The Kvarnbo Hall: Reconsidering the Importance of the Late Iron Age Åland Islands

This article accounts for and contextualizes a newly discovered monumental longhouse, a potential hall from the Late Iron Age, on the Åland Islands, Finland. The 45 m long building and its location are discussed in regional and historical context, in comparison to the full data set of coeval houses on Åland, and are argued to signal a social stratification, manifesting a higher level of achievement in this Late Iron Age society. This is further examined in the context of Iron Age settlement development. A rapid and large-scale colonization to Åland, evident in the middle of the first millennium AD, is for the first time explanatorily discussed, addressing the question of why this process occurred. Sudden population growth is linked in part to large-scale climatic disturbances, with fatal consequences in those areas of heavy agricultural dependency, forcing population movement to Åland driven by the presence of maritime resources, particularly seals, and available land.     

Sermon,preacher and society in the middle ages

Over the past twenty-five years, studies produced on medieval preaching and sermons have grown so considerably that they now constitute a discipline known as sermon studies. The discipline incorporates various methodologies which include exegesis, liturgy, theology, social history, cultural history, literary criticism, textual criticism, and art history. Therefore, this essay can only be a sampling of some of the literature which has recently appeared. The essay is ordered under the headings: ‘sermon’, ‘preacher’, and ‘society’. The section on sermons isolates methodological issues which form the basis of sermon studies. It outlines the criteria scholars have established to use medieval sermons as an historical tool. The second section investigates the diversity of preachers and considers their role as educators. The third section on society considers those studies which have examined sermons as sources which reflect as well as influence moral and intellectual tendencies in the Middle Ages.     

Sermon,preacher and society in the middle ages

Over the past twenty-five years, studies produced on medieval preaching and sermons have grown so considerably that they now constitute a discipline known as sermon studies. The discipline incorporates various methodologies which include exegesis, liturgy, theology, social history, cultural history, literary criticism, textual criticism, and art history. Therefore, this essay can only be a sampling of some of the literature which has recently appeared. The essay is ordered under the headings: ‘sermon’, ‘preacher’, and ‘society’. The section on sermons isolates methodological issues which form the basis of sermon studies. It outlines the criteria scholars have established to use medieval sermons as an historical tool. The second section investigates the diversity of preachers and considers their role as educators. The third section on society considers those studies which have examined sermons as sources which reflect as well as influence moral and intellectual tendencies in the Middle Ages.     

Comparative microstructural and elemental analysis of iron artefacts from Kaveri valley archaeological sites

Iron has been one of the most critical technotraditions that had lasting impact on social formation throughout the Iron Age and historical period. Iron was used in warfare and subsistence economy. Our knowledge on ancient iron smelting and working have generally been derived from ethnography and ethnohistory, which is by all means, time, region, and raw material specific. Scientific analyses of ancient iron have contributed in understanding this heritage to a respectable extent, yet a comprehensive knowledge about the evolution of iron making through time and space in India eludes us. In this work, a comparative study of iron artefacts from two Iron Age/Megalithic-Early Historic sites of Tamil Nadu, south India, that is, Mangadu (burial site) and Ambal (habitation-cum-burial site) is carried out to understand the iron thermal-processing capabilities. The retrieved artefacts were examined using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) for elemental composition. The imaging of the artefacts was done using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD), and Optical Microscopy (OM). In addition, phase identification was performed using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS). Combination of these analyses illustrates that inhabitants of Mangadu and Ambal were aware of the iron alloy manufacturing/processing techniques such as forging and hammering.     

Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure,Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

This essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar's Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe's novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne's and Frazar's adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system.     

Beyond Iron Age ‘towns’: Examining oppida as examples of low‐density urbanism

The question of whether Late Iron Age oppida in Europe were truly ‘urban’ has dominated debate over these sites since the nineteenth century. Oppida have been surprisingly absent from comparative urban studies, however, despite increasingly nuanced perspectives on the nature and diversity of the urban phenomenon. In particular, Roland Fletcher's implication that oppida might represent part of a broader alternative form of low‐density urbanism has been largely overlooked, by Iron Age scholars and urbanism specialists alike. With the complex nature of many oppida now becoming increasingly apparent, I suggest it is a pertinent time to assess Fletcher's claim and examine whether oppida can be convincingly compared to low‐density urbanism elsewhere in the world and, if so, what implications this might have for understanding Iron Age societies. This paper argues that oppida do indeed display aspects of low‐density urbanism and that this is likely to be due to the negotiated nature of power in Iron Age societies.     

