Cultural Resource Management for a Majapahit Kingdom Site in Trowulan,East Java,Indonesia

Abstract

The Kingdom of Majapahit located in East Java, Indonesia, was established in 1293 ce and lasted until its destruction in the sixteenth century. At its peak, the Kingdom covered the modern-day region of Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula. Archaeological remains from the Majapahit era have been discovered in several places, including Java, Bali, and Sumatra, but the most important site is located in the small town of Trowulan in East Java. Trowulan has been researched since the beginning of nineteenth century, with most of the work concerned with the study and preservation of the archaeological remains; little research has taken place regarding the archaeological remains in the relation to the local community. Archaeologists and the government agree that the inhabitants of Trowulan have violated regulations related to the protection of the monuments and that their activities have damaged the site. Until now neither the neither archaeologists nor the government have conducted any research into the reasons behind the local community’s actions. Understanding the local communities’ perspectives and aspiration is essential in order to develop relevant recommendations regarding the protection and management Trowulan’s cultural heritage. This research has been undertaken using qualitative methods, including observations, in-depth interviews, and Focus Group discussions.     

Classical and Liberal Republicanisms and the New Consumer Culture

United States archaeologists working on the East Coast have recognized a massive discard of consumable goods, such as ceramics and glass, in archaeological contexts that date to the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Explanations for this phenomenon have varied from "changing households" to "style consciousness" to the "Americanization of the U.S. population." I examine the acquisition and eventual discard of consumer goods from several working-class households found at a former industrial armory town, Harpers Ferry. The town is about 60 mi from several coastal port towns and the domestic assemblages display a pattern similar to that of the East Coast sites, although there is a lag of about a decade. While economic models are often used by archaeologists to explain human behavior, cultural patterns are more complex and a variety of phenomena needs to be examined. The growth of consumerism and the eventual massive discard of goods in Harpers Ferry may also be explained by the fall of classical republicanism and the rise of liberal republicanism and romantic ideals in the United States.     

The Measures and Materiality of Improvement in Ireland

This paper examines the impact and evidence of Improvement thinking on domestic and social spheres. Taking the example of Ireland it examines the origin and development of improving strategies and methodologies from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, in particular the widening application of reform to incorporate domestic, educational and moral concerns. Improvement measures were imposed on communities often by a land-owning class of differing social and religious origin, engendering socio-political tension still evident in Ireland today. Equally it was a period of new commercial opportunities and social betterment creating new class divisions that have been previously undervalued. This paper draws on work on a group of islands on the northern periphery of the country, where archaeological and historical evidence demonstrate that the reforms associated with the Improvement project were still underway well into the nineteenth century.     

Clothing Economy and Clothing Culture: The Farm Wardrobe from a Gendered Perspective in Nineteenth-Century Sweden

This article examines the clothing of landowning farmers in inland Swedish from a gendered perspective during industrialisation in the nineteenth century. It considers clothes as possessions and goods within a European framework of trade and influence. In particular, it shows how clothing was a means of expression that changed during the course of industrialisation and how gender became an important factor in the supply and making of clothes. In the region examined, clothing changed from being a local fashion, characterised by similarities in material and workmanship between men's and women's clothes, to become a part of fashion in general with its emphasis on differences between men's and women's wardrobes. In the early nineteenth century, the female wardrobe accounted for a higher value as it included a greater share of garments made of manufactured fabrics. In late nineteenth century, when industrial forestry had replaced livestock farming as the main source of income in the area, men's wardrobes grew in value due to increased demand for tailor-made garments and purchased fabrics. By contrast, women's garments were often made of simpler fabrics and sewn by seamstresses. These changes responded to the growing breadwinner–homemaker ideal and to national-romantic ideas about folk costume – two tendencies that emphasised female domesticity and home-woven fabrics.     

