CONTINUING THE RESEARCH: ARCHAEOGEOPHYSICAL INVESTIGATIONS AT THE BATTLE MOUND SITE (3LA1) IN LAFAYETTE COUNTY,ARKANSAS

Abstract

The continuing use of archaeogeophysical methods at the Battle Mound site (3LA1) exemplifies the power of geophysics as a non-invasive, preservation-oriented, and economically feasible way to pursue the exploration of settlement patterning at the Middle and Late Caddo (ca. A.D. 1200–1680) mound site. Using these methods, a 1-ha (2.47 acres) area directly east of the large mound was surveyed using magnetic gradiometry and concatenated to the existing survey area. Results from the 1-ha survey provide further elucidation of the spatial structure and internal organization of the Caddo Indian occupation at the Battle Mound site.     

BURYING THE DEAD,CREATING THE PAST1

Professional historians tend to be ambivalent about one of the prime historical phenomena of our time: the desire to commemorate. The amount of attention given to memory (collective or not) and trauma bears witness to the fact that historians really do want to give in to that desire; the fact that they treat these subjects in a rather “positivist” way suggests that they regard it as a bit improper to do so wholeheartedly. As a result commemoration is all over the place but is never taken as seriously as it should be. This essay argues that effective commemoration should start with a question Giambattista Vico might have asked: “who are we that this could have happened?” Posing this question means relinquishing the identity‐enhancing, self‐celebrating stance from which we tend to commemorate “unimaginable” events. Commemorative self‐exploration is a confrontation with what we don't like to be confronted with: the fact that occasionally we behave in utter contradiction to what we regard as our identity. Heterodox, “monstrous,” and therefore Gedächtnisfähig behavior comes in three varieties: things we are proud of, things we are ashamed of, and the sublime “mutations” in which we “commit” history and embark on the unimaginable. Because sublime mutations change consciousness, commemorating them confronts posterity with almost insuperable epistemological difficulties. Commemorating sublime mutations means burying them—not in the sense of “covering” them, but in the sense of “inventing” a way in which they keep on living.     

NATIVE AMERICAN MATERIAL CULTURE FROM THE WALLACE BOTTOM SITE,SOUTHEASTERN ARKANSAS

Abstract

This paper synthesizes analyses of Native American artifacts collected at Wallace Bottom (3AR179) from 1998 to 2006. These artifacts offer the prospect of identifying the archaeological signature of the Quapaw people in the early colonial era, a decades-old conundrum in lower Mississippi Valley archaeology. While this artifact assemblage appears to date to the early colonial era (A.D. 1650–1750), it contrasts markedly with the archaeological “Quapaw phase” (Phillips 1970:943–944). The Wallace Bottom site now seems a good candidate for the location of both the Quapaw village of Osotouy and the French Arkansas Post. The native material from Wallace Bottom exhibits a generalized midwestern character, consistent with Degiha Siouan traditional narratives of migration. The material from Wallace Bottom and the neighboring Lake Dumond site also reflect continental scale interaction during the era in which the Quapaws and contemporary native societies of the historic period were taking form.     

A TOWN AT THE CROSSROADS: SITE-WIDE GRADIOMETRY SURVEYING AND MAPPING AT OLD TOWN RIDGE SITE (3CG41) IN NORTHEASTERN ARKANSAS

Abstract

Gradiometry survey at the Old Town Ridge (3CG41) site, a stockaded Middle Mississippian period town in the central Mississippi River Valley of Arkansas, demonstrates the efficacy of a broad-coverage, site-encompassing remote sensing methodology for initial interpretation of intrasite organization and complexity. Site access, time constraints, deep plow furrows, and cotton plant “stubble” associated with ongoing agriculture at the site defer the efficient use of a site-wide multisensor prospection methodology. However, a gradiometry survey identified multiple anomalies consistent with prehistoric structures, earthworks, earthquake liquefaction, and other interpreted features encompassed within the remains of a 7-ha, rectangular enclosure. Aerial photography, topography, and preliminary archaeological ground truthing provided additional information for analysis and interpretation.     

