Joshua Wright

Households without Houses: Mobility and Moorings on the Eurasian Steppe

Mobility is often cited as the essence of life in the Eurasian steppe, and with it mobile dwellings and households. Steppe nomads offer ethnographically potent visions of inhabited space into which archaeological landscapes fit comfortably. Challenges include the discovery of early household sites, the characterization of households that lack structures, and how to examine the dynamics of mobile pastoralist households without being drawn into an agglomerative model that builds toward optimal practices. This paper will marshal the archaeological evidence for domestic spaces in mobile steppe households. A flexible and extensible model of household spaces will be offered that links activities and resources into a network of contextual relationships at the household scale. This provides a model for analogical use of ethnographic data, frameworks into which the archaeological fragments of mobile households can be fitted, and above all a means of comparative characterization between periods of inhabitation in the world’s steppes.

The Anthropocene and the landscape of Confucius: A historical ecology of landscape changes in northern and eastern China during the middle to late Holocene

The Yellow River catchment of northern China was central to the rise of complex societies from the first Neolithic farmers through to early states and empires. These cultural developments brought with them rising populations and increasing intensity of land-use. This region provides an important record of landscape changes that mark the development of the Anthropocene in China. Geoarchaeological research in the middle reaches of the Yellow River catchment of Henan Province and eastward to the Si River drainage of Shandong Province illustrates human impact on vegetation and hydrological systems dating back at least until the middle Neolithic Yangshao Period in the mid-Holocene, ca. 7000u2009yr BP. This research provides geomorphological evidence that early human impact began in the Yangshao period with deforestation, soil erosion, and increased alluviation in the upper catchment of the Yiluo River. The increased alluviation allowed small-scale Neolithic farmers to intensify and supplement their production with rice paddy farming. Further east along the Si River of Shandong Province, Neolithic Dawenkou farmers were intensifying production by taking advantage of the already moist floodplains, but had little impact on the surrounding forests and hillslopes. At the beginning of the Zhou Period (ca. 1000 BCE), farmers along the Si River at Qufu began to intensify production by digging canals into the floodplain, and deforestation of the hillslopes led to the beginnings of widespread floods and silty floodplain buildup, culminating in the massive destructive floods of the later Han Period characterized by thick sand beds.

The Work of Monuments: Reflections on Spatial, Temporal and Social Orientations in Mongolia and the Maya Lowlands

In this article, we look at two very different contexts of monument use – Bronze Age Inner Asia and the Classic period Maya lowlands – in order to explore the function and meanings of monuments and the variety of ways in which they worked to mark and differentiate ancient landscapes. Our goal in uniting such disparate contexts is to examine how power and social organization in these settings were translated into monumental material forms, and how such materializations were experienced by those who viewed and re-interpreted the monuments. In particular, we explore how monuments acted as orientational markers within specific cultural contexts. Our discussion finds common ground between the disparate settings through several common interpretive frameworks focused on spatial, temporal and social orientational work accomplished by active, agentive monuments through their relationships with humans, which we frame as a ‘technology of the monument’. Monuments are instrumental in situating groups within these different layers, or landscapes, of lived experience, yet even while physically fixed, allow for movement through changing meanings and ideas.

ASIA, CENTRAL AND NORTH, STEPPES, DESERTS, AND FORESTS

Central Eurasia is a broad belt of steppe grasslands fringed by forests to the north and by high mountains and dry deserts to the south. This great swathe of land is arid and cold and is characterized by nomadic horse-riding peoples with cultures long adapted to this harsh environment. With time, the first Central Eurasians adapted and prospered under these conditions, such that their descendants eventually peopled the New World, forged roads of communication between Old World civilizations, and assembled some of the most impressive empires in human history. This essay examines the archaeological heritage of eastern Central Eurasia and focuses on the development of pastoral nomadic economies, horse traction and riding, advanced metallurgical technologies, early status systems, and the first states to arise on the eastern steppe lands.

A Possible Archaeological Case for the Taxation of Medieval Eurasian Nomads

At several locations in the Mongolian steppe, the archaeological remains of large enclosure walls have been found in association with structures and ceramics related to the Mongol and Khitan-Liao empires. These structures are probably the remains of infrastructure built to support large-scale extraction of livestock from the pastoralist population in Mongolia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. This may be evidence of little-documented taxation policies of steppe states during this period, the scale of the production of resource surplus from the steppe, and examples of state-structured pastoralist landscapes and the state itself in the everyday experience of medieval herders.

Household Archaeology in East Asia: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Research brings together papers highlighting archaeological research on households from East Asia. Contributing authors examine this ubiquitous social unit as a “topic of” central inquiry, treating the household as an important subject in itself as well as the locus of various human interactions that crosscut all categories and levels of society. This collection provides comparable case studies from a vast and diverse region encompassing China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan.