Academic literature on the topic 'Angkor Archaeological Park'

By the fourth century AD, the landscape of Roman Britain was densely settled and archaeological surveys and excavations have consistently shown that most lowland areas supported farming communities, including on the heavier claylands (Smith et al. 2016). Thereafter the character of the archaeological record changes dramatically with the appearance of settlements, cemeteries, and material culture whose ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural affinities lay in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia (Chapters 8–9). All too often, however, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England is discussed in a way that implies that settlements characterized by Grubenhäuser and cemeteries furnished with Germanic grave goods were characteristic of the whole of eastern England (e.g. Welch 1992; Lucy 2000; Tipper 2004; Hamerow 2012), whereas detailed local studies have suggested that this was not the case. In areas such as Sussex (Welch 1983) and Lincolnshire (Green 2012) evidence for Anglo-Saxon colonization has only been found in certain parts of the landscape, and the potential reasons for ‘blank’ spots in the distribution of Anglo-Saxon settlement are complex: they may in part simply reflect areas where there has been less archaeological investigation, or that these areas were unattractive for settlement. There is, however, another possibility: that these distributions are not a record of where people were and were not living, but a reflection of how the cultural identity of early medieval communities varied from area to area, and that some of these identities are archaeologically less visible than others. There has long been speculation that at least some of the ‘blank areas’ in the distributions of Anglo-Saxon settlements and cemeteries reflect the places where native British populations remained in control of the landscape. West (1985, 168), for example, noted the lack of early Anglo-Saxon settlement on the East Anglian claylands, and speculated that this is where a substantial Romano- British population remained: ‘did they survive somehow, perhaps in a basically aceramic condition, or were they, in the main, drawn to the new settlements on the lighter soils to become slaves or some subordinate stratum of society, as indicated by later documentary evidence, or was the population drastically reduced by pestilence or genocide?’ (West 1985, 168).

This chapter surveys death and burial in nineteenth-century New Mexico as the region transitioned from Spanish, to Mexican, to United States control. Highlighting Albuquerque and Santa Fe, it considers the territory’s multiracial and multicultural past by tracing Indian and Spanish burial practices, the influence of colonialism and independence, and ultimately the arrival of non-Catholic “Anglo,” African American, European, and Asian newcomers to transform the local burial landscape. Although earlier archival and archaeological evidence suggests that New Mexicans did not segregate their dead by race and ethnicity, subsequent imperial shifts, new concern over public health, evolving church influence, and religious and racial transformation led to new practices to separate the dead by faith, national origin, race, and economic standing.

The Anglo-Saxon achievement in the development of water-power to drive millstones for grinding grain is underlined by references to over 6000 mills in England at the time of the Domesday survey, the majority of which must have been established by or during the late Anglo-Saxon period. This chapter sets out to discuss the legacy of water-power in England after its introduction by the Romans and the apparent revival of watermill technology from the late seventh century, which is attested by archaeological finds and documentary sources. The provision and control of a manageable water supply, using both fresh and salt water, and the technology of waterwheels, in particular interpretation of the archaeological evidence for the use of both horizontal- and vertical-wheeled mills, form an important part of the discussion. The relationship between watermills and those who built and ran them is also considered.

Water has always played a major role in early religious beliefs. There is ample archaeological evidence of this influencing the siting of prehistoric monuments and the casting of votive deposits, sometimes evens sacrificial bodies, in water, or of the suggestion that water might provide a link to the underworld. That such beliefs lingered on into the early medieval period, perhaps to be bolstered by an influx of pagan Anglo-Saxons and then Danes, is in little doubt, and the Christian church had continuously to issue edicts banning what it regarded as pagan practices and especially the dedication of votive offerings to springs and other similar kinds of site, or the ‘worship’ of such sites and gatherings at them. Anglo-Saxon attitudes to bodies of water as the home of demons are also reflected in contemporary literature. Yet Christianity also saw water as a powerful symbol: heathen shrines could be purified by sprinkling on ‘holy’ water; many springs and wells were to be linked to Christian saints and water was an essential part of Christian baptism. These ways of thinking about the landscape of water will be explored in this chapter.

