Archaeological Project Research Articles

Finding Matilda - Teaching and Learning About the Holocaust Through Documentary Creation

Susan Cardillo’s Finding Matilda – Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust through Documentary Creation, explores the process of experiential learning through filmmaking with students documenting an archaeological project in search of the remains of Matilda Olkin, a young Lithuanian college student and poet who has been hailed as the new Anne Frank. The film and accompanying research statement outline how through the process of making the documentary these “GenZ” students developed a greater understanding of the Holocaust whilst at the same time giving one of its forgotten victims a voice. The project explores how teaching and learning about the Holocaust can be enhanced through project-based, experiential learning in a real-world context of study and engagement with the human condition.

Ontwikkelingen in de mediterrane landschaps-archeologie aan het GIA. Waar komen we vandaan en waar gaan we naartoe?

Developments in Mediterranean landscape archaeology at the GIA: Where have we come from and where are we heading? In this paper, I discuss in brief the development of Mediterranean landscape archaeology in Italy as this has taken shape at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (GIA) from the 1980s onwards in the Pontine Region Project, in southern Lazio, in central Italy, and in the Raganello Archaeological Project, in northern Calabria, in southern Italy. I do this against the theoretical and methodological background of the rise of systematic artefact survey and the fruitful discussions that practitioners have about the interpretation of the archaeological surface record, multidisciplinarity in landscape archaeology research, and the application of new methods and techniques. I end with a few words on the importance of data integration, as is now happening within the framework of the Rome Hinterland Project, an undertaking that is being carried out by the universities of Groningen (coordinator), Durham (in cooperation with the British School at Rome), St. Andrews, Rome (La Sapienza), Leiden and Melbourne.

Sítio de arte rupestre Cañada de El Café, Chuhuahua, México, e suas implicações na arqueologia regional

Em junho de 2015, arqueólogos e alunos da EAHNM visitaram o sítio Cañada del Café, Aldama, Chihuahua, previamente cadastrado pelo Arqueólogo Francisco Mendiola (INAH Chihuahua) em 1996 no deserto de Chihuahua. Nessa visita foi constatada a existência de 7 conjuntos de pinturas que não haviam sido registrados anteriormente nas paredes do cânion de rocha sedimentar presente no referido sítio. Do exposto, surge o Projeto Arqueológico Cañada El Café, que registrou menos de 600 pinturas, 15 sítios arqueológicos e material lítico, no qual foi identificado um componente arcaico (5000/4000 – 1500/1000 AC) dos sítios e, possivelmente, das pinturas. Com base nessas evidências, é estabelecida uma afiliação da área com os grupos da região de Big Bend, Texas, durante o período pré-hispânico.

Megaliths in Tropical Africa: Social Dynamics and Mortuary Practices in Ancient Senegambia (ca. 1350 BCE – 1500 CE)

When analyzed systematically, Tropical Africa megalithism appears to have emerged in contexts of friction between different lifeways, agriculturalists versus foragers, pastoralists versus hunter-gatherers-fishermen, or agriculturalists versus fishing folks. The monuments built were clearly part of actual territorial strategies. Research conducted by the Sine Ngayene Archaeological Project (2002-2012) frontally addressed the “Why” of the emergence of megalithism in that part of the world, and probes the reasons for the performance of the elaborate burial practices preserved in the archaeological record. This paper emphasizes the diversity and complexity of burial protocols invented by Senegambian “megalith-builders” communities from 1450 BCE to 1500 CE. Senegambian megalithism is shown to have proceeded from territorial marking imperatives, shaping a multi-layered cultural landscape through the implemented mortuary programs anchored on the construction of Ancestorhood.
 Keywords: Megaliths; Senegambia; Cultural landscape; Mortuary program; Burial practice; Monolith-circle; Sine-Ngayene;

Megaliths in Tropical Africa: Social Dynamics and Mortuary Practices in Ancient Senegambia (ca. 1350 BCE – 1500 CE)

