E. Christian Wells

Peopling landscapes between villages in the Middle Gila River Valley of central Arizona

The prehistoric Hohokam conducted a great variety of activities in the spaces between their villages, including social gatherings and ceremonial observances as well as economic and subsistence practices. Recent full-coverage pedestrian survey along the middle Gila River in central Arizona indicates that nonresidential sites are more numerous and cover considerably greater area than residential settlements. Unfortunately, in the Hohokam region researchers are not always able to distinguish residential sites from activity areas based on features observable on the surface. In this study, quantitative measures of artifact density and diversity of surface collections from artifact scatters are used to distinguish residential sites from nonresidential sites. This is accomplished by assessing the extent to which their assemblages resemble artifact collections from known habitations, campsites, or specialized or diverse activity loci. Differences in artifact density and diversity enable many ambiguous artifact scatters to be classified into these general functional site types. Knowing the distribution of site types relative to elements of the natural and cultural landscapes can provide insight into past social and ecological or economic behaviors not offered by site-specific approaches. The study concludes that considering both the physical and cultural dimensions of landscapes significantly increases the research value of nonresidential sites for understanding the use and meaning of spaces between villages.

Toward a theory of ritual economy

Ritual economy is a theoretical approach for understanding and explaining the ways in which worldview, economy, power, and human agency interlink in society and social change. Defined as the “process of provisioning and consuming that materializes and substantiates worldview for managing meaning and shaping interpretation,” this approach forefronts the study of human engagement with social, material, and cognitive realms of human experience. This chapter explores the theoretical roots of ritual economy and how they are expressed in this volumes contributions, which ground the discussion in actual case studies applied to both capitalistic and noncapitalistic settings across a number of different cultural contexts. By knitting together two realms of inquiry that often are sequestered into separate domains of knowledge, ritual economy exposes for analysis how the process of materializing worldview through ritual practice structures economic behavior without determining it.

Environmental worldview and ritual economy among the Honduran Lenca

This chapter examines the historical relationship between Honduran Lenca worldview and how ecological resources are managed through ritual practice. The way in which the Lenca conceive of the biophysical environment is an active process of meaning-making that takes place through their interaction with the environment. The Lenca codify this relationship in the compostura, a complex set of ceremonial performances linked to economic practices that mediate human needs and desires with those of the ancestors who animate the landscapes surrounding households and communities. Through an examination of contemporary, historical, and archeological cases in western Honduras, this chapter explores how ritual economy shapes, and is shaped by, environmental worldview.

Balancing Archaeological Responsibilities and Community Commitments: A Case from Honduras

Abstract Exploring the implications of a recent discovery in NW Honduras, this paper considers the ethical dilemma that arises when an archaeologists responsibility to disseminate information conflicts with her/his commitment to protect cultural resources. We suggest that applied archaeology that benefits local communities among which investigations are conducted is a first step toward developing long-term solutions to conservation and stewardship challenges.

Ritual or residential? An integrated approach to geochemical prospection for understanding the use of plaza spaces at Palmarejo, Honduras

Patios and plazas represent two of the most common types of open space found at ancient Mesoamerican settlements. Patios tended to serve as areas for household activities, while plazas were commonly the focus of community wide religious and political rituals. With the aid of geochemical prospection of sediments and plasters, archaeologists have been able to successfully identify and characterize these spaces at many archaeological sites in the Maya region of southern Mesoamerica. However, in communities located adjacent to the Maya world where cultural interactions between different ethnic groups were highly complex, it is difficult to understand the use, management, and meaning of open spaces, which often shifted over time. While geochemical studies in the region have been useful for detecting the locations of activity areas in open spaces, the structure and composition of these activities often remain challenging to interpret because they represent a palimpsest of different practices over time. In this paper, we examine the interplay of chemical residues with other sediment properties, including organic matter and potential hydrogen, with the greater goal of increasing the interpretive potential of geochemical data for understanding activity spaces at the site of Palmarejo in northwest Honduras (ca. AD 600–900). Using a mild acid extraction procedure and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, we chemically characterize anthrosols from a formally defined open space at the site, and analyze the data quantitatively and spatially using interpolation with Kriging. We then compare the spatial patterns of the chemical elements to the distributions of soil organic matter (loss-on-ignition) and soil pH (glass electrode), and evaluate the results with excavation data from the space. While the results are not straightforward, our research leads us to conclude that the area under investigation most likely served as a venue for ritual activities, a finding that is consistent with similarly structured areas in the community and the broader region. These results lead us to advocate for more integrated analyses of multiple sediment properties in archaeological prospection of complex spaces.

