A Post-Roman Sequence at Carlisle Cathedral

Excavations in 1988 revealed a stratigraphic sequence extending from the later Roman period to the twelfth century. Of particular interest and importance is a collection of Viking-Age metalwork which, with other material, sheds light on settlement in Carlisle before the arrival of the Normans in 1092.     

WORKING ON THE RAILWAY: THE RISEHILL TUNNEL NAVVY CAMP,CUMBRIA

Abstract

An archaeological evaluation was undertaken by Channel 4's Time Team at the site of a navvy camp associated with the construction of Risehill Tunnel (also called Black Moss) on the Settle to Carlisle railway line, near Garsdale in Cumbria. The evaluation, comprising eight trenches, LiDAR and geophysical survey, highlighted the generally good preservation of the site, although many of the buildings appear to have been of timber with only rough stone foundations. Specialisation and division of different parts of the site between settlement and working areas was also seen. Contemporary documentary evidence has assisted with the interpretation of the archaeological remains, and revealed the extreme conditions which the workers and their families endured.     

Patterns of Forest Settlement in Western Thailand

Most studies of land settlement are concerned with planned schemes. This is despite the fact that unplanned settlement has more often been the major process by which agricultural land is settled in many countries. In this local study of spontaneous forest settlement in western Thailand, the recent history of two communities is traced in order to shed light on the process of settlement Common assumptions about frontier communities are examined critically. It is suggested that many aspects of the post-settlement community, in particular social differentiation, can best be understood in light of the process of settlement     

边疆的空间涵义及其人文地理研究框架

基于空间维度的地理学边疆研究一直为欧美地理学界所关注,并促进了地理学的理论建构。相比之下,我国的边疆研究一直以历史学为主流,人文地理学在边疆研究中的地位有待加强。本文通过对边疆概念的评述认为,习惯上的领土边疆概念无法反映当前边疆所具有的多重涵义,根据功能的不同对边疆进行类型划分十分必要。为此作者将边疆划分为政治边疆、文化边疆和拓居边疆三种类型,并分析了每一类型边疆的空间涵义。基于边疆的分类与空间涵义,本文构建了一个根植于人文地理学的边疆研究框架,并初步提出了人文地理学边疆研究的维度、视角及重点内容。     

In Medio Chori: The Tomb of Thomas of Corbridge,Archbishop of York,in Southwell Minster

Four medieval archbishops of York died in their palace at Southwell in Nottinghamshire. Three archbishops were buried in Southwell Minster. Archbishop Thomas of Corbridge was buried in an important position in the middle of the choir. His tomb had a marble top with an inlaid brass memorial. Thus Corbridge was held in high esteem and there is some evidence that he may have been regarded as an unofficial saint.     

Creating an Imperial Frontier: Archaeology of the Formation of Rome’s Danube Borderland

For investigating the formation of frontier zones, study of changes in small communities that constituted the majority of earlier populations provides a different perspective from a focus on major centers. A network model applied to settlement and cemetery sites on Romes Danube River frontier in Bavaria, Germany, shows that many communities, through participation in regional and long-distance circulation systems, played significant roles in creating the dynamic and culturally heterogeneous character of that landscape. This approach offers a model applicable to analysis of the formation and functioning of frontier regions in all cultural contexts.     

THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPEAN RUSSIA DURING THE ROMANOV PERIOD (1613-1917)

This paper compares and contrasts Russian frontier experiences on the northern and southern parts of the European plain during the Romanov era (1613-1917). Both were “open” frontiers, in Turner's sense of a frontier as the “hither edge of free land,” but their environments and the settlement processes which affected them were very different. It is suggested that the character of a frontier society is decisively influenced by the process whereby settlers must adapt to their new environment, the features which attract them to that environment, and the character of the pre-existing inhabitants. The northern frontier formed part of what Meinig has called a “boreal riverine empire” with a harsh environment, to which paradoxically the Russians found it relatively easy to adapt, the great attraction of fur-bearing animals and reasonably benign relations with native peoples. By contrast, the southern frontier was a “frontier of exclusion,” following Lattimore's phrase, with hostile indigenes, a natural environment demanding special methods of adaptation, but with many more attractions than the north. Such contrasts gave rise to considerable differences in the settlement process, in the character of land allocation and in the type of society evolving subsequently, with long-term consequences for emerging human landscapes.     

