A ZOOARCHAEOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS OF SOUTH CAROLINA’S PREHISTORIC COASTAL SITES

Abstract

A synthesis of faunal analyses from South Carolina’s prehistoric coastal sites is presented as a means of investigating geographic differences and diachronic changes attributable to climate. Thirty-one zooarchaeological samples from 26 sites are presented, ranging from the Late Archaic through the Late Mississippian periods. Frequencies of taxa such as eastern oysters, quahog clams, sea catfishes, and drums, among others, vary spatially and temporally, roughly paralleling broad climatic trends. These results, while preliminary, provide insight into faunal use patterns and are used to indicate avenues for future zooarchaeological research in South Carolina and surrounding areas.     

Trade and culture: the ongoing debate

ABSTRACT

The debate over how to reconcile trade liberalization with cultural policy is a long-standing one. There is great variation in how countries have navigated this debate. Furthermore, evolving individual policy approaches show noteworthy dynamism, largely in response to domestic politics, shifts in the international trading system and technological developments. This special issue explores different approaches to the trade and culture debate across geographic space, as well as the evolution across time through analysis of six cases – Canada, the European Union, South Africa, Latin America, the United States and China.     

Detached from Their Homeland: The Latter-day

Over the past few decades, the homeland concept has received an ever-increasing amount of attention by cultural geographers. While the debate surrounding the necessity and applicability of the concept continues, it is more than apparent that no other geographic term (including culture areas or culture regions) captures the essence of peoples' attachment to place better than homeland. The literature, however, provides few examples of the deep-seated loyalty people have for a homeland despite being physically detached from that space. Employing land use mapping and informal interviews, this paper seeks to help fill that gap by exemplifying how the daily lives of Mormons living in Chihuahua, Mexico reflect their connection to the United States and the Mormon homeland. Our research revealed that, among other things, the Anglo residents perpetuate their cultural identity through their unique self-reference, exhibit territoriality links reflected in their built environment, and demonstrate unconditional bonding to their homeland through certain holiday celebrations. It is clear to us, as the Anglo-Mormon experience illustrates, that the homeland concept deserves a place within the geographic lexicon.     

Mothers,communities and the scale of difference

Only recently did geographic concern turn to why and how, and when and where political identities are reproduced but, as yet, our understanding of the political relations between families and communities remains understudied. This lack of attention is attributable, in part, to the complexities of families and communities but, this aside, all societies regulate reproduction and there are always claims for legitimization of particular views of family values and community relations. With this paper, I argue that highlighting the social construction of scale suggests ways that the social imaginary of a domestic myth is spatially embedded within a nurturing local community. I outline some recent feminist discussion of local childcare cultures and critique of 'the public sphere' prior to raising scale as a way to open up static versions of justice and difference. Arguments in the paper that relate to the social construction of scale are illustrated by examples from a study of the impact of a new child and a residential move on mothers in San Diego. I argue that although the birth of a child highlights important questions that relate to responsibility, self-identity and notions of family, community and society, it is from within a politically structured notion of scale that many of the constraints and contexts of childcare arise. This paper focuses specifically on negotiating childcare as a basis of resistance through day-to-day contestations at multiple scales.     

Beach body work: Australian women’s experiences

This article examines Australian women’s complex relationship with the beach through a focus on affect and on what bodies do. Interviews with ten participants of diverse backgrounds and of different ages reveal that women understand the beach as a mediated and surveilled space where their bodies are foregrounded. In this environment, there is an intersection of women’s knowledge of the popular constructions of the archetypal Australian beach body, real women’s bodies, and interviewees’ experiences of the beach as a place of shame and pride. As a means of managing this affective landscape participants detail a range of bodily strategies enacted prior to going to the beach and once at the beach. This bodily labour demonstrates that for Australian women the beach is a dynamic and complicated site of both leisure and labour.     

Doing the Doric: The institutionalization of regional language and culture in the north-east of Scotland

The focus of this paper is on the practices and processes of joint action and knowledge, the performativity of language and the tracing of how particular items of rhetoric move, solidify and change. The paper illustrates the contingent factors that give language and practice variable meanings through an examination of the Doric dialect and culture of north-eastern Scotland. Doric has, in recent years, been increasingly discussed and debated by the press and the academy. Here, it is argued that the continued reproduction of 'north-easterness' is related to the ways in which dialect and culture have been mobilized, politicized and legitimized through the erection and operation of an institutional framework. The role of 'expert' and enthusiast knowledges in the propagation of cultural trends is analysed, contrasting the existence of north-eastern tradition as an allegedly 'organic' culture, when dialect use and 'traditional' practices were unproblematic and everyday, with contemporary institutionalized 'north-easterness'. This is achieved through an exploration of the spectacularization of tradition, unpacking some of the tensions this creates with regard to the Bothy Ballad and literary traditions of the north-east.     

