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The Taphonomy of Disaster and the (Re)Formation of New Orleans
American Anthropologist
Abstract
Using observations from recent participation in post-Katrina recovery efforts in New Orleans, I make the case in this article that taphonomic processes such as trash removal, deposition, earthmoving, and demolition are a primary medium through which individuals and communities reconstitute themselves following a disaster. Taphonomy, or the formation of the archaeological record, does not simply reflect social processes, it is a social process. The taphonomic processes currently underway through the clean-up and rebuilding efforts in New Orleans dramatically illustrate this point. I recommend that both ethnographers and archaeologists undertake a fine-grained ethnoarchaeology of disaster. I engage with the literature of disaster to illustrate the potentials I see for this type of study, particularly as it pertains to the culture–nature nexus, perceptions of vulnerability, and the revelatory power of disasters.
... In the last decade or so, disaster ethnographers have examined the ruins of what they label "misguided development," which they criticize for its role in generating "natural" disasters (Angell 2014;Dawdy 2006Dawdy , 2010Dawdy , 2016González-Ruibal 2008;Hastrup 2010;Schäfers 2016;Wilford 2008;Xu 2017). Many of these critiques, like the wider literature on ruination that they form part of, build on the ideas of Walter Benjamin (1998, 178), who claimed that ruins are the material equivalent of allegories: they are figures that can be interpreted to reveal deeper truths. 2 Modern ruins, for example, reveal truths hidden by modernist aesthetics and material-spatial orders. ...
... In the last decade or so, disaster ethnographers have examined the ruins of what they label "misguided development," which they criticize for its role in generating "natural" disasters (Angell 2014;Dawdy 2006Dawdy , 2010Dawdy , 2016González-Ruibal 2008;Hastrup 2010;Schäfers 2016;Wilford 2008;Xu 2017). Many of these critiques, like the wider literature on ruination that they form part of, build on the ideas of Walter Benjamin (1998, 178), who claimed that ruins are the material equivalent of allegories: they are figures that can be interpreted to reveal deeper truths. 2 Modern ruins, for example, reveal truths hidden by modernist aesthetics and material-spatial orders. ...
... In the last decade or so, disaster ethnographers have examined the ruins of what they label "misguided development," which they criticize for its role in generating "natural" disasters (Angell 2014;Dawdy 2006Dawdy , 2010Dawdy , 2016González-Ruibal 2008;Hastrup 2010;Schäfers 2016;Wilford 2008;Xu 2017). Many of these critiques, like the wider literature on ruination that they form part of, build on the ideas of Walter Benjamin (1998, 178), who claimed that ruins are the material equivalent of allegories: they are figures that can be interpreted to reveal deeper truths. 2 Modern ruins, for example, reveal truths hidden by modernist aesthetics and material-spatial orders. ...
In 2011 a tsunami over 20 meters high struck Japan's northeastern coastline. Along with causing close to 20,000 deaths, it destroyed many buildings, leaving behind a landscape of ruins. In the years since the disaster, various groups in Japan have interpreted these ruins as a way to work through “what went wrong.” Some pointed to local officials’ failure to properly prepare for the disaster, as well as the form of economic development that they had promoted. Others, however, particularly state officials, argued that the ruins of failed development reveal something that can be used to stimulate economic recovery and legitimize further development. Ironically, these groups mobilized the debris of “progress” to advance progress itself, complicating theories of recent ruins as “counter‐sites.” This shows that actors can construct and leverage the truth content of ruins in support of the very ideologies and processes that caused their ruination in the first place. [3.11, disaster, governance, materiality, modernity, ruination, Japan]
... Following Shannon L. Dawdy's (2008) suggestion that archaeologists should take their methodological focus on the longue durée to better understand human-environment interactions in an era of climate change and environmental disasters, this paper suggests toxicity as an avenue to investigate the complex social and ecological effects of human-produced pollution. This project is not merely tasked with uncovering sites of environmental degradation: it also investigates the unique materiality of toxicity and the social implications of living with toxicants. ...
... Yet the archaeological record is not constituted by the sum of the 'real past' plus taphonomic distortions. These distortions are the history (Dawdy 2008). Given this, how are our relationships to these fragments changed if we view them, not merely as traces overdetermined by a single past, but as things that can be traced backwards as they enter and exit continually shifting assemblages in which they are active members? ...
Studies of the heritage industry, museology and archaeology and nationalism have highlighted vital ways in which the objects archaeologists study—far from being inert representations of the past—are lively, political, and potent in the present. This paper proposes that in order to investigate the long-term impacts of humans on the environment we as archaeologists must extend this reflexive turn to questions of ecological harm and pollution. First, archaeologists need to approach forms of human-derived pollutants as a type of artifact to attend to both the conditions of their production as well as the social effects of ecological degradation in the past. Second, archaeologists need to investigate the ongoing nature of this ecological degradation and its effects in the present. Drawing from my excavations of an early twentieth-century industrial site in Western Canada, I investigate how the rise of industrial-scale production in Edmonton, Alberta, remade the urban landscape by providing new consumer goods and manufacturing jobs, as well as—due to rampant pollution—remaking the environment and the ways in which the local population interacted with it. At the same time, I outline how the remains of this industry impacts the present as a form of pollution that affects local water quality and soil chemistry. Through these effects, industrial artifacts continue to actively transform the ecological relationships of humans and non-humans alike. In so doing, this project demonstrates the value of archaeology as a discipline whose focus on long temporalities and materiality provide unique insight into one of the most pressing contemporary political issues, ecological devastation and its social impact.
... Archaeologists have successfully taken up a variety of contemporary questions related to disasters (Dawdy 2006), environmental justice (Bangstad and Pétursdóttir 2021; Rockman and Hirtz 2020; Crutcher and Kondeh, this volume; Rybka, this volume), conflict and recovery (Keita et al. 2021;Lindskoug and Martínez 2022;McAtackney 2014;Zarankin and Funari 2008;Ylimaunu et al. 2024), global inequality (Funari 2009), undocumented migration (De Leon 2012Hamilakis, 2018;Jungfleisch, this volume;Kiddey 2024;Singleton 2017), and protests themselves (e.g., Beisaw and Olin 2020; Message 2020). ...
Archaeologies of activism, including contributions to this diverse volume, offer unique approaches to justice efforts, ranging from contemporary archaeologies of protests and activist events to archaeological projects that are -in and of themselves- acts of activism and protest. Some find themselves facilitating and negotiating communications between diverse groups and making decisions that maximize benefits for multiple groups. Some wrestle with questions of authority and decision-making and seek paths to decenter archaeologists in community efforts while still contributing to communities’ overall goals. Many find themselves, like ethnographers, inextricably embedded in their research with surprising consequences. They share stories of trial and error, challenges and successes, and sometimes painful progress. As there is no one-size-fits-all approach to doing archaeology about or of activism, this concluding chapter traces the origins of activism in archaeology and looks to future applications of archaeology in justice efforts for readers seeking opportunities for praxis.