Settlement Dynamics and Social Organization in Eastern Iberia during the Iron Age (Eighth–Second Centuries BC)

Summary.   This paper explores the formation of urban societies in the eastern Iberian Peninsula. From the Early Iberian Iron Age onwards it is possible to trace the emergence of a hierarchical settlement pattern in which larger settlements carried out the most important functions of control and exploitation of the resources in this territory, extending their authority over several small farming villages. This settlement pattern is associated with the complex socio-economic structures and political organization of Iberian aristocracies. In this paper we will focus on the development of the Iberians' active role in exchanging goods with oriental traders; it is this contact which subsequently produces social change in the Iron Age period.     

Filipinos settle in the Canadian North: unsettling a gendered frontier

This paper explores how contemporary accounts of Filipino settlement in the Yukon articulate with the imaginative project of a ‘frontier Yukon.’ Since 2007, Whitehorse, Yukon has been as a prominent site of settlement for Filipino newcomers to Canada. This has been supported by the implementation of a new immigration policy–the Yukon Nominee Program (YNP)—inaugurated to address shortages in the territory’s service sector labour market. What happens, we ask, to frontier narratives when they are put into conversation with bodies, peoples, places, and collective experiences that they were never meant to narrate? We discuss how hegemonic notions of race, gender, and frontier masculinity are reworked and unsettled in emerging narratives of Filipino settlement. In working through multiple and contested notions of the frontier, we play on varying meanings of the verb “to settle.” Frontier mythologies seek to settle the disruptive potential of Filipino workers and families as they newly inhabit borderline spaces. At the same time, the hard work of “settling" into a foreign environment is set both within and against the hegemonic facade of frontier mythology. We find that while the examined discourses of arrival in the Yukon reinforce hegemonic accounts of the Yukon’s settlement, and obscure histories of settler colonialism through their celebration of multiculturalism and diversity, they also contain moments of ambiguity that “unmap” hegemonic frontier narratives.     

Contextualizing Early Urbanization: Settlement Cores,Early States and Agro-pastoral Strategies in the Fertile Crescent During the Fourth and Third Millennia BC

This paper employs data from selected sample survey areas in the northern Fertile Crescent to demonstrate how initial urbanization developed along several pathways. The first, during the Late Chalcolithic period, was within a dense pattern of rural settlement. There followed a profound shift in settlement pattern that resulted in the formation of large walled or ramparted sites (‘citadel cities’) associated with a more dynamic phase of urbanization exemplified by short cycles of growth and collapse. By the later third millennium BC, the distribution of larger centres had expanded to include the drier agro-pastoral zone of northern and central Syria, termed here the ‘zone of uncertainty’. This configuration, in turn, formed the context for Middle Bronze Age settlement, and the pattern of political rivalries and alliances that typified the second millennium BC. Evidence is marshalled from archaeological surveys and landscape analyses to examine these multiple paths to urbanization from the perspectives of (a) staple production within major agricultural lowlands; (b) the shift towards higher risk animal husbandry within climatically marginal regions; (c) changes in local and inter-regional networks (connectivity); and (d) ties and rights to the land. Textile production forms the core of the proposed model, which emphasizes how the demand for wool and associated pasture lands opened up new landscapes for agro-pastoral production and settlement. The resultant landscapes of settlement are then compared with the picture in the southern Levant where a more restricted zone of uncertainty may have limited the opportunities for agro-pastoral production.     

Opening Panama's Darien Gap

The Darien "gap" was opened in the 1970s when a ribbon of highway was cut through the wilderness allowing uncontrolled colonization to penetrate the region. The Gap Highway and associated settlement frontier led to the removal of rain forest habitats and resulted in drastic reductions in wild plant and animal resources. Other resettlement programs also altered the indigenous landscape which had survived largely intact since colonial times. The region's historic Negro riverlowns have declined while population growth has occurred along the new "cattle front" and in the "cultural parks." These new patterns have undermined the region's traditional subsistence base. Although the Darien has experienced considerable deforestation, it nevertheless contains one of the last remaining stands of Central American rain forest and continues to nurture the cultural heritage of the Kuna and Choc Indians.     

