Archaeological Approaches Research Articles

Metadata dating the digital city: a software archaeological approach

De Digitale Stad was a pioneering website of the early Dutch web. Historical study of its remnants has required extensive system knowledge, which may pose a new challenge for digital humanity researchers. The study of remnants is covered by the metaphor of “archaeology.” In view of software character of web artefacts, the metaphor “web archaeology” is implicitly limiting. An approach is proposed that considers the working character of the software, “software archaeology.” In a case study it is shown by the example of “metadata dating” how the software archaeological approach can be brought to bear on born digital artefacts. The case illustrates the historical value of extracting time-related metadata from digital artefacts, “metadata dating.” Metadata dating is performed on three archives related to De Digitale Stad. By aggregation of time-related metadata, new historical insights into De Digitale Stad have been gained. Whereas the early internet has often been presented as ever changing, novel and revolutionary, the results bring to light strong continuities in the usage patterns shown in De Digitale Stad. Contrary to expectations, it is observed that the citizens of De Digitale Stad, were primarily interested in the preservation of the traditional content in their files, and less in the results of their own coding efforts.

Balancing the scales: archaeological approaches to social inequality

ABSTRACT Archaeology lends a critical perspective to research on social inequality due to the field’s unique access to deep history, emphasis on materiality, and explicit incorporation of multiple lines of evidence. This paper offers a concise overview of archaeological approaches aimed at students and scholars in other fields. We develop a categorization of disciplinary strategies, arguing that archaeologists address institutionalized inequality through examining inequalities in the accumulation of goods or resources (economic differentiation); access to resources or knowledge (social differentiation), and inequalities in action, the ability to make decisions for oneself or others (political differentiation). We illustrate these categories with reference to the distinctions between material, relational, and embodied wealth. We draw upon a broad range of geographic, chronological, and cultural case studies to illustrate the flexibility and utility of archaeological methods for answering questions about inequality in human societies.

Renewing learning: Reimagining the newness of families' sociotechnical practices towards ecologically sustainable media engagement

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of families using new media and mobile technologies around their homes. While I was originally studying how families' everyday practices were being reconfigured by these new tools, what I found unsettles assumptions about learning with “new” media and about processes of technological change. This paper examines how older and newer technologies coexist in practice, and offers renewability as a key phenomenon for children learning in the context of family life. Drawing on observations and interviews with two sisters, nine-year-old Lara and twelve-year-old Latasha, I develop the concept of renewability through their sociotechnical practices of recycling and interleaving media forms as they went about routine activities like studying and reading after school. I present the cases narratively and adopt a media archaeological approach to studying material culture, where moment-to-moment interactions with technology provide proleptic evidence of future media strata and substrata. I then discuss families' changing practices in terms of processes of technology development, focusing on paper technologies and the contradictions of contravening on complex social-ecological conditions. I conclude that designing for renewability of learning is a way of envisioning responsible forms of technologically re-mediated action in an era of climate change. • Children and families use a wide variety of older and newer technologies. • Media engagement at home sometimes involves using old tools in new ways. • Learning technologies rely on resource extraction, exploiting local ecologies. • Families' ways of recycling valued technologies are ecologically sustainable.

Hellenistic Landscapes and Seleucid Control in Mesopotamia: The View from the Erbil Plain in Northern Iraq

In this article we discuss the archaeological landscapes of the Erbil plain during the Hellenistic period (late fourth century BCE–mid second century BCE) based on the data collected during the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) between 2012 and 2019. We use a landscape archaeology approach to trace patterns of habitation, migration, land exploitation, and water management from the Iron Age to the early first millennium CE. Over the course of the first millennium BCE, the Erbil plain was transformed from an urbanized core region to a rural area of the vast Seleucid world through a moment of depopulation in the post-Assyrian period. These transformation processes continued after the end of the Hellenistic period, but with a different pattern. Urbanization resumed, peaking during the Parthian (Arsacid) era, when the region was part of the kingdom of Adiabene. Ultimately, our analysis shows how the planned landscape of Assyria was transformed in the centuries that followed the collapse of the empire and how the proximity of political power was the critical variable in the settlement patterns of this part of northern Mesopotamia under the empires of the first millennium BCE.1