... Disused quarry buildings were also scavenged for raw material, much like today, with blocks split into small tiles or slabs carted off for use elsewhere (Gwyn 2015, 74). The placement of some of these sites of secondary industry within the landscape was not incidental, and was deeply connected to the socioeconomics of the time (Dawdy 2006;Mitchell 2017): they were often located on the backs of tipping piles or hidden by walls of waste rock, deliberate acts of concealment by men who sold slate out of sight of the authorities. While tip quarrying was not always done illegally or "under the table", the practice was especially prevalent during the Great Depression (Gwyn 2015, 74). ...
Inspired by a type of quarrying waste nicknamed “bastard rock”, this paper uses the concept “bastard” as an analogy for industrial heritage landscapes: conceptually and physically difficult, inherently hybrid and comprised of contested lineages and inheritances. Advocating for relational landscape approaches in heritage management, this paper also addresses the exclusion of active industry from UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscapes and buffer zones, using the case study of Penrhyn Quarry in The Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales as an example of when “one-size-fits-all” heritage management strategies risk diminishing the cultural heritage they seek to preserve for future generations.
... Each layer can be dated by the assemblage of artefacts and environmental evidence -shedding light on many aspects of social life -for example, on the choices that were made by urban populations as to what to throw away at particular times (cf. Dawdy 2006). ...
This paper investigates a waste landscape in the Marston Vale, Bedfordshire, UK, consisting of a range of landfill hills. The hills originated as vast holes in the ground created by clay extraction, which presented suitable receptacles for the dumping of landfill waste. Although of much larger scale than evidence normally dealt with by archaeologists, these are treated here as archaeological features within an archaeological landscape. While other papers deal with important aspects of political ecology of waste landscapes, the present focus is on the upscaling of methods that is necessary to cope with such mega-scale contemporary waste landscapes, in order to make them more susceptible to archaeological analysis.
... The dumping of waste to create new terrain from a specific, time-limited event of waste production (in this case, the Blitz and subsequent demolitions) produces a distinct taphonomic and temporal signature comparable to other cities in the UK and elsewhere (see also Terrington et al. 2018, 33). Despite being hidden beneath a layer of greenery, the rubble is therefore an especially clear marker of anthropogenic change to the Earth's geological strata and one that has a distinctly social taphonomy (sensu Dawdy 2006). The proposed re-excavation of the marshes for flood prevention would indicate that land gained from waste remains an open deposit, subject to ongoing transformation; as Edgeworth notes, the archaeosphere is never complete (Edgeworth 2014, 105). ...
Vast quantities of waste rubble produced through demolition, natural disasters and conflict form part of the globe-spanning, anthropogenic deposit that has been called the “archaeosphere”. Whilst such material is often considered “waste” and of little value in the immediate aftermath of deconstruction or destruction, rubble rarely remains “wasted” for long and becomes reused in new cycles of construction. While architectural salvage and spolia are relatively well studied, the reuse of demolition rubble in the creation of new terrain (reclamation) is rarely discussed.
Responding to this, I discuss how World War II bomb rubble was used to reclaim ground from Hackney Marsh and Leyton Marsh in East London. This waste material not only provided valuable new terrain for leisure facilities, but also led to a broad array of unexpected and emergent uses and valuations, including as site of footballing heritage and place of remembrance and contestation.
... Handling the materiality of the contemporary world, archaeologists have worked to elucidate pressing social issues that simultaneously require immense care towards human subjects. Studying crises reveals new perspectives on how humans cope through material interactions, adapted to deal with social and environmental issues ranging from homelessness (Kiddey, 2017;Zimmerman et al., 2010) to migration (De Le on, 2012, 2015Hamilakis, 2017), long-term processes of colonization (Magnani and Magnani, 2018), and natural disasters (Bagwell, 2009;Dawdy, 2006Dawdy, , 2016Yazdi, 2010). While it is possible to draw attention to inequalities or the ramifications of poor state policy using archaeology, scholars have wrestled with the ethics of representing human suffering (see for instance De Le on, 2015). ...
Global crises drastically alter human behavior, rapidly impacting patterns of movement and consumption. A rapid-response analysis of material culture brings new perspective to disasters as they unfold. We present a case study of the coronavirus pandemic in Tromsø, Norway, based on fieldwork from March 2020 to April 2021. Using a methodology rooted in social distancing and through systematic, diachronic, and spatial analysis of trash (e.g., discarded gloves, sanitization products), signage, and barriers, we show how material perspectives improve understanding of relationships between public action and government policy (in this case examined in relation to the Norwegian concept of collective labor, dugnad). We demonstrate that the materiality of individual, small-scale innovations and behaviors that typified the pandemic will have the lowest long-term visibility, as they are increasingly replaced or outnumbered by more durable representations generated by centralized state and corporate bodies that suggest close affinity between state directive and local action. We reflect on how the differential durability of material responses to COVID-19 will shape future memories of the crisis.
... Archaeology is responsive to current events, from global migration and refugee crises (De León 2012, 2015Hamilakis 2016;Kiddey 2019) to deforestation (González-Ruibal and Hernando 2010), pollution (Pétursdóttir 2020;Schofield et al. 2020), and natural disaster (Dawdy 2006(Dawdy , 2016. Archaeological analysis reveals novel perspectives on contemporary human behavior (see also Nativ and Lucas 2020), drawing attention to manifestations of global geopolitics and local ways of coping expressed through the material world. ...
This article shows how to record current events from an archaeological perspective. With a case study from the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, we provide accessible tools to document broad spatial and behavioral patterns through material culture as they emerge. Stressing the importance of ethical engagement with contemporary subjects, we adapt archaeological field methods—including geolocation, photography, and three-dimensional modeling—to analyze the changing relationships between materiality and human sociality through the crisis. Integrating data from four contributors, we suggest that this workflow may engage broader publics as anthropological data collectors to describe unexpected social phenomena. Contemporary archaeological perspectives, deployed in rapid response, provide alternative readings on the development of current events. In the presented case, we suggest that local ways of coping with the pandemic may be overshadowed by the materiality of large-scale corporate and state response.
... The study of the archaeology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has emerged as a distinctive sub discipline within archaeology (Bradley et al. 2004;Buchli and Lucas 2001;Dawdy 2006;González-Ruibal , 2019;Saitta 2007). In Britain the focus has been on the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the material dimension of post/super/hyper modernity (Harrison and Schofield 2010). ...
The Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s was a global economic crisis, yet to understand its impacts in material terms, it is necessary to recognize that they were situated within specific local and regional contexts. This article, drawing on the work of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Landscapes of the Great Depression in the North East project, explores the impacts and responses to the Great Depression in Northeast England through an exploration of the materiality of a series of different responses to the crisis, as well as wider consideration of its impact on the landscape. By moving beyond an individual site, and instead looking at a range of interventions at site and landscape scale it shows the potential of taking a more holistic and comparative approach to exploring the impact of the Great Depression and offers an approach that might be used to better understand economic crises in other situations and contexts.
... While site formation processes and taphonomy are widely discussed in archaeology (e.g., Binford 1983;Brain 1981;Dawdy 2006;Schiffer 1976Schiffer , 1987, there is limited Table 1 List of sites investigated archaeologically and shown in Fig. 1 Site Name International Journal of Historical Archaeology consideration of these in relation to underfloor deposits in historical archaeology. Casey (2004: 33) suggested this may be in part because the presence of cellars in many American buildings precludes the capacity for deposits to build up underneath floorboards, so they are rarely encountered. ...
Archaeological deposits build up inside standing buildings both under and between floors and these have the potential to provide considerable information about human behavior in the past. Under and between floor spaces provide a unique depositional environment that allow the survival of rare and fragile organic materials that typically do not survive in other archaeological contexts, including paper, cardboard, fabric and other fibres, seeds, leather, and human hair and skin cells. However, they require a clear understanding of depositional processes to allow their interpretation. Experimental archaeology was conducted to understand the process of artifact deposition and the interpretation of underfloor deposits in twelve standing buildings in Western Australia. Floors were built and a range of artifacts swept across them to determine how artifacts travelled across floorboards or fell through gaps between boards. Size, shape, and angularity of artifacts were key determinants of the likelihood of deposition. Sweeping activity makes it more likely that material will be deposited around the margins of rooms, and particularly, to either side of doorways. Underfloor deposits excavated from two specific Western Australian buildings, Ellensbrook Homestead, and the York Residency Museum, are interpreted based on the results of these experiments.
... Emphatically impermanent, both in terms of how long residents can stay and in how long the building itself will remain in situ, PLACE/Ladywell is not designed as a long-term home. It has been argued that disasters such as earthquakes "prompt explicit engagements with the city as a material and social assemblage" including "at the level of intimate experience" (Angell 2014:676), making "relations between people and their landscape" especially "self-conscious" and "active" (Dawdy 2006:720, quoted in Angell 2014. We argue that the same is true of the slow crisis of homelessness; a disaster situation in which there is heightened sensitivity to the capacities of materials and objects to afford or deny homemaking, as well as to the politicised distribution and governance of those materials by human actors. ...
This paper explores resident experiences of life in PLACE/Ladywell, a “pop‐up” social housing scheme in London providing temporary accommodation for homeless families. Specifically, we consider barriers to, and assertions of, homemaking in this temporary setting through fixtures and fittings—a door lock, wall stickers, and a fireplace. The paper utilises assemblage thinking to understand homemaking within these time‐limited and constrained circumstances. Despite their seeming banality, fixtures and fittings offer a material, politicised, and lively means of studying the attempted and thwarted production of home by residents living in PLACE/Ladywell. The absence of door locks reduces parents’ ability to maintain privacy and intimate relations; restrictions on hanging pictures and other decorative measures are circumvented by the use of wall stickers; and a defiant decorative fireplace establishes a sense of home in a temporary setting. Together, these objects constitute vital elements in negotiations between fixity and impermanence in temporary accommodation.
... Instead of reducing the idea of movement inherent in the ruin to an influence to be neutralized in order to reconstruct a previous state considered unaltered, this movement can itself be analyzed. In other words, remains do not simply preserve the trace of social processes, they are social processes both taphonomically and in themselves (Alcock, 2002;Dawdy, 2006). This perspective encourages us to look at the ruin as a site of a tension, a ''play of forces'' as Simmel (1907) puts it, between construction and destruction; or between future and past, permanence and impermanence, memory and forgetting (Schnapp, 2015). ...
Monumental architecture in Levantine sites such as Jerf el-Ahmar, Göbekli Tepe, or Jericho appears to play an important role in place-making practices and in the organization of a possibly hierarchical sociopolitical life at the very beginning of the Neolithic. This paper focuses on an underdeveloped aspect of this phenomenon: all these buildings were ritually destroyed in a highly spectacular and costly fashion. Their ruins were purposefully curated and accumulated. Far from being static remains, these structures are the meaningful result of the dynamic re-production of monumental space and of its inscription in the landscape. Understanding these actions calls for decentering the dominant vision of architectural valuation associated primarily with ideas of “creation” or “heritage.” Architectural destruction, I shall finally claim, may well be more significant than construction for understanding the Neolithic consolidation of sedentism in the Near East.
... While I have included contributors from a range of backgrounds at different stages in their careers, there are important voices missing (for a few published in this journal, see Dawdy 2006;De León 2012). That being said, the contributors describe the diversity of thought on the subject, even as they explore common ground. ...
... While I have included contributors from a range of backgrounds at different stages in their careers, there are important voices missing (for a few published in this journal, see Dawdy 2006;De León 2012). That being said, the contributors describe the diversity of thought on the subject, even as they explore common ground. ...
... While I have included contributors from a range of backgrounds at different stages in their careers, there are important voices missing (for a few published in this journal, see Dawdy 2006;De León 2012). That being said, the contributors describe the diversity of thought on the subject, even as they explore common ground. ...
This Vital Topics Forum looks at archaeology as a form of
bearing witness. While bearing witness has been an important
frame for scholarly interrogation of structural violence
for some time (Agamben 1998; Butler 2016), it is perhaps
Paul Farmer (2004) who popularized this way of scrutinizing
structural violence. For Farmer, there are two ways to bear
witness. The first is “to show the stoic suffering of the poor”
(25). The second entails showing that suffering “is a consequence
of structural violence that is immanent to the prevailing
system and that links together apparently disconnected
aspects of that system” (26).At its most general level, bearing
witness is a valuable way to scrutinize violent encounters,
traumatic events, dislocations, and structural inequalities.
It can help obtain support from those who might feel distant
from those events, diffuse pressure from communities
most directly affected, and bring about change. Bearing witness
can take the form of communicating traumatic personal
experiences or documenting for others the dislocations, institutionalized
violence, and kinds of difference-making that
often escape social examination. Contributors build on these
forms by arguing that bearing witness is part of an archaeological
episteme. That is, as archaeologists, we produce
accounts of the past. When we produce such accounts, we
make choices about how they are narrated. Those choices, of
course, are constrained by existing traditions, our positions
in the field, and our political commitments. Most importantly,
those accounts are limited by what we are trained to
see as observers.