Plantation Soilscapes: Initial and Cumulative Impacts of Colonial Agriculture in Antigua, West Indies

ABSTRACT This paper examines physical, chemical, and biological properties of soils and sediments from landforms in eastern Antigua, West Indies, to better understand the long-term consequences of colonial plantation agriculture for soil health. Plantation farming played a central role in the history of Caribbean societies, economies, and environments since the seventeenth century. In Antigua, the entire island was variably dedicated to agricultural pursuits (mostly sugarcane monoculture) from the mid-1600s until independence from the United Kingdom in 1981, when most commercial cultivation ceased. Today’s soilscapes are highly degraded, although it is unknown what the role of the island’s plantation legacy has played in this process. Our research combines geoarchaeological survey and sampling, sediment core analysis, and historical archival research to model the initial and cumulative impacts of the plantation industry on the island. We focus on the region surrounding Betty’s Hope, the island’s first large-scale sugarcane plantation in operation from 1674 to 1944. We find that current erosion and degradation issues experienced by today’s farmers are not attributable to intensive plantation farming alone, but rather are part of a complex mosaic of human-environmental interactions that include abandonment of engineered landscapes.

Agroindustrial Soilscapes in the Caribbean: A Geochemical Perspective from Betty’s Hope, Antigua

ABSTRACT This research examines the chemical impacts to soils caused by the industrialisation (mechanisation and mass production) of sugar and rum manufacturing in the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Soils and sediments excavated from Betty’s Hope sugar plantation (1674−1944) are chemically characterised by mild acid extraction and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectroscopy. These data are integrated with analyses of soil properties, including colour, texture, pH and organic matter, to examine activity patterns in areas associated with a large multi-use building dating to the period of industrialisation. Quantitative analysis of the data employs zero-order and partial linear correlation, multidimensional scaling, principal components analysis and spatial interpolation using semivariogram modelling and Kriging. The results reveal the locations of activity areas inside the building, which aids in understanding its role in sugar and rum production. The research also reveals evidence for soil contamination by heavy metals (lead and mercury), suggesting that plantation sites from this period may be polluted with industrial wastes. These findings have implications for activity reconstruction in the archaeological past as well as environmental and community health issues today.

Social and Environmental Impacts of British Colonial Rum Production at Betty’s Hope Plantation, Antigua

Rum, a by-product of sugar production, has been a key element of social, cultural, political, and economic processes in the British Caribbean since its invention in the early seventeenth century. However, little is known about the social and ecological impacts of its manufacture. This chapter draws on the formal techniques of life cycle assessment (LCA) to better understand the consequences of rum production for human and environmental health. Drawing on archaeological research at the British sugar plantation, Betty’s Hope, in Antigua, the authors outline how different aspects of the production process, including raw material extraction, materials processing, and manufacture as well as the generation of wastes created unique environmental legacies that persist today. The authors conclude that British rum production was internally economically sustainable in terms of the production process but was not socially or environmentally sustainable. Given the unique configuration of British rum production, the authors suggest that similar industries in other parts of the Caribbean may have only had a life cycle of approximately one century, with social and environmental burdens contributing to the decline of individual industries.