Exotica in Context: Reconfiguring Prestige,Power and Wealth in the Southern African Iron Age

Prestige goods, in various combinations and permutations, feature prominently in anthropological and archaeological templates of the emergence of social inequality and early state formation in premodern societies. In Africa, discussion of the contribution of prestige goods to the evolution of cultural behaviours such as class distinction and statehood has been conducted primarily through theoretical lenses that allocate significant weight to the proceeds of external long distance trade. The major outcome is that archaeologists have rarely paused to evaluate not just the definition of prestige goods but also the congruity between global ‘universals’ and African ‘particularities’. Using empirical evidence from the southern African historical and archaeological records, this paper seeks to evaluate the concept of prestige goods and to assess their contribution to the evolution of Iron Age (AD 200–1900) communities of different time periods, from locally centred positions. It reveals that the distribution, use and deposition of exotic imports in southern Africa is not compatible with the pattern suggested by the prestige goods model, and points towards their valuation as embedded within situational contexts of meaning. In fact, hinterland elites controlled neither the source nor the distribution of exotic goods from producer regions, making them a volatile source of power and prestige. While local elites used exotic imports when available, and imposed taxes on their citizens—payable in both local and external goods—land, cattle, religion and individual entrepreneurship were far more predictable and stable sources of prestige, wealth and power. This provides the basis for reassessing the development of complexity in the region and potentially contributes towards global debates on the impact of long-distance trade in the development of complex states.     

Report of the Portable Antiquities Scheme 2011

Abstract

Dutch East India Company (VOC) Fort Frederik Hendrik, the first European settlement on Mauritius, was established as a refreshment station for onward- and homeward-bound East Indiamen. The fort's archaeological remains offer a rich fund of information on a 17th-century stronghold and the population once in occupation. The material evidence reflects the fort's links with the Company's worldwide network of settlements, with both trade goods and people passing through. It also reflects cultural change and the settlers' endeavours to adapt to the local environment.     

Photography and Latin American Ruins

Ever since the nineteenth century photographers have regularly turned to Latin American ruins to express a diverse range of scientific, colonial, aesthetic and spiritual desires. This article looks at photographs of Latin American ruins from the nineteenth century through several archaeological expeditions in Central and South America over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing in particular on photographs of ruins that include human subjects, I argue that the human-material interactions evident in these images undermine the traditional view of a split between the archaeological subject and the material object, serving as a reminder of the political actuality of ‘classical’ ruins, sites that have sometimes been left out of the West’s contemporary fascination with the dark underbelly of modernity. Acknowledging that such politics is by no means always innocent, sometimes reflecting as it does the embedded power relations of neo-colonial desires, I argue nonetheless that ancient ruins in Latin America continue to be spaces around which social relations can be formed, not least through humour and pleasure.     

Rethinking the Dawn of History: The Schedule,Signature, and Agency of European Goods in Protohistoric Illinois

Abstract

Interpretations of the archaeological record of the seventeenth century Illinois Country have been temporally compressed, and the richly stratified archival, ethnographic, and material records from that era have not been applied to the archaeological information at hand. A muddied view of the remarkable changes that occurred within the cultural landscape of Illinois is the result. European goods first appear in the region between 1580 and 1630 and the pottery of the Illinois Indians—the Danner series—is present in each early Illinois sample that includes these imports. A reexamination of the Zimmerman, Palos, and Oak Forest sites suggests that temporal changes in trade good assemblages can be better understood in the context of historically documented trade schedules. Further, it is argued that the Illinois Indians actively positioned themselves in the political and economic landscape of the fur trade many decades prior to the arrival of the French in the Illinois Country, serving as the principal agents of the great changes that are associated with protohistory in Illinois.     

Artefactual Persons: The Relational Capacities of Persons and Things in the Practice of Excavation

A number of recent theories have argued that archaeological objects and data reflect the social and subjective interpretation of the archaeologists excavating them. These interpretative or post-processual approaches have importantly called into question the empirical assumption that the world exists as an object prior to interpretations that archaeologists give it. However this perspective fails to look at the ways in which the social and subjective factors are themselves constructed through fieldwork. In contrast to an approach that seeks to investigate how social and subjective factors 'determine' different kinds of archaeological objects, this article therefore examines the particular fieldwork practices and conventions through which an opposition between subjectivity and objectivity is itself created.     

