, or unknown fragmented items. A nearly equal division of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic items are present in the collection. Anthropomorphic fragments almost always include heads or headdresses and hair. A few arm or leg appendage fragment are present as well. Zoomorphic items are often heads as well, with dogs, bats, and birds frequently represented. Other items included in the collection include ceramic beads and censer fragments, but do not represent much of the collection. Lastly, some artifacts recovered were so fragmented and without explicitly diagnostic traits, and are counted in this analysis as unknown fragments, as it is unclear if they were instruments or figurines themselves, but clearly were not part of ceramic wares such as vases, bowls, plates, or other serving types.

The end of the Aguada occupation in the Ambato valley and its subsequent abandonment of the several settlements is related to various fire events. In this sense, the proposal of this paper aims to contribute to the knowledge about the dynamics of past forest fires in the Ambato Valley, Province of Catamarca, Argentina, in order to understand the interaction between the inhabitants of the area in the past and these regimes of fire. Usingarchaeological settlement data from years of excavation and crossing it withpedoanthracological studies, as indicators of forest fires in the area, we reconstruct the space inhabited by this society that we call “fire landscapes”. The present analysis is based on paleoenvironmental evidence from the study of microcharcoal sampled in sediments, analysing the past landscape and spatiality of the settlements, their environment and subsequent abandonment. We discuss three sites, Martínez 2, PiedrasBlancas and La Rinconada, which present evidence of fires. We present and discuss these landscapes of fire and apossible scenario of the end of the occupation of the area, using some ethnographic data, crossing it with archaeological examples from nearby regions to “think out of the box” about our Western vision of the concept of abandonment. We consider that the depopulation of thearea andthe abandonmentof the settlements could be related to rituals, strategies and / or practices of abandonment of the dwellings and not to situations of violence and conflicts as suggested by several previous investigations.

Vitrified hillforts are architectural monuments exhibiting evidence of significant in-situ high-temperature alteration in the form of dark, glassy, bubbly-textured inorganic material adhering to rock fragments. It was proposed that samples of vitrified material from northern English vitrified hillforts Wincobank, Castle Hill and Castercliff were misidentified metalworking slag, potentially evidence for craft production at the sites. Thin section petrography and bulk chemical analysis (pXRF) employed to ascertain the materials' production mechanism discounted a metallurgical origin. A regime of experimental heating demonstrates that the forts' integral building materials are capable of vitrification. It is proposed that inorganic clay used as part of the enclosure wall filling material accounts for the bulk of the vitrified material at each site due to its relatively lower melting point. The temporal, thermal and material requirements for vitrification suggest that the firing mechanisms were neither accidental, incidental nor combative in origin; rather, vitrification was premeditated and likely a form of site elaboration or conspicuous consumption which, concurrently with other features of the northern vitrified hillforts, indicates local contemporary adherence to a wide but variable Iron Age social order.