AN INVESTIGATION OF THE ORIGINS OF VARIATION IN PERISHABLE ARCHITECTURE AT JONATHAN CREEK

Abstract

The Jonathan Creek site in Kentucky was excavated in the early 1940s in an effort to uncover the community plan of an entire Mississippian town and mound center. Although the project terminated prematurely, the remnants of 89 structures representing a diverse array of architectural foundation styles were documented. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of multiple attributes, such as posthole diameter and spacing, wall-trench width and depth, roof supports, and floor area, are necessary to adequately parse the variation in architectural style, construct inferences about the aboveground appearance of buildings, and suggest origins for the diverse construction methods used at the site. At least some of the distinctive differences in foundation preparation would have resulted in diversity in the appearance of finished buildings. Time is not wholly adequate to explain this diversity. Technological and functional choices made by the ancient builders account for some of this variation, while social, genealogical, and ethnic differences, and possibly distinctive ritual customs and traditions among the residents, explain other sources of variation.     

CHILDREN OF THE STREETS: RESCUE,REFORM AND THE FAMILY IN LEEDS, 1850-1914

Abstract

Attempts to rescue and reform destitute, orphaned and street children - the ‘waifs and strays’ of the new urban environment - led to a proliferation of children’s homes and welfare organizations in the second half of the I9th century. Local studies enable us to build up a detailed profile of the individuals involved from a grass-roots level. Using a study of Leeds, this article sketches the motives and aspirations of, on the one hand, philanthropists and, on the other, of parents and children enmeshed in what was a complex and ad hoc system. ‘Welfare’ was not simply a rigid mechanism that was imposed on the urban poor; from a local perspective it can be viewed as a relationship, albeit an unequal one. The institution of the children’s home could provide an important strategy for family survival in a world of limited choices.     

THE PROBLEMS WITH VISUAL IDENTIFICATION OF DOVER AND FORT PAYNE CHERT

Abstract

Similar characteristics including color, luster, texture, and mineral inclusions of both Dover and Fort Payne chert types coupled with the wide geologic and geographic distribution of these deposits compound interobserver errors associated with visual identification methods. Samples were obtained from outcrops of Dover from Kentucky and Tennessee and Fort Payne chert from Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee demonstrating their extensive geologic distribution as well as the great similarity in macroscopic traits. A logistic regression analysis upon the sample database demonstrates successful differentiation of the chert types. However, the Dover/Fort Payne case study provides a cautionary example of the potential pitfalls with sourcing studies solely reliant upon visual attributes to assign artifact provenance. In general, the use of visual chert identification should be a “first approximation” and it is argued here that large type databases systematically sampled from both primary and secondary sources highlight the possible wide range of macroscopic variation present.     

DENTAL ATTRITION AT THE INDIAN KNOLL (15OH2) AND BLACK EARTH (11SA87) SITES: EXTREME WEAR AS A STRESSOR IN LATE ARCHAIC POPULATIONS OF THE OHIO VALLEY

Abstract

This study investigates comparatively the prospect that excessive dental wear in certain Late Archaic populations in eastern North America was caused by extensive shellfish consumption and the associated ingestion of grit. Specifically, the amount and rate of dental wear at Indian Knoll, a large shell midden site in western Kentucky, are compared to those at the Black Earth site, a contemporary occupation in southern Illinois with no evidence of shellfish utilization. Results show no significant differences in dental wear between Indian Knoll and Black Earth and point correspondingly toward the alternative prospect that the intensification of Late Archaic food-processing technology using stone-grinding and hot-rock cooking was the proximate cause. Such technologies provided short-term caloric benefits, but long-term disease consequences for adults of child-bearing age. A decrease in young adult dental wear correlates with the adoption of both food production and pottery in the subsequent Woodland period.     

HEIDEGGER,LATOUR AND THE REIFICATION OF THINGS: THE INVERSION AND SPATIAL ENCLOSURE OF THE SUBSTANTIVE LANDSCAPE OF THINGS – THE LAKE DISTRICT CASE

“Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscape's meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latour's notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heidegger's concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to England's Lake District.     

