Joshua Wright
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3590860 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Joshua Wright |
| NOMBRES | Joshua |
| APELLIDO | Wright |
| FIRMA | WRIGHT J |
| AFILIACIONES | Oberlin College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4300-5568 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 162 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2007 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
A Rabbi, A Priest, and a Minister
The early Cold War years have typically been seen as a period of increased religious interest in the United States. Religious and political leaders promoted interreligious cooperation among American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews amid an existential conflict against “godless communism.” This article shows how popular comedy helped realize this project of ecumenical sociability by renegotiating the boundaries of proper and improper humorous spee…
Occurrences of Persian glazeware in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia
Zuun Baruun Kherem, a medieval Eurasian center in Eastern Mongolia
Mongolia contains many urban sites of the medieval Kitan-Liao period (10th-12th centuries CE). The paired site of Zuun Baruun Kherem (ZBK) is a well-preserved example. The ZBK project aimed to examine the form and chronology of construction, the empty areas contained within many walled enclosures of this period, and the administrative use of these centers on the imperial frontier. Fieldwork was carried out primarily using hand augers to systemati…
[Re]Integrating a dispersed agenda
Amid resurgent geopolitical fissures and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a growing awareness in the sector of the need for, and concern about, national and international collaboration in archaeological projects. This article reflects on present-day challenges for international collaboration in central Eurasian archaeology and furthers a much-needed discussion about (re)integrating local narratives with inter-regional trends in…
The sanctuary at Keros in the Aegean Early Bronze Age
This article aims to summarise the results of three periods of fieldwork carried out since 2006. These are the Cambridge Keros Project of 2006–2008, the Keros Island Survey of 2012–2013, and the Keros-Naxos Seaways Project of 2015–2018. Taken together, these form a coherent, large-scale project that aimed to study a maritime landscape in some depth, putting the Kavos and Dhaskalio sites in a broader context, while through excavation understanding…
Optimal standards of proof in antitrust
Economic analyses of antitrust institutions have thus far focused predominantly on optimal penalties and the design of substantive legal rules, and have largely ignored the standard of proof used in trials as a policy tool in shaping behavior. This neglected tool can play a unique role in the antitrust context, where a given firm may have the choice to engage in exceptional anticompetitive or procompetitive behavior, or simply follow more convent…
Prehistoric Mongolian Archaeology in the Early 21st Century
There has been a great increase in archaeological research in Mongolia since 2000. Increasingly precise chronologies, regional studies, and the growth of development-driven archaeology are transforming our knowledge of this key region of northeastern Asia. This review summarizes recent work and provides a narrative of the prehistoric and medieval cultural sequences as presently understood. I focus on long-standing key topics: early human habitati…
‘All those Rocks….were Talking to Each Other’
Proto-Urban Establishments in Inner Asia
Walled sites attributed to the Xiongnu steppe empire (2nd century b.c.–1st century a.d.) constitute the earliest investments in explicitly non-mortuary built environments among pastoralists of the Mongolian Steppe. These permanent constructions are important precedents to the medieval towns of subsequent steppe empires, yet very little of the complete layouts and surrounding remains of the large enclosures are understood. Our investigations of th…
Against the Mane
Against the Grain is both a wide-ranging voyage of discovery and a regionally focused study of the trajectory of agriculture from its earliest appearance until historical times, coupled with discussion of the mechanisms that maintained early states. For Scott, the state is a fragile entity (pp. 21, 23, 118, 125) based on the production of grain, along with water transport, city walls, tax collection, specialized administrators, monumental centres…
Countermapping the Past
This paper explores possibilities for recognizing and analytically using culturally-specific understandings of artefacts and spaces at an ancient Maya archaeological site. In the case study that we present, we use Classic Maya material categories – derived from hieroglyphic texts – to re-envision our representations of artefactual distributions and accompanying interpretations. We take inspiration from countermapping as an approach that recognize…
The earliest Bronze Age culture of the south-eastern Gobi Desert, Mongolia
Pristine Affluence
Reviewed by: Pristine Affluence: Daoist Roots in the Stone Age by Livia Kohn Joshua Wright Pristine Affluence: Daoist Roots in the Stone Age. Livia Kohn. St. Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2017. 273 pp. Paperback US $35. ISBN 978-1-931483-36-0; ebook US $15. ISBN 978-1-365-50563-8. The archetypical Daoist immortal is depicted as a chubby bearded man wearing a loose robe, sometimes with a gourd of liquor in his hand and a donkey or water buffa…