The fantasy of access: Neoliberal ordering of a public beach

Neoliberal governance has led to the progressive privatization and ordering of urban public spaces, restricting their use as domains of political expression and visible identity formation. While the processes of privatization have taken a variety of forms, the end result either produces new privately-owned spaces or restricts access and behavior in extant public space. A programmatic, bourgeois-public space emerges where a fantasy of open-access occludes the experience of exclusion. This fantasy of inclusive public space is upheld by dualistically countering its faux-democratic state management against private ownership. Though scholars have theorized the neoliberal production of public spaces elsewhere, this paradigm has rarely been applied to the large and proximate public beaches and coastlines that bound US lands. This paper seeks to complicate our understanding of the process of privatization by countering legal and experiential exclusions that govern access to beaches in Connecticut. A study of the Eastern Point beaches in Groton, Connecticut is used to analyze the impacts of a Connecticut Supreme Court case that struck down residents-only restricted beaches. Supported by empirical data from beachgoers at the small public and private beaches, the mechanics of exclusion are shown to hinge upon race class and locality. Though Connecticut beaches are now more legally inclusive, results from this research indicate that the ruling has had negligible effects upon the practice of social exclusion from the beach. Using anarchist theories of spatial practice, I suggest that a democratic public space can only be achieved through occupation and embodied resistance to neoliberal ordering.     

Identity,contingency and the urban geography of 'race'

Traditional research in urban geography concerned with issues of 'race' has focused on a series of substantively important issues, yet with conceptual foundation inadequate to the task. Specifically, this body of work has employed outdated and theoretically limited conceptions of identity without sufficient consideration to the importance of historical and geographic contingency. I argue in this essay that topics of traditional concern to urban geography gain new relevance and importance when they are reconsidered and reworked from a social constructivist perspective that takes seriously the importance of identity and contingency. I illustrate my argument with discussions of two aspects of my current research agenda. First, I discuss how research on urban residential segregation gains considerably from a more sensitive encounter with multifaceted notions of identity that explicitly address geographic contingency. Second, I review recent empirical research on US mortgage-lending markets that demonstrates the geographic and class contingency of discrimination. The paper ends with a call for research that employs multiple methodologies.     

Reproducibility and Replicability in Geographical Analysis

The scientific method is predicated on the assumption that research designs and results can be reproduced and replicated. However, recent findings in some disciplines suggest that many studies fail to reach this standard, moving issues surrounding reproducibility and replicability forward into the research agenda of those fields. While the topic has yet to become a point of controversy in geography, the intricacies of geographic phenomena and spatial data analysis make the field vulnerable to criticism. This commentary discusses how uncertainties related to the conception, measurement, analysis, and communication of geographic analyses contribute to difficulties in the reproduction and replication of geographic research. Investigating how these uncertainties collectively impact the reproducibility and replicability of spatial data analyses should be a critical focus of future Geographical Analysis research. A call to action for geographers to improve the reproducibility and replicability of their work and specific recommendations on how Geographical Analysis might facilitate this process conclude the commentary.     

“Doing” Agency: Introductory Remarks on Methodology

As a theory of social reproduction, agency provides an attractive framework for understanding how material culture relates to everyday social action, to long-standing cultural institutions, and to wholesale culture change. What remains under-explored in archaeology is the question of how to proceed in linking observable material patterning to the agency of ancient social reproduction and how to understand the role of material culture in this dynamic process. This introduction (to this and the next issue of JAMT (Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory)) explores why there is a need for archaeology to develop explicitly articulated “middle range interpretive methodologies” that are appropriate for agency-oriented research in the past.     

Is Feminist geography relevant?

Abstract

As the whole point of feminism is to empower women and girls and to improve the circumstances of their lives, most feminist geographers would claim that indeed feminist geography is — or at least aims to be — relevant; they would then hasten to point to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in this claim: what counts as relevant and relevant to whom are complicating questions. The work of feminist geography encompasses teaching, activism and scholarship — all potentially relevant activities. In considering what counts as relevant, I discuss the difficulties of equating relevant with applied and of knowing whether or not our teaching, research and activism will turn out to be relevant. Complicating any claim to relevance is our inability to know, and lack of control over, how others will use our work. Asking ‘relevant to whom?’ points to the difficult truth that what some women view as positive change others may see as harmful to their interests; in this senserelevance is specific to particular contexts, scales and places. At the same time, relevance can enter the intricate web of global interconnections and transcend particular contexts, scales and places. Relevance itself is therefore a geographic concept. Feminist geographers struggle to hold together these sometimes contradictory geographic dimensions of relevance. I close by arguing that the growing body of feminist geography work engages with a range of social issues around the world and certainly has the potential for relevance at a variety of scales. But the relevance question will remain a complex and ambiguous one for feminist geographers.     

