Academic literature on the topic 'Causeway Lake'

Approaching monumentality and politics at an epicentral-scale, Houk and Ashley Booher use a site-planning approach in chapter 8 to argue that the Late Classic rulers of Chan Chich, Belize designed major architectural components of the site to function as the theater for public spectacles and processions. The authors are able to demonstrate evidence for rituals’ having taken place along the two causeways and at their termini structures, as well as an apparent functional relationship between one causeway and an associated courtyard. Ritual, in this case, was actually the means to a political end. As Houk and Booher show, converting the monumental landscape of Chan Chich into a vast stage for public spectacle and ritual processions required considerable planning, labor, and resources. The Late Classic rulers at Chan Chich and other sites spent vast resources on the architecture of political theater as an exercise in community building and regional competition for labor, loyalty, and prestige.

Scudamore Lane, sloping down riverwards from just behind the Monument,* lies, at night, in the shadow of two black and monstrous walls which loom high above the glimmer of the scattered gas-lamps. The footpaths are narrow, and the causeway is paved...

Diane Chase and colleagues discuss one of the largest Classic-period Maya sites that ever existed, Caracol, Belize, in Chapter 6. Using over 30 years of data from the site, the authors examine four components of Caracol’s monumental landscape: the site’s plazuela groups, its causeway system, its reservoir system, and its agricultural terraces. Extensive excavation, mapping, and LiDAR data demonstrate that Caracol’s expansive territory was a heavily modified landscape, with considerable evidence for centralized planning. Mapped onto this planned landscape at Caracol is evidence for economic integration and centrally directed social engineering in the form of “symbolic egalitarianism.” As large and populous as Caracol was, it is not surprising that the city’s rulers extended their influence beyond the kingdom’s immediate territory and onto the larger geopolitical landscape of the Late Classic period. Chase and colleagues broaden the concept of monumentality to consider strategic political nodes on the landscape and inter-polity interactions on a truly regional scale. The authors close their chapter with a consideration of the roles of human decision making and climate change in the final abandonment of the kingdom.

Landscape in common usage refers to the physical landforms of hills, valleys, rivers, and lakes, together with vegetational cover that may have changed significantly over the centuries depending upon environmental factors as well as the impact of human settlement. It may also refer to the man-made landscape of buildings and settlements, roads and boundaries made by human occupation over the centuries. Although field archaeologists tend to focus their attention upon ‘sites’, it has long been recognized that individual settlements cannot have functioned in isolation from their environment, nor from their neighbours in the landscape. Equally important, although at the limits of archaeological inference, is how later prehistoric people viewed their own environment, which can hardly have been a matter of ignorance or indifference. The fact that a Neolithic long barrow extends down the spine of the hillfort at Hambledon Hill, or that a causewayed enclosure lies concentrically within the circuit at the Trundle in Sussex, may not have determined the hillfort's location, but it is hardly likely that Iron Age builders were unaware of their antiquity and significance. Landscape archaeology is often wrongly regarded as a recent contribution to field archaeology. Following the long-term excavations at Danebury of the 1970s and 1980s, the Danebury Environs Project still stands as one of the most significant advances in hillfort studies, together with landscape surveys around Maiden Castle, Dorset, and Cadbury Castle among others. A pioneer in this field was Christopher Hawkes, encouraged from the 1920s by O. G. S. Crawford. In the St Catharine's Hill report, Hawkes had stated explicitly that his purpose was to show ‘the place occupied by the hill settlement in the life of the contemporary countryside’ (Hawkes et al. 1930: 6), and in his Hampshire hillfort excavations of the 1930s he demonstrated this principle, notably at Quarley Hill (Hawkes 1939), where his excavation was designed to elucidate the relationship between hillfort and those linear features that physically linked it to its surrounding landscape. The Danebury excavation was the ultimate sequel to Hawkes’ Hampshire hillfort campaign, and with its Environs Programme, extended the study of the hillfort in its landscape context on a scale never previously practicable. This entailed a study of documentary sources and air photographs as well as field survey with selective excavation.