7 results
Cultural Burning
- Bruno David, Michael-Shawn Fletcher, Simon Connor, Virginia Ruth Pullin, Jessie Birkett-Rees, Jean-Jacques Delannoy, Michela Mariani, Anthony Romano, S. Yoshi Maezumi
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- Published online:
- 10 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 06 June 2024
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- Element
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This Element addresses a burning question – how can archaeologists best identify and interpret cultural burning, the controlled use of fire by people to shape and curate their physical and social landscapes? This Element describes what cultural burning is and presents current methods by which it can be identified in historical and archaeological records, applying internationally relevant methods to Australian landscapes. It clarifies how the transdisciplinary study of cultural burning by Quaternary scientists, historians, archaeologists and Indigenous community members is informing interpretations of cultural practices, ecological change, land use and the making of place. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Mobile Landscapes and Their Enduring Places
- Bruno David, Jean-Jacques Delannoy, Jessie Birkett-Rees
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- 07 March 2024
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- 04 April 2024
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This Element presents emerging concepts and analytical tools in landscape archaeology. In three major sections bookended by an Introduction and Conclusion, the Element discusses current and emerging ideas and methods by which to explore how people in the past engaged with each other and their physical settings across the landscape, creating their lived environments in the process. The Element reviews the scales and temporalities that inform the study of human movements in and between places. Learning about how people engaged with each other at individual sites and across the landscape deep in the past is best achieved through transdisciplinary approaches, in which archaeologists integrate their methods with those of other specialists. The Element introduces these ideas through new research and multiple case studies from around the world, culminating in how to 'archaeomorphologically' map anthropic constructions in caves and their contemporary environments.
Gateway to the Yayla: The Varneti Archaeological Complex in the Southern Caucasus Highlands
- William Anderson, Michelle Negus Cleary, Jessie Birkett-Rees, Damjan Krsmanovic, Nikoloz Tskvitinidze
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- European Journal of Archaeology / Volume 22 / Issue 1 / February 2019
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 June 2018, pp. 22-43
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- February 2019
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Recent ground surveys in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region of southern Georgia have investigated a previously undocumented group of sites along a ridge overlooking the upper Kura river valley. Features and artefacts recorded at Varneti suggest long but episodic occupation from the Chalcolithic to the later medieval periods, with prominent phases in the Early to Middle Bronze Age and the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age. Varneti has the potential to contribute to understanding economic and strategic aspects of the long-term settlement pattern in the southern Caucasus, especially the interplay between lowland and highland zones. Its position in the landscape, at a transitional point between the river valley and the upland pasture (yayla), may explain its persistent use by agro-pastoral communities that operated in varied cultural situations. The survey results help us frame a series of questions regarding economic and social dynamics at a local and regional scale and the continuity and discontinuity of practice in highland environments through long timespans.
4 - Capturing the battlefield: Mapping and air photography at Gallipoli
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- By Jessie Birkett-Rees, Monash University (Melbourne)
- Edited by Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, C. J. Mackie, La Trobe University, Victoria, Ian McGibbon, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Wellington, Richard Reid, Department of Veteran Affairs
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- Anzac Battlefield
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- 05 December 2015
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- 05 January 2016, pp 59-82
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THE LANDSCAPE OF GALLIPOLI: A PIVOTAL GEOGRAPHY
The Gallipoli Peninsula, with its rugged terrain and distinctive topographic features, forms a dramatic natural setting for the meeting of geography, history and archaeology. The peninsula, the straits of the Dardanelles and the Aegean coast have together comprised a strategic landscape for millennia. People have attempted to capture the pivotal geography of this region through myth, literature, history and, of course, cartography. To map a place is to have its measure, to know it and in some sense to own it; to capture its likeness on the page, even if capture of the land depicted proves elusive in reality. Gallipoli features in the earliest geographic texts and documents, from both West and East, in which the settlement and fortification of the region are graphically depicted along with the coastlines and mountainous topography.