Wales provides a rare opportunity to explore the development of an early medieval socio-political landscape in a part of the Western Roman Empire that was not subject to Germanic incursion before the 11th century. South-East Wales is particularly important in this respect as it lies within the Romanised zone of lowland Britain. A lack of early evidence, however, has led scholars to construct anachronistic interpretations overly dependent upon evidence drawn from lawbooks of the 13th century. Archaeological evidence and documentary sources from South-East Wales do, however, afford an opportunity to explore the organisation and exploitation of the early medieval landscape independently of the lawbooks. This chapter examines territorial organisation, central places and long-term political continuity in early medieval South-East Wales. It concludes by considering some of the contrasts between patterns of power in South-East Wales and Anglo-Saxon England.

Chapter 3 explores the search, during the 1920s, for the origins of David’s city and a monotheistic Jerusalem. It recovers international, metropolitan, and local mandate initiatives for verifying the location of Jerusalem’s oldest part, Mount Ophel, known as the City of David, by considering the activities of the Anglo-American press, organizations such as the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), and Palestine’s antiquities administration. It also considers the effect of the excavations on the mount on local landholders and owners. The chapter relates the excavations to mandate policies in regard to town planning (which reached its vogue during the interwar period), and to the visions of British urban planners and designers, like William McLean, Charles Robert Ashbee, and Patrick Geddes, administrators such as Ronald Storrs, Jerusalem’s military governor, and archaeologists. It examines how they sought to integrate the city’s antiquities and archaeological remains and their notion of a walled city into a vision of its modernization. The chapter recoups the early limited attempts to excavate the Davidic city and discusses the complex negotiation over access to Ophel and other historical monuments, between the mandate authorities, archaeologists and their institutions, and local landholders who cultivated the excavation sites. The negotiation and disputes about who owned land were also clashes over the worth and value of antiquity.

In the past the study of early medieval kingdoms has mostly been a singledisciplinary activity based upon the extremely limited documentary sources, with boundaries back-projected from much later evidence (e.g. Bailey 1989, fig. 8.1). What is presented in this study, in contrast, is an attempt to have a more archaeologically and landscape-based discussion that includes using the distributions of cultural indicators such as artefact types, architectural forms, burial practices, and the locations of particular sites that appear to have been positioned in liminal locations. Three phases in the development of these kingdoms can be distinguished: • The fifth to sixth centuries (emergent kingdoms): the period of Grubenhäuser and Anglo-Saxon burials associated with a suite of material culture showing marked regional affinities. Anglo-Saxon kingdoms existed by the end of this period, and a broad consensus has emerged that they were formed through the amalgamation of a series of smaller regiones (e.g. Arnold 1988; Bassett 1989a; Yorke 1990; Scull 1993; 1999; Harrington and Welch 2014). This model—which Bassett (1989b) has compared to a football knock-out competition—is, however, based largely upon the fragmentary and very partial documentary record (see Chapter 7), and it does not explain the close correspondence of the boundaries between the fifth- to sixth-century socio-economic zones spheres identified here and those of the Iron Age and Roman periods. • The seventh and eighth centuries (mature kingdoms): a new suite of material culture (e.g. East Anglian and East Saxon coinage, and Ipswich Ware) whose circulation in part appears to have been restricted to the polities within which they were produced. The authority of the East Saxon kings had started to decline during the latter part of this period, although East Anglia survived. • The ninth century (the declining kingdoms): the East Saxon kingdom virtually disappeared and become a territory within Wessex. The distributions of later eighth- and ninth-century inscribed coinage, and distinctive artefact types such as silver wire inlaid strap ends, suggest that the East Anglian socio-economic sphere, and the kingdom that was based upon it, survived within the same boundaries that had emerged by the fifth and sixth centuries until it was overrun by the Danes in the 870s.

