zoe crossland
Columbia University, Anthropology, Faculty Member
- Landscape Archaeology, Critical Theory, Semiotics, Historical Archaeology, Archaeology of the Contemporary Past, Anthropology, and 36 moreArchaeology, Embodiment, Forensic Anthropology, Forensic Archaeology, Mortuary archaeology, Charles S. Peirce, 18th & 19th Centuries, Argentina History, Archaeology of Ancestors, Anthropology of Madagascar, Artefacts as Evidence, British medical history, Bodies as Evidence, Gender, Humanities, Material Culture Studies, STS (Anthropology), Material Semiotics, Archaeological Method & Theory, Death and Burial (Archaeology), Madagascar, History of Slavery, African Diaspora Studies, Archaeological Theory, Materiality (Anthropology), Theoretical Archaeology, Cultural Landscapes, Memory Studies, Cremation, Indian Ocean World, Funerary Archaeology, History of Archaeology, History of Archeology, African Archaeology, Anthropocene, and Mass Gravesedit
- hjedit
Research Interests:
Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors, and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders, and missionaries.... more
Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors, and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders, and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for historical accounts of the past and for thinking about questions of presence and representation. How were the dead made present, and how were they recognized or not? In attending to these multifarious encounters of the nineteenth century, how might we reflect on the ways in which our own history-writing makes the dead present? To tackle these questions, Zoë Crossland tells an anthropological history of highland Madagascar from a perspective rooted in archaeology and Peircean semiotics, as well as in landscape study, oral history, and textual sources.
Research Interests: Semiotics, Landscape Archaeology, Cultural Semiotics, Africa, Missionary History, and 14 moreHistory of Missions, Charles S. Peirce, Materiality (Anthropology), Indian Ocean World, Memory and materiality, Social Semiotics, Mortuary archaeology, Material Semiotics, Madagascar, Materiality, Mortuary Practices, Monumentality, History of the London Missionary Society in Southern Africa, and Standing Stones
Available at: http://shop.le.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?modid=1&prodid=2710&deptid=4&catid=371&prodvarid=0 "Only a few decades ago the post-medieval burial grounds of Britain and Ireland were routinely destroyed or damaged in the... more
Available at: http://shop.le.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?modid=1&prodid=2710&deptid=4&catid=371&prodvarid=0
"Only a few decades ago the post-medieval burial grounds of Britain and Ireland were routinely destroyed or damaged in the course of development without any archaeological recording having taken place. However, during the 1990s influential site reports such as the crypt clearance at Christ Church, Spitalfields in London demonstrated that the detailed archaeological study of such sites can tell us a great deal, help us to refine our own methods and capture the imagination of the wider public. Since then numerous archaeological projects have taken place in burial grounds, although it is still the case that only a relatively small number of these are published and readily accessible.
Despite the publication of several important site reports in recent years, there is almost no archaeological literature which brings together the primary archaeological evidence from several sites, and nothing approaching the size or scope of this book, the first interpretative and synthetic discussion of the below-ground archaeology of death and burial in post-medieval Britain and Ireland. Chapters review the evidence for the preparation of the corpse; the coffin and other things that accompanied the corpse to the grave; the burial landscape including the different kinds of cemeteries and burial places used in the period; unusual burials (criminals, suicides, excommunicants, victims of war or shipwreck and others); and evidence of the development of scientific knowledge of the body through anatomical dissection, embalming and display. There is also a gazetteer of over 500 sites of archaeologically excavated post-medieval human burial, with references, site summaries and other details."
"Only a few decades ago the post-medieval burial grounds of Britain and Ireland were routinely destroyed or damaged in the course of development without any archaeological recording having taken place. However, during the 1990s influential site reports such as the crypt clearance at Christ Church, Spitalfields in London demonstrated that the detailed archaeological study of such sites can tell us a great deal, help us to refine our own methods and capture the imagination of the wider public. Since then numerous archaeological projects have taken place in burial grounds, although it is still the case that only a relatively small number of these are published and readily accessible.