Archeology of the Lu City
The honest labour of stone mounds
During the period of the adoption and spread of nomadic pastoralism in the eastern Eurasian steppe early pastoralists were developing animal husbandry as well as forming the social networks and political systems that went along with the new needs of a food production economy. The building and modification of diverse types of stone monuments and the long-term development of monumental landscapes constituted costly signals that communicated informa…
Payment changes and default risk
Households without Houses
The research that provided the basis for this paper was carried out in collaboration with the Institutes of History and Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and would not have been possible without my colleagues Chunag Amartuvshin, William Honeychurch, and D. Molor and the hospitality of the people of Egiin Gol and Baga Gazaryn Chuluu. The work was supported by the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, t…
Household Archaeology in East Asia
This special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Research brings together papers highlighting archaeological research on households from East Asia. Contributing authors examine this ubiquitous social unit as a “topic of” central inquiry, treating the household as an important subject in itself as well as the locus of various human interactions that crosscut all categories and levels of society. This collection provides comparable case studies…
The Anthropocene and the landscape of Confucius
The Yellow River catchment of northern China was central to the rise of complex societies from the first Neolithic farmers through to early states and empires. These cultural developments brought with them rising populations and increasing intensity of land-use. This region provides an important record of landscape changes that mark the development of the Anthropocene in China. Geoarchaeological research in the middle reaches of the Yellow River …
A Possible Archaeological Case of the Taxation of Medieval Eurasian Nomads
At several locations in the Mongolian steppe, the archaeological remains of large enclosure walls have been found in association with structures and ceramics related to the Mongol and Khitan-Liao empires. These structures are probably the remains of infrastructure built to support large-scale extraction of livestock from the pastoralist population in Mongolia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. This may be evidence of little-documented ta…
Inequality on the Surface
Reconstruction of ancestral temple for a fu (Fu Hao), Anyang, Xiaotun 258 12.3.The afterlife of things: charioteer and chariot in Yinxu site-museum chariot display 259 12.4.Chariots of the ancestors: Anyang, Angang steel works 262 FIGURES xiv 12.5.A dog death-attendant with bronze bell on top of tomb chamber, Sipanmo, Anyang 12.6.Lu: inscribed trophy deer skull, and antler arrowhead 12.7.Niu: inscribed oracle-bone, and hairpin 13.1.Locations disc…
Landscapes of Inequality
Khirigsuurs are stone monuments of variable scale and complexity that dominate the archaeological landscape of the Mongolian Bronze Age. Though there are countless typical-sized monuments, there are a few very large structures suggesting that a chiefly hierarchy directed their construction. Using measurements of size and formal complexity to compare these mega-monuments and khirigsuurs within fully surveyed areas this article argues that these mo…
The Work of Monuments
In this article, we look at two very different contexts of monument use – Bronze Age Inner Asia and the Classic period Maya lowlands – in order to explore the function and meanings of monuments and the variety of ways in which they worked to mark and differentiate ancient landscapes. Our goal in uniting such disparate contexts is to examine how power and social organization in these settings were translated into monumental material forms, and how…
Re-writing Monumental Landscapes as Inner Asian Political Process
The potential for monumental structures to convert, transform, and communicate has been explored extensively in the archaeological literature (Trigger 1990; Sherratt 1990; Bradley 1998) and, most recently, with regard to social memory and its potential for re-invention through monumental re-use (Williams 2003; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003). The reuse of monumental sites in the eastern steppe region of Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, southern Siberia, Xinji…
The Xiongnu settlements of Egiin Gol, Mongolia
The Xiongnu people have long been considered an archetypical nomadic group, characterised archaeologically mainly from their tombs - which have reinforced the stereotype. Thanks to a sophisticated survey project, the authors are able to reveal the Xiongnu's economic complexity. Although primarily pastorialists they practiced cultivation and their ceramics reveal a settlement hierarchy which chimes with the broader social and settlement system of …
Organizational principles of Khirigsuur monuments in the lower Egiin Gol valley, Mongolia
Households without Houses