... While I have included contributors from a range of backgrounds at different stages in their careers, there are important voices missing (for a few published in this journal, see Dawdy 2006;De León 2012). That being said, the contributors describe the diversity of thought on the subject, even as they explore common ground. ...
... While I have included contributors from a range of backgrounds at different stages in their careers, there are important voices missing (for a few published in this journal, see Dawdy 2006;De León 2012). That being said, the contributors describe the diversity of thought on the subject, even as they explore common ground. ...
Collaboration with CHCP has shown me that the archaeological
record does not function as a silent witness.
Without question, archaeological discoveries have a
disruptive potential. Artifacts can evoke powerful responses
that draw emotional connections between the present and
the past. Yet, responses to evidence of suffering are not automatic.
Such emotions are produced within and through what
Williams (1977) eloquently termed “structures of feeling.”
The May 5, 1887, San Jose Daily Times reported “general rejoicing”
among white San Joseans witnessing the fire that consumed
the Market Street Chinatown. My initial tendency to
interpret heat-affected artifacts as evidence of tragedy, rather
than resilience, exemplifies how emotional responses are not
independent of political, economic, and discursive structures.
As CHCP engages in its ongoing work to commemorate
Chinese American history, they and other heritage stakeholders
are reshaping these discursive structures and creating
possibilities for more meaningful accounts of the past.
... While I have included contributors from a range of backgrounds at different stages in their careers, there are important voices missing (for a few published in this journal, see Dawdy 2006;De León 2012). That being said, the contributors describe the diversity of thought on the subject, even as they explore common ground. ...
... While the temporality of materials normally refers to how objects are impacted by time as an external force, archaeology is arguably unique for its careful attention to materials as time. The material mediation of time is at issue not only with the specific objects archaeologists uncover and curate, but also with the taphonomic processes that they must understand in order to investigate the deposition of objects and their transformation over various periods of time (Schiffer 1987;Dawdy 2006). Distinct regions and layers of the Earth involve different taphonomic conditions, which can influence the preservation and distribution of material remains. ...
This paper compares the material practice of amateur astronomers with that of archaeologists, specifically arguing that they engage with materials and time in distinct but complementary ways. In particular, the paper outlines the ways in which amateur astronomers become attuned to the temporal cycles and rhythms of extraterrestrial materials as they gaze into the night sky, much like how archaeological practitioners must get to know the taphonomic processes involved in the formation of archaeological sites. Finally, it is argued that for these reasons astronomers might offer insights into the investigation of orbital space debris - a topic of interest among archaeologists of outer space - and materials that produce their own threatening and nested temporalities.
... Thus, the archaeological study of MDVs allows archaeologists to examine the taphonomy of ruins. Dawdy ( 2006 ) argues for a taphonomy of disaster. For instance, when Hurricane Katrina occurred in New Orleans, it wiped out much of the city in a short period of time. ...
This collection of essays in Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement draws inspiration from current archaeological interest in the movement of individuals, things, and ideas in the recent past. Movement is fundamentally concerned with the relationship(s) among time, object, person, and space. The volume argues that understanding movement in the past requires a shift away from traditional, fieldwork-based archaeological ontologies towards fluid, trajectory-based studies. Archaeology, by its very nature, locates objects frozen in space (literally in their three-dimensional matrices) at sites that are often stripped of people. An archaeology of movement must break away from this stasis and cut new pathways that trace the boundary-crossing contextuality inherent in object/person mobility.
Essays in this volume build on these new approaches, confronting issues of movement from a variety of perspectives. They are divided into four sections, based on how the act of moving is framed. The groups into which these chapters are placed are not meant to be unyielding or definitive. The first section, "Objects in Motion," includes case studies that follow the paths of material culture and its interactions with groups of people. The second section of this volume, "People in Motion," features chapters that explore the shifting material traces of human mobility. Chapters in the third section of this book, "Movement through Spaces," illustrate the effects that particular spaces have on the people and objects who pass through them. Finally, there is an afterward that cohesively addresses the issue of studying movement in the recent past. At the heart of Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement is a concern with the hybridity of people and things, affordances of objects and spaces, contemporary heritage issues, and the effects of movement on archaeological subjects in the recent and contemporary past.
... The incompleteness of assemblages has been a productive line of reasoning. Whether one is talking about the site-formation process (Schiffer 1987), the inability of conceptual apparatus to confront difference and variation (Brumfiel 1992), the differential preservation of materials (Dawdy 2006), or what assemblages conceal (De León 2012), what is missing from the assemblage has brought about an ordered set of questions to some very messy and fragmentary data. ...
Recent headlines about Michigan, California, and India have disabused a public conventional wisdom that water is free of charge. Cases such as these, where human needs directly compete with institutional forces, are not new. Water, as a substance essential to production and reproduction in eighteenth-century Caribbean plantations, created a predicament, the resolution of which was unevenly borne by human beings held as slaves. Building on Barbara Voss’ concept of the mesoscale and Maria Zedeno’s insights about index objects, I present an assemblage-based analysis of slave life that compares “water ways” at two plantations occupied during Dominica’s brief sugar boom (1760–1830). I combine material characteristics of objects used to capture and transform water with their biographies in a landscape, circulations in peripheral flows, and supporting roles in social relations. Pottery and glass used to store, capture, and serve water were part of the creative strategies used by enslaved laborers to resolve some of the predicaments of slavery. At the same time, they created predicaments of their own, as media for some of the cultural politics that supported plantation colonies. As such, a focus on water ways allows us to examine exclusionary forces, such as regulation, markets, violence, and legitimation, at the human scale.
... Thus, the archaeological study of MDVs allows archaeologists to examine the taphonomy of ruins. Dawdy ( 2006 ) argues for a taphonomy of disaster. For instance, when Hurricane Katrina occurred in New Orleans, it wiped out much of the city in a short period of time. ...
In this chapter we consider military dependents’ villages (MDV), juancun, of Taiwan as a subject for the archaeological study of modern ruins. MDVs were built in Taiwan after the retreat of the Nationalist Government from Mainland China to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War between 1945 and 1949. In order to settle a large number of military personnel and their dependents from Mainland China, more than 800 MDVs were built as temporary settlements throughout Taiwan beginning in the 1950s. Since the retreat was supposed to be temporary, these MDVs were built simply. However, the plan to invade Mainland China was never realized because of the changing political situation. As a result, the MDVs became long-term settlements for the diaspora group, Waishengren. Beginning in the 1970s, the government initiated programs to reconstruct the MDVs. Since then, many MDVs have been reconstructed to serve as public housing or other public buildings. Some of the MDVs have already been torn down, but no construction has been done yet. A small number of MDVs have remained intact and are awaiting reconstruction; the villagers now moved elsewhere. These decaying MDVs became an obstacle for urban renewal. However, in recent years, some of the MDVs have been preserved for their social value. Some of them were preserved because of their representation of the Waishengren identity and others were preserved of artistic value. Our research examines the construction, destruction, ruination, and reuse of MDVs in the past 60 years. We argue that this contemporary archaeological project concerning the social life of modern ruins will provide us with new perspective to interpret how a settlement is built, remodeled, and rebuilt in any archaeological context.