Despite the publication of several important site reports in recent years, there is almost no archaeological literature which brings together the primary archaeological evidence from several sites, and nothing approaching the size or scope of this book, the first interpretative and synthetic discussion of the below-ground archaeology of death and burial in post-medieval Britain and Ireland. Chapters review the evidence for the preparation of the corpse; the coffin and other things that accompanied the corpse to the grave; the burial landscape including the different kinds of cemeteries and burial places used in the period; unusual burials (criminals, suicides, excommunicants, victims of war or shipwreck and others); and evidence of the development of scientific knowledge of the body through anatomical dissection, embalming and display. There is also a gazetteer of over 500 sites of archaeologically excavated post-medieval human burial, with references, site summaries and other details."
Research Interests:
This volume interweaves archeological and ethnological accounts of Madagascar at the interface of past and present. Rafaolo Andrianaivoarivony's analysis integrates the material aspects of the landscapes of the Central Highlands with the... more
This volume interweaves archeological and ethnological accounts of Madagascar at the interface of past and present. Rafaolo Andrianaivoarivony's analysis integrates the material aspects of the landscapes of the Central Highlands with the social context of their production. Zoë Crossland examines conceptions of the Highland wilderness and the historical variation of living practices across and within this space. Sandra J. T. M. Evers examines how the category of people called andevo (slave) in Southern Betsileo territory negotiate their inherited denomination. Fulgence Fanony and Henry T. Wright's contribution examines the changing use and significance of Betsimisaraka spears in the Mananara Valley. Gillian Feeley-Harnik's paper explores the meanings invested in clothes, particularly in the cloth wrappers known as lamahoany. Jeffrey C. Kaufman examines the meanings of prickly pear cactus (raketa), and the cactus-delimited landscape, of Malagasy pastoralists of the south who have used the species for multiple economic and political purposes. Mike Parker Pearson analyzes historical changes in [Androy] tomb form and the structure of funerary ritual, and he explores possible motivations behind the transformations. Ramilisonina's contribution examines a form of monuments embedded in the apparently 'natural' landscape: scared tombs enclosed in remnant primary forests in the southern Androy region. Genese Sodikoff considers the ways Malagasy landscapes were imagined by British and North Americans in the 19th century by focusing on the circulation of a floral species, the Malagasy lace leaf plant, in conservatories and aquariums. Bram Tucker analyses self-conceptions and others' conceptions of Mikea people in southwestern Madagascar. Pierre Vérin analyzes the economic environment of Madagascar with reflection on the legacies of state socialism and public debt at the end of the 20th century.
Link to download individual papers: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?g=mdiag;c=mdia;c=mdiaarchive;cc=mdiaarchive;idno=0522508.0014.001
Link for purchase of MDIA volumes: www.umich.edu/~mdia/mdia_archives.htm
Link to download individual papers: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?g=mdiag;c=mdia;c=mdiaarchive;cc=mdiaarchive;idno=0522508.0014.001
Link for purchase of MDIA volumes: www.umich.edu/~mdia/mdia_archives.htm
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black... more
This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Cet article est consacre au site de Shuqba Cave dans le Wadi en-Natuf, a l'ouest de la Judee. Les AA presentent le projet archeologique relatif au site natoufien et l'etude stratigraphique.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
An interview and accompanying photographic essay around Jon Crispin's photographs of a collection of abandoned suitcases found at a now-closed psychiatric center at Willard, in upstate New York. Many held the possessions of former... more
An interview and accompanying photographic essay around Jon Crispin's photographs of a collection of abandoned suitcases found at a now-closed psychiatric center at Willard, in upstate New York. Many held the possessions of former patients and ranged in date from the turn of the 20th century into the late 1960s. The suitcases have now been accessioned to the permanent collection of the New York State Museum in Albany, NY.
