Dear Colleagues,

We’re inviting paper abstracts for our session “Leaving No Stone Unturned: What Archaeology Means to Unsustainable Urban Growth”, which we convene at the EAA 2018, in Barcelona, 5-8 Sept 2018. While we coin this session from a lens on tropical urbanism, we’re aiming to attract culturally and disciplinarily varied contributions from a range of research, projects, and ideas. Please find an abstract and further details below. This Call for Papers is intended for wide circulation, with apologies for cross-postings.

Session title:

Leaving No Stone Unturned: What Archaeology Means to Unsustainable Urban Growth (no. 265)

Conference:

European Association of Archaeologists, Annual Meeting, 2018, Barcelona (https://www.e-a-a.org/eaa2018)

Dates:

September 5-8, 2018

Session organisers:

Benjamin N. Vis (Kent), Christian Isendahl (Gothenburg), Elizabeth Graham (UCL)

Submission deadline:

February 15, 2018

Registration deadline for presenters:

March 31, 2018 (also early bird registration rate deadline)

Abstract requirements:

Title, and abstract of around 250 words

Paper length:

15-20min. (incl. questions)

Abstract:

People face global challenges unprecedented in human history. The complex system of human-environment interactions highlights problems resulting from crucial interconnected trends. These include population growth, rapid urbanisation which is alarmingly outpaced by the expansion of urban land cover, a decreasing ratio of food producers to food consumers, and increasing soil degradation. These conditions create a truly critical developmental dynamic that casts our future in a bleak light. Calls that emphasise the need to develop knowledge-based plans for sustainable urban growth are not only urgent and understandable, but will prove to be ill-informed pipe dreams if negative trends are not reversed.

One way to counteract the quandary that global processes confront us with is to design solutions at the local scale that are appropriate to local conditions. Archaeology is increasingly revealing past tropical urban development patterns. These alert us to long histories of radically different kinds of urban planning, design, life and ecological relations. In this session we invite contributions that seek to critically operationalise current insights and evidence from the archaeology of tropical cities across the globe. What do ancient tropical urban conditions have in common? How are alternative social and ecological relations manifested in distinctive developmental trajectories and do they display causal consistencies in urban form? How has past tropical urbanisation affected long-term environmental dynamics, and how were changes managed in urban life and governance? Ultimately, how can we present and use the distinctiveness of the archaeological-material evidence-base for indigenous urban vernaculars to inform global sustainable urban development debates?

Key words:

Urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)

Tropical Archaeology

Ancient Cities

Comparative Urbanism

Future-oriented Archaeology

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Dr Benjamin N. Vis | +44 (0)1227 82 6543 | https://kent.academia.edu/BenjaminVis |

School of European Culture & Languages | University of Kent |

Rutherford College W3.E7 | Canterbury CT2 7NX | UK |

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