A. Bernard Knapp

Archaeologies of landscape : contemporary perspectives

1. Archaeological Landscapes: Constructed, Conceptualized, Ideational: A. Bernard Knapp and Wendy Ashmore. Part I: Ethnographic and Historical Cases:. 2. Identifying Ancient Sacred Landscapes in Australia: From Physical to Social: Paul S. C. Tacon. 3. Creating Social Identity in the Landscape: Tidewater, Virginia 1600--1750: Lisa Kealhofer. 4. Conceptual Landscapes in the Egyptian Nile Valley: Janet E. Richards. 5. Buddhist Landscapes in East Asia: Gina L. Barnes. 6. Mountains, Caves, Water: Ideational Landscapes of the Ancient Maya: James E. Brady and Wendy Ashmore. Part II: Protohistoric / Ethnohistoric Cases:. 7. The Inca Cognition of Landscape: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Aesthetic of Alterity: Maarten van de Guchte. 8. The Ideology of Settlement: Ancestral Keres Landscapes in the Northern Rio Grande: James E. Snead and Robert W. Preucel. Part III: Prehistoric Cases:. 9. Centering the Ancestors: Cemeteries, Mounds and Sacred Landscapes of the Ancient North American Midcontinent: Jane E. Buikstra and Douglas K. Charles. 10. Ideational and Industrial Landscape of Prehistoric Cyprus: A. Bernard Knapp. 11. The Mythical Landscapes of the British Iron Age: John C. Barrett. Part IV: Commentaries:. 12. Sacred Landscapes: Constructed and Conceptualized: Carole L. Crumley. 13. Exploring Everyday Places and Cosmologies: Peter van Dommelen. Index.

Bronze Age World System Cycles [and Comments and Reply]

This essay explores the geographical extent of the world system and dates its cyclical ups and downs during the Bronze Age and, in a preliminary way, the early Iron Age. The scope of these twin tasks is exceptionally wide and deep: wide in exploring a single world system that encompasses much of Afro-Eurasia, deep in identifying systemwide conomic and political cycles since more than 5,000 years ago.

Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia: The Mesopotamian Advantage

The emergence of early Mesopotamian (Sumerian) civilization must be understood within the framework of the unique ecology and geography of the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the late 5th and 4th millennia B.C. The former gave Mesopotamian societies important advantages in agricultural productivity and subsistence resource resilience not possessed by contemporary polities on their periphery, while the latter gave them enduring transportational advantages. This material imbalance created opportunities and incentives that made it both possible and probable that early Mesopotamian elites would use trade as one of their earliest and most important tools to legitimize and expand their unequal access to resources and power. Given this, a still hypothetical but testable) model is presented that accounts for the precocious socioeconomic differentiation and urban growth of southern Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium as social multiplier effects inadvertently set in motion by evolving trade patterns. This trade was first largely internal, between individual southern polities exploiting rich but localized ecological niches within the Mesopotamian alluvium during the Late Ubaid and Early Uruk periods. By the Middle and Late Uruk periods, however, inherently asymmetrical external trade between growing southern cities and societies at their periphery in control of coveted resources gained more prominence. In due course, import-substitution processes further amplified the one-sided socio-evolutionary impact on southern societies of these shifting trade patterns. Unequal developmental rates resulting from the operation of these processes over time explain why the earliest complex societies of southwestern Asia appeared in southern Mesopotamia and not elsewhere.

Bodies of Evidence on Prehistoric Cyprus

This study takes as its point of departure recent discussions in sociology, anthropology, queer theory, and masculinist and feminist studies on the contextual constitution of sex and gender, with its surrounding debates. We explore the adoption and implications of the body as a phenomenon in archaeology and its connection to power-centred theories. As a case study, we use a body of data comprised of prehistoric Cypriot figurines (Chalcolithic and Bronze Age), and suggest that an archaeology of individuals may be possible in prehistoric contexts. In conclusion, we suggest that archaeologists move beyond rigid, binary categorizations and attempt to prioritize specific discourses of difference by implementing constructions of self or identity

Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique [and Comments and Reply]

Archaeology isbecoming a broader, more catholic discipline. The positivist foundation of new archaeology is being questioned, and alternative radical approaches are being championed. In an attempt to assess the validity of these new directions, this paper reviews the historical association of spatial archaeology with human geography and examines the radical critique in each discipline. It concludes that radical archaeology does not offer a viable methodology for explaining past cultural patterning and calls instead for a behavioral archaeology, modeled in some respects upon behavioral geography, which takes careful account of individual behavior and is committed to general theory in the explanation of cultural evolution.

