Urbanism in Mesoamerica

Urban societies have been defined as stratified, and sometimes literate, societies that build large, densely populated, and monumental centers that serve specialized political, economic, and ritual functions for their regions. Mesoamerica is one of six world regions where urban societies developed, independently, in antiquity. Mesoamerican cities sometimes fit traditional definitions, and other times defy them. There are examples of dispersed low-density urban settlements (Classic Maya, Veracruz) or cities where evidence of writing remains elusive (Teotihuacan). Functional urban definitions have led to debates regarding the urban standing of earlier, Middle Formative Olmec centers, as no contemporary settlements match the monumentality and regional prominence of La Venta or San Lorenzo. The regional settlement studies that have proliferated in the Basin of Mexico and Valley of Oaxaca since the 1960s have helped scholars demonstrate the demographic and political might of Late Formative, Classic, and Postclassic cities such as Monte Albán, Teotihuacan, and Tenochtitlan. Urbanism was demonstrably shown to be a regional phenomenon, one that developed from autochthonous processes as settlements became prominent population centers whose functions, monuments, and institutions served and ruled over their larger regions. While some of the best-known Mesoamerican cities were the capitals of large regional states (Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlán, Monte Albán, and Tzintzuntzan), researchers have documented an even greater number of city-states, which are defined as small states socially and territorially centered around their capital city. The Classic and Postclassic cities of the Maya lowlands, the Postclassic polities or altepemeh of the Basin of Mexico, and the kingdoms of Postclassic Oaxaca are examples of city-states. Among Mesoamerican cities, there was diversity in the form of government, ranging from cities where rulers’ names and royal tombs appear prominently in the archaeological record (Classic Maya cities, Postclassic Oaxacan city-states), to cities where, despite decades of research, no single royal palace or tomb has been found (Teotihuacan). The material record of cities of the latter type suggests that they were governed through more corporate forms of political organization. In the early 21st century research has focused on the role of collectives in city construction, configuration, and governance and the challenge of archaeologically identifying neighborhoods, districts, or other suprahousehold social groups (tlaxilacalli and calpolli, social units above the household in Postclassic Nahuatl polities). Although Classic period Maya centers were not originally considered urban, thanks to settlement studies and, later on, LiDAR technology, scholars have demonstrated that beyond their monumental acropolises there was extensive low-density settlement that was unmistakably urban. The Maya model of low-density lowland urbanism features dispersed populations and extensive urban footprints that integrate complex webs of agricultural areas, terraces, raised fields, hydraulic features, and house mounds. This model may have useful applications for modern-day planning efforts in low-lying cities that need to adapt to climate change. Indeed, Mesoamerican urbanism has much to contribute as the world’s population becomes increasingly urban. Humanity must learn from its past successes, and failures, with urban living.

Politics of Identity in Maloti-Drakensberg Rock Art Research

The contexts of hunter-gatherer rock arts of the southern Maloti-Drakensberg are characterized by enduring patterns of cultural acquisition and social transformation, resulting in communities with highly contextual identities and cultural possessions, but with nonlinear relationships between the two. Attempts to mitigate discontinuities between ethnographic source and interpretive subject, however, have left interpretive methodologies to represent authorship in more singular terms, to the exclusion of potential contextual sources who express identities not outwardly San, despite ancestral trajectories overlapping those of the artists. Recognition of the inheritances of the communities of the present Maloti-Drakensberg, and their transformative histories, necessitates their inclusion not only as sources, but as contributors to ethnoarchaeological process.

Heritage Management in East Africa

The countries of Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and South Sudan geographically lie on the eastern part of the African continent and are member states of the East African Community (EAC), a regional economic bloc. These countries, as many other countries in the world, have important heritage places that are significant to their communities. As a result, these countries have developed various methods of managing this heritage. Heritage management should be understood as caring for a heritage site without compromising its significance so that present and future generations can continue enjoying it. Consequently, countries around the world have put in place various legal regimes that enable them to manage and protect their heritage. Though the East African countries listed belong to the same geographical region and economic bloc, they had differing colonial experiences and, therefore, their legislation regimes, including that governing heritage, may not be exactly the same. Kenya and Uganda, for instance, were British colonies, whereas Tanzania started as a Germany colony but later ended up as a British Protectorate. Rwanda and Burundi also started as Germany colonies but ended up as Belgian colonies. South Sudan, once part of the larger Republic of Sudan, was a British colony. Common to all these countries, however, is the fact that the colonial management system laid more emphasis on the protection of tangible as opposed to intangible heritage, and it also ignored and in most cases destroyed the indigenous management systems that local communities had hitherto used to manage their heritage. Despite gaining their independence from the colonial governments in the early 1960s, these countries, have however, apart from Rwanda, continued to use the inherited colonial legal systems. It is now widely accepted within heritage management circles that unless indigenous heritage management systems are embraced, the local communities tend to feel alienated from their heritage and thus in most cases tend to disregard, ignore, or in some cases destroy the heritage site as it no longer belongs to them but to the state; the end result is that pressure is put on the heritage as the national government institutions do not have adequate financial and human capacity to manage all the heritage resources in their jurisdiction.

