Reimagining Regional Analyses: The Archaeology of Spatial and Social Dynamics

Tina L. Thurston

oct 2009 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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Reimagining Regional Analysis explores the interplay between different methodological and theoretical approaches to regional analysis in archaeology. The past decades have seen significant advances in methods and instrumental techniques, including geographic information systems, the new availability of aerial and satellite images, and greater emphasis on non-traditional data, such as pollen, soil chemistry and botanical remains. At the same time, there are new insights into human impacts on ancient environments and increased recognition of the importance of micro-scale changes in human society. These factors combine to compel a reimagining of regional archaeology.

The authors in this volume focus on understanding individual trajectories and the historically contingent relationships between the social, the economic, the political and the sacred as reflected regionally. Among topics considered are the social construction of landscape; use of spatial patterning to interpret social variability; paleoenvironmental reconstruction and human impacts; and social memory and social practice. This book opens a discourse around the spatial patterning of the contingent, recursive relationships between people, their social activities and the environment.

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Dr. Tina L. Thurston is an Associate Professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, who works regularly in Northern Europe. Her research, funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society, concerns the social, political, and economic relationships between ordinary people and their governments, especially as is changed during the development of political complexity over the course of the Iron Age, Early Medieval, and Early Modern periods in Denmark, Sweden, and Northern Ireland.

Roderick B. Salisbury is an IGERT Fellow in GI Science at the University at Buffalo in NY and an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, UK. His research focuses on Late Neolithic communities, social practices and soil in the Carpathian Basin. He is the co-editor of Space—Archaeology’s Final Frontier? An Intercontinental Approach, published by CSP in 2007.