Socio-political change on a slave-raiding frontier: war,trade and 'Big Men' in nineteenth century Sisalaland,Northern Ghana

Abstract

Life in nineteenth century northern Ghana was characterised by insecurity as inhabitants experienced frequent slave-raiding. Local villages forged alliances with raiders as a means to alter the local political balance in their favour. Preliminary research indicates that many of the local powerbrokers who emerged as war leaders during this period also occupied easily defensible locations or well-fortified villages with access to trade routes. Archaeological investigations at the hilltop site of Yalingbong reveal that the community was well-situated to take advantage of increased trading opportunities but that status differences within the site are not marked.     

The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology

The Phoenicians played ambivalent roles in Western historical imagination. One such role was as a valued predecessor and prototype for the industrial and maritime enterprise of nineteenth‐century imperial Britain. Explicit parallels were drawn in historical representations and more popular culture. It was widely believed that the Phoenicians had been present in Britain, especially in Cornwall, despite a lack of convincing historical evidence, and much importance was placed on supposed archaeological evidence. Ideological tensions arose from the need to reconcile ancient and modern Britain, and from the Semitic origin of the Phoenicians. This example shows the power of archaeological objects to provide material support for national and imperial constructions of the past.     

Beyond the Visual: Considering the Archaeology of Colonial Sounds

Many historians and archaeologists have focused on trade goods in the French colonies, yet few have examined how these items were animated in colonial contexts. Here, the issue of colonial performance as it related to trade goods (such as hawk bells, brass tinklers, glass beads) is examined and it is argued that the power of these objects was more than purely visual. Case studies from French Louisiana are presented to discuss the intersection of bodies and objects, of the exotic and the erotic towards understanding the sounds that emanated from colonial communities and households.     

A Vast Inland Empire and the Last Great West: remaking society, space and environment in early British Columbia

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new order was imposed on the land and inhabitants of present-day interior British Columbia. From one perspective this was a story of human progress and improvement – the advance of colonizing Europeans into lands that they considered underutilized and unproductive and that they sought, often successfully, to bring within the growing orbit of global trade and world capitalism. Yet for many people and creatures the story of resettlement was far from a story of progress. In relatively short order – less than a century – the grasslands of interior British Columbia were swept and transformed by many of the most powerful currents of western modernity. The results of this transformation were uneven and often deeply inequitable. By the late nineteenth century native peoples had been dispossessed and struggled to survive on small resource-poor Indian Reserves; a few corporate and family-owned cattle ranches controlled the best range leaving small-scale immigrant ranchers with more or less marginal land; and many types of grassland had been heavily overgrazed. This paper explores these darker sides of European resettlement in present-day interior British Columbia by emphasizing the role of ranching in colonial resettlement, by describing the stratified rural society that ranching, in part, produced, and by revealing the different ways that cattle and ranches interacted with natural and economic processes to remake an environment.     

Legends,Traditions or Coincidences: Remembrance of Historic Settlement in the Central Highlands of Scotland

Study has established that sources of evidence (local traditions, documentary, cartographic, archaeological) of the burning of a settlement at Bunrannoch during the 1745/6 Jacobite uprising are contradictory. Some contradictions may result from conflation of long term social memories of earlier events during the late first millennium CE and the way in which the events surrounding the uprising were subsequently remembered. Such conflation may stem from the way identities of local communities were conceived during the late eighteenth century. Some members of local communities would have grounded themselves in traditional life ways, which were being actively transformed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast, sponsors of change, or improvement, viewed such communities as largely criminal and impoverished.     

Copra World: Coconuts,Plantations and Cooperatives in German Samoa

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-19th century, the copra trade has created challenges and opportunities for Pacific Islanders, including Samoans. In the wake of formal annexation in 1900, German colonial officials tried repeatedly to force Samoans to work on foreign plantations for wages. In this article, I argue that Samoans resisted these demands in two major ways. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of Samoans continued subsistence agriculture that offered greater control over their lives. On the other hand, Samoans selectively adapted to new economic circumstances. Occasionally, Samoans engaged in wage labour on Euro-American plantations to earn the cash needed for imported goods, government taxes and church donations. To circumvent the monopolistic practices of Euro-American traders, Samoans also founded copra cooperatives. These ultimately folded under coercion, but not without creating a crucial legacy for future anti-colonial resistance. In Samoa’s world of copra, sweetness and colonial power were tightly bound together.     