The Pre-Roman Iron Age in Britain and Ireland (ca. 800 B.C. to A.D. 100): An overview

Those communities that lived in Britain and Ireland ca. 800 B.C. to A.D. 100 represent particularly well-researched examples of the complex agrarian, nonurban, societies with high population densities that characterize the Pre-Roman Iron Age across temperate Europe. This paper provides a critical introduction to the extensive recent literature on the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Britain and Ireland. Evidence from the large number of salvage excavations and surveys, the application of a wide range of analytical techniques, and important changes in interpretative frameworks are transforming understandings of this period. After reviewing these developments, a chronological account of the period is outlined which attempts to integrate these new results. This suggests that current interpretations of social processes across Iron Age Europe in terms of state formation, urbanization, and core-periphery relations with Mediterranean civilization need revision.     

A masculinist northern wilderness and the emancipatory potential of literary irony

There has been an increasing body of critical research in modern literary geography claiming that forms of social oppression and injustice can become established through the institution of literature. It has also been stated that literature can equally well act as an emancipatory ‘tool’ through which subjugated histories are rewritten. This article is concerned with the colonialist history of Finnish northern literature, Lapland romanticism, the exoticism of nature and the interrelations of these with masculinism and sexist oppression. It discusses how northern nature is romanticized through literary stereotypes based on masculinist values and a multidimensional social process of sexism, and how the regional marginalization of northern Finland has been justified at the same time. The primary focus is on the emancipatory potential of untraditional northern literature, on a northern female author, Rosa Liksom, who through her unconventional literary irony has functioned as an emancipatory ‘project’ against the masculinist stereotypes of the northern wilderness. Liksom's literary irony serves as a metafictive ‘method’ working in pursuit of revealing its own discursive structure, as a strategy through which literary conventions and their wider social context become deconstructed.     

CHARIOTS AND CONTEXT: NEW RADIOCARBON DATES FROM WETWANG AND THE CHRONOLOGY OF IRON AGE BURIALS AND BROOCHES IN EAST YORKSHIRE

This paper presents 21 new radiocarbon dates for Iron Age burials excavated at Wetwang Slack, East Yorkshire, including three chariot burials. The dates are analysed using a Bayesian approach, along with previous dates from the cemetery and from other chariot burials in the region. The model suggests that regular burial at Wetwang spanned the third and earlier second centuries cal BC, a shorter period than once thought, whilst the chariot burials all belong to a short‐lived horizon centred on 200 cal BC. The dating of brooch types present in the burials is also reassessed. Our results imply that brooches of La Tène D form appeared in Britain in the later second century cal BC, in line with Continental evidence, but reinforcing the void in the later Iron Age sequence revealed in a recent study of decorated metalwork. Both this apparent gap and the end of the classic East Yorkshire mortuary tradition may well be manifestations of the more general changes that swept across Europe at this period, ushering in the new forms of political organization and social practices that define the Late Iron Age.     

Ceramics, Ethnohistory, and Ethnography: Locating Meaning in Southern African Iron Age Ceramic Assemblages

For ceramics to be relevant in the Southern African Iron Age, archaeologists must broaden their theoretical base to include social and other contexts when interpreting material culture items such as pottery. Pottery remains critical in understanding cultural dynamics in the region for the past two millennia, but current usage is narrow in scope. Using ethnohistorical data and archaeological examples from South Africa and Zimbabwe, we argue that pottery provides valuable information on the region's Iron Age, if archaeologists address the social meaning of ceramic assemblages. Ceramic production among rural communities provides the basis on which a wide range of social issues are discussed and used to critique pottery recovered from archaeology. Ethnography suggests that ceramic assemblages are context specific, and archaeologists are cautioned against making generic statements on the basis of similarities of vessel shape and decoration motif.     

THE CULTURAL BIOGRAPHY OF A PHOENICIAN MUSHROOM-LIPPED JUG

Summary.   This paper is the biography of a single piece of pottery found in a tomb in Sardinia. The form is one that is common in Levantine sites in the Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age, but this single vessel, its history, context, and form, allows a greater story to be told: it points to a second wave of Levantine exploration and colonization – probably Tyrian – that built upon a Euboean–northern Phoenician initial phase in the eighth century BC.     

From Ancient India to Medieval Shiraz: The Journey of the Ascetic Cat

The figure of the ascetic cat, one known for his pretense to piety, appears throughout the medieval Persian literature. This study examines the movement of this literary motif along the Silk Road where Buddhism and Manichaeism facilitated its transmission into the nascent Islamic civilization. The study traces the possible paths of their journey by examining both the literary transmission of two anecdotes of the ascetic cat from India to Shiraz, as well as by considering the historical context for such transmission.     

WHAT IS HISTORY? WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Ivan Jablonka seeks something other than a mere combination of history, social science, and literature. He would like history, itself understood as a social science, to be a literature of the real world. He is also interested in literature informed not only by the results but, more important, by the forms of reasoning and inquiry of history and related social sciences (notably anthropology and sociology). Jablonka's own positioning within the Annales seems obvious, notably in his stress on cognition, problem‐oriented research, and the status of history as a social science. But the attention and research devoted in the work of scholars in and around the Annales to the relations among history, literature, and fiction have not been pronounced, and in this context Jablonka inflects the understanding of history in relatively underdeveloped directions. Despite possible disagreements one may have over specific issues, Jablonka's thought‐provoking book raises very important questions, opens many significant avenues of inquiry, and seeks a desirable interaction between historical and literary approaches.     