Research Interests:
In this wonderfully rich and thought-provoking article, Gavin Lucas exhorts us to write about archaeology in the mode of the contemporary. This is to attend to the shifting interplay between past, present and future, undertaken through a... more
In this wonderfully rich and thought-provoking article, Gavin Lucas exhorts us to write about archaeology in the mode of the contemporary. This is to attend to the shifting interplay between past, present and future, undertaken through a focus on the relations between objects, in contrast to the impoverished concern with succession and order that a notion of chronological contemporaneity imposes. His paper undertakes the useful task of disentangling concepts around time and contemporaneity, and raises a number of interesting questions. Here, I would like to discuss two of the most compelling contributions of Lucas's paper: the foregrounding of modes of persistence and of consociality, both of which I would like to explore by reflecting on my experiences of historical narrative and alternate temporalities in the history of highland Madagascar. The issue of persistence introduces the question of historical privilege – that is, how do some things persist while others fall to dust? ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The ideas of materiality and embodiment are explored in this article. It considers the contribution of archaeology to the interdisciplinary study of materiality and embodiment, focusing especially on the emergence of the archaeology of... more
The ideas of materiality and embodiment are explored in this article. It considers the contribution of archaeology to the interdisciplinary study of materiality and embodiment, focusing especially on the emergence of the archaeology of the body since the late 1980s. Human bodies have been a focus of archaeological study for a long time, with two divergent modes of analysis. What follows in this article is a review of some of the ways in which archaeologists have attempted to overcome these disciplinary limitations, by deploying a range of anti-foundationalist perspectives to theorize the embodied agency of past people. It further explores how questions of materiality have entered into the debates around embodiment. Finally this article presents two case studies. The first considers the use of apotropaic devices in seventeenth-century England, and the second looks at how the agency of the dead body is portrayed in discourse around contemporary forensic archaeology. An analysis of rel...
Research Interests:
Abstract The missionary encounter provides an exemplary case-study for studying social change. Diaries and letters written before departure and on the journey to the mission field describe missionary plans and hopes for the mission. The... more
Abstract The missionary encounter provides an exemplary case-study for studying social change. Diaries and letters written before departure and on the journey to the mission field describe missionary plans and hopes for the mission. The choice of books and equipment purchased reveals their expectations of the land and people they will encounter. On arrival these expectations are met with unanticipated ways of life and often radically different social formations to which missionaries must adjust. This article considers the ways in which missionary expectations are structured by their past experiences. I explore the ways in which their adjustments to the new places and practices of the mission field grow out of the interaction between missionaries' remembered understandings of place and their ongoing embodied experience 'in-place'. Looking at the first missionaries to highland Madagascar, I outline their rural upbringing in Welsh-speaking Wales and the ways in which this shaped their landscape perceptions. I argue that this rural upbringing, in combination with the highly cultivated and socially stratified world that they encountered, influenced their assessment of the landscapes of Madagascar, contributing to a more ready acceptance of the social and political conditions there than was found among other missionaries to Madagascar from a more urban background, or indeed among London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries to other parts of Africa.
Research Interests:
Evidence excavacated from mass graves and clandestine burials has played an important role in the international prosecution of human rights abuses as well as in individual criminal cases. The archaeological dimension of forensic... more
Evidence excavacated from mass graves and clandestine burials has played an important role in the international prosecution of human rights abuses as well as in individual criminal cases. The archaeological dimension of forensic anthropological work is focused on the grave site and its immediate surrounding environment, making the work very visible and sometimes contentious. This review traces the ways in which forensic archaeological evidence is composed and evaluated, exploring how anthropologists have negotiated the sometimes competing demands and claims of the courts, scientific practice, and relatives of the dead.
Research Interests: History, Forensic Psychology, Archaeology, Law, Anthropology, and 15 moreForensic Anthropology, Human Rights, Forensic Genetics, Expert evidence, Forensic psychiatry, Evidence, Forensic Archaeology, Archaeological Theory, Artefacts as Evidence, Evidentiality, Law of Evidence and Proof, Forensic Law, Identication Evidence, Facial Comparison, and DNA Evidence and Databases
Research Interests:
Southern Plains to the Southeastern United States, and argues that long-distance exchange involving Caddo ceramics played a role in "a broader social, political, and economic relationship linking the Mississippian peoples, the Caddo,... more
Southern Plains to the Southeastern United States, and argues that long-distance exchange involving Caddo ceramics played a role in "a broader social, political, and economic relationship linking the Mississippian peoples, the Caddo, Southern Plains farmers and bisonhunting nomads, and the Puebloan Southwest" (p. 98). Anne Cobry and Donna Roper examine ceramics from sites on the Northern Great Plains dating to the Plains Village period. According to their interpretation, ceramics appear to move from the Medicine Creek area of Nebraska to some of the sites examined from the High Plains. Interestingly, this is opposite of the pattern of lithic movement, which seems to go primarily from the High Plains to the Medicine Creek area. This exchange would make sense if agricultural products (and the pots used to transport them) were moving from the horticultural groups along Medicine Creek to huntergatherer groups on the High plains, possibly in exchange for toolstone or completed chipped stone tools.
Research Interests:
What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this... more
What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this thought-provoking forum. Their responses are diverse and wide-ranging. While Edward Harris looks to archaeological stratigraphy for a material paradigm of the Anthropocene, Alice Gorman explores the extent of human impact on orbital space and lunar surfaces – challenging the assumption that the Anthropocene is confined to Earth. Jeff Benjamin investigates the sounds of the Anthropocene. Paul Graves-Brown questions the idea that the epoch had its onset with the invention of the steam engine, while Mark Hudson uses Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects to imagine the dark artefacts of the future. Victor Paz doubts the practical relevance of the concept to archaeological chronologies, and Bruce Clarke warns archaeologists to steer clear of the Anthropo...
Research Interests:
This contribution to a collection of papers on unknowability takes up the archaeology of the Neanderthals to untangle the issues involved in unknowability and the problem of the indeterminacy of archaeological evidence. When we think... more
This contribution to a collection of papers on unknowability takes up the archaeology of the Neanderthals to untangle the issues involved in unknowability and the problem of the indeterminacy of archaeological evidence. When we think about unknowability in archaeology we tend to focus on the relationship between our tangible archaeological evidence and the past that it points to. But there is another dimension to the unknown that is more future-oriented. These traces and the past they make present are understood dynamically in relation to emergent future possibilities. How is that unfolding field of possibility involved in the way in which the past is known and unknown?
Research Interests:
Link to paper: https://semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/9/10 There has been a sustained and forceful call in recent anthropological accounts to engage more critically with the tangible materiality of the world, and... more
Link to paper: https://semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/9/10
There has been a sustained and forceful call in recent anthropological accounts to engage more critically with the tangible materiality of the world, and especially a demand to take into account the ability of things to resist or exceed the discursive frameworks within which humans situate them. In this shift away from questions of subjectivity and interpretation, there is often an attendant downplaying of the semiotic. We resist this dualistic framing of semiotics in opposition to material things, and suggest that we should think more carefully about the assumption that subjectivity, interpretation and semiotics should be pushed aside in order to explore the nonhuman. Here we construe semiotics more broadly, recognizing a more encompassing field that engages explicitly with the non-representational, drawing upon a Peircean heritage. Rather than putting questions of representation to one side in order to focus on the peculiar characteristics of things, in this issue we situate representation within a wide-ranging field of sign-making and sign-perception, in which the concrete characteristics and qualities of sign relations are fully recognized. This is to put representation in its place as one of many forms of sign-relation, and similarly to situate human ways of knowing within a world of knowing actors, humans and nonhumans alike.
