Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Rochelle A. Marrinan, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Anthropology. Title and description from dissertation home page (6/16/04). Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation focuses on the nature of architectural space in the Caddo area of eastern Texas, in the southwestern portion of the Caddo archaeological area. The early European accounts and the archaeological record indicate there was a wide range in size, shape, form, and use of architectural space in the Caddo area. Buildings have a variety of structural attributes and may be found isolated or associated with plazas or earthen mounds. This dissertation is a detailed examination of this architectural diversity. The sites included in this study range from large multi-mound centers that have seen large-scale and long-term research, such as the George C. Davis site, to smaller hamlets and farmsteads. This study includes 265 structures from 31 sites located throughout the Pineywoods, Post Oak Savanna and Blackland Prairie of eastern Texas. This dissertation provides an examination of the structuring of architectural space by Caddo groups living in eastern Texas. Through a detailed examination of documentary, archaeological, and geophysical data, this research examines the nature of the Caddo built environment; how Caddo cultural space was created, maintained, and altered, and how this relates to broader Caddo society. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide descriptions and comparisons of Caddo architecture from eastern Texas to address three interrelated themes: cultural significance of architectural space to the Caddo, physical form of structures and construction attributes, and variation and change. / text

No description available.

My research is on the significance of building practice at sites that are known as chambered monuments or long cairns and long mounds. In particular, this work focuses on the long cairn sites of Gwernvale, Powys and Hazleton North, Gloucestershire; and the long mound sites of Easton Down, Beckhampton Road, Horslip, and South Street in the Avebury region of Wiltshire, and Gussage Cow Down 78 and 294 in Dorset. These sites are considered to be among the first 'architectures' in Britain. These architectures have been considered by archaeologists to characterise part of what we know about the neolithic in southern Britain. There are features and material culture associated with the mesolithic at these sites but this evidence has previously been understood as having made a 'place' for architecture, or as having created a 'setting' for later architectural constructions. I am writing to challenge our architectural understandings of these sites. In the following chapters trees, the processing of wood, hearth settings, the working of flint, grassland, worked earth, the processing of animal bone are recognised as having been a part of the connective dynamics of architectural construction. I will argue that material culture that was a part of these activities was left in these areas. These small things were parted, re-assembled and entwined together into assemblages that blur archaeologists distinctions between fifth and fourth millennia B.C. lives and that blur distinctions between hunter-gatherer and pastoralist (and partly agriculturalist) practices. Practices of making did not remain the same; neither did practices of connecting, parting, re-assembling and entwining materials. Material culture, as a media for making and understanding connections between people and things, did not remain constant. However, through encounters with the material and historical conditions of others lives, people made something of living and dying during the fifth and fourth millennia.