Changes and survival: the territory of Lleida (Catalonia) after the twelfth-century conquest

The city of Lleida and its surrounding territory were conquered by the counts of Barcelona and Urgell in late 1149, ending over four centuries of Muslim rule. This territory formed the western frontier of Catalonia with Aragon and Lleida, and would be one of the major cities of what was known as ‘New Catalonia’, the lands conquered to the south and west of the Carolingian ‘Spanish March’ during the twelfth century. The article describes how patterns of settlement, agriculture and fortification changed after the conquest to conform to the needs of a feudal society. It describes continuities such as the importance of irrigation canals, as well as the reorganisation of the population with Christian settlement and transfers and expulsions of the Islamic population and a greater concentration of the population into fortified spaces.     

FIRE IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON: A SPATIALLY EXPLICIT MODEL FOR POLICY IMPACT ANALYSIS*

ABSTRACT.  This article implements a spatially explicit model to estimate the probability of forest and agricultural fires in the Brazilian Amazon. We innovate by using variables that reflect farm-gate prices of beef and soy, and also provide a conceptual model of field management and deforestation fires to simulate the impact of road-paving, cattle exports, and conservation area designation on the occurrence of fire. Our analysis shows that fire is positively correlated with the price of beef and soy, and that the creation of new conservation units may offset the negative environmental impacts caused by the increasing number of fire events associated with early stages of frontier development.     

'The last frontier': rationalizing the spread of farming into the boreal woods of Canada, c. 1910–1940

As the twentieth century opened, there were rumours that the cheap land underpinning the dramatic spread of settlement in the previous century might be running out. There were strong motivations, generated particularly by the large body of land seekers with a passion for farming, to hold off the demise of the famous agricultural frontier. Also wedded to the continuation of a frontier were politicians and civil servants across the country. Whether it was a subconscious expectation that the frontier would simply continue or a fear that its disappearance would lead to unpredictable social disturbance, politicians encouraged expansion beyond what was known to be good farmland. The major source of new land, from c . 1910, was the boreal forest. There was a steady accumulation of information about the North that was readily available to government officials but only indirectly to ordinary land seekers. Although the news about farming conditions in the boreal margin was unpromising except for a few pockets, independent and assisted farm settlements continued into the 1930s. The typical two-thirds of farm failure within one generation in most of the new boreal settlements caused a great deal of settler grief and forced reluctant officials to respond to the negative scientific evidence and to reassess frontier nostalgia. The Second World War provided both a denouement of the northern farm settlement and a reason for many people to depart the 'last frontier'.     

Geographical propinquity among pre-famine Catholic Irish settlers in Upper Canada

Recent studies of frontier settlement in North America have suggested the existence of a greater complexity of society and locality than once visualized. The settlement of propinquitous groups of people with similar origins was a common feature of nineteenth-century America. The territorial identity of these groups may have both reflected and reinforced their cultural distinctiveness. This study examines the geographical propinquity of the Catholic Irish in the Robinson emigration of 1825 to Upper Canada (early Ontario). The object is to demonstrate the varying pattern of propinquity spatially and to associate the pattern with characteristics of social propinquity. The existence of social institutions, particularly the nuclear family and the parish, or antecedent community, within the Irish group appears to have been an important influence on the local geographical pattern of initial settlement.     

SHA'AR HAGOLAN AND NEW INSIGHTS ON NEAR EASTERN PROTO-HISTORIC URBAN CONCEPTS

Summary.   The new results from the Pottery Neolithic site of Sha'ar Hagolan in Israel, dated to 6400–6000 BC (calibrated), reveal advanced notions of settlement planning, including the introduction of courtyard houses, a street system and infrastructure such as the construction of a water well. It is suggested, on the basis of the Near Eastern archaeological evidence from the eighth to sixth millennia BC, that early signs of urban concepts may be found at this stage. These signs show the development of 'functionally hierarchical' concepts reflected in domestic architecture and settlement planning. At least from the cognitive point of view, these concepts may be on the direct trajectory towards the full-blown urban centres of the fourth and third millennia BC in the Near East.     