The Uruk Expansion: Cross-cultural Exchange in Early Mesopotamian Civilization [with Comments and Reply]

Comments and Reply] Author(s): Guillermo Algaze, Burchard Brenties, A. Bernard Knapp, Philip L. Kohl, Wade R. Kotter, C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Glenn M. Schwartz, Harvey Weiss, Robert J. Wenke, Rita P. Wright and Allen Zagarell Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 30, No. 5 (Dec., 1989), pp. 571-608 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743567 . Accessed: 06/10/2014 22:44

The prehistory of Cyprus: Problems and prospects

The archaeological record of prehistoric Cyprus is rich, diverse, well-published, and frequently enigmatic. Regarded by many as a “bridge” between western Asia and the Aegean, Cyprus and its past are frequently seen from scholarly perspectives prevalent in one of those two cultural areas. Its material culture, however, differs radically from that of either area. Apart from the early colonization episodes on the island (perhaps three during the pre-Neolithic and Neolithic), evidence of foreign contact remains limited until the Bronze Age (post-2500 B. C.). This study seeks to present the prehistory of Cyprus from an indigenous perspective, and to examine a series of archaeological problems that foreground Cyprus within its eastern Mediterranean context. The study begins with an overview of time, place, and the nature of fieldwork on the island, continues with a presentation and discussion of several significant issues in Cypriot prehistory (e.g., insularity, colonization, subsistence, regionalism, interaction, social complexity, economic diversity), and concludes with a brief discussion of prospects for the archaeology of Cyprus up to and “beyond 2000”.

Archaeology without gravity: Postmodernism and the past

Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the past and the present have become commonplace: anthropologists now situate cultures in their historical contexts, while historians pursue particularistic ends within politicoeconomic or ideational structures. Archaeologists have cast their nets even more widely, not only toward anthropology and history, but to fields ranging from molecular biology to hermeneutics. Postmodernist approaches maintain that archaeologists should be looking at the past from multiple perspectives and listening to its multivocality. Archaeologists, in fact, not only develop different ways of understanding the past, but actually develop alternative pasts. This paper argues that multiple paths to alternative pasts enhance archaeological understanding and, at the same time, stimulate the development of archaeological theory.

Past Practices: Rethinking Individuals and Agents in Archaeology

Archaeologists who seek to examine peoples roles in past societies have long assumed, consciously or unconsciously, the existence of individuals. In this study, we explore various concepts and dimensions of ‘the individual’, both ethnographic and archaeological. We show that many protagonists in the debate over the existence of ‘individuals’ in prehistory use the same ethnographic examples to argue their positions. These positions range from the claim that any suggestion of individuals prior to 500 years ago simply projects a construct of western modernity onto the past, to the view that individual identities are culturally specific social constructs, both past and present. Like most contributors to the debate, we too are sceptical of an unchanging humanity in the past, but we feel that thinking on the topic has become somewhat inflexible. As a counterpoint to this debate, therefore, we discuss Bourdieus concept of habitus in association with Foucaults notion of power. We conclude that experiencing oneself as a living individual is part of human nature, and that archaeologists should reconsider the individuals social, spatial and ideological importance, as well as the existence of individual, embodied lives in prehistoric as well as historical contexts.

Labor Control and Emergent Stratification in Prehistoric Europe [and Comments and Reply]

Prevailing theories on the emergence of stratified societies in prehistoric Europe, which focus on the differential control of material wealth and resources by an elite minority, are deficient in failing to define the socioenvironmental circumstances under which the differential control of resources might initially have been established. An altemative model is offered that generates stratification from the patron-client relationships known to occur ethnographically incertain circumscribed, high-risk environmental settings. Implications of the model find partial support in an examination of settlement and sociopolitical trends during the European Neolithic.