Geoarchaeology of ritual behavior and sacred places: an introduction

Conceived broadly, geoarchaeology is the application of earth science methods and techniques to archeological problems (Goldberg and Macphail 2006). In practice, this has meant providing information on paleoenvironmental contexts (Butzer 2008; Waters 1992) or stratigraphic integrity for archeological sites (Goldberg and Berna 2010). Increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques including micromorphology, microspectrometry, and instrumental chemical analysis (Can t i and Hui sman 2015) have expanded the geoarchaeological toolkit to enable the assessment of cultural and natural formation processes in a wide variety of archeological contexts (Schiffer 1996). Nonetheless, the scope of human behaviors considered in geoarchaeological analysis of cultural formation processes has tended to be limited to economic, technological, or Bhousekeeping^ behaviors (Goldberg et al. 2009). It is our contention, as well as the contention of the contributing authors, that geoarchaeological methods are well-suited to identify behaviors that might be considered part of religious practice (e.g., Dalan and Bevan 2002). Indeed, with the right conceptual tools, behavioral geoarchaeologists are already contributing unique perspectives to our understanding of ritual behavior and sacred places. Archeologists typically approach the study of ritual and religion through the analysis of uncommon artifacts, iconography, and architecture that are often linked with ethnographically or historically known ceremonial practices (Fogelin 2007; Rowan 2011). Over the last few decades, however, archeologists have begun to recognize that sacred places and objects have life histories that are significantly different than other places or objects (Boivin 2004; Walker 1995). The unique life histories of sacred places entail unique sequences of behaviors in the establishment, use, maintenance, and abandonment of these places that cannot be inferred from abandonment assemblages or architecture alone (Hollenback 2010). Geoarchaeologists have a unique role to play in the interpretation of ritual behavior and sacred places through the analysis of sediments and soils that have been physically and chemically altered by human behavior even in the absence of artifacts in primary contexts (e.g., Van Keuren and Roos 2013). This special issue brings together archeologists and geoarchaeologists from across the world who have investigated sediments and soils from Bsacred places^ or at least in locations that have been hypothesized to have been loci for ritual behavior. Contributors to the volume use earth science concepts, methods, and techniques to parse the consequences of human and natural activity in the formation of archeological deposits from settings of ritual behavior in a manner that is accessible to our archeological colleagues. Important to these studies is a consideration of the Blife history^ of such places as well as the manner in which human behavior impacted sediments and soils from sacred places in ways that differed from secular, mundane, or Bprofane^ contexts. Our contributions emphasize methodological rigor within a consideration of broader anthropological issues.

The Archaeology of Environmental Change: Socionatural Legacies of Degradation and Resilience

“Going green” and “sustainability” are on everyone’s minds right now. Understandably, most of the discussion on these topics comes from (and is influenced by) the biophysical sciences, such as ecology and environmental engineering. However, the contributions from the historical sciences, including history and archaeology, are routinely undervalued. This makes little sense to me, an archaeologist and sustainability officer at a large metropolitan university, because the kinds of environmental changes we face today are similar to those people have confronted in the past. Archaeology, with its unique ability to track the long-term causes and consequences of human impacts to varied environments, can and should play a more prominent role in contemporary sustainability discourse. The contributors to The Archaeology of Environmental Change provide a series of compelling case studies across time and space that demonstrate unequivocally how a deep-time historical perspective can improve our prospects for a sustainable world. The book, written broadly for both social and natural scientists and students, is divided into three sections. The first part, “New Frameworks for Interpretation,” introduces new and useful analytical constructs for studying human-environmental relationships and trajectories. Charles Redman and colleagues (Chapter 1), using data from the Hohokam region, and Sander van der Leeuw (Chapter 2), drawing on case studies from Portugal and Greece, discuss how archaeologists might engage allied disciplines using resilience theory and the concept of panarchy. This approach views change as episodic, patterns and processes as discontinuous, and ecosystems as having multiple (and sometimes competing) equilibria. From this perspective, resource management must be flexible to account for an ever changing ecosystem. Vernon Scarborough (Chapter 3), comparing datasets from the lowland Maya region and the Basin of Mexico, makes the broader point that we need to explore and test other, non-Western, concepts and ideas about economy and technology to enhance our modeling capabilities. In other words, just because archaeologists are not ethnographers does not mean that we should shy away from exploring the productive potential of local ecological knowledge for enhancing archaeological explanation.