When analyzed systematically, Tropical Africa megalithism appears to have emerged in contexts of friction between different lifeways, agriculturalists versus foragers, pastoralists versus hunter-gatherers-fishermen, or agriculturalists versus fishing folks. The monuments built were clearly part of actual territorial strategies. Research conducted by the Sine Ngayene Archaeological Project (2002-2012) frontally addressed the “Why” of the emergence of megalithism in that part of the world, and probes the reasons for the performance of the elaborate burial practices preserved in the archaeological record. This paper emphasizes the diversity and complexity of burial protocols invented by Senegambian “megalith-builders” communities from 1450 BCE to 1500 CE. Senegambian megalithism is shown to have proceeded from territorial marking imperatives, shaping a multi-layered cultural landscape through the implemented mortuary programs anchored on the construction of Ancestorhood.
 Keywords: Megaliths; Senegambia; Cultural landscape; Mortuary program; Burial practice; Monolith-circle; Sine-Ngayene;

Creating Community and Engaging Community: The Foundations of the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands

This article discusses how Co-Principal Investigators that designed and executed the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project (ELPAP) came together as a community, to demonstrate how such a formation within the discipline, with all its ups and downs, facilitates the skills needed to conduct community archaeology. By using the ELPAP as a case study, this article provides a multiscale examination of the ELPAP, expanding the discourse on community archaeology to include community building practices among archaeologists, between organizations, and with communities impacted by archaeological work.

The City as Fac¸ade in Velha Goa: Recognising Enduring Forms of Urbanism in the Early Modern Konkan

What do we know of early modern colonial urbanisms in South Asia? Rich archival sources provide meta-narratives of the ‘rise and fall’ of colonial outposts and their spatial projects. This article revisits these histories through the results of an archaeological project conducted at Portuguese Goa. In settings such as Velha Goa, histories of the city are unavoidably structured by elite, top-down understandings of social processes, principally owing to the limits of the colonial archives themselves. Quotidian material transformations, essential to urban process, remain largely unconsidered. In Goa, the archaeological data suggest the dominant historical narratives that characterise this capital of empire as the ̒Rome of the East’ work to substantiate a vision of the city that erases other socialities. The archaeological data allow us to productively think of the colonial early modern urban landscape as both a physical and conceptual façade. Historical tropes of ruination mask rich and varied archaeological evidence of enduring forms of urbanism. The idea of the city as façade allows at once a characterisation of the concealed failures of colonial urban governance and its legacies in perpetuating certain ideals and understandings of urbanism, and it questions narratives of urban decline that still resonate today.

Pre-oil Globalization in a Rural Community

This article aims to study whether the increase of agricultural settlements in the Sultanate of Oman during the Late Islamic period (c. 1500-1950) was related to pre-oil globalization, as attested in the wider Gulf region. This is done by analysing the archaeological dataset of the agricultural village of Sahlat, with a focus on the ceramic material, located in the Suhar region. The assemblages collected by the Wadi al-Jizzi Archaeological Project, point to its occupation from c. 1750 to 1930. During this time period, the coastal towns of southeastern Arabia were heavily influenced by globalization processes, but the effects and reach of trade on rural communities remains poorly known. In this paper, Sahlat is compared to two contemporary sites connected to the same falaj system, and two other sites in the Gulf region. The results indicate that pre-oil globalization did not only impact coastal towns, but that rural settlements such as Sahlat experienced similar transformations. It is suggested that pre-oil globalization was not only linked to the pearling trade, but that the export of dates should also be taken into consideration when studying this topic.

“Looking through the keyhole”: problems and research strategies for landscape archaeology in an alluvial plain with a high rate of vertical growth. The case of Bassa Romagna and south-eastern Po Valley

This paper aims to outline the main limits that a landscape archaeological project has to face examining a floodplain with a high rate of vertical growth of ground levels, due mainly to the combined action of subsidence and alluvial sedimentation phenomena. The investigated area is the Bassa Romagna, the south-eastern part of the Po Valley, object of survey since 2009. The paper focuses on the characteristics of the archaeological data collected, on the influence of the biases detected, and it presents some of the solutions applied in order to mitigate these limits.