The Making of an Internal Frontier Settlement: Archaeology and Historical Process in Osun Grove (Nigeria), Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries

The historical, material, and spatial processes that defined the formative settlement practices in Early Osogbo (southwest Nigeria), a seventeenth- to early eighteenth-century frontier community, is the subject of this article. I use different datasets, including the spatial layout of the site, the archaeological depositional sequence, diverse artifact categories, and oral historical sources to engage Igor Kopytoff’s Internal African Frontier thesis. In this article, I argue against Kopytoff’s conceptualization of the frontier as a conservative space that relied on innovations from the metropolis. Instead, I demonstrate that Early Osogbo was a dynamic formative settlement in an internal Yoruba regional frontier whose material life was not a mere copy of a metropolis’s. Instead, this emerging community was characterized by diversity, complexity, experimentation, and newness that resulted from local forces of migration, frontier social networks, and regional exchange systems involving several spheres of interstitial frontiers and multiple metropolises. Contrary to the metropolis-frontier pattern of migration that informed Kopytoff’s Internal African Frontier thesis, Early Osogbo was originally created by frontier-frontier migrations before it became a site for intermetropolis contestation. The article underscores the need to bring conceptual clarity to the study of frontier processes, arguing that different historical contexts, migration patterns, and regional political frameworks produced different kinds of frontiers such as crossroads, boundary, colony, and cultural frontiers. The archaeological profile of Early Osogbo demonstrates that the settlement was a crossroads frontier community.     

GHANA'S COCOA FRONTIER IN TRANSITION: THE ROLE OF MIGRATION AND LIVELIHOOD DIVERSIFICATION

Since the first commercial planting of cocoa in Ghana more than a century ago, the production of cocoa has been a key factor in the redistribution of migrants and has played a pivotal role in the development of both sending and receiving communities. This process has been acknowledged in the literature for decades. However, how migration flows have changed in response to changing livelihoods dynamics of the frontier and how this has impacted on the development of the frontier has only attracted limited attention. Based on a study of immigration to Ghana's current cocoa frontier in the Western Region, this article aims to examine how immigration and frontier dynamics in the Western region are contributing to livelihood transitions and small town development, and how this process is gradually becoming delinked from the production of cocoa. The article focuses on how migration dynamics interlink with livelihood opportunities and strategies. It is argued that migrants to the current frontier can be divided into at least four different types based on their migration, settlement and livelihood practices. Accordingly, to understand how the cocoa frontier changes as well as its continuation beyond the frontier crop, there is a need for a broader understanding of the frontier concept, and how frontier transformation interacts with migration and livelihood dynamics.     

Bronze Age boundaries and social exchange in north-west Cyprus

Summary.   During the Late Bronze Age a number of towns engaged in copper production and overseas trade arose throughout the coastal regions of Cyprus. While some of these towns were located within a few kilometres of major ore deposits in the Troodos Mountains, others were situated much farther away, and presumably acquired their copper supplies through extensive networks of exchange. This paper addresses the question of how such networks may have been structured in north-western and north central Cyprus, within and adjacent to the research area of the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project. Based on our analyses of site locational factors, we propose the co-existence of at least two distinct networks of copper procurement and transport. Consideration of the finds from settlement and mortuary sites in the northern Troodos and Mesaoria plain suggests a pattern of hierarchical exchange relations between coastal and inland regions.     

Carlisle: Function and Change between the First and Seventh Centuries AD

Archaeological excavations combined with antiquarian observations shed considerable light on the evolution of Roman Carlisle. From being a fort in the northern advance under Cerialis and Agricola, Carlisle developed as a nodal hub supported by a number of activity ‘zones’. By the early third century most had become absorbed into the newly created civitas capital. The Roman town declined and stone buildings became ruinous, a process that probably commenced before the fourth century and continued until the land was taken over by the kings of Northumbria and the church in the seventh century. Scanty archaeological records for the sub- and post-Roman periods are supplemented by implications for socio-political structures drawn from texts.