Between 1707 and 1715 the St. Paul’s parsonage served as a residence for the Anglican missionaries assigned to the parish. Household provisions were stored in a brick-lined cellar below the house until it was destroyed by fire in July of 1715. This fire began the cellar’s functional transformation from storage to refuse pit. Here we use the artifacts and faunal materials recovered during archaeological excavations of the cellar and its stratigraphy, in conjunction with a few surviving letters chronicling some of the events that took place in 1715, to reconstruct the events that contributed to the formation of the archaeological deposits within the cellar.
In this article, I undertake an archaeology of urban “wastelands.” In doing so I ask how such places are materially and conceptually “made” and examine the effects that such labeling has on how postindustrial urban sites are used and valued. Taking examples from the capital cities of England and Scotland (London and Edinburgh), I show that the meaning of “waste” at such sites is temporally and socially contingent. Establishing certainty between which landscapes are “wasted” and which are not can prove difficult, and, in some cases, archaeologists themselves may be implicated in labeling and then “cleansing” wastelands, with archaeology operating as a form of waste management. While wastelands may appear as dissonant and associated with negativity or decay at first glance, I show that these places can also facilitate surprisingly generative and creative uses and provide new forms of heritage value.
The pandemic response was a thoroughly mediated phenomenon – one that paired digital information technologies with automated logistical systems to address inter-related crises of circulation. In the logistical sphere, automated media were used to manage flows of people, commodities and even (in the case of ‘smart’ ventilation systems) air itself. In the media realm, automated systems played a role in circulating timely notifications and alerts and in detecting and responding to false information. This theme issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers focused on the analysis of automated control and response systems, including the networked devices and infrastructures that supported them, and the digital forms of data collection and processing they enabled. This introductory essay focuses on some organizing themes that emerge from the theme issue contributions, including the relationship between automation and the temporality of viral contagion, logics of pre-emptive intervention and forms of atmospheric and environmental control.
Qualitative research on disaster debris removal decisions https://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_record_Report.cfm?dirEntryId=358954&Lab=CESER
The authors blend archaeological data with ethnographic, archival, and historical accounts to tell the story of a post-Famine stone cabin in County Cork, Ireland that was inhabited between 1860 and 1915. Research reveals the stories of the two families that once lived in the cabin and connects them to broader issues of land ownership, politics, and social dynamics. These issues came to a head in 1915, when one family was evicted from the property and the cabin was set ablaze. Artefacts found in situ speak to the complexities of everyday life and reveal localized expressions of identity and belonging.
Contamination has been viewed as a form of invasion—an intrusion perpetrated by a group, a pernicious substance, or an unwanted agent. It is ‘the Other’ that has fascinated anthropologists for so long. We often assume that our current theory of knowledge about contamination is justified—although this current understanding fails to take into account the agency of contaminants themselves. Ideas about contamination throughout history have helped to fashion a particular dichotomy—a dualism where infection contrasts against wellbeing, where purity confronts impurity, and where ‘pristine’ nature opposes toxic landscapes. However, this binary understanding is often a double bind that does not reflect all of the nuances involved in contemporary problems, such as ecological disasters. For this reason, anthropologists have a lot to gain by focusing on matter – that is – to envision the agency of given materialities as a complementary topic to the analytical processes surrounding contamination. For instance, what actually happens if we consider that contamination “refuses” to recognize our political, social, and cultural boundaries? This article attempts to reconceive the notion of contamination by targeting the materiality of contaminants, particularly nuclear radioactivity in relation to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, in order to theorize a hybridized (i.e., non-binary) understanding of contamination—an understanding that better reflects the ways in which societies, governments, and individuals think about and interact with matter.
At a time when archaeology has turned away from questions of the long-term and large scale, this collection of essays reflects on some of the big questions in archaeology and ancient history - how and why societies have grown in scale and complexity, how they have maintained and discarded aspects of their own cultural heritage, and how they have collapsed. In addressing these long-standing questions of broad interest and importance, the authors develop counter-narratives - new ways of understanding what used to be termed 'cultural evolution'. Encompassing the Middle East and Egypt, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, the fourteen essays offer perspectives on long-term cultural trajectories; on cities, states and empires; on collapse; and on the relationship between archaeology and history. The book concludes with a commentary by one of the major voices in archaeological theory, Norman Yoffee.
At a time when archaeology has turned away from questions of the long-term and large scale, this collection of essays reflects on some of the big questions in archaeology and ancient history - how and why societies have grown in scale and complexity, how they have maintained and discarded aspects of their own cultural heritage, and how they have collapsed. In addressing these long-standing questions of broad interest and importance, the authors develop counter-narratives - new ways of understanding what used to be termed 'cultural evolution'. Encompassing the Middle East and Egypt, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, the fourteen essays offer perspectives on long-term cultural trajectories; on cities, states and empires; on collapse; and on the relationship between archaeology and history. The book concludes with a commentary by one of the major voices in archaeological theory, Norman Yoffee.
This article examines how people formed and negotiated relations to time in routine engagements with materials and places in medieval South India. Questions of history and memory, which have become central to our understanding of precolonial Indian social and political practices, are frequently considered in relation to courtly epigraphical and textual production or monumental building projects. Positing that experiences of time are formed in everyday acts of production, consumption and maintenance, this article problematises the term ‘social memory’ to propose an alternative framework for exploring temporal relations: the concept of historicity. Historicity provides a robust analytical vocabulary for discussing how historical actors inhabited their own present, how they oriented themselves towards pasts and futures, and the kinds of timescales that both framed their actions and were formed in action. Operationalising this framework, I build on an analysis of excavated ceramics from a twelfth- to thirteenth-century settlement at Maski (northern Karnataka) to foreground the diverse ways in which individuals and communities drew upon available pasts and acted with initiative within an intersubjective present world of tasks and activities.