Contract Archeology in South Africa

The roots of contract archeology were laid even before the development of a legislative framework that prescribed the processes to be followed. Contract archeology was being seen by the museums and universities as the best avenue to the subsidizing of archeological research. The increased research funding of the 1960s and 1970s was on the decline in the 1980s. Universities, therefore, were at a disadvantage and needed to explore other avenues of funding. Legislative changes over the years, which made it mandatory for developers to fund impact assessments to mitigate potential damage of valuable heritage resources from their proposed activities, have led to a significant proliferation of private archeological companies. These have been established to provide developers with the expertise they need to satisfy these legal requirements. The approach used in South Africa is that the developer must pay to assess the nature of the likely impact of their proposed activity. Government entities are then tasked with the responsibility of reviewing studies undertaken by specialists subcontracted by developers. The subdiscipline of archeology has grown significantly in South Africa, specifically enabled by legislative changes over the years requiring that predevelopment assessments of heritage sites be undertaken prior to approvals being made. However, archeology has continued to be defined as racially unrepresentative of the South African demography. In addition, the management of heritage resources through the use of contract archeology has been characterized by a variety of administrative challenges.

Care As Belonging, Difference, and Inequality

The topic of care has inspired a vast and complex body of research covering a wide range of practices. As an open-ended process, it is generally directed at fulfilling recognized needs and involves at least one giving and one receiving side. Although care has mostly positive connotations in everyday usage, giving or receiving it can also be a negative experience or express domination. Care evolves through complex arrangements of different actors, institutions, and technical devices and at the same time transforms them. As human needs are not a given, the process of care involves negotiations about who deserves to receive it and on what grounds, as well as who should provide it. Because care is so deeply implicated in articulating and mediating different moralities, it becomes central to constructions and classifications of difference. In this way, care extends far beyond intimate relations and is engrained in processes that establish belonging as well as various forms of inequality. Researching care in intimate settings as well as in public sectors enables bridging various communities of care and grasping how the distribution of care not only mirrors inequalities but contributes to their (re)production or even intensification.

The Development of Archaeology in Africa

Africa is the cradle of humankind, with the origin, evolution, and dispersal of hominids understood from this continent. It was not left out in the quest for knowledge on how human beings lived in the past, where they lived, what they used and ate, as well as changes that occurred through time. The development of archaeology in Africa, as elsewhere, had two aspects to it—the volume and inclination of work done as evidenced by extensive fieldwork and publications, and the change in approach that saw a shift toward philosophical and methodological concerns. Terminology broadened as there was a shift from merely establishing evidence of occupation and the presence of material culture, to studying the subtleties and processes underlying the material culture. The human mind is complex; it generated a dynamic material culture temporally and spatially, and notwithstanding the environmental impact on past cultures, humanity also colonized landscapes. Appreciation of an interchange between humanity and the environment became necessary to sync and contextualize the development of ideas, concepts, and worldviews, and whether they emerged from within societies or were externally influenced, they were shared across time and space—necessitating multidisciplinary approaches to studying the past. To an archaeological scholar in Africa, the problem is compounded. The study of the past has always been from an observer’s point of view, resulting in the call to “decolonize archaeology”—Africans were alienated in studying the past and the tendency was to have them not see this past as their heritage. Archaeology must be relevant to Africa’s issues of environmental management, food security, and socioeconomic challenges such as youth and women’s empowerment. What can the discipline offer? Is the archaeology of Africa accessible to its population, and do we see possibilities for an intergenerational beneficiation of Africa’s past? Most importantly, Africa still has a wealth of knowledge to offer in the study of the paleoenvironment, human evolution, food production and processing, historical ecology, multidisciplinary approaches, and computer technology. Their contribution to a better understanding of the rich, complex, and dynamic African past is of utmost importance.

Water Infrastructures

Water infrastructures have been central to anthropological theory and practice for many decades. Early research tended to focus on infrastructures related to agriculture, such as irrigation systems, and often emphasized their consequences for social and political organization. While these and other studies (e.g., on hydroelectric dams) continue, work since the early 2000s considers household and community plumbing networks for both potable water and wastewater (sanitation). These studies conceive of water infrastructures broadly—as social and technical assemblages of materials and matter as well as people and their behaviors—and examine them from sociotechnical, technopolitical, and phenomenological perspectives. Sociotechnical approaches emphasize the ways in which water infrastructures mediate the relationships between people and social institutions, and between people and the biophysical environment more generally. Technopolitical perspectives often focus on the bureaucratic and governance implications of water infrastructures, especially how states strategically deploy or withhold certain infrastructures to craft citizenship, for instance. Phenomenological approaches are widely varied, but tend to give the most agency, and sometimes animacy, to water infrastructures, and to consider the sensorial and emotional implications of human-nonhuman interactions. Future research will be facilitated by decolonizing studies of water infrastructure, incorporating other disciplinary approaches and perspectives such as engineering, and better articulating the policy implications of research findings.

