Harnessing the waves: Monuments and ceremonial complexes in Orkney and beyond

Utilising recent observations by Phillips (2003) on the location of chambered cairns in Orkney in relation to the sea this paper attempts to explain why megalithic monuments cluster in particular locations. In the past, the distribution of cairns has been related to the levels of survival in marginal locations. However, monument locations, from across Scotland, demonstrate that clustering was a feature of monumental distribution in the past. From a maritime perspective it becomes easier to understand these groupings in Orkney as the product of interactions between widely dispersed island communities. Utilising a long-term perspective it is possible to use the relative patterning of monuments of different ages to suggest the changing audiences to whom these monuments were addressed. For example, the clustering of Earlier Neolithic monuments in Orkney, in places that form important linking locales, suggests a role for these monuments involving establishing and maintaining links between island groups within the Orkney archipelago. The location of later Neolithic monumental complexes, on the other hand, suggests the importance of inter-regional maritime contact at precisely the time when such contacts are strikingly evident in the archaeological record. It is argued that a closer integration of our approaches to land and sea is needed if we are to understand the nature of long distance contacts in the past.

An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Hafting and Stone Tool Diversity among the Gamo of Ethiopia

The significance of flaked stone tool variation has been a source of great archaeological debate for over 100 years. Even though evidence for stone tool hafting exists as far back as the Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age, there is a dearth of information concerning how hafting affects stone tool technology. This ethnoarchaeological study of hafted stone scrapers among the Gamo of southern Ethiopia examines why a single cultural group utilizes two different hafts, which generate different lithic morphologies, technologies, and spatial distributions. The relationships between history, environment, and social group membership are explored to demonstrate how these associations create variation in technological practices.

Maritime Archaeology and Maritime Heritage Protection in the Disputed Territory of Northern Cyprus

Between 1967 and 1974, the island of Cyprus was a centre of maritime archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean. Individuals such as Michael and Susan Katzev, George Bass, Jeremy Green and Richard Steffy were living on and visiting the island, and testing and developing methods still common in the discipline. The hostilities on Cyprus in the summer of 1974 and the implementation of international regulations limiting archaeological work in the northern portion of the island, however, had repercussions still evident today. This article summarizes past maritime archaeological work along the northern coastline, addresses the regulations limiting archaeological activity in the region and discusses a new training program licensed by the Nautical Archaeology Society aiding in the protection of the island’s maritime heritage representing approximately 10,000 years of activity.

The When, Where, and How of Novices in Craft Production

Archaeologists frequently underestimate the importance of children as well as craft skill acquisition in the formation of archaeological assemblages. Perhaps even more often they conflate the terms “novice” and “child” in ways that oversimplify the factors that are involved in incorporating new producers into craft production. In particular, the skill acquisition involved in stone tool production is influenced by a variety of factors, including danger, raw material value, raw material availability, and raw material recyclability, as well as a variety of social factors. This paper examines the influence of each of these factors and also suggests patterns useful in recognizing and distinguishing between novices and children in the archaeological record.

Training and Maritime Archaeology in a University Context

This paper draws on experience gained by Bournemouth University to consider undergraduate education in maritime archaeology. At Bournemouth maritime archaeology is taught firmly in the context of a broader archaeological education. Archaeological programmes vary with the institutions within which they are taught, each programme thus having an individual character that separates it from that of other institutions and further enriches the subject through the breadth of this education. At Bournemouth the value of teaching archaeology with a high component of practical experience has been long understood. This does not mean that archaeology is taught as a purely practical subject but as one within which experience in the field is seen as a worthwhile focus. Bournemouth’s programme therefore recognises the value of field research projects as learning environments for undergraduates studying maritime archaeology. The programme is subject to a number of constraints, notably the size of the archaeological employment market, levels of pay within that market, questions of ongoing professional development after graduation, and the requirements of other employment markets into which archaeological graduates enter. This paper argues that research project-based learning, and in particular, involvement with amateur groups, provides a way to balance these constraints and supports development of both technical and transferable ‘soft’ skills.

Advances in Polynesian Prehistory: A Review and Assessment of the Past Decade (1993–2004)

The pace of archaeological research in Polynesia has intensified in recent years, resulting in more than 500 new literature citations over the past decade. Fieldwork has continued in such previously well-studied archipelagoes as Tonga and Samoa in Western Polynesia, and Hawai’i and New Zealand in Eastern Polynesia, and has expanded into previously neglected islands including Niue, the Equatorial Islands, the Austral Islands, and Mangareva. The emergence of Ancestral Polynesian culture out of its Eastern Lapita predecessor is increasingly well understood, and the chronology of Polynesian dispersal and expansion into Eastern Polynesia has engaged several researchers. Aside from these fundamental issues of origins and chronology, major research themes over the past decade include (1) defining the nature, extent, and timing of long-distance interaction spheres, particularly in Eastern Polynesia; (2) the impacts of human colonization and settlement on island ecosystems; (3) variation in Polynesian economic systems and their transformations over time; and (4) sociopolitical change, especially as viewed through the lens of household or microscale archaeology. Also noteworthy is the rapidly evolving nature of interactions between archaeologists and native communities, a critical aspect of archaeological practice in the region.