THE RED INK OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

The red ink on four fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls was analysed by X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction. The red pigment was identified as mercury sulfide (HgS), cinnabar. The significant archaeological and historical aspects of this finding are discussed.     

REVISITING GUGE,NGARI AFTER 12 YEARS

<正>EDITOR’S NOTES: Mr.Cheng Weidong is a senior journalist on a national pictorial magazine.He enjoys a Special Government Allowance from the State Council.He w...     

BUILDING FENCES,CROSSING BARRIERS

It was late August, and the weather already turned chilly on the grasslands of Changtang.In our project site we were guiding local villagers on how to build up fences around their sheepfolds and homes. This measure was necessary following the increasing records of human-wildlife conflict threatening the survival of wild bears in the region.     

REVISING THE PAST / REVISITING THE PRESENT: HOW CHANGE HAPPENS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

This article investigates the various forces that may help to explain the ongoing historio‐graphical phenomenon of revision. It takes as its point of departure Michel de Certeau's understanding of the writing of history as a process consisting of an unstable and constantly changing triangulated relationship among a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession), analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (or discourse). For de Certeau, revision is the formal prerequisite for writing history because the very distance between past and present requires continuous innovation simply to produce the objects of historical knowledge, which have no existence apart from the historian's identification of them. The specific nature of revision at a given moment is determined by the specificities of the process as a whole, that is, by the characteristics of place, procedure, and text and their contemporary relational configuration. Taking the rise of “linguistic‐turn” historiography as exemplary of the process of historical revision in its broadest possible meaning, the article seeks to discover the possible “causes” for that turn. It begins with an analysis of the psychological roots of poststructuralism as a response to the holocaust and its aftermath, and then proceeds to explore the possible economic and social transformations in the postwar world that might account for its reception, both in Europe but also, more counterintuitively, in the United States, where postmodernism proved to have an especially strong appeal. Added to this mix are the new patterns of social recruitment into the historical profession in the “sixties.” the essay suggests that, to the extent that revision is understood as the result of the combined effect of psychological, social, and professional determinations, it is unlikely that there will ever be genuine consensus about the sources of revision in history, since all historians bring to their work differing congeries of psychological preoccupations, social positions, and professional commitments.     

THE LAST RIGHTS: MORE ON ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE DEAD

Summary. In a recent paper, one of us (Bahn 1984) made a preliminary sketch of the main issues involved in the question of whether archaeologists have the right to disturb the dead. Since then, a number of important new case studies have featured prominently in the media, and more literature on the subject has started to appear—most notably a collection of papers (Green 1984) which, though focused on the particular problems of North America, contains much food for thought for archaeologists elsewhere. In this article we propose to look at the new data and consider what light moral philosophy can throw on the problem as a whole.     

BLOOD FOR THE GHOSTS: READING RUIN'S BEING WITH THE DEAD WITH NIETZSCHE

A focus on roots, localizations, usurpations, and obliterations together with commemoration and different fields of scholarly research, along with a thematic focus on Homer's Nykia, permit Hans Ruin to revisit the foundations of history in Being with the Dead. Ruin draws on cultural sociology, including the work of Alfred Schütz, as well as Heideggerian historicity and the dead of the distant past, including archaeology and ethnography, paleography and physical anthropology. Ruin also engages Michel de Certeau's Writing of History and its focus on the other in a necropolitical account tracked through interdisciplinary fields. In my reading I supplement Ruin's critical focus on Homer scholarship beyond the twentieth century with a return to Nietzsche's nineteenth-century emphasis on the “blood” needed to bring the voices of the past to speak in his own reading of Homer. To do this, I note the dead-silenced (“zombie”) scholarship haunting Nietzsche's voice in his field of classical philology in addition to Nietzsche's source scholarship and his hermeneutic methodology of historiographical research for the sake of ethnography, archaeology, and Nietzsche's lectures on pre-Platonic philosophy.     