8 Hidden In(site): Meritocratic Stewardship and the Materiality of Volunteering

ABSTRACTThe Dr. James Still Historic Office and Homestead—home to a nineteenth century, self‐educated, African American doctor, born to formerly captive parents, who would go on to become the third largest landowner in a predominantly White rural community in Southern New Jersey—has been the focus of the Dr. James Still Community Archaeology Project (DJSCAP) since 2013. This paper, however, shifts the target of archaeological exploration and asks what we can glean from the actors in and around the site. Using data collected by DJSCAP, this chapter critically examines how a community comes to understand and commemorate their efforts to protect and preserve Dr. Still's meritocratic narrative via a material engagement with the site. Reflecting on the simultaneous navigation of the past, present, and future via objects, the chapter explores how “things” such as donations and donor plaques do the social work of volunteering, informing perceptions of effort, talent, memory, and entitlement around the site. Using materiality theory and an archaeological lens attuned to nowness, this chapter identifies key instances in which the articulation of bodies, ideas, objects, and labor generate fascinating insights into the theorization of meritocracy as a moral economy that underpins volunteering. This contemporary archaeological approach uncovers the materiality of austerity, informing how communities navigate systemic failures in heritage site management through individual and collective efforts that I call meritocratic stewardship.

Monstrous things: horror, othering, and the Anthropocene

SUMMARY This article approaches the masses of discarded things washed ashore and roaming waterways as the new monsters of the Anthropocene. It explores the ways in which monstrosity and archaeology intersect, and how the genre of horror simultaneously emerges from and informs the current epoch. As they embark on their post-abandonment journey, things’ immense scale, spread, and refusal to serve as proxies for human narratives result in the impossibility of fully grasping and making sense of them. Combining archaeological approaches and queer theory, this article attempts to get to the heart of the inevitable, complex entanglements between people and monstrous Others.

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Migration and theDeep Timeof Media Infrastructures

AbstractWhile infrastructures of media and of migration currently converge in specific ways, in this commentary, we consider how these infrastructures always reflect distinctive moments in media history, as well as in migration history. An archaeological approach to infrastructure posits that media infrastructures do not spring into action fully formed, and neither is there ever a moment when they would be fully formed. We propose the perspective of deep time of infrastructures as a way of opening up unresolved questions about what critical researchers can and should do with historically-informed inquiry of media technologies across migration contexts. We specifically operationalize the deep time of media and migration infrastructures by addressing the three dimensions of: (1) materialities; (2) practices; and (3) imaginaries.

Community practice and religion at an Early Islamic cemetery in highland Central Asia

Archaeological studies of Early Islamic communities in Central Asia have focused on lowland urban communities. Here, the authors report on recent geophysical survey and excavation of an Early Islamic cemetery at Tashbulak in south-eastern Uzbekistan. AMS dating places the establishment of the cemetery in the mid-eighth century AD, making it one of the earliest Islamic burial grounds documented in Central Asia. Burials at Tashbulak conform to Islamic prescriptions for grave form and body deposition. The consistency in ritual suggests the existence of a funerary community of practice, challenging narratives of Islamic conversion in peripheral areas as a process of slow diffusion and emphasising the importance of archaeological approaches for documenting the diversity of Early Islamic communities.

Echoes in the capitol, echoes in history: architectural acoustics, media archaeology, and the infrapolitics of reverberation

ABSTRACT This paper explores the notion of infrapolitics as the political dimension of reverberation and architectural acoustics. This aim is approached through a media-archaeological counterreading of the history of poor acoustics in the former chamber of the US House of Representatives supplied by historian Emily Thompson, as well as through juxtaposition of other cases of reverberation envelopes from the history of architectural acoustics. A media archaeological approach to reverberation and architectural acoustics, it is argued, approaches infrapolitics as a speculative understanding of the effect of architectural acoustics on early American democracy, and of architectural acoustics on discourse in general.