On the Late Roman Imperial map known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, mountains line the Gallipoli Peninsula while twin settlements face each other across the entrance to the Dardanelles. By the thirteenth century, the Gallipoli Peninsula appears as a waterway lined with towers rather than mountains, as drawn by a medieval clergyman on the celebrated Hereford mappa mundi in distant England. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman geographer, admiral and cartographer Piri Reis carefully delineated the coastlines of the Dardanelles and peninsula in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation). Captain Piri is thought to have been born in the town of Gelibolu, once the most prominent Ottoman naval port, where the Dardanelles open into the Sea of Marmara. His naval charts highlight the small harbours of the Dardanelles and Aegean coast, including Suvla Bay, and depict the twin fortresses of Sultaniye and Kilitbahir guarding the Narrows. Piri Reis begins and ends his cartographic circumnavigation of the Mediterranean at Gallipoli: ‘… starting from the fortresses of Sultaniye and Kilitbahir around Gallipoli, we have described this sea stop by stop and again ended with these fortresses, completing the cycle …’
The strategic location of the Gallipoli Peninsula is augmented by its complex physical geography. The landscape is defined by ridgelines, which also serve to structure military and historical descriptions of the battlefield, from the First Ridge directly above Anzac Cove to the Third Ridge extending between the headland of Gaba Tepe in the south and heights of Chunuk Bair in the north.
8 - Artefacts from the battlefield
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- By Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Jessie Birkett-Rees, Monash University (Melbourne), Michelle Negus Cleary, University of Sydney, Simon Harrington, The Royal Australian Naval College, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Reyhan Körpe, 18 March University, Muhammet Erat, 18 March University
- Edited by Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, C. J. Mackie, La Trobe University, Victoria, Ian McGibbon, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Wellington, Richard Reid, Department of Veteran Affairs
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- Anzac Battlefield
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- 05 December 2015
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- 05 January 2016, pp 159-191
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Material culture does not just exist. It is made by someone. It is produced to do something. Therefore it does not passively reflect society – rather, it creates society through the action of individuals.
Hodder & Hutson, Reading the Past, p. 6.The things humankind makes and uses at any particular time and place are probably the truest representation we have of values and meaning within a society.
Kingery, Learning from Things, p. ix.We live in a world of material things. Objects that we have manufactured (artefacts) and structures that we have built envelope our daily existence. They constitute the tangible and tactile expressions of our contemporary society, as they did for all past human communities. As such, artefacts reveal much about our thoughts and our actions. They inform on our preferences and purchasing power, our cultural affiliations and travels, and our stage of life and gender. In other words, artefacts have the potential to group people with something in common. Artefacts fill museums around the world, and together with standing monuments, they form a major component of the public face of archaeology. The rationale behind the study of artefacts in archaeology, then, can be easily understood. As objects made and used by people, they play a central role in a discipline that is concerned with material culture and how it can be utilised to make sense of human behaviour and achievements.
How far we can approach the ‘true’ meaning of material culture has been much debated, and need not detain us here. Suffice to say that, as evidence from the past, objects are worthy of study in themselves. For many, though, artefacts are seen as ‘fossils’: static and mute expressions of past actions, which are often displayed in serried ranks in a museum. This method is of limited value, for it obscures the cultural biography of an archaeological object, which has its own history of creation, use, deposition, post-deposition and recovery. We explained our project's recovery system in chapter 5. Here we touch on the first three stages of the lifecycle of the JHAS artefacts, although not with the same level of attention.