The Historic Port of El Real de Salinas in Campeche, and the Role of Coastal Resources in the Emergence of Capitalism in Yucatán, México

The emergence of capitalism in the peninsula of Yucatán is generally presented as a process resulting from the capitalization of the agricultural sector and the export of products from its sugar, cotton, and henequén plantations in the nineteenth century. In addition to these products, the peninsula also had a dynamic coastal economy in which the harvesting of salt and the extraction of logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum), played a major role and contributed to the flow of goods to international markets. We present a preliminary archaeological survey and historical documentation of El Real de Salinas, a salt-producing port on the north coast of Campeche, which was also involved in the extraction of other coastal products and closely linked to the inland plantation system.

How to Make an Unfired Clay Cooking Pot: Understanding the Technological Choices Made by Arctic Potters

Between about 500 a.d. and the late nineteenth century, clay cooking pots associated with the Thule culture were produced in the Arctic region. Ethnographic and archaeological records indicate that these vessels were typically underfired (often even unfired), highly porous, and easily broken. Despite these characteristics, the evidence indicates that they were used to heat water over open fires. In this paper, we examine how Arctic potters were able to produce unsintered vessels capable of holding liquids without disintegrating. We conclude that the application of seal oil and seal blood to the pot’s surface was the key to their success.

Strontium Isotopes from the Earth to the Archaeological Skeleton: A Review

Strontium isotope analysis of archaeological skeletons has provided useful and exciting results in archaeology in the last 20 years, particularly by characterizing past human migration and mobility. This review covers the biogeochemical background, including the origin of strontium isotope compositions in rocks, weathering and hydrologic cycles that transport strontium, and biopurification of strontium from to soils, to plants, to animals and finally into the human skeleton, which is subject to diagenesis after burial. Spatial heterogeneity and mixing relations must often be accounted for, rather than simply ``matching' a measured strontium isotope value to a presumed single-valued geologic source. The successes, limitations and future potential of the strontium isotope technique are illustrated through case studies from geochemistry, biogeochemistry, ecology and archaeology.

Social Signaling and the Organization of Small-Scale Society: The Case of Contact-Era New Guinea

Small-scale society furnishes the bread and butter of archeological research. Yet our understanding of what these communities did and how they achieved their purpose is still rudimentary. Using the ethnography of contact-era New Guinea, this paper presents a “social signaling” model of small-scale social systems that archeologists may find useful for contextualizing and interpreting the material record of these societies. It proposes that the organization of small-scale society was oriented, among other goals, towards biological and social reproduction, subsistence optimization, and military defense. To advance these multiple collective interests, however, these communities had to deal with three problems: an optimality problem, a conflict-of-interest problem, and a free-rider problem. The optimality problem was solved with a modular (or segmented) social structure, the conflict-of-interest problem by a process of social signaling, and these two solutions together operated to resolve the free-rider problems they created. In addition to explaining the structure and function of small-scale societies, the model provides a unified framework that can account for the ceremonial behaviors, core cultural conceptions, and leadership forms that these societies generated.

The Bioarchaeological Investigation of Childhood and Social Age: Problems and Prospects

Recently, the value of the study of children and childhood from archaeological contexts has become more recognized. Childhood is both a biological and a social phenomenon. However, because of specialization in research fields within anthropology, subadults from the archaeological record are usually studied from the biological perspective (bioarchaeology) or, more predominantly, the social perspective (social archaeology), with little research that incorporates both approaches. These polarized approaches to childhood and age highlight the dualistic way in which “biological” and “social” aspects of the body are viewed. Some recent literature criticizes bioarchaeological approaches, and calls for the incorporation of childhood social theory, including social age categories, into subadult health analysis. However, few studies have explicitly addressed the practicalities or theoretical issues that need to be considered when attempting this. This paper critically examines these issues, including terminology used for defining subadulthood and age divisions within it, and approaches to identify “social age” in past populations. The important contribution that bioarchaeology can make to the study of social aspects of childhood is outlined. Recent theoretical approaches for understanding the body offer exciting opportunities to incorporate skeletal remains into research, and develop a more biologically and socially integrated understanding of childhood and age.

Introduction

The research reported in this special issue details research undertaken at the site of Casselden Place in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to providing specific information about this site, this collaborative effort demonstrates how the theory and practice of the archaeology of the modern city has developed and matured.

Increased Sedentism in the Central Oases of the Egyptian Western Desert in the Early to Mid-Holocene: Evidence from the Peripheries

Two locations adjacent to the great central oases of the Egyptian Western Desert experienced an unusual period of sedentism in the early to mid-Holocene. Around the Southeast Basin near Dakhleh Oasis and in the Wadi el-Midauwara above Kharga, areas sharing close cultural ties, groups of slab structure sites attest to increased sedentism spanning 2,500 years. Kharga seems to have been settled fairly continuously through the two and a half millennia, but little is known of subsistence practices in this location. Dakhleh experienced two episodes of increased sedentism. Early Holocene Masara groups occupied a well-watered location within a generally dry desert. In the wetter mid-Holocene, Bashendi settlers in large stone-built sites hunted, collected wild cereals, and may have kept herds. As the desert dried after 5300 BC, the settlers switched to a life of mobile forager-herders.

