The Archaeology of Anxiety

Recent efforts to engage more explicitly with the interpretation of emotions in archaeology have sought new approaches and terminology to encourage archaeologists to take emotions seriously. This is part of a growing awareness of the importance of senses—what we see, smell, hear, and feel—in the constitution and reconstitution of past social and cultural lives. 

Yet research on emotion in archaeology remains limited, despite the fact that such states underpin many studies of socio-cultural transformation. The Archaeology of Anxiety draws together papers that examine the local complexities of anxiety as well as the variable stimuli—class or factional struggle, warfare, community construction and maintenance, personal turmoil, and responsibilities to (and relationships with) the dead—that may generate emotional responses of fear, anxiousness, worry, and concern.

The goal of this timely volume is to present fresh research that addresses the material dimension of rites and performances related to the mitigation and negotiation of anxiety as well as the role of material culture and landscapes in constituting and even creating periods or episodes of anxiety.

The Archaeology of Anxiety

Chapter 1

Archaeologies of Anxiety: The Materiality of Anxiousness, Worry, and Fear 

Jeffrey Fleisher and Neil Norman

Chapter 2

The Importance of “Getting It Right:” Tracing Anxiety in Mesolithic Burial Rituals          

Liv Nilsson Stutz

Chapter 3

Risky Business: A Life Full of Obligations to the Dead and the Living on the Early Bronze Age Southeastern Dead Sea Plain, Jordan

Meredith Chesson

Chapter 4

Feet of Clay: An Archaeology of Huedan Elite Anxiety in the era of Atlantic Trade         

Chapter 5

Hid in Death’s Dateless Night: The lure of an uncanny landscape in Hittite Anatolia

Tim Flohr Sørensen and Stephen Lumsden

Chapter 6

Communities of Anxiety: Gathering and Dwelling at Causewayed Enclosures in the British Neolithic

Oliver Harris

Chapter 7

Bodily Protection: Dress, Health, and Anxiety in Colonial New England

Diana DiPaolo Loren

Chapter 8

Ritualized Coping during War: Conflict, Congregation, and Emotions at the Late Prehispanic Fortress of Acaray

Margaret Brown Vega

Chapter 9

 “Concern”ing contribut

Susan Kus