Maxime Lamoureaux-St-Hilaire and Scott McRae's new book deals with instances of ancient abandonment on a variety of scales, but as the subtitle indicates, the contributions go beyond giving snapshots of abandoned sites. Rather, they more deeply and richly consider—often with reference to ethnographic evidence and even fiction—how people became attached to or entangled with place(s), how the process of “detachment” played out, and how attachment can remain despite physical relocation. The eight case studies, briefly discussed in this review, include discussions of five American cultures, Early Bronze Age northern Mesopotamia, medieval Bagan in Myanmar, and Late Iron Age Bassar in Africa.
The normativity of abandonment and mobility and other recurring themes is set out in the introductory chapter by the editors and then elaborated with a range of examples by Patricia McAnany and Lamoureux-St-Hilaire in Chapter 2. McAnany and Lamoureux-St-Hilaire introduce us clearly to the idea of stressors and enablers of migration, rather like push and pull factors, and to acts and processes of place-making and place-leaving and their materiality. They also illustrate how people could and did remain attached to abandoned locations, that those places therefore remained “active,” and how descendants might sometimes return to or reuse them. Importantly, they emphasize that Western ontologies of landscape and settlement, of property and property rights, may not be relevant in other cultural contexts: abandonment is not always to be regarded as a “failure.”
In Chapter 3, Donna Glowacki offers a careful and nuanced discussion of abandonment and migration in the Puebloan Mesa Verde region, which became depopulated at the end of the thirteenth century AD. She critiques Malthusian collapse narratives and instead carefully demonstrates the normal mobilities of individuals, families, and even whole villages while identifying processes of serial migrations and of social group fusion and fission. Rather than having one single cause, migrations and community fission and fusion throughout the history of the region took place for many reasons, often social. The final abandonment was not a complete cultural detachment from place, despite physical movement away from it and into other communities and cultures.
Jennifer Birch and Louis Lesage (Chapter 4) examine the ways in which mobility was the norm in Huron-Wendat communities of the Great Lakes region, with villages moving every generation. Yet the regular abandonment of settlements and of their agricultural land, or movement of households between villages, did not equate to a complete detachment from place. Places and landscapes remained (and remain today in descendant communities) imbued with meaning—not least through the construction of ossuaries in which the remains of the village deceased were deposited and comingled in the Feast of the Dead, which would take place when a village was being relocated. Ancestors would continue to inhabit these territories. Mobility here was an ongoing process that happened alongside the making of wider place-meaning.
Chapter 5, by Kenneth Sassaman and Asa Randall, concerns the Late Archaic Poverty Point site in Louisiana. Poverty Point has been reconstructed as a long-lived cosmological center that related to or embodied various aspects of the environment and hosted large gatherings of people (a “cosmunity”). As regular sea-level rise abated, the cosmology as it had developed may have been challenged or undermined and Poverty Point—and its mode of expression through major earthworks—was abandoned.
Scott Macrae, Gyles Iannone, and Pete Demarte (Chapter 6) use the concepts of landesque capital and sense of place to explain the different fates of the minor administrative and agricultural site of Waybil and the agricultural zone of the Contreras Valley, both of which were part of the Late Classic Maya Minanha state. The Contreras Valley, they note, had a long history before the rise of Minanha and continued after its collapse, whereas Waybil, the rise of which was closely related to Minanha, was abandoned at the same time as the city in AD 810. Chapter 7, by Lamoureaux-St-Hilaire, Marcello Canuto, Tomas Barrientos, and Jose Bustamante, examines the abandonment of the Maya capital of La Corona, a small state whose development was stimulated by an alliance with the Kaanul hegemonic kingdom (Calakmul). After the fragmentation of Kaanul, La Corona continued as a “postcolonial” royal center for some 150 years. During this phase, its architecture was modified over time as the royal line transformed its behavior and role in response to a reduction in its relative status. These chapters on the Classic Maya offer an effective counterbalance to apocalyptic and deterministic “megadrought” collapse narratives.
Chapter 8 by Phillip de Barros and Chapter 10 by Iannone discuss the villages of the Bassar region of Togo and of Bagan in Myanmar, respectively. In the case of the Late Iron Age Bassar, stressors that affected the survival of village settlements and migration included raiding for slaves and cattle by other groups from the west and north, while some of the enablers that drew people into the region were iron-working opportunities, the availability of good farmland, and linguistic similarities. Those founding new settlements would “capture” the locality by identifying and entering into a relationship with the local diwaal, the spirit of the territory. These relationships could continue even after a site was abandoned. Classical Bagan, by contrast, was a major imperial capital from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries AD, with a large and diverse population. As the state collapsed and Bagan lost primacy, nobles and commoners left the city. Yet the established patterns of Burmese culture remained active and alive and Bagan itself remained populated. The city also retained its primary cultural significance and new monuments continued to be built, on a reduced scale, though old monuments fell into ruin.
Michael Danti (Chapter 9) focuses on northern Mesopotamia at the time of a proposed megadrought, collapse, and widescale abandonment of settlements (ca. 2200–1900 BC). He reminds us that many sites and regions in northern and western Syria actually enjoyed continuity through the period. Focusing on Sweyhat, he notes that the site underwent significant development at the beginning of the megadrought, and despite subsequent destructions by fire in the city, much was rebuilt; the city was only gradually abandoned later, in the early second millennium BC. The nomadic lifestyle that the people shifted into became a sustainable norm, with the urban period the blip in the long-term history of the region, not the norm.
Drawing the book together in the penultimate chapter, Catherine Cameron looks back at abandonment studies in archaeology and usefully considers the contribution of the eight case studies contained in the volume. This is helpful as a critical summary. The final chapter, by Jeffrey Cohen, takes a different tack and discusses the challenges of studying mobility and migration in archaeology and cultural anthropology, especially those of focus (long/short term) and resolution (high/low).
Lamoureaux-St-Hilaire and McRae's volume succeeds in demonstrating that the concept of “detachment” is a useful lens through which archaeologists can view abandoned sites; it can be applied beyond those cultures discussed in the book itself. Because it emphasizes abandonment as a lived and experienced process, rather than just an event, it can enable additional layers of meaning, on multiple scales, to be included in descriptions and narratives. In this regard, the authors also explicitly and rightly eschew proposing simplistic, deterministic, and apocalyptic causes for why people moved away—even in cases labeled “collapse.” The chapters all effectively combine sharp description with insightful theoretical discussion to broaden and deepen the reader's understanding of abandonment and shifting settlement patterns in each culture. The book is readable and engaging, and it should appeal to both students and scholars who are interested in the dynamics of settlement, mobility, and the “mysteries” of abandonment.
