Human Ecology, 2019

This volume brings together papers from the 9th Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology Visiting Scholar Conference, held in 2016 at SUNY Buffalo. In the introductory chapter, organizer and editor Attila Gyucha explains that the conference explored three major questions regarding the trajectories of nucleated sites: (1) what factors and integrative mechanisms brought large populations together? (2) What social practices and institutions facilitated the development and sustainability of these sites? (3) What were the impacts of permanent nucleations for sociocultural development? Gyucha also provides a useful review of the literature that recognizes regularities but also acknowledges variation in local and regional developments. He also notes an increasing emphasis on processes over stages and categories. The remainder of the volume consists of 14 chapters organized by the three major themes of the conference. In Chapter 2, Smith summarizes evidence that aggregation "energizes" people and leads to a variety of outcomes, including scalar stress, community formation, and economic growth. Smith emphasizes the central role of face-to-face interaction and especially its recent formalization in settlement scaling theory in emphasizing generalizations regarding the process of settlement aggregation. In contrast, Chapter 3, by O'Shea and Nicodemus, argues against generalization. They focus on Pecica, a Bronze Age settlement in the Carpathian Basin, concluding that the specific history of this site does not express a "typical" trajectory. This leads the authors to argue "Rather than guessing at population numbers and arguing for structural changes that "must have occurred," archaeologists can describe in often great detail what actually did occur" (p. 76).

This is work in progress. I welcome suggestions, comments, and criticism. Abstract: I contextualize the idea of coalescent societies by examining the archaeological data from the North Central European Plain, 500 – 600s CE. The proposed thesis is that in response to post-Roman socioeconomic stress, various groups formed culturally mixed societies deemed as coalescent communities of practice. They devised cooperative strategies to manage critical resources and secure group survival. My data support the conclusion that at times of political and economic volatility people compromised idiosyncratic cultural identities in favor of sustainable group wellbeing. The offered theory of communal dynamics under pressure explains entangled group interactions that involved the local stock and migrants.

The Bronze Age in Europe and the Mediterranean. XIII Int. Congr. of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, Forlì 1996, 1996

The deconstruction of ethnic identities has shattered how we understand the social landscape of the ancient Mediterranean. As cleansing as this deconstruction has been, it has left a gap in our ability to analyse social entities at an intermediate scale between households and states. In this context, the concept of communities emerges as a productive framework. Communities are social entities that are enacted through interactions and presuppose a sense of commonality, cohesion and belonging that attenuates internal social differentiation. This perspective invites archaeologists to explore complex social dynamics through a lens that can be applied to the material record, and this session hopes for papers that combine theoretical rigour with empirical analysis. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, different forms of communities – e.g. ritual communities or communities of practice – and their relationships with other entities such as families, groups or the state. Papers may explore how “practices of affiliation” (W.H. Isbell), such as drawing cultural boundaries, referring to a common past, and sharing experiences from everyday encounters to festive events, fostered communities. Similarly, the role of emotions and the senses, for example in feasts and funerals, but also the significance of space and place, provide rich avenues for exploration. Other themes include community cohesion, resilience or transformation in scenarios of intercultural contact, as well as moments when community identity and membership were contested from within the community, but papers could also challenge humanist notions by exploring “more-than-human communities” (O.J.T. Harris) that bring together people, animals and things.

The definition of urbanism is a topic long debated by scholars in numerous historical disciplines, but almost all of these discussions are derived from textual sources and are based on examples that postdate the introduction of writing. This volume, edited by Fernández-Götz et al., extends that analytical perspective into a context where primary written sources are not available and the archaeological record is the only key to determining the level of social complexity. The European Association of Archaeologists session organized by the three editors in Helsinki in 2012 focused on revisiting the emergence of urban lifeways in archaeological contexts in Europe, with case studies drawn from recent research projects carried out in Germany (the Early Iron Age Heuneburg hillfort and the Late Iron Age oppida of Manching, Schnippenburg, and the Hunnenring at Otzenhausen, among other sites), France (Early Iron Age contexts in central, eastern, and southeastern Gaul, including recent work at Bourges, Corent, and Mont Lassois/Vix, and the Late Iron Age oppida of Bibracte, Gergovia, Entremont, and Le Castellan), Switzerland (Basel-Gasfabrik and the late La Tène settlement landscape of the upper Rhine), the Czech Republic (Němčice, Staré Hradisko, Stradonice, and Závist), Austria (Braunsberg and Roseldorf), Spain (the Early Iron Age Meseta [Álvarez-Sanchís and Ruiz Zapatero] and the Celtiberian oppidum of Segeda [Burillo-Mozota]), and Britain (Late Iron Age hillforts of southern England [Sharples]). Several papers present recent research, much of it the result of rescue archaeological projects as well as geophysical and topographic prospection (Armit et al., Blöck et al., Hornung, and Wendling and Winger); others provide theoretically, linguistically, and historically oriented overviews of urbanization and the oppidum in Iron Age Europe (Collis, Fernández-Götz et al., Lukas, Rieckhoff, von Nicolai).