RESPONSIBLE ACTION AND THE PROBLEM OF REIFICATION

This paper elaborates a “personal,” as opposed to an institutional, view of administrative responsibility. The idea of personal responsibility is better suited for appreciating the cognitive, conceptual, and interpersonal dynamics of policy processes than is the institutional view of responsibility as accountability. From the perspective of personal responsibility, the primary impediment to responsible action by policy makers, policy analysts, and administrators is not that they may act in ways that are ethically or morally wrong. Rather, the problem is that such actors may either not perceive that important choices are available to them or, when choices are perceived, their moral, as opposed to their instrumental, content may not be appreciated. Responsible action should thus be seen as a conceptual or cognitive issue, not simply one of adherence to or departure from institutionally objectivated standards of correctness. Inability to appreciate the moral nature of action may be explained by the cognitive tendency to reify policy making and administrative institutions, roles, rules, and situations.     

SIFTING THE SANDS OF TIME: GEOARCHAEOLOGY,CULTURE CHRONOLOGY,AND CLIMATE CHANGE AT SQUIRES RIDGE,NORTHEASTERN NORTH CAROLINA

Abstract

Since 2000, East Carolina University has conducted archaeological research in the Tar River valley in the northern Coastal Plain of North Carolina designed to address poorly understood aspects of the region’s culture-history. In particular, survey and excavation along a portion of the Tar River have focused on problems related to Coastal Plain chronology, typology, and geoarchaeology. Here we provide an overview of testing done at one site, Squires Ridge, that contains stratified Woodland and Archaic period remains in a 1-m deposit of largely aeolian sandy soils. We suggest that the formation of the archaeologically stratified portions of sand ridges along the Tar River reflect millennial-scale climatic cyclicity representing regional manifestations of climate change during the Early to Middle Holocene. Sand ridges along the Tar River likely represent proxies of climate change, while the archaeology contained within them manifest human adaptations to such change.     

Person,role, and society

Charles C. Hughes. Eskimo Boyhood: An Autobiography in Psychosocial Perspective. Lexington, Kentucky: The University of Kentucky Press, 1974. ix + 429 pp. Illustrations and references. $12.75 (cloth).     

REVISITING PLATFORM MOUNDS AND TOWNHOUSES IN THE CHEROKEE HEARTLAND: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH

Abstract

This article describes the development and initial results of the Western North Carolina Mounds and Towns Project, a collaborative endeavor initiated by the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research Program at the University of Georgia. The goal of this project is to generate new information about the distribution of late prehistoric mounds and historic period townhouses in western North Carolina. This ongoing research has produced updated location and chronological data for 15 Mississippian period mounds and historic Cherokee townhouses, and led to the discovery of a possible location for the Jasper Allen mound. Using these new data, I suggest that David Hally's model for the territorial size of Mississippian polities provides a useful framework for generating new research questions about social and political change in western North Carolina. I also posit that the cultural practice of rebuilding townhouses in place and on top of Mississippian period platform mounds, a process that Christopher Rodning describes as “emplacement,” was common across western North Carolina. In terms of broader impacts, this project contributes positively to the development of indigenous archaeology in the Cherokee heartland.     

OYSTER DEMOGRAPHICS AND THE CREATION OF COASTAL MONUMENTS AT ROBERTS ISLAND MOUND COMPLEX,FLORIDA

Abstract

Anthropogenic coastal landscapes often incorporate shell, a durable remnant of subsistence activity. Collection, consumption, and even feasting can thus contribute to histories of site formation and mound construction. This research assesses how oyster consumption related to the creation of Mound A, a shell mound at the Roberts Island Shell Mound Complex in Citrus County, Florida, is differentiated from the instances of oyster consumption that resulted in the midden constituting the rest of the island. I compare the size of shell remains from mound and off-mound midden contexts to assess variation in the sizes represented across the samples, stratigraphic variation within each context, and evidence for directional change indicative of over-exploitation. I identify a relationship of dependence between shell size and stratigraphic depth in off-mound samples that does not appear in mound samples, suggesting a relatively short period of time for the accumulation of mound deposit oyster shells. The findings of this study point to mound construction at Roberts Island Shell Mound Complex as a distinct and deliberate activity, with the construction event likely sharing importance with the community aggregation and consumption that facilitated it.     

