sey075

This is a migration. I recently wandered into the conceptual quagmire of migration. I posted previously on concepts and their clarity (or lack thereof), using the example of identity . Please see the first part of that prior post for my discussion of John Gerring's pointers on concept formation in the social sciences. A caveat here. I am most interested in the topic of migrations or human movements in agrarian state societies. The concepts and perhaps methods differ for non-state societies. In fact the one domain where I found coherent and interesting archaeological work on migration is the U.S. Southwest. For reviews of this work, see: Schachner (2012), or Nelson and Strawhacker (2011); particularly the synthetic chapters. So, what is wrong with the concept of migration in the archaeology of states? First, many or most archaeologists do not define the term. I was flabbergasted that major programmatic works, published explicitly to promote and refine the concept of migration, do n...

1563 date panel, Calixtlahuaca Basically, I am incredibly busy right now, leaving me little time for more enjoyable things like blog posts. Why so busy? The Calixtlahuaca project is coming to a close. I am working to make sure all our final analyses get done and paid for before the NSF grant turns into a pumpkin. Among other things, my students and I are hosting a project workshop here at ASU in November, with participants coming in from the U.S. and Mexico to organize our data and thoughts. So why did someone carve both the Aztec and Christian dates in a panel in 1563, when Calixtlahuaca was under the control of Martín Cortés, son of the conqueror? Our urban services project is starting up (the NSF grant started in September). Not only are we charting new territory in the GIS analysis of premodern (archaeological and historical) cities, but we are undertaking a massive program of coding historical data to analyze the social, economic, and political context of each city in our sample....