Lynda Carroll

Communities and Other Social Actors: Rethinking Commodities and Consumption in Global Historical Archaeology

The relationships between people and commodities, and the processes through which goods are entangled with peoples lives can be better understood with a focus on the community. The concept of community offers a way to understand the entanglement of individuals and small groups with global processes. In addition, a focus on the community allows historical archaeologists a scale of analysis to consider the links between people, communities, and global networks of exchange, as commodities are exchanged in and out of local, regional, or global arenas.

Toward an Archaeology of Non-Elite Consumption in Late Ottoman Anatolia

Over the past two decades, a growing number of studies have focused on the social histories of workers, peasants, and other popular classes in the Ottoman Empire (e.g., Berktay and Faroqhi 1992; Faroqhi 1986, 1987; Quataert 1983; Quataert and Zurcher 1995). However, it is still relatively rare for these people to be included in historical dialogues focusing on the Ottoman Empire. After all, of the vast documents available to scholars on the Ottoman period, relatively few sources describe and document the lives of non-elite groups, especially working classes and rural populations. As a result, these groups remain virtually invisible, and their lives are left unrecorded. If dialogues centering around the lives of the peasants, workers, nomads, and other non-elite groups living within the Ottoman Empire are going to be written, new approaches must be explored. Archaeology is one form of ‘documentation’ which can be used to examine non-elite economic behaviors of the Ottoman past. Much more than the study of sherds, or the history of minutiae, archaeology provides a window into the lives of workers and peasants by examining the types of material goods they consumed and then disposed of Equally important, archaeology allows us to reevaluate the relationships between non-elite groups and larger-scale political economies by examining the use of material culture within local, imperial, or global contexts. By focusing on non-elite consumption patterns,

Building Farmsteads in the Desert: Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Rural Landscapes in Late Ottoman Period Transjordan

During the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire initiated economic and political reforms to address its faltering economy, civil unrest, and military losses. In its rural provinces, the state initiated a series of reforms that encouraged both capital investment and an attempt at Ottoman colonialism based on European models. In the Balqa’ region of Transjordan, this resulted in the transformation of the rural countryside, the creation of large rural farmsteads, and an increase in agricultural production. This also resulted in the settlement of Bedu, as many pastoralists were turned into agricultural workers. A postcolonial archaeology of this transformation provides a voice to people who lived under the Ottoman state and challenged the imposition of capitalism and colonial models. At Qasr Hisban, Bedu used both the hidden spaces of local caves, and the architecture of the expanding farmstead, to create their own challenges to the structures of state, capitalism and Ottoman colonialism.

Could've Been a Contender: The Making and Breaking of "China" in the Ottoman Empire

Growing interest in global historical archaeology is often focused on commodities exchange, especially between “the west and the rest.” However, ceramics production and consumption in the Ottoman Empire during the fourteenth through twentieth centuries was not only between the Ottomans and the west, but also the Far East. Chinese porcelains served as inspiration for the production of many Ottoman ceramics, especially during the Empires height in the sixteenth century. Although with less success, Ottoman ceramics “contended” for a place within local and global markets. This paper will examine the production and consumption of Ottoman ceramics as part of this empires struggle to achieve and maintain power relationships globally, as well as within its own dominions.

A Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire: Breaking New Ground

Community is known solely from survey. Nevertheless, both chapters argue for periods of only seasonal occupation of the communities, which further confounds estimating regional population. In both cases, ceramics and lithics suggest little dependence on the larger Chaco region. Part 2 consists of chapters by Winston B. Hurst (Edge of Cedars); Joseph Peter Jalbert and Catherine Cameron (Bluff Great House, Chimney Rock, Far View); Ruth M. Van Dyke (Red Mesa Valley sites), and Stephen R. Durand and Kathy Roler Durand (Guadalupe) that examine relationships between outlying communities and Chaco Canyon. The key question is whether or not the great house and its community were founded by emissaries from Chaco Canyon or by locals emulating Chaco style. There is no reason to expect uniform conclusions nor are any given. A principal criterion used to infer emissaries is the incorporation of otherwise hidden architectural details, such as banded masonry in plaster-covered walls. While this seems useful, it is troubling because observing such features depends on excavation and few great houses have been excavated.