A CAPTIVE'S STORY: PURITANS,PIRATES, AND THE DRAMA OF RECONCILIATION

Abstract

This essay examines the use of Hebrew sources in debates on church and state in civil war England. It fits within a developing historiography that seeks to uncover the deeper texture of early modern political discourse, and also poses questions about the prevalence of statist and secular understandings of public power in the context of the English civil war. Its specific focus is on debates on church government in the 1640s, studies of the Hebrew commonwealth in the 1650s, and the use of Hebraism by Hobbes and Harrington as an antidote to clericalism.     

A Palaeolithic fishhook made of ivory and the earliest fishhook tradition in Europe

Prehistoric fishhooks have previously been described in northern Europe as being common since the Mesolithic. Here we present a Final Palaeolithic ivory fishhook from the site Wustermark 22 (north-eastern Germany), the raw material of which is about 19,000 years old. Five further fishhooks were discovered in situ at the same site one of which has a calibrated radiocarbon age of about 12,300 years. The tool industries of flint artefacts and bone/antler tools are associated with descendants of the Federmesser-culture and the palynological context indicates a Younger Dryas environment. Wustermark 22 represents the largest collection of Palaeolithic fishhooks so far found at a single European site. A comparison with other sites in Europe, containing Palaeolithic fishhooks suggests that the appearance and development of fishhooks may be associated with a general change in resource availability during the Greenland Interstadial 1 (Bølling/Allerød warming), which is also connected with a change from late Upper Palaeolithic to Final Palaeolithic industries in Northern Central Europe. We conclude that Mesolithic fishhook tradition has its roots in the Final Palaeolithic.     

THE CONFEDERATE AND THE FREEDMEN: BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL COMPARISONS FROM THE RECONSTRUCTION-ERA SOUTH

Abstract

In 1999, the human remains, coffin, and associated artifacts of William Ayres Crawford, a Confederate colonel who died in Saline County, Arkansas, in 1874, was examined archaeologically. Comparisons to Crawford's biohistory are made to his contemporaries—African-American freedmen who lived and died in the 1870s and early 1880s and who were interred in Freedman's Cemetery in Dallas, Texas. The Freedman's Cemetery site was intensively studied archaeologically in the early 1990s. In the process, key disparities and similarities between a slave-holding confederate officer and people who experienced the horrors of enslavement are revealed.     

SOUSA VITERBO AND THE IDEA OF INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of Sousa Viterbo's contribution to industrial archaeology. This Portuguese historian and archaeologist not only employed and printed both the terms ‘archaeology of industry’ and ‘industrial archaeology’ in the late 19th century, but also left behind a number of writings which secure his place as a true ancestor of the current industrial archaeology. Selected excerpts of three of Viterbo's texts written between 1896 and 1902 are here translated into English for the first time.     

ZOOMORPHIC EFFIGY PENDANTS: AN EXAMINATION OF STYLE,MEDIUM, AND DISTRIBUTION IN THE CADDO AREA

Abstract

Caddo zoomorphic effigy pendants were crafted from a wide variety of raw material, such as freshwater mussel shell, Busycon perversum (whelk) marine shell, animal bone, and various types of soft stone. They have been documented at contemporaneous Late Caddo (A.D. 1400–1700) sites along the Red River in northeast Texas, southwest Arkansas, and northwest Louisiana; the Black Bayou, Big Cypress Bayou, and upper Sabine River basins in northeast Texas; the Ouachita River in south-central Arkansas; and the Arkansas River in central Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. This paper describes the development of a comprehensive corpus that investigates stylistic groups, differential raw material or medium utilized, and the spatial distribution of zoomorphic effigy pendants throughout the Caddo area. Results reveal north-south heterogeneity, suggesting the presence of broader traditional cultural narratives associated with a complex idea that is manifest regionally in distinct stylistic forms and linked to Caddo beliefs concerning Beneath World themes. Additionally, this stylistic and spatial analysis offers an additional dataset to further explore social, political, and economic linkages among and between contemporary Caddo groups around A.D. 1500.     

