Architecture of First Societies E-Book

Mark M. Jarzombek

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1221

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

ARCHITECTURE OF FIRST SOCIETIES THIS LANDMARK STUDY TRACES THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE BY LOOKING AT THE LATEST ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH From the dawn of human society, through early civilizations, to pre-Columbian American societies, Architecture of First Societies traces the different cultural formations that developed in various places throughout the world to form the built environment. It is the first book to explore the beginnings of architecture from a global perspective. Viewing ancient cultures through a lens of both time and geography, this history of early architecture brings its subjects to life with full-color photographs, maps, and drawings. The author cites the latest discoveries and analyses in archaeology and anthropology and discovers links to the past by examining how indigenous societies build today. "Encounters with Modernity" sections examine some of the political issues that village life and its architectural traditions face in the modern world. This fascinating and engaging tour of our architectural past: * Fills a gap in architectural education concerning early mankind, the emergence of First Society people, and the rise of early agricultural societies * Presents the story of early architecture, written by the coauthor of the acclaimed A Global History of Architecture * Uses the most current research to develop a global picture of human interaction and migration * Features color and black-and-white photos and drawings that show site conditions as well as huts, houses, and other buildings under construction in cultures that still exist today * Highlights global relationships with color maps * Analyzes topics ranging in scale from landscape and culture to building techniques * Helps us come to terms with our own modern approaches to historical conditions and anthropological pasts Architecture of First Societies is ideal reading for anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of the strong relationships between geography, ecology, culture, and architecture.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Half Title page