Excavating Utopia: Why Archaeologists Should Study “Ideal” Communities of the Nineteenth Century

The study of utopias is riddled with contradictions: we admire and fear them; they are a radical critique of the modernist societies that surround them, and yet they are in some ways the archetypal product of modernity. This paper suggests that studying Utopia could be of value in analyzing some of the complexities and contradictions of Western society and ideology in the nineteenth century, as well as causing us to question some of the preconceptions we regularly bring to the study of the archaeological past. Finally I will suggest that a different kind of nineteenth century, one which includes the radical dissent and resistance of utopian thinkers and experimenters, provides a strong basis for a critique of the social values of modern capitalism.     

INDIA,THE GREAT DIVERGENCE,AND THE WRECKAGE OF MODERNITY

Research over the last two decades on the economic divergence of Europe and China before the nineteenth century has stimulated much recent scholarship investigating similar diverging paths between Europe and India. Following the lead of Kenneth Pomeranz, this work focuses on the demographic, ecological, and geographical factors in this divergence and argues for the direct comparability of the most economically advanced parts of Europe with such places as Gujarat and Mysore in Mughal India, which showed considerable proto‐industrial development before their relative economic decline and deindustrialization in the nineteenth century. The book under review approaches this topic by deploying a modified Marxian‐Weberian framework and draws on extensive research in Indian and British archives to argue that both Gujarat and Mysore might have embarked on paths of sustained economic growth through natural commercial expansion and deliberate mercantilist statecraft hindered by the East India Company. Despite resurging interest in Marx, much recent work in global economic history highlights the limitations of modernization theories drawn from a long tradition of Western social science indebted to the theories of Marx and Weber.     

Imperial Expansion, Ethnic Change, and Ceramic Traditions in The Southern Chad Basin: A Terminal Nineteenth-Century Pottery Assemblage from Dikwa, Borno State, Nigeria

In the course of an archaeological project in the southern Chad Basin of Nigeria, excavations were conducted at several deeply stratified mound sites that date from the Late Neolithic to the Late Iron Age. As a way to complement the ceramic sequence obtained so far and to link it with today's pottery tradition, a small excavation was conducted at a site that dates to the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century A.D. A pottery assemblage was discovered that shows obvious links to today's tradition but notable breaks with those of the nineteenth century and earlier. This break in decoration style and technique is interpreted as an archaeologically visible expression of changing ethnic identity. This ethnic change and the associated spread of the ceramic tradition can be linked with the expansion of the sphere of power of the Kanem-Borno Empire into the area south of Lake Chad after the sixteenth century A.D.     

Globalization,trade, and material culture: Portugal’s role in the making of a multicultural Europe (1415–1806)

SUMMARY: In the Early Modern age, Portugal was among the first European countries to engage in overseas trade and colonial ventures. The influx of new people and things rapidly transformed it into a multicultural country in permanent contact with the rest of Europe and the wider world. While we possess a vast amount of knowledge describing the overseas contacts and acquisition of goods from historical documents, in recent years archaeological excavations have begun to reveal direct evidence of these interactions. This includes thousands of people and objects such as ceramics, ivory and stone artefacts produced in overseas territories in Africa, South America and Asia. They were exported in vast amounts to several European countries, and are frequently found in archaeological excavations. These commodities were in part responsible for changing European perceptions of the world, its dimensions and cultural plurality. They also rapidly left their mark on European goods production, leading to changes in aesthetics and the introduction of new forms. This paper will discuss some of these objects in terms of how they reflect an Early Modern globalized world, and their influence on European daily life.     

Constructing Community: Experiences of Identity, Economic Opportunity, and Institution Building at Boston’s African Meeting House

The African Meeting House in Boston became a center of the city’s free black community during the nineteenth century. Archaeological excavations at this site recovered material from the Meeting House backlot and a neighboring apartment building occupied by black tenants. These artifacts reveal strategies the community used to negotiate a place for themselves, create economic opportunities, and build community institutions. The Meeting House helped foster community success and became a powerful center for African American action on abolition, educational equality, and military integration. The present study argues that the archaeological and historical evidence from the African Meeting House demonstrates the power of the actions of individuals in the black community to counter widespread racial inequality with personal and community success.