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1 - The contemplation of ruins: archaeological approaches to architecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2011

Jerry D. Moore
Affiliation:
California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Summary

At this time the fortress serves only as a witness of what it once was.

Cieza de Leon, 1550–52, on the site of Paramonga

Ancient traces of stone suggest humans have lived in buildings for at least 350,000 years. If the features and dates from the Paleolithic site of Terra Amata, France, are interpreted correctly (de Lumley 1969; cf. Villa 1983), early humans built small, temporary huts of saplings, cobbles, and brush on the edge of the Mediterranean during the Holstein interglacial. More permanent dwellings date from ca. 12,000–10,000 bp, as proto-agricultural Natufian peoples crowded around permanent springs in the post-Pleistocene Levant (Henry 1989) and sedentary hunters and gatherers using Jomon pottery settled the forested river valleys of the Japanese islands (Aikens and Higuchi 1982; Pearson 1986; Watanabe 1986). An unbroken legacy of human buildings stretches from the massive walls and tower built 9,350 years ago at Jericho, perhaps the oldest example of communal construction (Kenyon 1952,1972; cf. Mellaart 1975; Bar-Yosef 1986), to the Louisiana Superdome, the world's largest arena with seats for 95,000. And with an apparent inevitability which is simply an artifact of hindsight, humans translated early dwellings into other architectural forms as rooms served as burial crypts, pithouses became kivas (Cordell 1979: 134; Scully 1975), and houses of men were transformed into dwellings of gods (Bukert 1988; Fox 1988). Over the last 10,000 years, the built environment has become coterminous with the human environment, as people have raised artificial boundaries defining private and public, secular and sacred spaces.

Type
Chapter
Information
Architecture and Power in the Ancient Andes
The Archaeology of Public Buildings
, pp. 1 - 18
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

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