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Foundations

Chapter 1: The Human World

Blombos Cave

Out of Africa

Kostenki and Aurignacian Cultures

Rock Art

Animism

The Shaman

Proto-Shintoism

Dance Ceremonialism

Chapter 2: Late Pleistocene—Early Holocene Societies

Dolní Věstonice

Venus Figurines

The Hunting Tradition: From Inner Asia to the Americas

Siberia

Crossing into the Americas

Magdalénien Cultures

The Holocene

Lepenski Vir: Forest/Riverine Prototype

Early Holocene America

Chapter 3: Savanna and Forest Peoples Today

!Kung

The Peoples of Australia

El Molo

Bambuti

Jarawa

Women:—The First Architects

Chapter 4: The Great Northern Continuum, Part I

The Pole and Pit House Tradition: The Sacred Plan

The Sami and Nenets

The Bear Cult

The Siberian Shaman

Kets and Nani

Yakut, Chukchi, and Koryak

The Tribes of the Great Plains

The Bison Hunt

Sweat Lodges

The Medicine Wheel

Chapter 5: The Great Northern Continuum, Part II

The Jomon and the Sanni-Maruyama Site

Alaska: Yup’ik, Koyukuk, Iñupait

The Northwest Coast Peoples

The Potlatch

The Haida

The Nuu-Chah-Nulth Whale Shrine

The Yokuts

The Klamath and Shasta

The Dorset and Ipiutak

The Thule and Inuit

Chapter 6: The Mound and Plaza Societies of the Americas

Ceremonial Exchanges

Watson Brake and Poverty Point

Atlantic Shell Mound People

Adena Culture

Hopewell Earthworks

The Horizon of Ceremonialism

Chapter 7: Plants, Animals, Rituals

The Agricultural World

Cattle-Tending Societies: The First Moderns

The Ritual Revolution

Niuheliang Ritual Center: China

Nabta: Egypt

GöBekli Tepe: Turkey

Chapter 8: The First Agro-Pastoral Perspectives

Çatal Höyük

Khirokitia, Jericho, and ‘Ain Ghazal

The Halaf, Hassuna, and Samarra Cultures

Religion and Cult Buildings

Building Materials

The Luri of Iran

The Indus Cultures

5000 BCE

Copper and Gold

The Vinča and Trypillian Cultures and the Production Crescent

Part Two: Transitions

Chapter 9: Village and Chiefdom Worlds

Sacred Groves

Chapter 10: Expansion into Europe

The Longhouse World

Ritual Landscapes and the Rondel

The Kurgan Emergence

Lake Shore Cultures

Megalithic Cultures

Spain, Portugal, and France

Ireland

Barrows, Enclosures, and Cursi

Newgrange

Gavrinis and Maeshowe

Skara Brae

Malta Temples

3000 BCE and Stone Circles

Beaker Culture

Stonehenge Redone

2500 BCE

CODA: Asian Megaliths

Chapter 11: Emergence of Central and South American Agriculture Societies

Chalcatzingo, Mexico, and the Sacred Landcsape

Olmecs

San Lorenzo and La Venta

Chinchorro and Paloma

La Galgada, Peru

The Cotton Revolution in the Extreme Landscape of The Supe Valley

CASMA

Painted Platforms

Chavín De Huántar

Post-Olmec and Post-Chavín Civilizations

Tairona

Yanomami

Chapter 12: Cattle-Tending Societies

Fulani

Dinka and Nuer

Maasai

The Naga and Other Mithun-Oriented Societies

The Toda: India

Chapter 13: The World of Portable Architecture

The First Horse Cultures

The Mongols

The Ger (Yurt)

The OBO

The Camel and Ninth-Century North Africa

Bedouin and Kababish

Rendille

Tuareg

Chapter 14: The Oceanic Horticultural Continuum

Trobriand Islanders

Dayak

Japan: Inari

Ifugao

Karo (Batak)

NIAS

Nan Madol

Chapter 15: African Transformations

Bantu

Himba

Acholi

Luo

Konso

The Mijikenda

Gurunsi

Batammaliba

Chapter 16: Agro-Centrism in North America

Hohokam Culture

Anasazi

Chaco Canyon

Upper Mississippi Chiefdom Cultures

Cahokia: Extreme Ceremonialism

After 1100 CE and the ZUNI

Cliff Dwellings

Casa Grande and Paquimé

Hopi

Navajo

Post-Cahokians

Effigy Mound Cultures

Lenape

Iroquoian Longhouse

Caddo

Osage, Pawnee, and Mandan

Endgame

CODA: Encounters with Modernity

Index

ArchitectureOF FIRST SOCIETIES

Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jarzombek, Mark.  Architecture of first societies: a global perspective / Mark Jarzombek.    pages cm  Includes index.  ISBN 978-1-118-14210-3 (cloth); 978-111-8-41921-2 (ebk.); 978-111-8-42105-5 (ebk.) 1. Architecture, Prehistoric—Textbooks. I. Title.  GN799.B8J39 2013  722—dc23  2012039442

Acknowledgments

Six years ago, I was preparing a lecture on the architecture of pre-history and discovered that the existing texts were either too generic or were written for experts. Plans, maps, and drawings were difficult to find, difficult to interpret, or altogether unavailable. Archaeological sites were disembodied spots on a map. And so what began as a desire to make a single lecture became a complex, multi-year project. As it developed and the more I learned, I ran various seminars to broaden the discussion with my colleagues here at MIT as well as with archaeologists, anthropologists, and researchers in various parts of the world, all of which proved invaluable.

Students came on board to help with the drawings and maps. I would like to thank in particular Timothy Cooke, who not only made numerous drawings, but also served as the book’s drawings coordinator; Alexander Wood coordinated photo acquisition and managed the complex world of digital files; Nicholas Polansky and Anne Callahan worked on drawings as well as on digital formatting; Adam Fulton assisted with research; Florence Guiraud and Michael Kubo produced the wonderful maps. All of these individuals worked long hours and occasionally through the night to meet deadlines. Others who made drawings were Ella Peinovich, Andrew Ferentinos, Daniele Cappelletti, Sun Min May Hwang, Nadine Volicer, Sasa Zivkovic, Farshid Emami, Jonathan Crisman, Reem Abuzeid, Anna Falvello Tomas, and Nancy Jarzombek. I would also like to thank the people from around the world who contributed photos. Anne Deveau kept the production schedule and helped monitor the perpetual flow of books, letters, and emails in and out of my office. The ever-smiling librarians at Rotch Library here at MIT who provided valuable assistance but who are probably relieved that this project has come to an end. I would also like to thank the editors at John Wiley and Sons, who shared the vision of this book.