The research that provided the basis for this paper was carried out in collaboration with the Institutes of History and Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and would not have been possible without my colleagues Chunag Amartuvshin, William Honeychurch, and D. Molor and the hospitality of the people of Egiin Gol and Baga Gazaryn Chuluu. The work was supported by the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, t…
The honest labour of stone mounds
During the period of the adoption and spread of nomadic pastoralism in the eastern Eurasian steppe early pastoralists were developing animal husbandry as well as forming the social networks and political systems that went along with the new needs of a food production economy. The building and modification of diverse types of stone monuments and the long-term development of monumental landscapes constituted costly signals that communicated informa…
The Xiongnu settlements of Egiin Gol, Mongolia
The Xiongnu people have long been considered an archetypical nomadic group, characterised archaeologically mainly from their tombs - which have reinforced the stereotype. Thanks to a sophisticated survey project, the authors are able to reveal the Xiongnu's economic complexity. Although primarily pastorialists they practiced cultivation and their ceramics reveal a settlement hierarchy which chimes with the broader social and settlement system of …
A Nested Approach to Survey in the Egiin Gol Valley, Mongolia
Defining an appropriate and adequate survey area is usually the first and most difficult step in survey research design. This paper presents an example from the Egiin Gol Survey project in which current models for nomadic polity development were evaluated against spatial data collected from a valley in north central Mongolia. The survey presented methodological challenges since no prior systematic survey had been conducted in Mongolia and the mob…
The Work of Monuments
In this article, we look at two very different contexts of monument use – Bronze Age Inner Asia and the Classic period Maya lowlands – in order to explore the function and meanings of monuments and the variety of ways in which they worked to mark and differentiate ancient landscapes. Our goal in uniting such disparate contexts is to examine how power and social organization in these settings were translated into monumental material forms, and how…
The Anthropocene and the landscape of Confucius
The Yellow River catchment of northern China was central to the rise of complex societies from the first Neolithic farmers through to early states and empires. These cultural developments brought with them rising populations and increasing intensity of land-use. This region provides an important record of landscape changes that mark the development of the Anthropocene in China. Geoarchaeological research in the middle reaches of the Yellow River …
The earliest Bronze Age culture of the south-eastern Gobi Desert, Mongolia
Proto-Urban Establishments in Inner Asia
Walled sites attributed to the Xiongnu steppe empire (2nd century b.c.–1st century a.d.) constitute the earliest investments in explicitly non-mortuary built environments among pastoralists of the Mongolian Steppe. These permanent constructions are important precedents to the medieval towns of subsequent steppe empires, yet very little of the complete layouts and surrounding remains of the large enclosures are understood. Our investigations of th…
Prehistoric Mongolian Archaeology in the Early 21st Century
There has been a great increase in archaeological research in Mongolia since 2000. Increasingly precise chronologies, regional studies, and the growth of development-driven archaeology are transforming our knowledge of this key region of northeastern Asia. This review summarizes recent work and provides a narrative of the prehistoric and medieval cultural sequences as presently understood. I focus on long-standing key topics: early human habitati…
Household Archaeology in East Asia
This special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Research brings together papers highlighting archaeological research on households from East Asia. Contributing authors examine this ubiquitous social unit as a “topic of” central inquiry, treating the household as an important subject in itself as well as the locus of various human interactions that crosscut all categories and levels of society. This collection provides comparable case studies…
[Re]Integrating a dispersed agenda
Amid resurgent geopolitical fissures and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a growing awareness in the sector of the need for, and concern about, national and international collaboration in archaeological projects. This article reflects on present-day challenges for international collaboration in central Eurasian archaeology and furthers a much-needed discussion about (re)integrating local narratives with inter-regional trends in…
Countermapping the Past
This paper explores possibilities for recognizing and analytically using culturally-specific understandings of artefacts and spaces at an ancient Maya archaeological site. In the case study that we present, we use Classic Maya material categories – derived from hieroglyphic texts – to re-envision our representations of artefactual distributions and accompanying interpretations. We take inspiration from countermapping as an approach that recognize…
A Possible Archaeological Case of the Taxation of Medieval Eurasian Nomads