There has been a sustained and forceful call in recent anthropological accounts to engage more critically with the tangible materiality of the world, and especially a demand to take into account the ability of things to resist or exceed the discursive frameworks within which humans situate them. In this shift away from questions of subjectivity and interpretation, there is often an attendant downplaying of the semiotic. We resist this dualistic framing of semiotics in opposition to material things, and suggest that we should think more carefully about the assumption that subjectivity, interpretation and semiotics should be pushed aside in order to explore the nonhuman. Here we construe semiotics more broadly, recognizing a more encompassing field that engages explicitly with the non-representational, drawing upon a Peircean heritage. Rather than putting questions of representation to one side in order to focus on the peculiar characteristics of things, in this issue we situate representation within a wide-ranging field of sign-making and sign-perception, in which the concrete characteristics and qualities of sign relations are fully recognized. This is to put representation in its place as one of many forms of sign-relation, and similarly to situate human ways of knowing within a world of knowing actors, humans and nonhumans alike.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In this chapter I consider how human remains are thematized as agentive within the field of forensic anthropology. The flourishing popular literature on forensic science commonly summons the image of the corpse that speaks or testifies.... more
In this chapter I consider how human remains are thematized as agentive within the field of forensic anthropology. The flourishing popular literature on forensic science commonly summons the image of the corpse that speaks or testifies. Here I explore how the corpse's agency is imagined in these texts, and how the forensic anthropologist's agency is positioned relative to the corpse. How might these common claims of corpse agency prompt us to think more critically about the agentive aspects of the dead?
Research Interests:
Each suitcase has been folded around with milk-white tissue paper and tied carefully with unbleached cotton tape. They are photographed straight on, square to the camera, showing the creases and puckers of the archival paper, and the... more
Each suitcase has been folded around with milk-white tissue paper and tied carefully with unbleached cotton tape. They are photographed straight on, square to the camera, showing the creases and puckers of the archival paper, and the shape of the case beneath. A photographic sequence is traced as someone, invisible to the viewer, unwraps the cases and opens them up. Inside lie empty medicine bottles and crumpled pill packets. A half-smoked cigar. Faded bus tickets and dog-eared datebooks in the color palette of an earlier age.
Research Interests:
An essay about life, thought and genesis.
Research Interests:
(Uncorrected proof)
Research Interests:
Response to 'Archaeology and contemporaneity' by Gavin Lucas in Archaeological Dialogues
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Semiotics, Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Architecture, Landscape Archaeology, and 13 moreCultural Semiotics, Archaeological Method & Theory, Missionary History, History of Missions, Charles S. Peirce, Southern Africa, Materiality (Anthropology), Peirce Pragmaticist Semiotics, Social Semiotics, Material Semiotics, Botswana, Materiality, and Archaeological Semiotics
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Forensic Psychology, Archaeology, Forensic Anthropology, Human Rights, Forensic Genetics, and 13 moreArchaeological Method & Theory, Expert evidence, Forensic psychiatry, Evidence, Forensic Archaeology, Archaeological Theory, Artefacts as Evidence, Evidentiality, Law of Evidence and Proof, Forensic Law, Identication Evidence, Facial Comparison, and DNA Evidence and Databases
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The histories of post-mortem intervention in 18th- and 19th-century Britain illustrate how the relationships within which the dead were located affected their postmortem treatment and were reproduced through it. This paper explores how... more
The histories of post-mortem intervention in 18th- and 19th-century Britain illustrate how the relationships within which the dead were located affected their postmortem
treatment and were reproduced through it. This paper explores how traditions of marking social distinctions among the dead have been incorporated into archaeological practice, tracing some of the ways in which relationships between the dead and the living define the nature and tone of post-mortem interventions. This history suggests that the conditions within which people are produced as dead bodies through archaeological practice are at present poorly understood, and, as
such, I contribute some notes towards a relational understanding of this production.
treatment and were reproduced through it. This paper explores how traditions of marking social distinctions among the dead have been incorporated into archaeological practice, tracing some of the ways in which relationships between the dead and the living define the nature and tone of post-mortem interventions. This history suggests that the conditions within which people are produced as dead bodies through archaeological practice are at present poorly understood, and, as
such, I contribute some notes towards a relational understanding of this production.