Introduction

In 1901, a certain Reverend W. J. V. Saville visited an island off the coast of New Guinea to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. The book that he wrote about his efforts opens with the following words; “The first thing that strikes one upon entering a Mailu village is its orderly arrangement. The villages are built on one distinct and characteristic plan. Two rows of houses, running parallel to one another, take the curve, if any, of the high-water mark on the shore.”1 He goes on to describe in great detail the feasts, ceremonies, and other activities that take place between the rows of houses. Saville never seems to notice a rather glaring paradox. The same people whom he calls savages and who use “stone age tools” in harvesting their yams and taro plants are not only accomplished builders, but have a highly prescribed social and ritualistic worldview as defined by the layout of their settlements. The paradox is easily resolved, as any contemporary anthropologist will tell us, if we remove from the discussion any comparison with the modern world. That allows us to recognize that the orderliness of the Mailu shore-line settlement is not an anomaly, but dates back to the ancient origins of mankind. Organization of space is an integral aspect of human society, as fundamental as language and fire. A hundred thousand years ago, it may not have manifested itself in the archaeological record with quite the clarity of a Mailu village, but it cannot be dismissed that when humans first began to develop social groupings, spatial coherence in one way or another also became an attribute. This book is an attempt to capture that history within the bounds of our archaeological and anthropological knowledge.

In doing this, I tried to avoid some of the standard terms that one might encounter in such a text. Take for example, the word hunter-gatherer. Though widely used, it gained currency only in the 1970s against the backdrop of the United Nations War on Hunger and thus implies—quite falsely and pejoratively, as many anthropologists are now fully aware—that these people are obsessed with food acquisition. Food is just as important to ancient societies as it is to us, but so too are all the other activities that make us human. They will socialize, make huts, dance, cook, weave, and even relax. The image conjured up by the word hunter-gatherers also does a disservice to the affluence that many of these societies once had. The huge and geometrically complex mound of Poverty Point Louisiana, made up of approximately 238,000 cubic meters of fill, may have been made by so-called “hunter-gatherers,” but hunting and gathering were certainly the least things on the minds of the people who built this astonishing edifice. The term “First Society” may also have some limitations, but at least it reminds us that we are always dealing with societies not with individuals. The expression is used in the book for the broad range of cultures that did not change or shift to agriculture. This resolute attachment to the natural world should not be seen as a failing on their part, for we have to remember that people lived without agriculture for over a million years. These people not only survived, they thrived; nor is the history of the First Society world quite over. A few First Society cultures remain, despite transformative onslaughts, as living reminders of our ancestry.

The first part, entitled Beginnings, tries to give a comprehensive overview of First Society attitudes to life, death, and social organization. The second part, Transitions, deals with the emergence of horticulture and agriculture and the rise of village worlds. It also introduces cattle-centric societies and the mobile cultures of the African and Asian deserts. Here we encounter a range of responses to First Society traditions from the cattle cultures, which tended to look down on their First Societies neighbors as well as on the agriculturalists with whom they traded, to the North American chiefdoms who, though adopting agriculture, remained closely associated with First Society norms. In this part of the book, the word “first” is used more metaphorically, indicating certain fundamental changes in the human social organization. Each of these firsts was a type of modernity that in one way or another, moved away from First Society norms.

In these discussions, I strive to avoid the standard perspective that places cities, empires and states at the apex of civilizational history. Many maps of Pre-Colombian America, for example, will show the territory of the Incas filled in with a color, while leaving the entire rest of South America blank as if it were not even populated. This tendency to privilege state-entities in our cartographic epistemologies does a great disservice to those parts of the world that developed chiefdom societies or where First Society people lived. From the point of view of “world civilizations” almost everything in this book takes place in the uncolored areas of most maps. This book tries to reverse that perspective. In fact, if one were to think of the map of the world as late as 1400 CE and take out the empires and urban cultures, I would venture to estimate that nine-tenths of the globes land mass would remain, and of that, about a half was populated by thriving village communities and the other half by First Society people. Colonialism, modernization, and globalization have so radically reduced that territory that it is difficult for us to even imagine the intricate and powerful web of realities that not that long ago stretched across the globe.

To help with the challenge of envisioning that world, this book will emphasize larger territorial histories. In the process, it will try to bring architectural and spatial understandings into focus as far as our contemporary knowledge allows. This is done to some degree as a challenge to both archaeologists and anthropologists who rarely produce drawings that serve larger pedagogical purposes. A typical archaeological drawing will have a lot of information about the area inside of the small plot of the dig, but will have no information of any kind outside of the lines. Site drawings are made only to put an X on a map to indicate the location of the dig. And as to anthropologists, they rarely make drawings any more at all and often see architecture as a backdrop to cultural activities, rather than as something to be studied in and of itself.

