Este estudio presenta un retrato de la sociedad colonial en las Américas del siglo XVII a través de textos autobiográficos. Se concentra en los protagonistas para sacarlos del anonimato y se describen sus destinos individuales con base en sus propios textos. Estos autotestimonios fueron escritos por diferentes actores como españoles, indígenas, mestizos, mulatos y extranjeros, tanto hombres como mujeres. A la vez, estos testimonios personales permiten caracterizar a los grupos sociales que moldearon las Indias al finalizar la fase de la Conquista.

Imagining the future, few people think of how discrimination and poverty will affect the shape of urbanization. Comics and Sci-Fi usually speak about the advanced technological progress of human beings, climate change, and superheroes. Meanwhile, a critical look at our modern lives indicates that this image is only a small part of a big puzzle. Rapid mass production and consumption in modern society has resulted in huge mountains of dumped objects and landfills where garbage communities live or manage their daily lives by collecting garbage. The growing valley between poor and rich gives us enough evidence to predict that garbage communities will continue to exist in the future. These communities have been ignored by archaeologists for many years. In the present article, I would like to propose that we have a look at the future of garbage communities and see whether garbage collecting can be identified as a form of subsistence and studied through archaeology.

Der vorliegende Artikel hat zum Ziel, interdisziplinärem Arbeiten eine neue präzise Gestalt zu geben. Sie basiert auf einer Analyse von Wissenschaftstypen, die tiefer ansetzt als die herkömmliche Unterscheidung von Geistes-, Sozial- und Naturwissenschaften und schlägt einen Modus modularer Kombinatorik vor. Die sprachliche Form der Darstellung ist so gewählt, dass die Überlegungen Forschenden aus allen Bereichen der Wissenschaft zugänglich, somit interdisziplinär anschlußfähig sind.

In interdisziplinären Forschungsverbünden entstehen häufig implizite oder auch explizite Spannungen um wissenschaftliche Vorgehensweisen, bis hin zu der Frage, was Wissenschaftlichkeit überhaupt ausmacht. Der vorliegende Artikel1 hat zum Ziel aufzuzeigen, dass sich verschiedene Typen wissenschaftlicher Forschung historisch ausgeprägt haben, die gleichberechtigt nebeneinander bestehen. Mit der Darstellung dieser Pluralität von Forschungsformen soll ein Verständnis befördert werden, das Unterschiede im Forschen nicht mehr zu Deutungskämpfen über 'wahre' Wissenschaftlichkeit auswachsen lässt, sondern als Chance zu einer interdisziplinären Kooperation mit Mehrwert.

This article responds to a growing tide of critique targeting select new materialist and object-oriented approaches in archaeology. Here we take a stand against this critical discourse not so much to counter actual and legitimate differences in how we conceive of archaeology and its role, but to target the exaggerations, excesses, and errors by which it increasingly is articulated and which restrict communication to the impoverishment of the field as whole. While also embracing an opportunity to clarify matters of politics and archaeological theory in light of object-oriented approaches and the material turn at large, we address a number of concerns raised by this critical discourse, which are, we contend, of relevance to all archaeologists: 1) the importance of ontology; 2) working with theory; 3) politics as first philosophy; 4) the concept of the subaltern; 5) binaries and the rhetorical desire for an enemy; and 6) the matter of misrepresentation.

Intrigued by repeated visits of Trump administration officials to the archaeological tunnels at the foot of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, I examine the extraordinary connection between American and Israeli nationalism, “Judeo-Christian values,” and Holy Land archaeology, and propose a “Pompeo premise” that equates Jewish antiquities and settlement with bedrock values of “Western civilization,” promotes a political narrative of redemption (even if accompanied by massive violence) and relegates Palestinian Muslims to an ephemeral existence. The “recovery” of a “true” Jerusalem, purified of any Islamic content, beneath the contested, chaotic surface of Palestinian and Israeli Jerusalem is delegated to archaeologists, who have for the most part accepted their task.

Accepting Globalisation means accepting diffusion, but globalisation has much to offer archaeologists, i.a. a monopoly on the sources of information for the early history and nature of globalisation. Beyond that, the elementary units of globalisation are not the states and boundaries we cannot find, but rather the cultures and civilisations we do and thus, there is less of a methodological confrontation with theory. Furthermore, globalisation offers a different approach to questions of economics which vex archaeological research. Approaching history from this vantage point allows a clearer means of structuring our understanding of history by combining cognitive, political, economic, social and cultural elements relating to identity and exchange to organise spatial and temporal groupings.

Der hier thematisierte Ansatz des Cityscaping bestimmt für die Analyse antiker Städte das Zusammenspiel aus normativen städtischen Mustern sowie dem Wirken unterschiedlicher Akteursgruppen mit ihren wirtschaftlichen, politischen und religiösen Interessen. Er fragt nach den daraus resultierenden baulichen bzw. performativen Raumformungsmechanismen, welche sich oft als Aushandlungsprozess oder Kampf um städtische Räume manifestierten. Die Impulse für aktuelle Debatten liegen in der Verbindung des Blicks auf städtische Eigenlogiken mit der Berücksichtigung von städtischen Netzwerken als Impulsgeber für urbanistische Entwicklung wie die Übernahme kultureller Muster gleichermaßen, was Städtevergleiche ermöglicht. Anliegen ist die präzisere Bestimmung der Bedeutung antiker Städte für die Geschichte der Stadt.

This article focuses on theories and discourses in cultural studies that deal with the concept and phenomenon of memory and analyzes the relevance of such content for professional discussions in ancient studies and the preservation of monuments. Using examples of my own and “borrowed” examples from others, I seek to show how the concepts from sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and historian Pierre Nora have an especially fruitful effect on our research and can generate new associations. I begin my observations at a natural temporal and spatial starting point: a historicist church interior in Berlin. The focus then moves to the medieval-looking Wartburg Castle, in Eisenach, and the western facade of the Metz Cathedral, concluding with the “ancient” ruins of Didyma and Pompeii.

The essay proposes the term ‘topopoetics’ in order to explain how cultural meanings, ideas and topoi originating in classical antiquity change and are transformed in and by artefacts. The artefacts under consideration are especially, but not exclusively, textual ones; they tend to unfold their topological dimensions by means of allegorical procedures. The contribution exemplifies the workings of topopoetics in early modernity by discussing central devices in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Richard Crashaw’s poetry and the front matter of Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables.

Hellenistic scholars have been the first to link the geographical description of the known world with a mathematical investigation of the terrestrial sphere. The definition of mathematical concepts devoted to geography and cartography – meridians and parallels, geographical coordinates for example – enabled the development of a specific branch of geographical knowledge. Already in the second century CE, Ptolemy was able to produce maps based on the latitude and the longitude of localities. Compared to more traditional literary geography, mathematical geography did not arise a strong interest among scholars of the Roman and Byzantine periods. This has incited modern historians to impute a global disregard for mathematical sciences to the “Roman geography”.

Space and landscape are central terms in the investigation of past societies and their interrelationship with the environment. However, even though these terms are so central, their definition is ambiguous what hinders a successful communication of research results and an open discussion. In this contribution we sketch the historical development of the understanding of space and landscape. Based on this summary we propose to think of these terms inclusively by integrating four different viewpoints on space, i.e. space as container, space as system of relations and connections, space as product of human perception, and space as construct. We employ our integrative viewpoint by developing different research questions for a holistic analysis of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic archaeological site Göbekli Tepe.