The physical difference in the archaeological traces of the bodies produced by cremation and inhumation have polarized discussions of these two burial practices. Conceptually, the wet, fleshy, decaying inhumed body has long been viewed as the binary opposite of the dry, skeletal, fragmentary cremated body. Inhumed bodies rot in situ, usually below ground, while cremains become portable, capable of being stored above ground. Recent studies aimed at re-integrating our understanding of cremation and inhumation have tended to focus on transitions between the hiatus of one burial mode and the (re-)introduction of another (e.g. Rebay-Salisbury 2012). However, in early Anglo-Saxon England (fifth to seventh centuries AD), cremation and inhumation were concurrently practiced, often in the same cemetery for tens if not hundreds of years. Therefore focusing only on transitions substantially reduces the field of investigation. Such different but contemporaneous burial modes may well have been influenced in part by contrasting and evolving beliefs concerning the body, death and the afterlife. In a recent transhistorical study of cremation and inhumation, Katherine Rebay-Salisbury (2012) identified religion as the primary influential context for funerary practices, with social concerns influencing the choices made within religious practices. However, any divergent cosmologies underpinning this difference still remain frustratingly veiled (Hutton 2010). While early Anglo-Saxon burials reveal a degree of genuine difference in the type and quantity of grave-goods and animals accompanying cremations and inhumations, a range of similarities also exists between them, ripe for further exploration. Cemeteries from Essex and Cambridgeshire provide particularly useful evidence of both cremation and inhumation practices, especially in light of recent publications of organic-rich burial sites of the fifth and sixth centuries AD from this area, notably Mucking I and II (Hirst and Clark 2009) and Springfield Lyons (Tyler and Major 2005). Three overarching concepts of body orchestration are addressed: containment, wrapping, and structuring, the evidence for which is first outlined thematically, then discussed as a whole. These shared concepts may be symptomatic of broader concerns for managing cadavers, which transcended the cremation-inhumation divide that is most clearly expressed through artefact and animal selection.

Insight into the diet of domestic animals in the archaeological record can elucidate diverse activities pertaining to ancient agricultural systems, including the utilization of the landscape by livestock and their herders (Bocherens et al. 2001; Bentley et al. 2003; Charles & Bogaard 2005), the impact of livestock farming on the environment (Amorosi et al. 1998; Witt et al. 2000; Mainland 2001), seasonality in husbandry practices (Akeret et al. 1999; Akeret & Rentzel 2001; Charles & Bogaard 2005), animal productivity (Amorosi et al. 1998) and the role of animals in society (Moens & Wetterstom 1988; Mainland & Halstead 2004). Research into the diet of domestic livestock has, however, largely focused on cattle, sheep, and goats (see for example all the references cited above) and it is only relatively recently that palaeodietary studies have begun to consider suid diet/nutrition and its potential value for elucidating the socio-economics of pig husbandry (e.g. Ervynck et al. this volume). This article presents one further such study: an analysis of dental microwear patterning in domestic pigs from selected Late Iron Age to medieval contexts in England, undertaken as part of a wider project into the potential application of dental microwear analysis to the question of pig diet and management in the prehistoric and historic past (Mainland et al. in prep.). Dental microwear analysis, although still primarily used within palaeontology (Teaford 1994; Rose & Ungar 1998), is increasingly being applied in archaeology to reconstruct both human (Rose & Ungar 1998; Schmidt 2001) and animal diet (Beuls et al. 2000; Mainland & Halstead 2004). In common with many other palaeodietary techniques (e.g. Schwarcz & Schoeninger 1991), dental microwear will not identify the consumption of individual foodstuffs but rather reflects broad functional and/or dietary adaptations (Rose & Ungar 1998); for example, browsing vs grazing (Solounias & Hayek 1993), folivory vs frugivory (Teaford & Walker 1984), hard vs soft diet (Teaford & Oyen 1989). Preliminary studies in modern suid populations have indicated that one basic axis of variation in pig diet/management is potentially identifiable using dental microwear, namely the separation of indoor-reared/stall-fed and outdoor reared/rooting populations (Ward & Mainland 1999).