Antiquity

Rhythm and possibility: Making space for ancient futures

“…In Europe and west Asia, the material marks of gathering places can be traced back to the ''princely'' burials of the Paleolithic and the megalithic constructions of the Neolithic period (Wengrow & Graeber, 2015). In the early Iron Age (c.1100-600 BCE), certain types of sites became paradigmatic for the interconnected cultures of Afro-Eurasia that anticipated the globalized conditions of Greco-Roman antiquity (Versluys & Sluiter, 2022). In the Eurasian steppe, for instance, food remains from the elite tombs of the region's pastoral nomads indicate that thousands of people congregated to construct the towering mounds in the short period when the ground was neither frozen nor too wet for moving building materials (Daragan & Polin, 2021).…”