Understanding Space Flashcards
Symbolic boundaries - Traveller campsites - Jewish mezuzzah
Prison architecture - E.g. Kilmainham Jail, Dublin. Designed for obedience, intimidation and surveillance.
Spatial layout of the Mongolian yurt - space both reflects and maintains the ideological order. High and low rank, dirty and clean, domestic and public, women and men.
The ideological role of space - Can reflect belief systems - E.g. Tana Toraja, Indonesia. Top floor is heaven, bottom is hell - direction and building all represent different values.
Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire. Use of space shows social order - many rooms have to be passed through to get to the upper class - barriers that many could not cross.
Access analysis - Scottish brochs (Iron Age). Access only from one place - reconstructed to show how people would move in them.
Natufian houses - round and many entrances- public spaces.
EBA Myrtos, Crete. Investigation took into account access routes but also senses - distances you could see, smell and hear things from.
Mucking North Ring, Essex Partition showed
- front-back - clean-dirty - public-private - sacred-profane - high status-low status - male-female
Lockerbie, Dumfries-shire. British Neolithic longhouses? Although it is shaped like a longhouse, artefacts found alongside it are ritual and axes - not domestic.
Site catchment analysis - Vita-Finzi and Higgs - Resources available within 2 hours walk - Beyond this, the return is not large enough to rationalise the expenditure of energy - least effort for maximum gain
Flannery’s ‘The Mesoamerican village’ - Looked at Pacific coast of Chiapas and Guatemala - 1500-500 BC - Identified different types of site based on archaeological survey and excavation
Landscape as a reflection of world views/ cosmologies - Belief systems mapped out in the landscape (cosmography) - e.g. Tewa Indians of New Mexico
Sacred landscapes in the Neolithic. Langdale Pike. Tools made here as perhaps an initiation rite or to protect the source of materials and methods. Highly inaccessible.
The Dorset cursus - A line of many different environment, taking in many neolithic monuments. May have been an initiation rite to teach young men about their environments and bring them closer to dieties.
