The Archaeology of the Landscape

All places have deep pasts, many preserved in written and oral histories - but those histories are uneven and deeply impacted by the biases of their writers (and speakers). Fortunately, landscape histories are preserved in the landscapes themselves—if you know how to look at them.  Landscape archaeology is field of study that centers the materiality of the past in its landscape context.  It is deeply challenging to interpret such mute material remains, but landscape archaeology holds the possibility of a broader understanding of the spaces of the past and how different people created them, moved through them, and imposed meaning on them.  This workshop will give three case studies in the archaeology of landscape being conducted by Harvard researchers at different career stages.

Speaker: Jason Ur (Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University)

Mortuary Landscapes of Colonial New England: Cambridge's Old Burying Ground  

The first case study is close to our institutional home: the Colonial-era Old Burying Ground on Garden Street, here in Cambridge.  It contains over 1,000 gravestone memorials to the early residents of Cambridge.  They have been subjected to genealogical and art historical analysis, but the burying ground has not received a proper treatment as a historical landscape.  Archaeology professor Jason Ur will show how the monuments and their placement speak volumes about the evolving society of Colonial and early American Cambridge, using tools such as GIS mapping, drone photogrammetry, 3D modeling, and geospatial analysis.

Speaker: Fernando Casamayor Molina (PhD Student, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Department of History of Art and Architecture (Secondary field in Archaeology), Harvard University)

Early Islamic Tell Brak: A Reassessment of the Abbasid Occupation

Tell Brak functioned as a planned, irrigated settlement with a significant fortified component during the early Islamic period.

As one of the most important sites in Mesopotamian archaeology, scholarly work here has largely focused on excavation reports by Oates, McMahon, and Ur, but little attention has been paid to the Islamic occupation. This paper builds on the initial survey conducted by Ur et al. (2011), which identified a fortified structure and an early Islamic settlement containing Abbasid-period materials comparable to those from other Syrian sites such as Tell Aswad.

We aim to shed light on this understudied phase by reassessing the surveyed material culture, the layout and organization of the irrigation zone, and the architectural remains of both the fortified complex and the settlement. The methodology employed combines satellite imagery analysis, spatial analysis using GIS technology, as well as the study of material culture and the built landscape. Additionally, the fortification and urban landscape are compared to other Abbasid sites, such as Raqqa, Basra, and Samarra. This approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of the extent and character of the Islamic presence at Tell Brak, including patterns of land management, settlement organization, and the logic behind the spatial distribution of material culture.

Our study suggests that the estate’s administrators did not operate on a blank slate; rather, the irrigation system was designed in response to a 5,000-year-old archaeological landscape. This points towards a substantial and organized Abbasid presence in the region. 

Speaker: Pablo Gutiérrez de León (ASPR Junior Postdoctoral fellow. American School of Prehistoric Research, Department of Anthropology (Harvard University)

Landscapes of death. Funerary and landscape archaeology in the Horn of Africa

In 2015 the archaeologists Semple and Williams defined the landscapes of the British Isles as “mortuary geographies.” They were spaces where, generation after generations of Britons and invaders, buried their deceased creating an astonishing and complex palimpsest in which tombs of different periods overlapped but still visible for today’s observers. However, this characteristic and good preservation it is not at all exclusive to British and European landscapes, where megalithic constructions like Stonehenge and other burials mounds sprout like mushrooms after a rainy day. Although less rainy, the Horn of Africa is one of these regions peppered by monuments. Here, in this eastern tip of Africa, funerary traditions began to erupt more than 5,000 years ago in the barren plains surrounding lake Turkana and lake Abhe, and the dry ridges of Eritrea. Through time, monuments evolved, mutated and changed reflecting a plethora of societies, from the more centralized and hierarchical Aksumites dominated by kings that were buried underneath gigantic stelae on the Northern Ethiopian and Eritrean Highlands, to the humble stone cairns and Islamic tombs of the more decentralized pastoralists of the Lowlands in present-day Somalia and Djibouti. By studying funerary architecture(s) our goal is to better understand how societies in the Horn of Africa were structured and, also, how they projected themselves, building tremendously complex landscapes in the process. Monuments covering the landscape are not just structures but elements within a wider and more cultural space. They were used to project power, transmit property rights and communicate memory to the people. Considering this, the goal of this talk is to tour the attendees around different locations in the Horn of Africa in order to unlock the hidden meanings of the most important landscapes of death of the Horn of Africa and shed a bit of light over the that erected them.