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"Smith, Monica L"
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Cartographies of warfare in the Indian subcontinent: Contextualizing archaeological and historical analysis through big data approaches
Some of the most notable human behavioral palimpsests result from warfare and its durable traces in the form of defensive architecture and strategic infrastructure. For premodern periods, this architecture is often understudied at the large scale, resulting in a lack of appreciation for the enormity of the costs and impacts of military spending over the course of human history. In this article, we compare the information gleaned from the study of the fortified cities of the Early Historic period of the Indian subcontinent (c. 3rd century BCE to 4th century CE) with the precolonial medieval era (9-17th centuries CE). Utilizing in-depth archaeological and historical studies along with local sightings and citizen-science blogs to create a comprehensive data set and map series in a “big-data” approach that makes use of heterogeneous data sets and presence-absence criteria, we discuss how the architecture of warfare shifted from an emphasis on urban defense in the Early Historic period to an emphasis on territorial offense and defense in the medieval period. Many medieval fortifications are known from only local reports and have minimal identifying information but can still be studied in the aggregate using a least-shared denominator approach to quantification and mapping.
Journal Article
Networks, Territories, and the Cartography of Ancient States
With broad lines and dark shading, the cartographic depictions of ancient states and empires convey the impression of comprehensive political entities having firm boundaries and uniform territorial control. These depictions oversimplify the complexities of early state growth, as well as overstating the capacity of central governments to control large territories. Archaeological and textual evidence suggests that ancient states are better understood through network models rather than bounded-territory models. Network approaches enable us to depict competition within and among polities as they grow, the efficient use of nodal points as a focus for political leaders, and the realities of nonoverlapping ritual, social, and economic activities that have an impact on political cohesion. Network maps and bounded-territory representations are compared for the Inka, Mauryan, and Sassanian polities.
Journal Article
The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes
Urban centers have inner and outer landscapes whose physical remains can be read as the materialization of social, political, economic, and ritual interactions. Inner landscapes are manifested in architecture and spatial organizations that configure relationships on the basis of economic status, ethnicity, occupation, age grade, and gender within the city. Outer landscapes are composed of the hinterlands on which urban centers depend for resources, including agricultural products and in-migrating laborers who seek economic and social opportunities. Urban-based elites reach deep into the countryside not only as a matter of political control, but also for investment of centralized resources into infrastructure such as canals, roads, and territorial borders. The monumental and household configurations of cities, expressed both at the heart of urban centers and in their countrysides, enable a distinct phenomenology of interaction mapped into daily experiences.
Journal Article
Citizen Science in Archaeology
Citizen science, as a process of volunteer participation through crowdsourcing, facilitates the creation of mass data sets needed to address subtle and large-scale patterns in complex phenomena. Citizen science efforts in other field disciplines such as biology, geography, and astronomy indicate how new web-based interfaces can enhance and expand upon archaeologists’ existing platforms of volunteer engagement such as field schools, community archaeology, site stewardship, and professional–avocational partnerships. Archaeological research can benefit from the citizen science paradigm in four ways: fieldwork that makes use of widely available technologies such as mobile applications for photography and data upload; searches of large satellite image collections for site identification and monitoring; crowdfunding; and crowdsourced computer entry of heritage data.
Journal Article
Urban infrastructure as materialized consensus
Infrastructure that shapes and facilitates daily life, such as pathways, conduits and boundary walls, constitutes one of the most dynamic forms of architecture in both ancient and modern cities. Although infrastructure is conceived and designed with particular goals and capacities, its temporal and spatial scale means that it is a constant work in progress that engages numerous agents: civic authorities design and implement infrastructure; designated agencies maintain and repair infrastructure; and ordinary people utilize, modify, ignore or destroy it. Infrastructure can be thus analyzed as a materialization of ongoing communication, in which there are often conflicts among different constituents to achieve consensus. The linguistic concepts of expert language and turn-taking are utilized to assess three brief case studies: historical New Orleans; a multipurpose micro-park in Vienna, Austria; and the archaeological city of Sisupalgarh, India.
Journal Article
Urbanism and the Middle Class: Co-Emergent Phenomena in the World’s First Cities
Beginning six thousand years ago, intermediate categories of socioeconomic status formed for the first time in cities as entrepreneurial individuals and households engaged in scaled-up manufacturing activities and in new types of “white collar” work, such as accounting, writing, and middle management. Knowledge workers were indispensable not only for the production and trade activities that characterized ancient cities, but also for the growth and management of religious institutions and the development of political authority. Archaeological and textual data provide evidence for a middle producer-consumer stratum in both tangible possessions (real estate, dwellings, material goods) and intangible investments (schooling, language, and mannerisms). Using information from Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Rome, and Mesoamerica, the article assesses how strategies of resource management and risk-taking utilized by the middle class also resulted in generative political relationships to address middle-class anxieties through the development of law codes, insurance, and formal systems of professional advancement.
Journal Article
Feasts and Their Failures
Archaeologists often interpret the physical evidence for large-scale consumption of food and beverages as the remains of feasts that successfully enhanced personal reputations, consolidated power, or ensured community solidarity. However, ethnographic accounts illustrate the potential for \"feast failure\": people may or may not contribute, may or may not come to the feast, may or may not be satisfied, and may or may not repay the feast-giver in labor or obeisance. Because they involve so many logistical and material components before, during, and after the event, feasts almost always exhibit some shortcomings. These failures paradoxically provide both hosts and guests the opportunity to demonstrate their managerial skills, a factor that would have been increasingly important with the development of multiple and overlapping groups at the inception of social complexity. The use of failure-prone events as testing grounds for social integration also may explain the increased amount and diversity of feasting behavior over time.
Journal Article
The Archaeology of Food Preference
Food preference is a socially constructed concept in which both consumers and producers define what is \"good to eat.\" Staple crops and daily meals are an important component of these definitions, as the regular use of particular foods reinforces norms of identity. Food preferences also affect agricultural systems because choices among cultivars are based on social needs in addition to economic variables such as yield and caloric value. Through textual and archaeological evidence, the trajectory of rice production is examined for Sri Lanka, the Brahmaputra Valley, the Tamil region, and Vijayanagara. In these regions and elsewhere in South Asia, shared ideologies of food preference resulted in a consensus mode of agricultural production: Irrigation works increased the tax base for political leaders and the donation base for temple economies, but they also benefited local inhabitants who would have been able to partake of a preferred food on a more regular basis.
Journal Article