Assemblage urbanism. Becoming urban in late medieval Southampton

Jervis, Ben

doi:10.1017/s138020381800017x

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Mats Roslund (1994;2018) asks what makes the qualitative difference between rural and urban communities in terms of social content and cultural expression, and he points to the urban networks in which medi eval towns were entangled. Production and exchange are basic urban practices that create and recreate urban networks, in which material, knowledge, and intentions ('meaning') circulated.…”

Section: The Sigtuna Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The modernist approach to historical research has been about discovering, describing, and understanding the emergence and importance of these relationships in our time and within the historical imperative's horizon of understanding. It is methodo logically a common procedure to create chrono logically rooted spaces between occurrences and events, but the creation of such space has influenced our research on history, including urban archaeo logy's schematization, development of methods, and explanatory models in terms of a reductionist comprehension of temporality and times (Larsson 2006;Jervis 2018). Modernists' linear concept of time has strongly contributed to the cementation of the conception of the existence of logically coherent and rationally explainable links between the past and present life.…”

Section: Events -Inferred Realitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Andersson 2017Andersson [1972; Helle 2006;Christophersen 1997;Larsson 2017). Ben Jervis (2018) has thought-provokingly discussed the discrepancies between the conventional historical narrative of Southampton in the Late Middle Ages and the narrative that can be told from the archaeo logical context: the material remains show a diversity of activities which do not match the macroeconomic explanation of the situation in Southampton in the fourteenth century ad: 'By seeing the town not as a purely economic and political entity, but as an entangled web of social interactions' he states, the narrative about fifteenth-century Southampton's economy changes content and direction drastically ( Jervis 2018, 140). To discover urban diversity and its preconditions, we need to hunt for the 'small-scale narratives', or, as Jervis (2018, 143) puts it: 'a case study of the local articulation of large-scale processes of royal power, international relations and economics' .…”

Section: Introduction: Hunting For Small-scale Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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High-Definition Archaeology, Small-Scale Narratives, and Monetary Practice in Medieval Scandinavian Urbanization

Christophersen¹

2022

Journal of Urban Archaeology

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High-definition archaeo logy is an efficient tool to study medi eval urban economic practices. Medi eval economy has been synthesized in 'grand narratives' which obscure the regional and local variations of economic practice. Through examples from two medi eval towns in Norway and Sweden the article aims to show regional diversity in monetary practices as an alternative narrative to the grand narratives that leave a dominant impression of the past as a linear and homogenous development. The article shows the complexity and dendritic development in early medi eval monetary practice by using high-resolution data and elements from Social Practice Theory. High-resolution data is required to establish 'dense chrono logies', which are of importance when reconstructing events and processes embedded in the archaeo logical contexts, as well as reconstructing norms and concepts of social behaviour embedded in events and processes.

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Section: The Sigtuna Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Events -Inferred Realitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction: Hunting For Small-scale Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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High-Definition Archaeology, Small-Scale Narratives, and Monetary Practice in Medieval Scandinavian Urbanization

Christophersen¹

2022

Journal of Urban Archaeology

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“…These bids for greater control often marked an inflection point in the world's first cities that either spurred their expansion or precipitated their decline. Thinking of cities as dynamic assemblages rather than as more static stages of interlocking institutions can get us closer to the realities of the urban transition ( Jervis 2018).…”

Section: After Childementioning

confidence: 99%

Cities, Surplus, and the State: A Re-evaluation

Jennings¹,

Frenette²,

Harmacy³

et al. 2021

Journal of Urban Archaeology

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Since at least the Enlightenment, the first cities have been commonly seen as products of a state or other kind of regionally organized polity that enabled the reliable production of a food surplus. In this paper, we re-evaluate the relationship between cities, regionally organized polities, and surplus based on data from the very early urban settlements of Jenne-jeno, San Lorenzo, and Liangzhu. These data clearly show that regionally organized polities were not necessary to feed these cities. The polities developed in reaction to urban life, often replacing more localized subsistence regimes that had provided greater autonomy for producers. We argue that decoupling regional polity formation from urbanization can provide a more accurate understanding of how cities first came into being.

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“…Nevertheless, archaeologists who draw on assemblage theories are particularly vocal about its promise to unravel or destabilize the entrenched conceptual categories that have long driven research. For instance, Jervis () writes of a relational‐ontology approach to the medieval European “town,” seeing it as an “entangled web of social interactions” rather than an economic entity or discrete space. He contends that such an approach to the intersections of people and materials forcefully shifts “our analytical gaze from studying the town as an example of a category of place, to understanding the processes through which that place, as a generative bundle of people, things, and materials, emerged, was articulated and translated; in other words, from being urban, to becoming urban” (141).…”

Section: Situated Learning Things and Assemblagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

Kosiba

2019

American Anthropologist

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Anthropological archaeology has long been a process of categorization. The history of the subdiscipline could be rendered in terms of an ongoing project to create, critique, and then refashion the categories by which archaeologists understand and explain social and ecological processes. Despite ever-changing theoretical tides, many archaeologists have continued to adhere to a lingua franca that demarcates their object of study, whether "the past," "nature," complexity, material culture, or historical knowledge. In 2018, strong currents in archaeological scholarship have both challenged and washed out the boundaries of many of these epistemological mainstays. This was more than a postmodern exercise to question metanarratives of history or to destabilize supposed social universals. The recent scholarship develops innovative theoretical perspectives and sophisticated methodological tools to shed light on the varied human interactions, practices, and projects that were previously occluded by research too sharply focused on bounded categories such as periods, polities, adaptations, and meanings. Furthermore, archaeologists are now more than ever critically examining the colonial institutions that they perpetuate and seeking to establish new common ground with Indigenous communities. A decidedly archaeological perspective seems to be taking shape.This is a view that sees social life from the ground up in terms of complicated relationships between people, things, and other organisms that cannot be reduced to catchall categories. [year in review, archaeology, archaeological theory, current issues, Indigenous archaeology, environmental anthropology] RESUMEN La arqueología antropológica ha sido durante mucho tiempo un proceso de categorización. La historia de la subdisciplina podría ser descrita en términos de un proyecto continuo de crear, criticar y luego rehacer las categorías a través de las cuales los arqueólogos entienden y explican los procesos sociales y ecológicos. A pesar de las mareas teóricas siempre cambiantes, muchos arqueólogos han continuado adhiriéndose a una lengua franca que demarca su objeto de estudio, ya sea "el pasado", "naturaleza", complejidad, cultura material o conocimiento histórico.En 2018, corrientes fuertes en la investigación arqueológica han tanto retado como difuminado los límites de muchos de los pilares epistemológicos. Esto fue más que un ejercicio posmoderno para cuestionar metanarrativas de la historia o para desestabilizar supuestos universales sociales. La reciente investigación desarrolla perspectivas teóricas innovadoras y herramientas metodológicas sofisticadas para arrojar luz sobre las variadas interacciones humanas, prácticas y proyectos que estuvieron previamente ocluidos por investigación excesivamente enfocada en categorías delimitadas tales como períodos, unidades políticas, adaptaciones y significados. Además, los arqueólogos ahora están más que nunca examinando críticamente las instituciones coloniales que perpetúan y buscando establecer un nuevo terreno común con las c...

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Assemblage urbanism. Becoming urban in late medieval Southampton

Cited by 9 publications

References 84 publications

High-Definition Archaeology, Small-Scale Narratives, and Monetary Practice in Medieval Scandinavian Urbanization

High-Definition Archaeology, Small-Scale Narratives, and Monetary Practice in Medieval Scandinavian Urbanization

Cities, Surplus, and the State: A Re-evaluation

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

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