Archaeology in the last fifteen years has, of course, made huge strides in coming to terms with our ancient past, but in the process it is now beset by layers of terminological complexity that only an archaeologist would love. A time period that was once simply known as “the Stone Age,” for example, is now chopped up into small time periods, usually, and obsessively, into threes—Early, Middle, and Late Paleolithic; Incipient, Initial, and Late Jōmon; Early, Middle, and Late Woodland; Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age, with the Middle Bronze Age further subdivided into Middle Bronze Age I, II A, II B, II C, and so on—relating to ever more specific geographical and temporal entities. To not use these terms in this book might seem to fly in the face of archaeological expertise, but I would argue that teaching history is different from teaching archaeology. Although I have drawn on the latest archaeological information, I have not tried to shape the narrative so that it becomes little more than a primer to archaeology. There are other books that can do that.

Anthropology too has made huge strides in the last decades. A generation of researchers has emerged armed with increasingly, complex methodological tools. The word “primitive,” which was used quite freely well into the late 1970s, is now, fortunately, universally rejected. They have also rethought attitudes regarding the use of words like “prehistory” and “pastoralism.” And yet, the word hunter-gatherer, despite critiques, persists, as does the equally humiliating term “forager.”

There are a few scholars who have struggled to overcome these various disciplinary problems. Their efforts are so remarkable in my view that they bear mentioning: Paul Memmott and his analysis of the architecture of the Australian aborigines; Werner E. Knuffel’s analysis of the Bantu hut; Jean-Paul Bourdier and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s study of African villages in Ghana and Burkina Faso; Alain Viaro’s work on the house of the Nias; and Suzanne Preston Blier’s analysis of the architecture of the Batammaliba. Peter Nabakov and Robert Easton’s book, Native American Architecture (1989), and William Morgan’s Ancient Architecture of the Southwest (1994) are also significant works. There are more, but not nearly as many as one would want, which means that hundreds of living cultures around the world have received little close scrutiny when it comes to their architectural expertise and their spatial and territorial under-standings. No analytical drawings exist of the marvelous houses and towns of the Konso in Ethiopia, the Dinka of Sudan, or even of some of the structures in the Brazilian rainforest. The best drawings of the Native American mound structures in Ohio were made in the 1890s! At stake is not some romantic association with the lost past, but the need to claim the legitimacy of architecture and landscape as an epistemological descriptor of the ritual and social activities of First Societies.

Architectural discourses are, however, beset by their own problems. In the 1970s, when the concept of “primitive architecture” was drifting out of fashion, it was replaced by the word “shelter,” and numerous books appeared with that word in the title. The problem is that a tipi of the Plains Indians is designed less as a shelter than as a cosmological diagram. The house I live in, by way of contrast, is most certainly not designed as a cosmological diagram and is in that sense much more a shelter than any tipi. So to use the word shelter is to disrespect the most critical aspect of the architecture of many First Societies.

Another term that is now solidly entrenched in the architectural literature is “vernacular.” It arose in the 1970s and was meant to describe structures that were built by craft traditions rather than by architects. Vernacular may be fine to describe barns or industrial buildings of the modern era, but when it comes to traditional village architecture, it is an awkward term. A vernaculum was a slave quarter at the rear of a Roman villa. And though it was not intended, labeling a shabono in Brazil or a house by the Nias as “vernacular” puts it on the wrong side of the civilization divide. These are majestic structures as grand in their context as any palace in Mesopotamia, and to give them the nomenclature “vernacular” is a real shame. Needless to say, the words “shelter” and “vernacular,” like “Stone Age,” “primitive,” and “hunter-gatherer” do not appear in this book.

This book cannot repair in any wholesale way the comprehension gap of how to address our ancient history. That discussion is more appropriate in the context of advanced historiography. But the book can at least begin to orient the student to a better understanding of the architecture and life of the First Peoples and of early agriculturalists. The book also tries to provide for the student a global perspective. By the word “global” I do not mean universals that transcend history, but rather the presence of historically determined communalities that stretch across regions and oceans. It is the accumulation of these histories across space and time that produces a global perspective of history. In that sense, although the book is broad in scope, it is not an encyclopedia. Rather it tries to provide a framework for learning and discussion.

I also tried to write this book with the idea that history is not something that happened and is over, but that continues on in various ways into the modern world. The history of the First Societies is our history, regardless of where we live on this globe. In that sense, I hope the book can open a classroom discussion about our modern age and its attitude to the past. Although modernity has escalated the terms of engagement with disastrous results for First Society people this book is not a lament. In fact, the entire book is built on the premise of history’s dynamic force. To that end, the book operates transtemporally and transgeographically so that students can get a sense of the different and overlapping histories that are still operating around and even through our contemporary culture.