Recreating and Protecting Southeast Ireland’s Cultural and Environmental Heritage

The Creadan Head Archaeological Project (CHAP) utilizes four decades of archaeological research on the earliest settlement of Ireland, some 10,000–12,000 years ago, as the basis for a heritage-tourism project in County Waterford, Ireland. Using best practices, CHAP is integrated into County Waterford’s economic development and heritage plans to provide opportunities for local community members to participate in the construction of their own heritage and ultimately making the region a Heritage and Ecotourism destination that includes videography, museum exhibits and heritage trails. The project team partners Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT, Republic of Ireland) with Geoarchaeology Associates (GAI, US) with a wide variety of local, national and international stakeholders including Waterford Treasures Museum, Waterford County Council, Waterford Chamber of Commerce.

Toward a Decolonial and Denationalized Public Archaeology

It has been more than a decade since I completed my own participation in a public archaeology project at Rogem Gannim, in West Jerusalem (Natasha Dudinski, “The Past on our Doorstep,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef3fPcrB11c); since then, in the role of an archaeological activist and advocate, I have observed the progress of public archaeology in Israel and abroad and participated in the local and global dialogue (Clark and Horning 2019), without initiating new fieldwork. This brief note, though looking toward the future as requested by the editors, is therefore retrospective in origin, rather than being a missive from the front lines.

Social Impact Archaeology: Pontefract Castle and the Gatehouse Project

Archaeology is said to add value to development, creating a deeper sense of place, community identity as well as improving health and wellbeing. Accentuating these wider social values has been welcomed by a profession keen to broaden its public relevance and legitimacy and protect its seat at the table in modern cultural life, but how much, if at all, do the public actually benefit from developer-led archaeology? Benefits to individuals and communities from archaeology projects are often abstract, intangible and difficult to attribute, and the discipline arguably lacks a satisfactory frame of reference around which it can express and design for these additional social values. Drawing on the language of social impact investing, this article will explore how the UK-based collaborative platform, DigVentures, has addressed this challenge. It introduces a 'Theory of Change' and 'Standards of Evidence' framework to account for the impact of development-led archaeology programmes, illustrating the causal links between activity and change through the case of the Pontefract Castle Gatehouse Project. It is complemented by a short documentary film exploring the spectrum of digital and physical opportunities for participation by the public alongside a team of highly experienced professional field archaeologists, demonstrating how development-led archaeology can be designed to accomplish far more than answer a planning brief.

Public Benefit as Community Wellbeing in Archaeology

This article outlines the theory and strategy behind Historic England's (HE) Wellbeing Strategy. It acknowledges the relevance of wellbeing to HE's core purpose, and proposes ways in which wellbeing can be built into archaeological and heritage projects. There is an evidenced link between access to heritage and wellbeing, which now needs to be better integrated into project design and implementation. The article concludes with an outline strategy for wellbeing-led projects, and a discussion of how the success of these projects could be evaluated.

No More Polluter Pays Principle: opportunities and challenges of public benefit provision in UK development-led archaeology

Key to the success of archaeological projects and the provision of public benefit as a result is partnership working, whether between archaeological practices, consultants or departments within larger organisations, commercial clients or regulatory bodies. This paper presents case studies from each of these as examples of successful public benefit from development-led archaeology and outlines the move away from the 'polluter pays' principle towards a more nuanced understanding of what archaeology can provide. A Postscript refers to the Planning White Paper in the UK, which could have significant implications for how archaeology is treated within the planning system.

Roman Water Pipeline Approved for 'Adoption' - Public engagement, awareness and benefit from a development-led archaeology project

The construction of a by-pass in North Rhine-Westphalia resulted in the excavation, recording and relocation of one of the most important archaeological monuments in the Rhineland: a stone and masonry aqueduct up to 95km long, which had supplied water to Roman Cologne. As preservation in situ was not possible the pipe was lifted in segments; some were displayed on the site, others were moved to sites nearby. The conservation of the segments was undertaken by apprentices from the Chamber of Crafts and the whole project was a successful collaboration between private, public, business and local communities.

Native American and land-grant collection praxis since NAGPRA

Since the granting of Native American materials – excavated in archaeological projects sponsored by federal and state governments across the United States in the 20th century – to public repositories, museum professionals have sought to manage such collections with care. At the University of Missouri, students responding to the local mandate of NAGPRA advocated a public investigation into the issue of Native American collections repatriation in the early 1990s. Their activism in part transformed campus praxis in three ways, effecting ethical shared decision-making, appropriate public access, and policy-level leadership. This paper examines the primary sources generated by students, faculty, and local and national journalists to broadly comprehend how community members continue to address Native collections management and access in a public land-grant university setting.