From the Trojan War to the sack of Rome, from the fall of Constantinople to the bombings of World War II and the recent devastation of Syrian towns, the destruction of cities and the slaughter of civilian populations are among the most dramatic events in world history. But how reliable are literary sources for these events? Did ancient authors exaggerate the scale of destruction to create sensational narratives? This volume reassesses the impact of physical destruction on ancient Greek cities and its demographic and economic implications. Addressing methodological issues of interpreting the archaeological evidence for destructions, the volume examines the evidence for the destruction, survival, and recovery of Greek cities. The studies, written by an international group of specialists in archaeology, ancient history, and numismatic, range from Sicily to Asia Minor and Aegean Thrace, and include Athens, Corinth, and Eretria. They highlight the resilience of ancient populations and the recovery of cities in the long term.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nearly every facet of our world, including some of the most fundamental forms of human behavior and our conception of the social. Everyday activities now pose a risk to individuals and to society as a whole. This radical shift in how we live has produced a wide array of material responses across the globe. This photo essay seeks to open up dialogue and ask questions about the numerous forms of COVID-19 materiality and altered landscapes that the authors have chronicled, witnessed, documented and cataloged in their communities, using archaeological and ethnographic methods. This materiality includes chalk art, graffiti, painted rocks and signage placed in both public and private spaces within the project authors’ communities. In framing our questions, we draw upon theoretical frameworks in the fields of cultural trauma studies, cultural anthropology and contemporary archaeology.
Despite widespread attention to the recent past as an archaeological topic, few archaeologists have attended to the particular social and ecological stakes of one of the most defining material features of contemporary life: the long-term effects of toxic industrial waste. Identifying the present era as the high Capitalocene, this article highlights the contemporary as a period caught between the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist production and the persistence of industrial waste. Drawing on an archaeological case study from Edmonton, Alberta, we outline how the working-class shanty town community of Ross Acreage (occupied 1900–1950) was formed in relation to the industrial waste that suffused its landscape. Drawing on data from both archaeological excavation and environmental testing, this article argues that the community of Ross Acreage was defined materially by its long-term relationship with industrial waste, what we term a ‘fence-line community’.
On 22 February 2011, a devastating earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand. The damage wrought by the earthquakes has led to an extensive archaeological project in the city, which has generated a wealth of new archaeological data. Both authors have long associations with the city and this has left them carrying out the archaeology of their own community, an experience that comes with a range of challenges and opportunities. These challenges and opportunities relate to the scale of the work, community engagement and how archaeology can contribute to breaking down the myths associated with Christchurch’s identity and its past.
In April 1859, U.S. Army assistant surgeon Charles W. Brewer was dispatched to a remote mountain valley in the Utah Territory with orders to oversee the burial of 120 massacre victims. The scattered bones of overland immigrants who had been murdered by Mormon militiamen were gathered and interred in a series of mass graves. Though Brewer reported that his work was complete, he carried away from the site two skulls and “long tresses of dark and blonde hair of some of the tender victims” (Robinson 1884). One of the crania was recently identified in the collections of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, historically known as the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C. The analysis of “Specimen 2032” is presented here, along with the history of movements and encounters that brought it to this place. Rather than focus solely on the object’s authenticity or its linkages to the massacre site, we examine it within multiple assemblages—lively gatherings of materials, agents, and practices. In moving through these assemblages, the so-called specimen, we argue, is ontologically modified and transformed.
With modern ruins, there may be diverging perspectives about whether the sites or objects are unsightly waste or artifacts. Among the local communities who routinely come into contact with such ruins, this viewpoint is often actively negotiated, and with it, so is history itself. Scholars of contemporary archaeology discuss the value of tracing these negotiations to understand the wider political and cultural process of historical creation, or negation. The situation becomes more complex in the wake of tragedy or disaster. Here, I explore the relationship of stakeholders on the Arizona–Sonora international border to the material culture of undocumented migrants, the objects left behind along the clandestine wilderness routes of migrant travelers abandoned en masse to ruin, as if in the fallout of disaster. But this disaster is human made, the product of US border policy. I consider these objects as a form of modern ruins that occupy a politically laden dialectical space between trash and heritage, a negotiation with ramifications for border policy. [contemporary archaeology, ruins, trash, heritage, US-Mexico border].
This article argues that some elements of material culture can creatively cross the line between notions of “nature” and “culture” as these and related ideas are often tacitly understood by some modern people. This has implications for the biosphere, but the division of these categories is also tied up with the division of people, processes of identification, memorialization, and the way some people are defined out of the human realm altogether. Modern material culture—objects used, left, manipulated, and removed by people—seems particularly adept at telling us about these categories in the minds of some modern people. An archaeology of the contemporary examines how people interact with different kinds of “natural” things in places where nature and culture, in the modern imaginary, meet and conflict. In the starkly different contexts of the city of Detroit and Yosemite National Park, such objects have been managed and manipulated in a way that speaks to crucial issues of memory, identity, and race. [contemporary archaeology, nature and culture, memory, national parks, Detroit]
In this article an archaeological critique of the time of modernity is proposed. This critique is developed through three main themes: materiality, multi-temporality, and ethics. Materiality is key to producing relevant archaeological accounts of the time of modernity: historical archaeology has to follow the time of things, rather than the temporal frameworks inherited from history and other fields. Multi-temporality is at the heart of modernity, which has to be understood as a heterogeneous phenomenon in which multiple, often incompatible, temporalities coalesce and clash, rather than as an homogeneous time of change and acceleration. Finally, the blurring of the past/present divide that is manifested through universal justice, political temporalities, and indigenous memory practices poses an important challenge to archaeology, but, at the same time, provides a unique opportunity to make the discipline socially relevant.
The National Trust of Australia (W.A.) property ‘Old Farm Strawberry Hill’ in Albany, Western Australia is
one of the state’s most significant heritage locations. It is a registered Aboriginal site where British colonists
established the first farm in the fledgling colony, and where Governor Stirling was housed briefly. Long
running archaeological investigations from University of Western Australia researchers at the site since the
late 1990s have revealed the shift from a solely Noongar Mineng landscape around the site of Barmup to the
arrival of the colony’s first farm, the history of the early buildings associated with Governor Stirling and
other early colonists, and material evidence for the various phases of life at the site. Four different phases
of investigation, each with different aims, have rewritten the history of the site, and provided the National
Trust with a range of positive heritage outcomes, allowing new interpretations of the site. In particular the
hidden histories of the undocumented residents of the site have been shown, and the general failure of the
upper class Spencer family to establish a British style country estate in Western Australia has been
demonstrated through the analysis of archaeological material.
Historicity has emerged within anthropology to refer to cultural perceptions of the past. It calls attention to the techniques such as rituals that people use to learn about the past, the principles that guide them, and the performances and genres in which information about the past can be presented. The concept is in essential tension with the meaning of the term as “factuality” within the discipline of history and in wider society. Anthropologists also sometimes compose histories within this Western paradigm, but historicity in anthropology orientates a different objective, namely to discover the ways (beyond Western historicism) in which people, whether within or outside the West, construe and represent the past. Historicity, which is grounded in a notion of temporality, offers a framework for approaching time as nonlinear and may thus be suited to studying other histories without fundamentally measuring how well they conform to Western history.