CROSSING THE RIVER: HOW LOCAL STRUGGLES BUILD A BROADER MOVEMENT

A case study of environmental justice organizing in South Carolina explores how local activists can build an oppositional ideology that connects to a broader agenda for social justice. A multi-issue, state-wide workers' rights organization provided ideological context and strategic experience that enabled residents fighting to clean up a polluted pond to connect their concern to a wider effort for economic justice and undoing racism. The organization's worker-centered, multi-racial identity and an organizing strategy that exposes contradictions of the dominant ideology are seen as enabling these wider connections.     

THE ER-RAM STONE MASK AT THE PALESTINE EXPLORATION FUND, LONDON

Summary. A stone mask which was purchased by T. Chaplin in Palestine at the end of the lastcentury is stored at the Palestine Exploration Fund in London. This specimen, together with some other examples from the same area, may date to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (seventh millennium bc).     

TOM JONES (3HE40): GEOPHYSICAL SURVEY AND SPATIAL ORGANIZATION AT A CADDO MOUND SITE IN SOUTHWEST ARKANSAS

Abstract

This article outlines a process that has facilitated discoveries of intrasite pattern, architecture, and diagnostic artifacts at the prehistoric Caddo mound site Tom Jones (3HE40) in southwestern Arkansas. A methodology of multisensor geophysical survey using electrical resistance, electromagnetic conductivity, gradiometry, magnetic susceptibility, high accuracy survey and mapping, and data georeferencing enabled by geographic information system technology has proven to be an efficient, effective, and essential component of an overall research plan. In addition to providing insights regarding the intrasite organization of an upland Caddo ceremonial mound center, this technologically integrated approach has established that Saratoga chalk geology and Blackland Prairie clays combine to form an advantageous medium for geophysical discovery.     

“环保之城” 骑自行车看哥本哈根

丹麦王国首都哥本哈根位于丹麦西兰岛东部,它是丹麦政治、经济、文化的中心,全国最大和最重要的城市,同时也是北欧最大的城市和著名的古城。根据丹麦的历史记载,哥本哈根在11世纪初还是一个小小的渔村和进行贸易的场所。随着贸易的日益繁盛,到12世纪初发展成为一个商业城镇。15世纪初,成为丹麦王国的首都。     

THE BODY AT WAR

This book is one of the truly original contributions in historical writing to appear during the centenary of the outbreak of the war in 1914. The authors' central argument is that at the time of the Great War, scientists and physicians reconfigured the human body as both a living organism and a site of meaning. They developed the notion that the body was an integrated set of self-regulating systems, the precariousness of which threatened all of us with death every single day. The authors term this the “integration–crisis duet.” Although the origins of this formulation long antedated the war, the problem of treating thousands of men who suffered from various forms of shock—wound shock, surgical shock, shell shock—brought this new configuration of the human body into high relief during and in the decades after the war. The metaphor of homeostasis, or self-regulation, Geroulanos and Meyers claim, was so powerful that it spread well beyond the domain of physiology and medicine to facets of psychoanalysis, political thought, cybernetics, philosophy, and anthropology.     

BRINGING IN THE DEAD: BURIALS AND THE LOCAL PERSPECTIVE ON KYTHERA IN THE SECOND PALACE PERIOD

Summary.   This article analyses the mortuary data of the 'Second Palace' period (c. 1700–1450 BC) on the Aegean island of Kythera. It proposes that the chamber tombs which were first introduced to the island in this period can offer potential insights into aspects of local-level social relations, especially at the central site of Kastri. This approach complements the broader cultural perspective that has usually been taken regarding these tombs, which have been viewed as indicators of Cretan cultural influence and, indeed, colonization. It is proposed that a strong horizontal in-group solidarity was being expressed by the tomb-using group at Kastri through spatial and diachronic uniformity in burial practices, and that this uniformity should be viewed at least partially as a response to local-level social agendas. The hypothesis is then explored that status identities were also being asserted in the burial sphere by at least some members of this group, through tomb location, the resources devoted to mortuary rituals and, perhaps, emphasis on lineage.