Prioritizing the past: assessing the implications of collaborative archaeological research on heritage in Xaltocan, Mexico

ABSTRACT This article outlines the ways that community-engaged archaeology has and has not affected local interpretations of heritage in the small central Mexican town of Xaltocan. Drawing on observations made while conducting my own collaborative archaeology project in Xaltocan and on filmed interviews conducted during the summer of 2019, I explore a variety of forces that shape how people living in Xaltocan value their town’s past. Furthermore, this study highlights the ways that the modern community memorializes and celebrates the history of their town in an attempt to untangle the broader social meanings of prehispanic heritage, particularly as a mechanism for asserting political and social power in a rapidly changing region.

The Making of a Byzantine Monastic Landscape

In this study, we present some results from the Mazi Archaeological Project (MAP), a diachronic regional survey in northwest Attica, Greece. We focus our discussion on the presence of the Middle Byzantine Monastery of Hosios Meletios and its relationship to local communities as well as to the surrounding natural and built environment. In doing so, we focus on three main strategies employed by the monastery: (1) large-scale building projects, (2) the redirection of movement in the area and (3) the exploitation of the natural environment and its economic resources. We also pay attention to the establishment of the paralavria (monastic dependencies) as a fundamental mechanism employed by the monastery to map its presence and influence and connect it to other sites of economic and religious importance in the region. We argue that the spatial, material and symbolic connections between the paralavria, the main monastery and key natural features in the area created a visually, spiritually and economically coherent and distinct monastic landscape.

A Study of the Centuries-Long Reliance on Local Ceramics in Jerash Through Full Quantification and Simulation

The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project revealed a robust and striking pattern of the extreme dominance (>99%) of locally produced ceramics over six centuries and across different depositional contexts (in total over half a million pottery sherds). The archaeology of Jerash points towards an exceptional degree of self-sufficiency in craft products: why? The project team implemented a full quantification approach during excavation, manually and digitally recording and counting all pottery and other classes of artefacts. This enabled a full analysis of trends in production and use of ceramics throughout the archaeologically documented history of Jerash and revealed the unexpected pattern of the extreme dominance of local pottery. Archaeologists formulated a set of hypotheses to explain this pattern, and we developed an agent-based model of simple customer preference driving product distribution to evaluate several explanatory factors and their potential interactions. Our simulation results reveal that preference for locally produced ceramics at Jerash might be a plausible theory, but only if its intrinsic value was considered rather high in comparison to other goods, or if it was preferred by a majority of the population, and there was a tendency to follow this majority preference (or a combination of these factors). Here, we present a complete research pipeline of a full quantification of ceramics, analysis and modelling applicable at any archaeological site. We argue that transparent methods are necessary at all stages of an archaeological project: not only for data collection, management and analysis but also in theory development and testing. By focusing on a common archaeological material and by leveraging a range of widely available computational tools, we are able to better understand local and intra-regional distribution patterns of craft products in Jerash and in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.

Applying Risk Management Concepts from CRM and the Outdoor Recreation Industry to Academic Archaeology Projects

ABSTRACTField safety is being taken more seriously across the cultural resource management (CRM) industry as CRM companies seek to be in compliance with their clients’ health and safety programs and to keep employees safe. Many universities also have organizational health and safety programs designed to protect students and employees, but academic archaeology is routinely conducted without adequate risk management planning. Risk management will be a workplace concern for aspiring archaeologists after graduating from college, which is why it is important for academic archaeology to meet industry standards. Archaeology can learn a great deal about fieldwork risk management from the outdoor recreation industry, which emphasizes building leadership skills rather than following proscribed rules and regulations to mitigate the myriad hazards in the field. This article provides some suggestions that academic archaeologists can use to apply risk management concepts from CRM and the outdoor recreation industry to academic projects in order to comply with university requirements and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), as well as to teach students how to be safe in the field.