At a time when archaeology has turned away from questions of the long-term and large scale, this collection of essays reflects on some of the big questions in archaeology and ancient history - how and why societies have grown in scale and complexity, how they have maintained and discarded aspects of their own cultural heritage, and how they have collapsed. In addressing these long-standing questions of broad interest and importance, the authors develop counter-narratives - new ways of understanding what used to be termed 'cultural evolution'. Encompassing the Middle East and Egypt, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, the fourteen essays offer perspectives on long-term cultural trajectories; on cities, states and empires; on collapse; and on the relationship between archaeology and history. The book concludes with a commentary by one of the major voices in archaeological theory, Norman Yoffee.
In chapter 1, Beaudry explores how household archaeology has grown into a vibrant area of archaeological research and provides an overview of the history of household archaeology, its major themes, theoretical approaches, and emerging trends. More than the study of architecture, household archaeology provides an avenue through which scholars may address issues of gender, power, and inequality in different societies. Beaudry points out that these themes can be addressed by employing practice theory to investigate the object worlds that households create, the material habitus that develops within particular households, and the ways in which objects in those worlds affect household members’ identity and self-presentation within and beyond the household. Beaudry suggests that archaeological theory focusing on refuse and midden analysis is key for comprehending the emotional taphonomy of discard and its relationship to episodes of household upheaval. She sees the case studies in this volume as contributions to a historical archaeology of households that affords insight into the ways that individual households are enmeshed in wider social issues and processes.
The El Niño phenomenon can cause devastating inundation with catastrophic social and economic impacts. Evidence for multiple second-millennium BC El Niño events is present as laminated sediment layers at Huaca Cortada, a large Initial Period monument of the Caballo Muerto Complex in the Moche Valley, Peru. These indicate that one response to this period of climatic flux was the renewal and expansion of temple architecture, perhaps in an effort to demonstrate control over nature, and to maintain a symbol of community permanence. The final abandonment of Huaca Cortada is also associated with an El Niño event around 1000–900 BC.
Because the landscape on which prehistoric people lived was dynamic and continually changed, the record of prehistoric activities across the landscape has been differentially presented and destroyed. insightful reconstructions of human organizational (settlement) systems from the archaeological record require a full understanding of the geological forces and history that have shaped that record. The landscape histories of the North Dakota Badlands and the stream systems of southern Arizona illustrate these points and the importance of geoarchaeological investigations to properly interpret the archaeological record.
A simple demographic model is developed here that fits the observed data of population loss and recovery following a disaster. The model includes a constant annual growth factor and an immigration wave that is superimposed on it. The constant annual growth factor (∼0.3%) is modified by introducing the concept of Relative Attractiveness of the place under consideration. The model is sufficiently flexible to handle cases ranging from the fall/recovery of a major city, which occurs on a time frame of 10 years to the gradual deterioration and no recovery of a “doomed” society or some demographic effects of a sudden event such as the gold rush in California.The observed population recovery time data, which may spread over periods of centuries, include all the other processes at work in the recovering society, so that the parameters chosen for the model are averages over both time and demographic processes. The model enables the quantitative estimation of population recovery time given the relative population loss and estimated shape of the Relative Attractiveness function. The applicability of the model to various events of population decline and recovery throughout Maya history was demonstrated. It can be applied to the whole society or to specific Polities, provided the required data are available.Whenever the model is used, it has to be borne in mind that it is meant to provide rough estimates only, and that the original data, on which the model is based, have a considerable spread in them. Therefore, the appropriate spread has to be taken into consideration.Disasters, especially those that cause large population losses, in which the population recovery process includes an in-migration wave, can probably be observed in the archaeological records as “cultural transitions”.
EXTRACT
In this chapter, the interactions between volcanism and early Maori society in
New Zealand - both disastrous and beneficial - are examined. Due to the brevity
of New Zealand's written history, the study relies largely on interpretations of
volcanological, palaeoenvironmental, archaeological and oral history data, in turn
constrained mainly by radiocarbon and other dating techniques including
palaeomagnetism, obsidian hydration and thermoluminescence. For the purposes
of the review, we have defined 'early' Maori society to date from 'earliest settlement' of New Zealand (c. AD 1250-1300) until the catastrophic Tarawera eruption on 10 June, AD 1886, the traumatic effects of which have been well described. After discussing briefly the question of origin and timing of initial Polynesian settlement, we summarise in detail the record of volcanic activity in New Zealand's North Island since c. AD 200, and record the types of volcanic hazards associated with this activity. We next use one of the main products of volcanism - tephra - to date and correlate the palaeoenvironmental impacts of early Maori people with archaeological records via tephrochronology. Tephrochronology is defined as the use of tephra layers, the unconsolidated, primary, pyroclastic products of volcanic eruptions, as chronostratigraphic marker beds to establish numerical or relative ages (e.g. Froggatt and Lowe, 1990; Lowe and Hunt, 2001). Following this section, the likely effects and impacts that volcanism and tephra deposition had on Maori society are examined. Turning to the other side of the coin, we describe the benefits and exploitation of volcanic features and products by early Maori. Finally, we discuss aspects of Maori mythology and spirituality associated with volcanism.
Nothing lasts for ever, not least human civilizations. There are many reasons why societies stand or fall, and these lessons from the past require investigation at various places and on various timescales.
Despite the establishment of significant traditions of emotion research in many disciplines, there has been little discussion of the state and potential of the archaeological study of emotion. This paper aims to review archaeological approaches to emotion-to assess the significance of existing studies and outline the potential for the incorporation of emotion into archaeological research. It argues that the study of emotion in the past is both necessary and possible; it considers which understandings of emotion we might find most useful, how the archaeology of emotion might be carried out, and what are the most promising avenues to explore. In archaeology, both the sociobiological approach and one based on empathy have serious problems. After reviewing and rejecting the dichotomy between emotions as entirely biological, universal, and hard-wired, on one hand, and entirely social and constructed, on the other, a view of emotions as historically specific and experientially embodied is advanced. Finally it is argued that it is vitally important for us to incorporate a consideration of emotional values and understandings into our archaeologies but that emotion cannot be separated from other aspects of social and cultural meaning and experience.
Many experiments have been conducted in the field of taphonomy in order to understand the effects of some agents and the associated pattern and process of bone modifications. A review of these experiments and the patterns of bone modifications is presented here. Numerous experiments focus on peculiar points of bone accumulation, mainly to gain knowledge about human habits and practices, but the action of some taphonomic agents has also been explored, among them, diagenetic processes. The striking feature of all these works are that they are localized, performed on non–statistical samples and without repeatability. Very few experiments combine different agents to fit more closely to the complexity of most fossil bone accumulations.