Honoring Ambiguity/Problematizing Certitude

In this paper I argue that the practice of archaeology over-emphasizes and over-rewards unambiguous certainty in our interpretations, even though our conclusions are usually drawn from necessarily partial, underdetermined and complex evidence. I argue that full or partial erasure of ambiguity from our data and from our interpretive assertions does not serve the long-term interests of the discipline; that a feminist practice aimed at more nuanced understandings of the past and open to more subtle, multivalenced notions of reality, must accept ambiguity as a central feature of archaeological interpretation. After I review familiar strategies that are used to obscure troubling areas of uncertainty in archaeology, I urge feminist practice to resist employing these “mechanisms of closure” in our work. It is only by openly recognizing and preserving the ambiguity that resides in messy data arrangements today that we stand any hope of fuller and richer understandings in the future.

Coastal societies, exchange and identity along the Channel and southern North Sea shores of Europe, AD 600–1000

This paper explores the functioning of coastal societies against the background of the changing role of coastal ‘contact zones’ on both sides of the Channel and southern North Sea region, between AD 600 and 1100. In so doing, it reassesses aspects of the generalising frameworks of interpretation applied over the past quarter of a century in favour of a more contextual approach, enabled by long known (although sometimes forgotten) and recent archaeological discoveries, together with new geological research. Regional and local complexity is a recurrent feature. A revolutionary increase in our awareness of the extent to which marginal coastal landscapes were occupied and exploited is matched by a commensurate increase in our knowledge of the number and complexity of settlements and seasonally used sites, involved in maritime exchange networks. Ultimately, this contribution confronts the dynamism of regional coastal societies with the wider socio-political structures in which they were incorporated.

Colonialism, Material Culture, and Identity in the Rio Grande and Hudson River Valleys

A comparison of two seventeenth-century colonial encounters in North America, examining the Pueblo–Spanish interaction in New Mexico and the Mohawk–Dutch situation in New York. I focus on material culture flows, the role of women, forms of labor that were extracted in each setting and how each of these contributed to power relations and identity construction.

Much More than Gender

Numerous publications on gender archaeology present case studies that incorporate gender in their analyses, but make little use of feminist theory and critique, and are ambivalent or negative to feminism. Aspects of Norwegian, British and American gender archaeology are discussed in relation to a desire for the ‘mainstream.’ The reasons for, and consequences of, a lack of feminist theorizing and engagement are related to Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges.

The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe

This article demonstrates the potential of an historical archaeology of smuggling and the value of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of smuggling and its prevention. By exploring the previously unstudied history of the King’s Pipe in Falmouth, a large chimney used for the destruction of tobacco, a rare survivor of many that once existed in England’s port cities, it demonstrates that archaeology could transform our understanding of smuggling and its prevention, and more broadly the history of crime and punishment in eighteenth century England.

The Archaeology of South Asian Cities

Urbanism in the Indian subcontinent occurred in three distinct time periods in which cultural cohesion over large regions is archaeologically demonstrated through the architecture and artifacts of social, ritual, and economic activity. In the Indus (2500–1900 B.C.) and Early Historic (3rd century B.C. to 4th century A.D.) periods, cities were not necessarily tied to political territories or guided by strong political leaders, but by the Medieval period (after the 9th century A.D.), urban zones were the base for political growth, warfare, and aggrandizement. The comparison of these three eras is undertaken within a framework for defining cities that balances quantitative criteria such as population size and areal extent with two types of qualitative criteria: internal specialization on the basis of materials found within archaeological sites, and external specialization on the basis of data recovered through regional analysis. Cities from the three eras also are evaluated from the perspective of the ordinary inhabitant through the examination of the social, religious, and economic factors that prompted and rewarded urban residence. While the Indus and Early Historic cities were attractive because of the networks of opportunity found there, Medieval cities additionally benefitted from a “push” factor as ordinary inhabitants allied themselves to urban areas in times of political stress and uncertainty.

Present Demands and Educating a New Generation of Maritime Archaeologists

Archaeology in Europe has changed a great deal over the last 25 years and these changes have certainly affected maritime archaeology. As such they also define the practical skills that are needed. On the one hand of course, unlike other branches of European archaeology, maritime archaeology still has a major preoccupation with a well-funded ‘treasure-hunting’ industry and no lack of ill-defined and ill-considered project initiatives. High ethical standards are therefore necessary and the public debate should continue. But within the structure of archaeology and its management at large, maritime archaeology should also show what its major contributions can be. It can only do so if sufficiently trained personnel are available. It is against this background that the Maritime Archaeology Programme at SDU in Esbjerg is being shaped. This paper reviews developments in the field and outlines the approach to education developed at SDU in response.