‘Now they’re coming after our schools’: interrogating urban intimacies of children and displacement

ABSTRACT

Education scholars grappling with policy issues related to community and identity issues may pay attention to the work of emotion. Rationalist, psychological frameworks that bound many educational researchers’ policy analyses are limited in scope: the policy process is seen as a linear cause-and-effect process. A feminist geographic attention to this research offers a more complex understanding of the experiences of policy. Using children’s displacement by gentrification as an example, this commentary will show how a feminist geographic understanding of place attachment offers a more complete understanding of the effects of gentrification. Specifically, using the concept of the ‘intimate city’, I show how the global process of gentrification is entangled with the intimate embodiment of emotions. And in order to effectively study education policy, we must be attuned to how children embody their emotions.     

Avoiding the “F” word: feminist geography in Iran

Abstract

Little attention has been given to how feminist geography is defined, applied, and taught in non-Anglophone countries, especially in Muslim majority societies where Women’s Rights are quite different from the western world. The case of Iran among other Middle Eastern countries becomes even more isolated due to the several political, linguistic, and cultural limitations opposed on Iranian academics and international collaborations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Women make half of Iran’s 80 million population, 63% of university graduates, almost half of informal workers, 30% of Iranian professors, 13% of high level management position holders, and under 5% of the Islamic Majlis (Iran’s Parliament). However, feminist geography, the sub-discipline that has been traditionally dedicated to the inclusion of gender as an analytical lens within Geography, is not a recognized field at any departments in Iran. This essay aims to present the current status of feminist geographic research and teaching at selected Iranian Universities. My goal is to offer a better understanding of how the local social and political context affect what constitute feminist geographic work and how geographers navigate the political and hierarchal university systems to engage in gender studies. Through informal interviews via emails and Skype with several Iranian geographers, I illustrate why Iranian geographers often avoid using “feminist” terminology in recognizing their work, even though their work is feminist.     

A Flawed Saint: The Popular Image of William Gladstone in the Australian Colonies

ABSTRACT

This article looks at the popular image of William Gladstone which gradually emerged and evolved in the Australian Colonies throughout the nineteenth century. By using a wide variety of newspaper sources and political speeches, the piece shows how Gladstone was extensively discussed and interpreted on the far side of the ‘British World’. It tracks the ups and downs of the turbulent relationship Gladstone had with the Australian Colonies over his long career, as he influenced Australian history both directly through the policies he implemented and indirectly as an inspiration for local politicians. It concludes that although Gladstone repeatedly aggravated Australian opinion both through his time at the Colonial Office and the ‘soft’ foreign policy he pursued as Prime Minister, his domestic popularity as a successful liberal and democratic figure was enough to make him a hero in colonial eyes. This conclusion shows how ‘British World’ popular sentiment was able to trump nominal local interests. This demonstrates not only the predominance of Britishness in Australian identity during this time period, but also how as a simultaneously separate yet intimately linked part of the Empire, Australians abstracted their own significance and meaning from domestic British politics.     

Formation of beach‐ridge plains: an appreciation of the contribution by Jack L. Davies

A robust debate among coastal geomorphologists as to the processes by which beach‐ridge plains around Australia have formed was initiated by a former President of the Institute of Australian Geographers. This review gives special consideration to the work of Jack L. Davies, whose academic contributions to coastal geomorphology in Australia have not always been appropriately acknowledged when explaining how similar plains have evolved elsewhere in the world. Davies recognised that relatively steep storm waves caused erosion (cut) on beaches, whereas less steep long‐period swell waves returned sand (fill). He considered the beach berm to be the nucleus on which a beach ridge formed, which could subsequently develop into a foredune, in contrast to cobble ridges that were deposited during storms. Offshore conditions regulate supply of sand to the shoreline, partly through effects on wave refraction, with higher rates of supply where the nearshore is shallow. It was apparent to Davies that the elevation of successive ridges might, but not necessarily, provide evidence of past changes of sea level, despite adornment by variable amounts of windblown dune sand. Morphodynamic understanding of long‐term coastal evolution, based on radiocarbon dating chronologies, has demonstrated that Australian coastal plains formed over the past ~6,000 years when sea level has been close to its present level, in contrast to several documented locations in the northern hemisphere where the sea has been rising for the past few millennia. Particularly insightful were observations by Davies that ridge formation could be influenced by a range of factors including changes in sea level, storminess, or sediment supply. These factors acting singly or in combination seem likely to change in the future. Understanding such responses remains a high priority and can be addressed by new technologies, such as light detection and ranging, optically stimulated luminescence dating, ground‐penetrating radar, and computer simulation.     