And finally, the GPS coordinates are given throughout the book, so that readers can study sites for themselves in the contemporary conditions. Some sites still exist undisturbed; others might be under parking lots, or in the middle of cities. There is a lesson even in that.

ENDNOTE

1. W. J. V. Saville, In Unknown New Guinea (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1926), 30.

PART ONE

Foundations

CHAPTER 1

The Human World

Some ninety thousand years ago, our ancestors—optimistically labeled Homo sapiens—began to migrate out of Africa. Their movement was incremental so it would hardly have dawned on them how momentous the consequences of their action were to be. But Homo sapiens were not the first to have set forth. Homo erectus had left Africa some 1.8 million years earlier and over the course of time had spread as far as China and England (Figure 1.1). Although these early hominoids are often portrayed as less advanced than Homo sapiens, it is now clear that they laid the foundations for later developments.1 Tangible evidence is hard to come by, apart from one clear example, a unique type of hand axe that was to remain an essential and effective part of human life for hundreds of thousands of years.2 First a proper stone—usually a river cobble of basalt or quartzite or flint—had to be chosen and then it had to be hit in a particular way with the help of another stone to flake off pieces. The stone had to be flipped and rotated with different types of strikes producing different edges. The final result was an oval or triangular object, pointed on one end and rounded at the base to conform to the shape of the palm where it was held. The symmetrical design of these axes makes them stand out from earlier stone tools; the symmetry also clearly reflects the quantum leap in the cognitive and linguistic capacities that make all of us human. Furthermore, tool making was no longer an informal process but became something of an industry, with some place—and obviously also craftsmen—dedicated solely to their production (Figure 1.2). People also worked in unison at kill sites, as evidenced at Olorgesailie, Kenya, where, along the shore of a large, now extinct isolated lake, thousands of stone tools have been found

Figure 1.1: Africa and Eurasia showing Homo erectus and Homo sapiens areas before 80,000 BCE. Source: Florence Guiraud

Figure 1.2: Acheulean hand axes, Olorgesailie, Kenya. Source: Emily Hoerner

The axes were mostly used for carving meat or breaking bones to access marrow.3 But experiments have also shown that they might have been thrown discus-style. With a range of about 30 meters, the point hurtles earthward with tremendous force. Such weapons would not have been good for moving targets, but against stationary ones, like animals standing close to each other while drinking at a lake’s edge, they would have been ideal, which perhaps explains why axes like these seem so often to be found in riverbeds and along lake shores.4 In one site in England, near a watering hole, a hand axe was found still lodged in the skull of a mammoth. Despite the assumption that making weapons was the key factor in this evolutionary moment, it is not necessarily obvious that these were always weapons. Some are so well-crafted and made from unusually colored stones that they might have been used as a marker of ancestral status associated with ritual activity. This seems very much to be the case of a particularly well-made stone axe uncovered at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, at a site near the shores of a one-time lake (Figure 1.3). Dating to about 1.8 million years ago, it is 23 cm long and was fashioned from a shiny, gray green volcanic rock. Olduvai Gorge produced another surprise, a circle of lava stones that were the remains of a hut or windbreaker consisting of branches anchored at the base by stones piled into heaps and spaced on the circumference about every .7 meters. This is the earliest evidence so far of a man-made structure.5 Scattered around the hut are the remnants of stone chipping and other activities

Figure 1.3: Hand axe, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Source: The Trustees of the British Museum

The Olduvai Gorge settlement proves without a doubt that a social order and spatial differentiation had developed during the time of Homo erectus. What is also clear is that people could expand and replicate their culture across space and time and, indeed, in a variety of ecological zones. In India, where Homo erectus arrived around 700,000 BCE, they lived in the semi-arid regions of western Rajasthan, in the alluvial plains of Gujarat, even in the moist deciduous woodlands in central India. The Baichbal and Hunsgi Valleys, located in the Deccan region of India, were particularly rich in settlements. In the wet season, groups would have dispersed over the valley in search of plant foods, berries, and fruits, whereas in the dry season, they congregated in larger groups near the numerous spring-fed streams, and focused more on the hunt, leaving behind their tell-tale axes. The bones of wild boar, cattle, elephant, horse, and hippopotamus that archaeologists have found at these sites indicate that people hunted in both forests and open grasslands. The Acheulean axe made it to England by around 500,000 BCE if not earlier, with sites at Barnfield Pit and Boxgrove Quarry.