5 - Battlefield archaeology: Gallipoli
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- By Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Jessie Birkett-Rees, Monash University (Melbourne)
- Edited by Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, C. J. Mackie, La Trobe University, Victoria, Ian McGibbon, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Wellington, Richard Reid, Department of Veteran Affairs
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- Anzac Battlefield
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- 05 December 2015
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- 05 January 2016, pp 83-97
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Whether set in remote antiquity or the modern world, battles and battlefields are generally perceived as the purview of military historians. Although broad themes such as the causes of war form a crucial element of military history, specific campaigns have often been investigated from the perspectives of strategy, logistics, tactics and manoeuvres of opposing armies. These mechanical and operational categories continue to attract attention, to be sure, but over the last quarter century or so the study of armed conflict has seen a significant shift of emphasis. Interdisciplinary approaches to an anthropological archaeology of modern conflict have developed, in which the study of human nature under the duress of battle – why soldiers behave the way they do and how their behaviour relates to their physical environment – is now considered of prime importance. Archaeological approaches and analyses have found an important role to play in these investigations, through the archaeologists’ attention to the physical record of human activity. Research concentrates on identifying the material remains of battlefields in which people not only fought and died but also lived for days, weeks or months at a time, building kitchens, sleeping quarters, medical posts, supply depots and all those related features that make up the landscape of warfare behind the front lines. Using material culture to understand the way people behaved during battles is the contribution archaeology makes to the study of battlefields and conflict more generally.
This emphasis on the materiality of war, especially modern technological conflict like the First World War, is a relatively new advance. Accordingly, objects of war are not necessarily viewed as functional items but as possessing their own ‘social lives’, whose biographies have yet to be written fully. Likewise the contested and tragic landscapes of destruction are multilayered places of commemoration and pilgrimage, as well as tourist attractions and sites that require heritage management. This broad anthropological approach, sometimes called ‘agency theory’, owing to the explicit emphasis it places on the human agent, has emerged as a powerful tool in the rapidly expanding discipline of battlefield archaeology, or, to use the more inclusive term, conflict archaeology. The underlying principle is that each military site, whether the scene of a protracted campaign or a brief encounter, has a distinct ‘fingerprint’, which was formed by the pressures of war, changing technology and the cultural backgrounds of the combatants.
Appendix - Anzac Gallipoli Archaeological Database
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- By Michelle Negus Cleary, University of Sydney, Sarah Midford, La Trobe University (Melbourne), Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Jessie Birkett-Rees, Monash University (Melbourne), Abby Robinson, University of Melbourne, Simon Harrington, The Royal Australian Naval College
- Edited by Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne, Mithat Atabay, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, C. J. Mackie, La Trobe University, Victoria, Ian McGibbon, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Wellington, Richard Reid, Department of Veteran Affairs
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- Anzac Battlefield
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- 05 December 2015
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- 05 January 2016, pp 246-250
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The Anzac Gallipoli Archaeological Database is a unique and detailed record of the information recovered during the JHAS field project. Its value is the documentation of archaeological contexts, thereby enabling features and artefacts to be studied in association. During the project, information was collated and managed in a Geographic Information System (GIS) and research database that includes searchable attributes about each feature and artefact. One outcome of the JHAS has been to make this database available to other researchers and the general public as a web-based, digital archive – the Anzac Gallipoli Archaeological Database (AGAD; <www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/gallipoli-battlefield>) – which is comprehensive in its content. It is an important and complementary resource for this book, as many of the features and artefacts that could not be included or illustrated in the text can be found online in AGAD.
AGAD occupies a unique space among the increasing number of digital archaeological gazetteers, archives and catalogues on web-based platforms that are being constructed as an effective way of making primary data available to a wide audience. With more than 2000 records precisely documented in the field, it aims to assist the study of the First World War through its emphasis on landscape and artefacts. The database is organised around the features and artefacts documented in the GIS, rather than specific sites or locations. The feature entries are of the various types used during the JHAS surveys (see table A.1). Each feature is given a unique Feature ID (and artefacts have an additional catalogue ‘Artefact Number’). Moreover, each feature has a record that displays data attributes, including a description, dimensions, chronological period, location and find-spot information, survey date, associated features, artefact type, material type, preservation rating and between one and three images, such as photographs and maps. Artefacts form a major portion of the archive, as they are the largest group of features recorded, and a separate set of artefact types is identified in the data set. It includes information documented in both Turkish and Anzac-held areas of the battlefield, providing an insight into the battlefield from perspectives on both sides of the conflict.
Feature types have been categorised from observations in the field. Eleven feature types are c. 1915 battlefield features (artefacts, boats, six types of earthworks, graves, roads, structures).