At several locations in the Mongolian steppe, the archaeological remains of large enclosure walls have been found in association with structures and ceramics related to the Mongol and Khitan-Liao empires. These structures are probably the remains of infrastructure built to support large-scale extraction of livestock from the pastoralist population in Mongolia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. This may be evidence of little-documented ta…
A Nested Approach to Survey in the Egiin Gol Valley, Mongolia
Defining an appropriate and adequate survey area is usually the first and most difficult step in survey research design. This paper presents an example from the Egiin Gol Survey project in which current models for nomadic polity development were evaluated against spatial data collected from a valley in north central Mongolia. The survey presented methodological challenges since no prior systematic survey had been conducted in Mongolia and the mob…
Organizational principles of Khirigsuur monuments in the lower Egiin Gol valley, Mongolia
Re-writing Monumental Landscapes as Inner Asian Political Process
The potential for monumental structures to convert, transform, and communicate has been explored extensively in the archaeological literature (Trigger 1990; Sherratt 1990; Bradley 1998) and, most recently, with regard to social memory and its potential for re-invention through monumental re-use (Williams 2003; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003). The reuse of monumental sites in the eastern steppe region of Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, southern Siberia, Xinji…
The Xiongnu settlements of Egiin Gol, Mongolia
The Xiongnu people have long been considered an archetypical nomadic group, characterised archaeologically mainly from their tombs - which have reinforced the stereotype. Thanks to a sophisticated survey project, the authors are able to reveal the Xiongnu's economic complexity. Although primarily pastorialists they practiced cultivation and their ceramics reveal a settlement hierarchy which chimes with the broader social and settlement system of …
Inequality on the Surface
Reconstruction of ancestral temple for a fu (Fu Hao), Anyang, Xiaotun 258 12.3.The afterlife of things: charioteer and chariot in Yinxu site-museum chariot display 259 12.4.Chariots of the ancestors: Anyang, Angang steel works 262 FIGURES xiv 12.5.A dog death-attendant with bronze bell on top of tomb chamber, Sipanmo, Anyang 12.6.Lu: inscribed trophy deer skull, and antler arrowhead 12.7.Niu: inscribed oracle-bone, and hairpin 13.1.Locations disc…
Landscapes of Inequality
Khirigsuurs are stone monuments of variable scale and complexity that dominate the archaeological landscape of the Mongolian Bronze Age. Though there are countless typical-sized monuments, there are a few very large structures suggesting that a chiefly hierarchy directed their construction. Using measurements of size and formal complexity to compare these mega-monuments and khirigsuurs within fully surveyed areas this article argues that these mo…
The Work of Monuments
In this article, we look at two very different contexts of monument use – Bronze Age Inner Asia and the Classic period Maya lowlands – in order to explore the function and meanings of monuments and the variety of ways in which they worked to mark and differentiate ancient landscapes. Our goal in uniting such disparate contexts is to examine how power and social organization in these settings were translated into monumental material forms, and how…
The Anthropocene and the landscape of Confucius
The Yellow River catchment of northern China was central to the rise of complex societies from the first Neolithic farmers through to early states and empires. These cultural developments brought with them rising populations and increasing intensity of land-use. This region provides an important record of landscape changes that mark the development of the Anthropocene in China. Geoarchaeological research in the middle reaches of the Yellow River …
A Possible Archaeological Case of the Taxation of Medieval Eurasian Nomads
At several locations in the Mongolian steppe, the archaeological remains of large enclosure walls have been found in association with structures and ceramics related to the Mongol and Khitan-Liao empires. These structures are probably the remains of infrastructure built to support large-scale extraction of livestock from the pastoralist population in Mongolia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. This may be evidence of little-documented ta…
Payment changes and default risk
Households without Houses
The research that provided the basis for this paper was carried out in collaboration with the Institutes of History and Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and would not have been possible without my colleagues Chunag Amartuvshin, William Honeychurch, and D. Molor and the hospitality of the people of Egiin Gol and Baga Gazaryn Chuluu. The work was supported by the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, t…
Household Archaeology in East Asia
This special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Research brings together papers highlighting archaeological research on households from East Asia. Contributing authors examine this ubiquitous social unit as a “topic of” central inquiry, treating the household as an important subject in itself as well as the locus of various human interactions that crosscut all categories and levels of society. This collection provides comparable case studies…