Archaeopress, 2022

The layout of a settlement reflects long-term processes and mutual interactions that occur among many variables. Sometimes, the factors that shape a settlement are the result of various deliberate decisions, but indirect effects also play a role in these processes. At an archaeological site, we usually excavate only parts of a settlement and can observe only those parts that have been preserved. Therefore, we accept that many of the components are missing. Because of this, and especially for prehistoric settlements, it can be difficult to interpret the community by exploring only the site plans. Through an ethnoarchaeological study from Central Anatolia, this paper will discuss the relationship between the structure of a community and the settlement layout, and address the factors that make a settlement nucleated, dispersed, or agglomerated

Human Ecology, 2014

This is the second part of a study on Bronze Age tells, and on our approaches towards an understanding of this fascinating way of life drawing on the material remains of long-term architectural stability and references back to ancestral place. Focusing on a rather specific way of organising social space and a particular materiality as a medium of past social action, this is also a study with wider implications for the study of European prehistory and theoretical issues of archaeological interpretation. Unlike the reductionist macro perspective of mainstream social modelling, inspired by aspects of practice theory outlined in this book, the account given seeks to allow for what is truly remarkable about these sites, and what we can infer from them about the way of life they once framed and enabled. The social is never a static given, but is situated in space and time where it constantly unfolds anew. The stability seen on tells, and their apparent lack of change on a macro scale, are specific features of the social field, in a given region and for a specific period of time. They come about as the result of social life unfolding in a specific way, and not another, that leaves the total nexus of practices and the material arrangements that together make up human sociality seemingly unchanged in outward appearance. In a community thus favouring tradition over change, norms and shared ends not only link and orient actions into practices, as they always do, but may effectuate the broadly speaking unchanged persistence of traditional practices and discourage deviation by social actors, without ever reducing them, of course, to mere dummies. Similarly, the material world that is always both the outcome of action and structures that action in the context of organised practices, by virtue of its longevity and apparent givenness may come to prefigure the social future in likenesses of the past more consistently than is otherwise the case. The social process, however, will always be fundamentally open and indeterminate, as social actors do have agency and intentionality in pursuit of their notion of a life well accomplished. Both stability and change are contingent upon specific historical contexts, including traditional practices, their material setting and human intentionality. They are not an inherent, given property of this or that ‘type’ of society or social structure. For on our tells, it is argued here, underneath the specific manifestation of sociality maintained, we clearly do see social practices and corresponding material arrangements being negotiated and adjusted. Echoing the argument laid out in the first part of this study, it is suggested that archaeology should take an interest in such processes on the micro scale, rather than succumb to the temptation of neat macro history and great narratives existing aloof from the material remains of past lives.

2017

This thesis examines the Tillsonburg Village's particularly large and dispersed community plan through an intra-site analysis of ceramic vessels and longhouse attributes, as these are considered useful indicators of social, organizational, and temporal processes. The archaeological site in Tillsonburg, Ontario dates to the late Middle Iroquoian Period (AD 1350-1420). Community coalescence involves the aggregation of previously separate social groups into one communal settlement. It is explored as the predominant conceptual approach to better understand the formation of the Tillsonburg Village's community plan. However, other processes relating to the contemporaneity of village areas or houses are also considered. Spatial and statistical analyses are used to explore spatial patterning of attributes among their associated contexts. The findings suggest that the Tillsonburg occupants were experimenting with formative processes of community coalescence, with groups interacting and living together in one settlement, yet still remaining socially and spatially distinct within the larger village community.