Decentring archaeology: Indigenizing GIS models of movement on the plains

Avenues of travel employed by past people have often become obscured by both natural and human processes. Relocating them with traditional archaeological field methods is thus difficult, and other approaches, such as relying on historic documents or uncritically employing GIS analyses have often been found to be problematic due to their colonizing impacts. That does not mean, however, that all archaeological approaches need to be cast aside. A decolonizing lens can be applied to existing methods to reveal a past that privileges Indigenous perspectives. By incorporating the concept of relational affordances, and identifying past significant places, this paper takes just such an approach when using GIS to reconstruct past avenues of travel along the Red Deer River in southern Alberta. By critically examining archaeological data and historic documents with a decolonizing perspective, significant places to past people are discovered, and a long-forgotten river crossing is relocated.

Research on the Photographic Printing Technology of Pictorials in the Context of Early Chinese Films

Among the numerous studies on the history of early Chinese films, film derivatives, as a part of it, have been neglected to some degree. Even worse, there are fewer studies on the material media with an archaeological concept. To fill this void, this paper adopted the column "The World of Screen" of the Pei-yang Pictorial News from 1933 to 1934 and the photo copperplate printing and zincography used as the object of study. Based on the research approaches of media archaeology (materiality, heterogeneity and reproduction), this study investigated the involvement of film promotion in the process of social cognitive shaping under new technologies, and highlighted the new graphic design, the image of the naked women and aesthetic changes brought about by film promotion from the perspectives of sensory extension, reading space expansion and power distribution. Finally, the study attempted to clarify the resurgence and rupture of media logic from the remnants of theatrical posters and the emergence of electronic advertising via modern concerns.

Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and the “familia-graphic” gaze

ABSTRACT In Running in the Family Michael Ondaatje plays the “family history detective” as he searches for his ancestry in Sri Lanka. This article explores the workings of family memory and the diasporic imagination as it emerges from both the colonial archive and the oral histories of his relatives in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. It argues that the text’s “familia-graphic” gaze reveals how “evidence” of inherited material culture, while touchable and concrete, remains ambiguous and interpretive. Through close analysis of both the text and images within the book, the article shows that a “familia-graphic” gaze is directed at Sri Lanka, its colonial history, and Ondaatje’s ancestors. This archaeological approach to family history differentiates between the role of the map and photograph in prompting familia-graphic memory as it seeks to piece together the traces of family, memory, and place held within the maps and photographs scattered throughout Running in the Family.

Visualizing childhood in Upper Palaeolithic societies: Experimental and archaeological approach to artists’ age estimation through cave art hand stencils

This paper presents rock art as a collective action in which different strata of society took part, including children and subadults. Until recent decades archaeology of childhood has not been in the main focus of the archaeological research, much less the participation of those children in the artistic activity. The present study approaches the palaeodemography of artists in the decorated caves through the paleolithic rock art itself. The approximate age of these individuals has been calculated through the biometric analysis of hand stencils in the caves of Fuente del Salín, Castillo, La Garma, Maltravieso and Fuente del Trucho, using 3D photogrammetric models as reference. The results have been compared with a modern reference population in order to assign the Palaeolithic hands to certain age groups. It has been demonstrated the presence of hand stencil motifs belongs to infants, children and juveniles, revealing this stratum's importance in the artistic activity.

A matter of craving-An archeology of relapse prevention in Swedish addiction treatment.

This article concerns how craving is approached and handled, how it is 'made up', in the practice of so-called relapse prevention (RP) for addiction problems. There is a lack of research on what RP in general, and craving in particular, 'is' and can become across settings. Drawing upon science and technology studies (STS) and critical addiction research, we analyze how craving is enacted in manuals and training material related to the intervention, and in interviews with professionals in the Swedish treatment system. Adopting an archeological approach, we scrutinize different layers of craving enactments in RP, in search of assumptions that give rise to what John Law refers to as 'collateral realities'. We identified three collateral realities: 1) 'The materialization of craving'; 2) 'The transcendence of the individual' and 3) 'The merging of treatment and everyday life' The data show that the brain, cognition, emotions and behavior are enacted in RP as demarcated targets of intervention that the individual can transcend and control. This approach, in turn, relies on the more foundational tenet that there are no clear-cut boundaries between different identities (I/me/self; body/brain/cognition), between different settings (inside/outside treatment; real/imagined situations) or between different points in time (now/then/before). We discuss the relevance and usefulness of addiction treatment realities where craving is approached as a stable object that can be effectively treated, and where interventions inaugurate neoliberal governance of responsibilized individuals.

