Humanities

Mountains are often groundlessly thought of as romantic backwaters lacking in development and civility, and portrayed as unruly places to pass through by academics working under the influence of ideologies of the state. Binaries of the urban and the rural, or the perception of civilized lowlands and crude shepherds and loggers, do not adequately account for the linear ecologies that intimately connect the plains to the mountains. In this chapter we advocate for the significance of these connecting ecologies that resist the colonial or statist marginalization of mountain peoples and places. These connecting linear ecologies are substantive landscapes of everyday movement, the flow of water, taskscapes, and interconnected land use, and are not limited to roads and routes.

Academic perspectives on ancient communities of the mountains tend to associate them with “landscapes of terror” (e.g., Matthews 2004). In these scenarios, marginalized mountain peoples are presented either as “tribal” threats to urbanized elites of the prosperous plains and lowland and river valleys, or impediments to regional circulation (Horden and Purcell 2000: 80). Such perspectives are produced under the influence of urban archives; they are typical of uncritical characterizations of mountains from an elitist bias and have to be taken with a grain of salt. Archaeological survey evidence, strengthened by ethnohistorical research, presents a far more even-handed perspective on life in the mountains. In this chapter we point to the intimately entangled nature of lowlands and mountains in the local context of west central Anatolia. This chapter is a modest attempt to bring back mountains as complex and connected landscapes of alterity and to invite mountains back to their place within settlement history.

Chicago's preoccupation with its architectural heritage has created an architourism industry around extant works by famous architects like Daniel H. Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. The social histories of these buildings can be illuminated through archaeological research such as the 2023 summer field project at the former sites of the Armour Mission and the Armour Flats. Excavation there produced materials related to the processes of urban renewal that made manifest the Mies-designed site plan for the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus. Amid building demolition, we recovered evidence of food consumption patterns as well as several children's toys from the turn of the twentieth century. The results presented here are preliminary-full analysis will be shared with our community partners in the Black Metropolis National Heritage Area to see what responses, correctives, or new questions for future research emerge.