Archeology of the Lu City
The honest labour of stone mounds
During the period of the adoption and spread of nomadic pastoralism in the eastern Eurasian steppe early pastoralists were developing animal husbandry as well as forming the social networks and political systems that went along with the new needs of a food production economy. The building and modification of diverse types of stone monuments and the long-term development of monumental landscapes constituted costly signals that communicated informa…
Pristine Affluence
Reviewed by: Pristine Affluence: Daoist Roots in the Stone Age by Livia Kohn Joshua Wright Pristine Affluence: Daoist Roots in the Stone Age. Livia Kohn. St. Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2017. 273 pp. Paperback US $35. ISBN 978-1-931483-36-0; ebook US $15. ISBN 978-1-365-50563-8. The archetypical Daoist immortal is depicted as a chubby bearded man wearing a loose robe, sometimes with a gourd of liquor in his hand and a donkey or water buffa…
‘All those Rocks….were Talking to Each Other’
Proto-Urban Establishments in Inner Asia
Walled sites attributed to the Xiongnu steppe empire (2nd century b.c.–1st century a.d.) constitute the earliest investments in explicitly non-mortuary built environments among pastoralists of the Mongolian Steppe. These permanent constructions are important precedents to the medieval towns of subsequent steppe empires, yet very little of the complete layouts and surrounding remains of the large enclosures are understood. Our investigations of th…
Against the Mane
Against the Grain is both a wide-ranging voyage of discovery and a regionally focused study of the trajectory of agriculture from its earliest appearance until historical times, coupled with discussion of the mechanisms that maintained early states. For Scott, the state is a fragile entity (pp. 21, 23, 118, 125) based on the production of grain, along with water transport, city walls, tax collection, specialized administrators, monumental centres…
Countermapping the Past
This paper explores possibilities for recognizing and analytically using culturally-specific understandings of artefacts and spaces at an ancient Maya archaeological site. In the case study that we present, we use Classic Maya material categories – derived from hieroglyphic texts – to re-envision our representations of artefactual distributions and accompanying interpretations. We take inspiration from countermapping as an approach that recognize…
The earliest Bronze Age culture of the south-eastern Gobi Desert, Mongolia
Prehistoric Mongolian Archaeology in the Early 21st Century
There has been a great increase in archaeological research in Mongolia since 2000. Increasingly precise chronologies, regional studies, and the growth of development-driven archaeology are transforming our knowledge of this key region of northeastern Asia. This review summarizes recent work and provides a narrative of the prehistoric and medieval cultural sequences as presently understood. I focus on long-standing key topics: early human habitati…
The sanctuary at Keros in the Aegean Early Bronze Age
This article aims to summarise the results of three periods of fieldwork carried out since 2006. These are the Cambridge Keros Project of 2006–2008, the Keros Island Survey of 2012–2013, and the Keros-Naxos Seaways Project of 2015–2018. Taken together, these form a coherent, large-scale project that aimed to study a maritime landscape in some depth, putting the Kavos and Dhaskalio sites in a broader context, while through excavation understanding…
Optimal standards of proof in antitrust
Economic analyses of antitrust institutions have thus far focused predominantly on optimal penalties and the design of substantive legal rules, and have largely ignored the standard of proof used in trials as a policy tool in shaping behavior. This neglected tool can play a unique role in the antitrust context, where a given firm may have the choice to engage in exceptional anticompetitive or procompetitive behavior, or simply follow more convent…
[Re]Integrating a dispersed agenda
Amid resurgent geopolitical fissures and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a growing awareness in the sector of the need for, and concern about, national and international collaboration in archaeological projects. This article reflects on present-day challenges for international collaboration in central Eurasian archaeology and furthers a much-needed discussion about (re)integrating local narratives with inter-regional trends in…
Zuun Baruun Kherem, a medieval Eurasian center in Eastern Mongolia
Mongolia contains many urban sites of the medieval Kitan-Liao period (10th-12th centuries CE). The paired site of Zuun Baruun Kherem (ZBK) is a well-preserved example. The ZBK project aimed to examine the form and chronology of construction, the empty areas contained within many walled enclosures of this period, and the administrative use of these centers on the imperial frontier. Fieldwork was carried out primarily using hand augers to systemati…
Archaeology (21 obras) · Geography (19 obras) · History (19 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (14 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology (12 obras) · Sociology (10 obras) · Ancient history (9 obras) · History (9 obras) · Anthropology (8 obras)