The Archaeology of Anxiety

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Archaeologies of Anxiety: The Materiality of Anxiousness, Worry, and Fear

   • Jeffrey Fleisher, Neil Norman

   Pages 1-20

3. The Importance of “Getting It Right:” Tracing Anxiety in Mesolithic Burial Rituals

   • Liv Nilsson Stutz

   Pages 21-40

4. Risky Business: A Life Full of Obligations to the Dead and the Living on the Early Bronze Age Southeastern Dead Sea Plain, Jordan

   • Meredith S. Chesson

   Pages 41-65

5. Hid in Death’s Dateless Night: The Lure of an Uncanny Landscape in Bronze Age Anatolia

   • Tim Flohr Sørensen, Stephen Lumsden

   Pages 67-93

6. Feet of Clay: An Archaeology of Huedan Elite Anxiety in the Era of Atlantic Trade

   • Neil L. Norman

   Pages 95-119

7. Communities of Anxiety: Gathering and Dwelling at Causewayed Enclosures in the British Neolithic

   • Oliver J. T. Harris

   Pages 121-139

8. Bodily Protection: Dress, Health, and Anxiety in Colonial New England

   • Diana DiPaolo Loren

   Pages 141-156

9. Ritualized Coping During War: Conflict, Congregation, and Emotions at the Late Pre-Hispanic Fortress of Acaray

   • Margaret Brown Vega

   Pages 157-186

10. “Concern”ing Contributions to This Volume

    • Susan Kus

    Pages 187-211

11. Back Matter

    Pages 213-215

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Recent efforts to engage more explicitly with the interpretation of emotions in archaeology have sought new approaches and terminology to encourage archaeologists to take emotions seriously. This is part of a growing awareness of the importance of senses—what we see, smell, hear, and feel—in the constitution and reconstitution of past social and cultural lives. 

 

Yet research on emotion in archaeology remains limited, despite the fact that such states underpin many studies of socio-cultural transformation. The Archaeology of Anxiety draws together papers that examine the local complexities of anxiety as well as the variable stimuli—class or factional struggle, warfare, community construction and maintenance, personal turmoil, and responsibilities to (and relationships with) the dead—that may generate emotional responses of fear, anxiousness, worry, and concern.

 

The goal of this timely volume is to present fresh research that addresses the material dimension of rites and performances related to the mitigation and negotiation of anxiety as well as the role of material culture and landscapes in constituting and even creating periods or episodes of anxiety.

• archaeological evidence of historic coping mechanisms
• archaeology and funereal rites
• archaeology of conflict and community response
• archaeology of rituals
• conceptual archaeology
• emotional and material landscapes
• emotions research and archaeology
• material culture and anxiety
• physical representations of fear, anxiety, and worry

“This volume is a bold, forward thinking, and essential contribution to this movement in archaeology. … The writing of this volume contains a tone of defending the choice to study emotion as a way to advocate for its more widespread acceptance in the discipline. The results of the volume should certainly compel more archaeologists to embrace this way of thinking about the past, and recognize the potential to more fully study people’s lives through the archaeological record.” (Jane Eva Baxter, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Vol. 6 (1–2), 2018)

• Rice University, Houston, USA

  Jeffrey Fleisher

• College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, USA

  Neil Norman

Jeffrey Fleisher (BA, MA, PhD, University of Virginia) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  His regional specialty is on the ancient Swahili coast of eastern Africa, focusing on the development of first and second millennium urban centers there.  Past research has focused on the ancient settlements of rural and non-elite Swahili, and their connections and contributions to urban developments.  Currently, he directs a long-term project at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Songo Mnara in southern Tanzania, focusing on the use of open and public space. 

Neil Norman (BA, Flagler College; MA, University of South Carolina; PhD, University of Virginia) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.  His specialties are the archaeology of social complexity and historical archaeology.  At present, he directs the Savi Countryside Archaeological Project (Republic of Benin), the Africatown Archaeological Project (Mobile, Alabama) and co-directs the Later Zanzibar Archaeological Project (Republic of Tanzania).

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