Implications of gendered environmental knowledge in water allocation processes in central Australia

The existence of gendered knowledge has been identified as a significant feature of Indigenous Australian culture, and the importance of considering the implications of gendered environmental knowledge in collaborative cross-cultural natural resource management has been highlighted. There is a lack of case studies that demonstrate how Indigenous women's knowledge and laws can be provided for in resource management contexts. From collaborative research with Anmatyerr women in central Australia, we discuss the implications of gender bias in relation to gendered knowledge in natural and cultural resource management, with a specific focus on Anmatyerr women's involvement in providing inputs about the cultural values of water within water allocation planning processes. This research highlights Anmatyerr women's own perspectives of their roles in contemporary contexts and identifies the existence of cultural change and continuity in relation to rights and responsibilities around water.     

From left-behind children to young migrants: the intergenerational social reproduction of rural migrant labor in China

ABSTRACT

Growing in number in the last two decades, rural migrant workers in China have completed intergenerational replacement, and young migrants have become a principal part of the migrant population. However, the process of such intergenerational reproduction has not been thoroughly examined. Based on field studies in the Chinese countryside, this paper analyzes the mechanisms of intergenerational reproduction of rural migrants from the perspective of rural communities, families, and school education. “Left-behind” rural communities, their migration-oriented social culture, and the cognition of rural–urban differences as constructed through migrant parents facilitated a subjective willingness for migration among left-behind children. Exclusion from urban-biased rural education is often the final external thrust for their migration. Having finished the transition, the households of a new young generation of rural migrants are experiencing a different crisis of reproduction. This paper argues that there is a systematic rupture between labor, households, and rural society and that this presents a critical development trap for China.     

A Historical GIS Approach to Studying the Evolution of the Railway and Urban Networks: The Balkans, 1870–2001

Abstract

The study investigates the complex relationship between border changes, railway construction, and the formation of the urban network of the Balkans between 1870 and 2000. The historical geographic information system is applied to measure the impact of border changes and railway construction on the growth of towns and cities and the concentration of urban population during a complex and important period for the formation of the economic geography of the region. While the research done so far has mainly focused on national contexts, the use of historical geographic information systems allows one to present a transnational perspective. The lack of historical continuity in the administrative organization of the Balkan states is offset by focusing on towns and cities instead of regions or municipalities. The results confirm the initial perception that in this part of the continent, national boundaries play a key role in determining the spatial distribution of population and economic activity.     

Young children’s use of an augmented reality sandbox to enhance spatial thinking

ABSTRACT

Augmented reality (AR) technology is being introduced in educational settings for its ability to overlay virtual information onto physical environments. The AR Sandbox is a conventional sandbox with depth coloured representations projected onto the sand’s surface. This research investigates how 4- and 5-year-old Australian children use an AR Sandbox to enhance their spatial thinking through play. Participants were four children, their two educators and the first author as a participant-observer researcher. Data were collected over an 8-week period during 2015 and included observation, child conferencing, photography, educators’ perspectives, and the researcher’s perspectives. Vignettes are presented to demonstrate how children’s spatial thinking was enhanced through exploration and representation in the AR Sandbox. Children’s active and dynamic manipulation of the space of the AR Sandbox, along with a range of socio-cultural contexts and tools, assisted in enhancing their spatial abilities.     

Forest as hazard,forest as victim: Community perspectives and disaster mitigation in the aftermath of Kelowna's 2003 wildfires

Situated within the political ecology of hazard, this article is an extended case study of the devastating 2003 wildfires in and around Kelowna, British Columbia (also known as the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire). This article reveals how compliance (or lack thereof) with fire mitigation strategies recommended by provincial, regional, and municipal agencies is complicated by differing social constructions of what constitutes ecologically sustainable forest management and community safety. Three perspectives emerge regarding the urban forests: “nature as hazard”—a volatile force to be controlled; “nature as instrumentally valuable”—a contribution to the character of one's surroundings and subsequent sense of place; and “nature as intrinsically valuable”—a distinct entity to be preserved and protected for its own sake. The article also examines how experiences of disaster influence community perceptions and result in a greater willingness to engage in fire mitigation strategies due to perceptions of heightened vulnerability. Forestry and fire mitigation agencies need to determine multiple courses of action among the varied and valid range of residents’ nature perspectives. The role of human agency in disaster mitigation must be examined, particularly as the risk of fire at the wildland‐urban interface continues to be exacerbated by encroaching human settlements and climate change.