This dissertation reconstructs North and South Carolina Lowcountry plantation waterfronts as a means of better understanding mobility, inequality, and human-environment interactions in the antebellum Lowcountry. Using a theoretical framework of hydrosociality, the author undertook archaeological and archival research to investigate the question: how did the built environment of navigable waterways...
This dissertation assesses the relationship between inequality and the longevity of urban communities. It does so through an examination of low-status households, a population segment I term Urban Commoners, at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize. Aventura was a socioeconomically diverse urban center that grew to its peak in...
This dissertation is about the environment, inequality, and ways of being in the world. Water is necessary for biophysical existence, but also holds symbolic and ideological power. In ancient Maya ontologies, water was a powerful social force in the landscape, necessary for both bodily functions and cosmological connections. In some...
This dissertation argues that royal nomadism, the custom whereby medieval rulers moved between many castles in a predetermined cycle, fundamentally affected the floorplan, use, and adornment of courtly built environments. This argument is a new departure for the study of castles. Scholars of medieval castles acknowledge that rulers passed through...
This dissertation investigates long-term biographies of seventeen small medieval settlements in the region of Hegranes, Skagafjörður, North Iceland, placing their creation, development, and reuse in the context of coupled social and environmental change. The individuals and households who lived at the Hegranes sites were at the nexus of both kinds...
People and horses have a deep, co-constructed, and co-evolutionary history. This dissertation evaluates sociopolitical change of the Hungarian Bronze Age (2800 – 800 BC) in the context of long-term shifts in human-horse relationships. In the Bronze Age, horses are assumed to mount the development of complex polities ruled by elite,...