Ostrich Eggshell Beads in Later Stone Age Contexts

Ostrich eggshell (OES) beads are a common feature of Later Stone Age (LSA) archaeology throughout eastern and southern Africa and have the potential to inform on site use, cultural diversity, social networks, and site formation. However, too often OES bead assemblages have not been recorded or studied in the necessary detail to make meaningful contributions to these important questions. In this respect, and to aid future research focusing on the African LSA, OES and OES beads must be discussed in detail, beginning with a background to ostriches and their eggs and commenting on why OES is an important raw material. Then, one should consider OES beads in detail, specifically, the manufacturing process, the social context in which they were made, and how they may have been used in the past. Subsequently, the focus should be on how OES bead assemblages are analyzed, as well as archaeometric approaches to studying OES bead residues and OES bead provenance. The potential insights gained from these diverse and multidisciplinary analytical approaches, especially when combined, are then highlighted through discussing trends in OES bead research from African LSA contexts. These trends include the contribution of OES beads to understanding the complex transition from hunter-gatherers to herders, the identification of different cultural groups in the past, and identifying the presence and extent of past social networks. The final focus should be on future research directions that will benefit OES bead research, specifically more detailed approaches to understanding OES bead diversity and the expansion of experimentally derived taphonomic frameworks for identifying past human and nonhuman behaviors in OES bead assemblages. Future research should build on the growing body of detailed OES bead analyses, as they provide unique insight and a strong complement to traditional archaeological approaches to understanding past peoples, groups, and cultures during the African LSA.

Migration, Displacement, and Dispossession

Debates about migration, whether led by politicians or scholars, often approach migration as a relatively new challenge and categorize it as a “destabilizing force,” ignoring the fact that the world’s past and present has been built by human movement. Humans have always migrated. Individual and population mobility as well as settlement are part of humans’ shared history. To integrate migration into an understanding of humans’ shared past, present, and emerging possible futures, several concepts prove useful including migration regime, displacement, dispossession, conjuncture, colonization, border-making, nationalism, and racialization. Deployed together, these concepts identify moments in human history in which migration has been understood to be part of the human experience and when, where, and how migrants have been stigmatized, and those who move defined as culturally or biologically inferior. By coupling the concept of migration regimes with an analysis of changing modes of dispossession and displacement over millennia, scholars can illuminate the intersection of the economic and political transformations of governance structures as well as the varying concepts of “the migrant” and “nonmigrant,” and “native” and “foreigner.” Anti-immigrant ideologies preclude discussion of the broader economic and political restructurings that underlie both increased human movement and anti-migrant sentiments. They also deflect attention from a set of questions that are at the heart of the anthropology of migration: Why do people leave familiar terrains, family, and friends? How do they manage to move and settle elsewhere? How do they relate to the life they left behind? These are questions that can equally be asked of people who move to another region of a country or travel across political boundaries. To answer these questions migration scholars have explored the linkages between forms of human mobility and processes of dispossession, displacement, and resettlement. In these investigations, social networks prove to be central to mobility and settlement. Since the 15th century, changing Western theories about human migration and the origins of political and social boundaries reflected transformations in political economy. Globe-spanning migration regimes used violent force, border formation and dissolution, documents, surveillance, and criminalization to allow the migration of some and disallow the movement or settlement of others. During that period, marked initially by colonialism and slavery, and then by nation state building and anticolonial struggles, migration scholars including the anthropologists took varying positions on the significance of mobility and stasis in human life. By the beginning of the 21st century, the accumulation of capital by dispossession emerged as a process increasingly central to a historical conjuncture marked by both heightened migration and anti-immigrant nationalism. Political struggles for social and environmental justice began to merge with movements in support of migration. This political climate shaped a new engaged anthropology of migration.

Landscapes and Memory

Broadly, landscapes can be considered terrains of connectivity. Landscapes encompass wild, cultivated, urban, feral, and fallow spaces, as well as the human and nonhuman entities who inhabit and shape them. Memory refers to the past as it exists in the present, bridging temporally discrete moments through the intentional or unintentional act of remembering. Memory studies, from the view of anthropology, include explorations of individual forms of remembrance, as well as the collective, heterogenous ways of marking, interpreting, and erasing the past. Taken together, landscapes and memory co-constitute one another: landscapes store, depict, and evoke memories while memories recall, revise, and shape landscapes. Knowledge and power are inevitably wrapped up in the relationship, and anthropologists have investigated the manifest ways such forces emerge through human acts of cultivation, commemoration, nostalgia, and forgetting. Because landscapes and memory appear in both physical and immaterial forms, the social constructs, cultural expressions, and human and nonhuman relationships on which they are based generate rich material for anthropological study. While landscape and memory are surely topics independently worthy of study, undertaking the two in tandem elucidates the intertwining threads that bind together space and time; such studies interrogate realms of personal meaning and political power while simultaneously highlighting dynamic processes of adaptation, improvisation, and erasure.