Building from the Ground Up: The Archaeology of Residential Spaces and Communities in Southeast Asia

Despite the ethnographic importance of the Southeast Asian house and household, an explicitly Southeast Asian “household archaeology” is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, archaeologists in Southeast Asia have undertaken excavations within habitation areas and residential spaces, identifying domestic debris, the partial remains of house structures, and activity areas. As a result, archaeologists of Southeast Asia have addressed many topics of relevance to those who use a household archaeology approach, including the identification and description of houses and household activities; the domestic economy; domestic ritual; diversity and variability both within houses as related to questions of identity, specifically gender and age, and between houses, especially as related to status; and identification of supra-household communities. In this review, I consider how archaeologists have addressed these themes using examples from a diverse set of geographic locations and time periods in mainland and island Southeast Asia. I conclude with suggestions for future research directions to continue building an archaeology of residential spaces and communities in Southeast Asia.

Analisis Signifikansi Taman Merdeka Kota Metro sebagai Objek Struktur Cagar Budaya

This article aims to identify and analyze the Taman Merdeka Kota Metro as the object of the cultural heritage structure. This research uses a descriptive qualitative method, with historical and archaeological approaches. The results showed that the Taman Merdeka Kota Metro met the criteria for cultural heritage as stated in Article 5 and Article 8 of the Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 11 of 2010 concerning Cultural Heritage. The criteria that are met are: a) over 50 years of age; b) represents a style period of at least 50 years; c) has a special meaning for history and education; d) have cultural values for strengthening the nation's personality; e) have a single element and become one unit with the urban spatial landscape; f) its placement is integrated with natural formations. So based on historical and archaeological perspectives, it can be concluded that Taman Merdeka Kota Metro deserves to be proposed for its status as a Cultural Heritage Structure.

Jews Court, Lincoln – an evaluation of Cecil Roth’s medieval synagogue and the discourse on the English medieval synagogue taking a buildings archaeology approach

ABSTRACT This paper presents an overview investigation of Jews’ Court, Lincoln, research findings, and preliminary thoughts on the form and location of the English medieval synagogue. Dr Cecil Roth assigned synagogue use to the building in the medieval period; however, its appearance is of post-medieval date. The study which took a buildings archaeology approach concluded that Roth’s hypothesis was incorrect. It further investigated the divergent opinions on the building’s construction date and phasing. This paper presents thoughts on the use of medieval building typologies to inform the understanding of the material evidence for the Medieval Anglo-Jewish community and hypotheses on the form and location of medieval synagogues.

Application of archaeological concepts to the interpretation of RNA virus quasi species evolution.

An enduring problem concerning the evolution of RNA viruses stems from the fact that their long-term rates of evolution (substitutions/ site/year) are lower than those calculated by comparing sequences of isolates collected over short time periods or within a single host (shortterm or intra-host evolution). This inconsistency has been attributed to several reasons, including deviations from the assumption of a molecularclock (constancy of mutational inputs as a function of time) and variations in viral multiplication rates, among others. We previously proposed a non-phylogenetic method for extracting information contained in mRNAs, that cannot be identified from examination of primary sequences alone, and that we called «archaeological» information. In this new approach, mRNAs are of interest as molecules, not for their primary sequence or encoded proteins but for encrypted information established in a remote past. In the present article, we propose that an archaeological approach may also contribute to explain higher short-term than long-term evolution rates in RNA viruses, in this case, by using the archaeological concept of palimpsest. The palimpsest is a record of historical changes, but it is not a successively ordered or a complete record, rather it is the product of two opposing activities, one of writing and rewriting and the other of erasing. In RNA virus quasispecies, the gain or loss of mutations is reflected in changes in the submolar frequency of myriads of variants in the population. The fact that mutation elimination is not always complete, turns viral quasispecies into complex palimpsests of viral variants or sub-populations thereof. Here we relate two main different temporalities of the quasispecies palimpsest (short- and long-term) to the stability of mutations in response to changes related to three components of the virus: the virions, the infected cell and the host cell lineage. Host cell lineage-related viral memory would be mostly irre versible as they are adaptive products to host cell changes. In contrast, memories related to the environment of the virion or responsive to the environment of the infected cell, which is shortterm mutational input, is less constrained provided the alteration in the ancestral information carried by the RNA is only transient. The two intermixed memory components result in two differently contributing mutation rates whose influence in the final result depends on whether the timescales used to take the sequences for comparison are short or long term.

Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing ed. by Lars Krutak and Aaron Deter-Wolf

Reviewed by: Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing ed. by Lars Krutak and Aaron Deter-Wolf Erica Steiner Krutak, Lars, and Aaron Deter-Wolf, eds, Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing, Seattle, The University of Washington Press, 2018; hardback; xii, 354; 24 colour plates, 157 b/w illustrations, 7 maps, 2 tables; R.R.P. US $60.00; ISBN 9780295742823. Just as tattooing has become more acceptable and visible within mainstream Western society over the last couple of decades, academic studies of tattooing, encompassing a variety of methodological approaches to investigating both contemporary and historical practices, have similarly increased. The archaeological approach is primarily concerned with the physical evidence for tattooing within the material record: evidence of tools and pigments, of representations of tattooing, and of course tattooed human remains. The editors of this volume, Lars Krutak and Aaron Deter-Wolf, have aimed for this to be ‘the first book dedicated to the archaeological study of tattooing [… which is not] region specific, [does not] contain dated or suspect scholarship [… and is not] overly academic and unapproachable for the general public’ (p. 4) . Within these admirable parameters, Ancient Ink is divided into three unevenly weighted parts. Part 1, ‘Skin’, focuses on tattooed human remains in whole and in part; Part 2, ‘Tools’, focuses on the archaeological identification of tattooing tools and toolkits; and Part 3, ‘Art’, discusses how ancient societies represented their tattooed selves. However, in addition to this tripartite division, Ancient Ink is also evenly split between what can be termed ‘archaeological’ and ‘experimental’ chapters. Each of the archaeological chapters provides an excellent scholarly overview of various physical, historical, and iconographic forms of evidence for tattooing within its own geographical focus. Uniquely, each of these is then followed by an experimental chapter that discusses either the same designs or the same culture within the context of modern tattooing revival or other experimental practices. Each experimental chapter is co-authored by at least one of the coeditors, providing this book with not just a clear stylistic continuity throughout, but also highlighting the real-world continuity of various tattooing traditions. The editors’ approach is to be commended, as it effectively meets one of their stated aims, ‘bridging the gap between academic and popular works on tattooing’ (4). Krutak and Deter-Wolf make the comment in their introduction that ‘tattooing is an almost universal human tradition’ (p. 8), an assessment evident through the geographical extent of historical tattooing and the demonstrably fundamental transcultural similarities of tattooing technology, design, and purpose. But in considering whether Ancient Ink fulfils this statement of global relevance, it is useful to reflect on how various historical and contemporary tattooing cultures have been both over- and under-represented by the editors. With six chapters, the historically culturally contiguous zone from the steppes of central Asia to south-eastern Europe represents over a quarter of Ancient Ink across all three sections, and it is the most comprehensively covered cultural zone. While this is not to say that the material does not merit such a treatment—indeed, the chapters from Svetlana Pankova, Petar Zidarov, and Leonid Yablonsky provide [End Page 250] important insights into the archaeology of Iron Age tattooing among the Scythians. Northern Europe, given its lack of archaeological (though not literary) evidence for tattooing, is understandably only referred to in passing by Gemma Angel (p. 107) and Luc Renaut (pp. 260–61). Modern European tattooing is covered by Krutak and Deter-Wolf, with an examination of collections of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century skin fragments in museums, as well as the short but thought-provoking chapter on organizations founded in the last decade for the purpose of allowing individuals to legally have their own tattoos preserved for them after death. North-eastern America and Alaska are represented with three ‘Tools’ and two ‘Art’ chapters, which is a fair reflection of the available archaeological evidence in these areas, being largely restricted to historical descriptions, depictions, and toolkits. Two of these chapters, both co-authored by Deter-Wolf, on the archaeological identification of tattooing tools, are must-read contributions to the field. But looking further south, there is no mention in Ancient Ink of the tattooing cultures of South America, especially...