Big Landscapes
Monumental Landscapes and Early Urbanism in the Prehispanic Andes
John Janusek
A predominant Western ‘naturalist’ perspective apprehends landscape as a backdrop to human experience and activity, including the construction and growth of cities. Processes considered ‘natural’ are black-boxed and rendered peripheral to human experience. Early New World cities drew power from the monumental forces made manifest in surrounding natural landscape features and skyscape cycles. Early centers and cities reciprocally embodied and made reference to those forces in their physical constitution, and emergent leaders mediated the relation between human communities and landscapes of potent, non-human beings. Such an ‘animist’ apprehension of the world was not given; it was continually created at early Andean centers such as Khonkho Wankane, Tiwanaku, and Cuzco. Furthermore, such an apprehension was not simply ‘religious.’ As a relational ontology, it defined a pragmatic- and given its longevity and its centrality to the rise of early cities such as Tiwanaku, highly resonant –interpretation of human production and reproduction in the world.
Big Plans
Timothy Pauketat
Monuments are designed for effect. These are both immediate and protracted depending on their hierophantic qualities (those that make manifest mystical powers) and materiality. The great buildings and public grounds of ancient American cities and ceremonial centers aligned human experience with the order of the cosmos. This point is exemplified by early Olmec centers, the great cities of central Mexico, the anomalous development at Chaco Canyon and, especially, the American Indian city of Cahokia near modern-day St. Louis. Cahokia’s plans were extended into the countryside at its inception, with profound immediate effects on the everyday lives of locals, immigrants, and pilgrims that rapidly radiated across the Mississippi valley. However, compared to other cities, its legacy did not last. Being built of wood and earth, it lacked the durability needed to ensure continued remembrance. Some of the best laid plans of monuments and people, it seems, go awry.
Big Buildings
Contextual monumentality, meaning and social interaction in Late Bronze Age Cyprus
Kevin Fisher
A detailed look at monumental buildings from Late Bronze Age Cyprus reveals that size was often not the primary means of expressing monumentality. Rather, it was created in the interplay of fixed-feature elements such as ashlar masonry, semifixed-feature elements such as furnishings and portable artifacts, and nonfixed-feature elements including the physical and verbal expression of the building’s occupants. Elites encoded meanings in these elements, which were combined to create specific contexts for social interaction and ritual performance. During these occasions, status and identity were negotiated and expressed as encoded meanings were communicated to participants, potentially influencing their behaviour. As places, these contexts also gradually acquired social meaning through their association over time with group activities, experiences and collective memory. The material expression of monumentality was therefore contextual, varying according the nature of the social interaction a particular space was intended for.
Big Texts
Monumentality and textuality in ancient Rome
Matthew Roller
This talk examines the relationship between textuality and monumentality in ancient Rome, from the middle Republic to the age of the emperor Augustus. I begin by discussing three instances of texts that configure themselves as explicitly and self-referentially “monumental,” insofar as they compare or relate themselves to non-textual monumental forms in stone, metal, or the like. I then examine in greater detail a pair of specific cases in which textuality plays a key role in linking together and elucidating the meaning (i.e., symbolic resonance) of other, non-textual monumental forms. The “bigness” of the texts in question has less to do with their own ambitions or mode of physical display than with their capacity to link and create expansive, resonant networks of meaning among multiple and varied monuments of other kinds.
Big Meanings
Lillian Tseng
This talk discusses how meanings were generated from the “Bright Halls” erected in Han China (207 BCE-220 CE). The Bright Halls were the ritual structures where the Han emperors affirmed their mandate from Heaven to rule. They were big buildings with big plans and big landscapes; their role was further articulated by many big texts. This talk focuses on how the Han people received the Bright Halls, with special emphasis on the significative and performative aspects of architecture.