Clovis Blades at Paleo Crossing (33ME274), Ohio

Abstract

This paper describes the previously undocumented Paleoindian lithic blade assemblage from the Paleo Crossing Site, Ohio (33ME274). Qualitative and quantitative comparisons of the Paleo Crossing blade assemblage to blade assemblages from other Paleoindian sites demonstrates its fragmented and utterly exhausted nature, but support its designation as Clovis. This is significant given that a majority of the Paleo Crossing toolstone outcrops 600 km southwest of the site in southern Indiana and western Kentucky, a prominent locale for Clovis prismatic blade manufacture. We propose that blade reduction was practiced for prolonging the use-life of distally retouched endscrapers, a prominent tool form at Paleo Crossing. Since use-wear and ethnographic evidence often show that endscrapers were used for hide-working, Paleo Crossing may be an appropriate venue to test for the presence of intense caribou hide-working.     

CHARTERS,NORTHUMBRIA AND THE UNIFICATION OF ENGLAND IN THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the clergy and their secular neighbours in the diocese of Durham in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In particular, it seeks to uncover the extent to which the two spheres experienced a shared sense of identity, in a period when that relationship was being recalibrated as the full impact of the Reformation was making itself felt. For example, the novelty of clerical marriage, within and without the clerical community, as well as oppositional doctrinal and confessional outlooks, were superimposed on to existing associations and networks. In other respects interaction between the clergy and lay society fluctuated between harmonious and positive to contentious and damaging. Meanwhile, preconceptions about the diocese are re-examined in the context of this relationship.     

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: THOMAS JACKSON AND THE CONTROVERSY OVER PRODIGIES IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES I

Abstract

This article focuses on Hobbes's use of metaphor, particularly the larger structural metaphor of the artificial man in Leviathan. Hobbes claims to draw his political animal according to the figurative outlines of the natural one, despite the significant differences between these two bodies. In Part I we see the scientifically-minded Hobbes reject the old dualistic imagery of body and soul, act and will; but in Part II the politically-minded Hobbes appeals to exactly these dualistic distinctions in order to lend his radical vision of the state the numinous appeal of the medieval and Tudor formulations. An understanding of Hobbes's rhetorical strategy, and what I call his strategic use of dualism, can show how the recent linguistic turn in Hobbes studies can in fact re-open the much older debate on the overall unity of his philosophical system.     

ETHNICITY AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN ANTEBELLUM NORTH CAROLINA

Abstract

During the early to mid-nineteenth century, the expanding market revolution caused the broad distribution of a wide variety of mass-produced goods, even to frontier regions of the United States. This analysis uses the material assemblages from three contemporaneous sites (ca. 1840–50) in southwestern North Carolina that represent the households of Cherokee and white tenants and enslaved African Americans. Analyses of three distinct artifact classes suggest a homogenized material culture in which faunal remains are more illustrative than other artifact classes in identifying ethnicity.     

THE CONCEPT OF TRANSPARENCY,ITS HISTORY,AND THE THEORY OF BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE

In this review essay, I examine the theoretical assumptions required in order to reconstruct an understanding of another historical period. Stefanos Geroulanos has produced a masterful history of mid‐twentieth‐century French thought, and he argues for a significant difference between that period and our own based on the values and ideas associated with the concept of transparency. The book is innovative in both its method and interpretation of the period of 1945–1984. However, despite the suggestive theoretical framework announced at its start, Geroulanos prefers to explore the theoretical content of conceptual history more than to explain how one might go about identifying, understanding, and translating the concepts of a different epoch. In order to contribute to what is already a successful project, I endeavor to extend some of Geroulanos's theoretical sketches through a comparison with Reinhart Koselleck's theory of Begriffsgechichte. Despite some muted criticism of Koselleck from Geroulanos, I argue that the projects share similar commitments, although Geroulanos needs to develop his theoretical premises at greater length, both for a full comparison and in order to complete the critical project that Transparency appears to be undertaking.