Approaches To Disruptions And Interactions In Archaeology

A collection of papers presented at the Graduate Archaeology at Oxford Conferences 2017-2019. The papers draw out different aspects of the key themes of interaction, mobility, entanglement and disruption amongst various communities and demonstrated through material culture, relating to a range of time periods.

Outgrowth of a session organized for the 75th Anniversary Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held in St. Louis, Mo., in 2010. Cf. acknowledgments.

Archaeological Networks and Social Interaction focuses on conceptualisations of human interaction, human-thing entanglement, material affordances and agency. Network concepts in the archaeological discipline are ubiquitous these days. They range from loose concepts, used as metaphors to address a notion of connectivity, to highly formal and mathematically complex predictions of human behaviour. These different networked worlds sometimes clash and rarely converge. Archaeologists interested in network analysis, however, have achieved a much better understanding of the implications of adopting formal methods for studying social interaction and there have been theoretical advancements realising a better synergy between different theoretical perspectives. These nascent concerns are explored further in this volume with regional specialists exploring case studies from Prehistory to the Middle Ages throughout the Ancient and New Worlds, outlining how formal network approaches contribute to studying social interaction archaeologically. This book will be of interest to archaeologists wishing to access the latest research on networks and interconnectivity and how these approaches have been productively modified to archaeological research.

Proceedings of the Graduate Archaeology at Oxford Conferences 2015-2016 This volume brings together two Graduate Archaeology at Oxford (GAO) conferences held in 2015-2016 to present the work of early-career researchers from across the globe. The papers cover a range of periods and regions, but all share the focus of bridging boundaries, whether these are theoretical, methodological or geographic. Some contributors traverse traditional divisions between subjects by integrating computational approaches with early excavation data or archaeology with historical sources to produce 'thick interpretations' of the past. Several papers approach the past as a bilateral process, examining how people shaped and were in return shaped by their interactions with the world around them. In addition, many authors have directly tackled the modern political divides that influence our research. Building on a strong tradition of novel approaches and interdisciplinary methods, these proceedings present current research on directly tackling issues of division head on.

Socialising Complexity introduces the concept of complexity as a tool, rather than a category, for understanding social formations. This new take on complexity moves beyond the traditional concern with what constitutes a complex society and focuses on the complexity inherent in various social forms through the structuring principles created within each society. The aims and themes of the book can thus be summarised as follows: to introduce the idea of complexity as a tool, which is pertinent to the understanding of all types of society, rather than an exclusionary type of society in its own right; to examine concepts that can enhance our interpretation of societal complexity, such as heterarchy, materialisation and contextualisation. These concepts are applied at different scales and in different ways, illustrating their utility in a variety of different cases; to re-establish social structure as a topic of study within archaeology, which can be profitably studied by proponents of both processual and post-processual methodologies.

Archaeological research on interregional interaction processes has recently reasserted itself after a long hiatus following the eclipse of diffusion studies. This "rebirth" was marked not only by a sudden increase in publications that were focused on interac tion questions, but also by a diversity of perspectives on past contacts. To perdurable interests in warfare were added trade studies by the late 196Os. These viewpoints, in turn, were rapidly joined in the late 1970s by a wide range of intellectual schemes stimulated by developments in French Marxism (referred to in various ways; termed political ideology here) and sociology (Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems model). Researchers ascribing to the aforementioned intellectual frameworks were united in their dissatisfaction with attempts to explain sociopolitical change that treated in dividual cultures or societies as isolated entities. Only by reconstructing the complex intersocietal networks in which polities were integrated-the natures of these ties, who mediated the connections, and the political, economic, and ideological significance of the goods and ideas that moved along them-could adequate ex planations of sociopolitical shifts be formulated. Archaeologists seemed to be re discovering in the late twentieth century the importance of interregional contacts in processes of sociopolitical change. The diversity of perspectives that resulted seemed to be symptomatic of both an uncertainty of how best to approach this topic and the importance archaeologists attributed to it.

This volume of original chapters written by experts in the field offers a snapshot of how historical built spaces, past cultural landscapes, and archaeological distributions are currently being explored through computational social science. It focuses on the continuing importance of spatial and spatio-temporal pattern recognition in the archaeological record, considers more wholly model-based approaches that fix ideas and build theory, and addresses those applications where situated human experience and perception are a core interest. Reflecting the changes in computational technology over the past decade, the authors bring in examples from historic and prehistoric sites in Europe, Asia, and the Americas to demonstrate the variety of applications available to the contemporary researcher.