An inherent tension exists between the meanings of the World Trade Center site created by dominant political and economic players and the significance of the space for those who actually live near it. Most of the writing on and analysis of the site have focused on the construction of a memorial space for an imagined national and global community of visitors who identify with its broader, state-produced meanings. But New Yorkers, in general, and downtown residents, in particular, bring to meaning making their own personal involvement in and knowledge of a located history that has social, political, and economic significance for their everyday lives. These meanings are as much a part of memorialization as the dominant players' political machinations and economic competition for space and status. Uncovering and eliciting these local memorial discourses is part of an ethnographic project that focuses on how personalized narratives of loss emerge and are manipulated within mass-mediated representations of the World Trade Center space. My contribution to understanding how the memorial process works has been to analyze what downtown residents say about their experience of September 11 and its aftermath, to record their feelings about a memorial, and, in so doing, to contest, expand, and modify the dominant media and governmental representations of September 11 and its memorialization.
In this article, I examine the narratives and meanings that have been projected onto the space of Ground Zero in New York City since September 11, 2001, how they have been deployed for various political agendas, and how they have informed the ways in which the site will be rebuilt and memorialized. I investigate the changing meanings attributed to the dust and the footprints of the World Trade Center buildings and the debates over architectural designs and the proposed memorial.
Leslie 2006 A New Landfill in New Orleans Sets Off a Battle
- Eaton
Eaton, Leslie 2006 A New Landfill in New Orleans Sets Off a Battle. New York Times, May 8: A1.
and Charles Ortloff 1981 Living with Crisis: Human Perceptions of Process and Time
- Moseley
- Robert Michael
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Moseley, Michael, Robert Feldman, and Charles Ortloff 1981 Living with Crisis: Human Perceptions of Process and Time. In Biotic Crises in Ecological and Evolutionary Time. M. H. Nitecki, ed. Pp. 231–267.
The Symbolism of Disas-ter. In Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster
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Hoffman, Susanna 2002 The Monster and the Mother: The Symbolism of Disas-ter. In Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster. S. Hoffman and A. Oliver-Smith, eds. Pp. 113–141. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
When Day Turned to Night: Volcanism and the Archaeo-logical Record from the Tuxtla Mountains
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London: Routledge. Santley, Robert S., Stephen A. Nelson, Bently K. Reinhardt, Christo-pher A. Pool, and Philip J. Arnold III 2000 When Day Turned to Night: Volcanism and the Archaeo-logical Record from the Tuxtla Mountains, Southern Veracruz, Mexico. In Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Hu-man Response. G. Bawden and R. Reycraft, eds. Pp. 143–162.
Juris 2000 Environmental Disruption and Human Response: An Archaeological-Historical Example from South Arabia
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Zarins, Juris 2000 Environmental Disruption and Human Response: An Archaeological-Historical Example from South Arabia. In Envi-ronmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response. G. Bawden and R. Reycraft, eds. Pp. 35–51.
Maritime Archaeology and Behaviour during Crisis: The Wreck of the VOC Ship Batavia (1629) In Natural Disasters and Cultural Change
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Gibbs, Martin 2002 Maritime Archaeology and Behaviour during Crisis: The Wreck of the VOC Ship Batavia (1629). In Natural Disasters and Cultural Change. R. Torrence and J. Grattan, eds. Pp. 66– 86.
Anthropogenic Soil Erosion in Prehistoric Greece: The Contribution of Regional Surveys to the Archaeology of En-vironmental Disruptions and Human Response
- Curtis Runnels
Runnels, Curtis 2000 Anthropogenic Soil Erosion in Prehistoric Greece: The Contribution of Regional Surveys to the Archaeology of En-vironmental Disruptions and Human Response. In Environ-mental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response. G. Bawden and R. Reycraft, eds. Pp. 11–20.
Prehistoric Site Attrition and the Archaeological Record: A View from the Settlement Point Site
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Saltonstall, Patrick, and Gary A. Carver 2002 Earthquakes, Subsidence, Prehistoric Site Attrition and the Archaeological Record: A View from the Settlement Point Site, Kodiak Archipelago, Alaska. In Natural Disasters and Cultural Change. R. Torrence and J. Grattan, eds. Pp. 172–192.
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History Rebuild or Relocate? New Orleans Will Rise Again
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Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 1995 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Vale, Lawrence J. 2005 Rebuild or Relocate? New Orleans Will Rise Again. Boston Globe, September 25: D12.
Volcanoes and History: A Significant Relationship? The Case of Santorini
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Manning, Sturt W., and David A. Sewell 2002 Volcanoes and History: A Significant Relationship? The Case of Santorini. In Natural Disasters and Cultural Change.
Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Relationship between Severe Environmental Perturbations and Culture Change on the North Coast of Peru
- Kornbacher
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Kornbacher, Kimberly D. 2002 Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Relationship between Severe Environmental Perturbations and Culture Change on the North Coast of Peru. In Natural Disasters and Cultural Change. R. Torrence and J. Grattan, eds. Pp. 204–234.
Dawdy @BULLET Taphonomy of Disaster and the (Re)Formation of New Orleans Gonzalez, David 2005 From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy
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Reycraft, Richard Martin, and Garth Bawden 2000 Introduction. In Environmental Disaster and the Archae-ology of Human Response. G. Bawden and R. Reycraft, eds. Pp. 1–10.
Three Decades Worth of Trash. Times-Picayune
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Hamilton, Bruce 2005 Three Decades Worth of Trash. Times-Picayune, November 16: A1.
Environmental Thresholds and the " Natural History " of an Andean Civilization
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Kolata, Alan L. 2000 Environmental Thresholds and the " Natural History " of an Andean Civilization. In Environmental Disaster and the Ar-chaeology of Human Response. G. Bawden and R. Reycraft, eds. Pp. 163–178.
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Term Human Response to El Niñ in South Coastal Peru, circa A.D. 1400. In Environmental Disaster and the Ar-chaeology of Human Response
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Reycraft, Richard Martin 2000 Long-Term Human Response to El Niñ in South Coastal Peru, circa A.D. 1400. In Environmental Disaster and the Ar-chaeology of Human Response. G. Bawden and R. Reycraft, eds. Pp. 99–120.
The Search for Remains in New Orleans
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Williams, Brian 2006 The Search for Remains in New Orleans. NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, April 28.
Broken Levees, Unbroken Barriers
- DeParle Jason
A New Landfill in New Orleans Sets Off a Battle
- Eaton Leslie
The Archaeology of Disaster
- Byrne Denis
Madame John's Legacy (16OR51) Revisited: A Closer Look at the Archaeology of Colonial New Orleans
- Dawdy Shannon Lee
Landfill's Reopening IsRaising New Stink
- Russell Gordon
Rebuild or Relocate? New Orleans Will Rise Again
- Vale Lawrence J.
Pompeii on the Mississippi
- Berry Jason
In Attics and Rubble, More Bodies and Questions
- Dewan Shaila
- Torrence
From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy
- Gonzalez David
Three Decades WorthofTrash
- Hamilton Bruce