Abstract
Anthropologists have long recognized that the built environment is culturally meaningful and can easily point out the ways in which architecture, and the spaces it defines, are dynamic constituents and loci of social memory, political discourse, religious community, and social life more generally (Geertz 1973; Lawrence and Low 1990; Rapoport 1990). Yet even when we focus on the dynamics of human movements through architectural spaces and places, archaeologists often speak in static, functional terms. Thus a building may be defined as a “royal palace” or a “sweatbath” and the structure atop a pyramid as a sacrosanct “temple.” A building may