PERCEIVING COMMUNITIES: EXCHANGE, LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL NETWORKS IN THE LATER IRON AGE OF WESTERN BRITAIN

Summary.   In recent years British Iron Age studies have focused on regionality whilst critiquing the hierarchical model of Iron Age society. Despite the success of these approaches there has been little detailed replacement of previous social models with an understanding of how Iron Age societies worked. Looking at the later Iron Age of western Britain this paper combines examination of the exchange of material culture alongside study of the landscape to explore the nature of Iron Age communities. It is argued that Iron Age societies in the region used material culture to construct and maintain social relationships, while using visual landscape references allowed groups to engage in larger perceived communities.     

Finding Fear in the Iron Age Of Southern France

Abstract

Changes in settlement organisation in Mediterranean France throughout the Iron Age have long been viewed as a social and cultural by-product of contact with Greece and Rome. While relationships with the state societies of the Mediterranean would doubtless have left their mark on settlement structures, it is possible that changing habitat-forms during this period could also be used to extrapolate patterns of conflict in the region.

Recent anthropological research has revealed a correlation between 'warlike', non-state societies and 'socialization for fear'. In ethnographic accounts this manifests itself as an increased delineation of personal space and reductions in social access on an individual level. It is possible that the fairly commonplace sets of evidence which reveal this 'fear' are apparent in the settlement record of the later Iron Age throughout the Bouches du Rhone.     

A Late Iron Age settlement in Wādī Banī Ḫālid: First season of the joint Omani-Italian archaeological project

This paper introduces the first results of the joint Omani-Italian archaeological project at Wādī Banī Ḫālid (northern Šarqiyyah governorate, eastern al-Ḥaǧar), where a dense Iron Age and ancient Islamic occupation was detected. The aim of the project is the definition of the Iron Age settlement patterns along the eastern al-Ḥaǧar landscape and its relationship with both the coastal areas and the al-Ḥaǧar inner piedmont sites of central Oman. In fact, this project follows previous studies of the coastal environment between Muscat and Raʾs al-Ḥadd, where several seasonal fishermen villages were investigated, and their connections with inner permanent sites, such as Lizq, recognised during the Early Iron Age II (1300–600 BCE). Therefore, Wādī Banī Ḫālid stands as a peculiar case of an Iron Age territorial unit, a natural scenario made of a narrow alluvial valley which provided natural conditions for the development of a complex culture. Moreover, the material culture emerged after a first excavation campaign proved that the main occupational phase of the imposing fortified settlement WBK1 is the Late Iron Age (late first millennium BCE to third–fourth centuries CE), thus hopefully allowing new questions to be posed for the definition of Late Iron Age cultures and the chronology in central Oman, which is mostly known based on the excavation of funerary evidence. For this reason, the first part of the paper focuses on the results of the first season in Wādī Banī Ḫālid, and the second part discusses the links between Wādī Banī Ḫālid and the south-eastern Arabia general framework during the Late Iron Age.     

‘Each fantasy chosen begin’: the music of The Divine Comedy

This article considers the cultural and social context for the music of the Northern Irish band The Divine Comedy. It focuses on three mid-1990s albums – Liberation (1993), Promenade (1994) and Casanova (1996) – and debates the significance of this performance of alternative Ulster masculinity during the peace process. It will detail the lyrical obsession with a very particular type of imagined Anglo-Irishness during the first two of these albums, and then consider the complicated uses of the ‘Britpop’ genre in Casanova. This music is baroque, literary and written by an Anglican bishop's son, Neil Hannon, who grew up in Enniskillen during the Troubles. It will consider how Hannon cobbles together an acceptable identity through the use of literary pretentiousness and a carefully crafted pop persona.     

Ceramics and change: an overview of pottery production techniques in northern South Africa and eastern Zimbabwe during the first and second millennium AD

In southern African Iron Age studies, there are few attempts to systematically apply and include laboratory analyses when studying archaeological ceramic materials. As demonstrated in this paper, such analyses help to understand the technological aspects such as raw materials, manufacturing techniques and vessel function. Combined with vessel shape and decoration as well as ethnographic studies, the results provide new ways to understand local and regional distribution networks of the ceramics craft. Furthermore, laboratory analyses are most useful when studying continuity and changes in the ceramics handicraft over time, which has implications both on cultural and social change as seen in the shift in ceramic production techniques. We use examples from Zimbabwe and South Africa to illustrate these changes and discuss them in a broader social and technological context in Iron Age southern Africa.