Cities in the modern world

SUMMARY: The archaeology of modern cities has grown enormously over the past half-century, driven in large part by developer-funded urban renewal. This activity has utilized a diverse array of methodological approaches, research paradigms and scales of analysis — a diversity increasingly reflected in the pages of Post-Medieval Archaeology. In this paper, we review the development of urban archaeology, with a particular focus on material remains from the past two or three centuries. We emphasize the role played by commercial archaeology and the growing importance of community engagement, along with changing theoretical models and the emergence of new analytical technologies.     

The militarisation of aerial theatre: air displays and airmindedness in Britain and Australia between the world wars

ABSTRACT

Aerial theatre, the use of aviation spectacle to project images of future warfare, national power and technological prowess, was a key method for creating an airminded public in the early twentieth century. The most significant and influential form of aerial theatre in interwar Britain was the Royal Air Force Display at Hendon, in which military aircraft put on impressive flying performances before large crowds, including an elaborate set-piece acting out a battle scenario with an imaginary enemy. Hendon was emulated by other air displays in Britain and in Australia, even civilian ones. Indeed, the inability of the much smaller Royal Australian Air Force to regularly project spectacle on the scale of Hendon across a much larger nation created a gap which civilian aviation organisations then tried to fill. Hendon thus helped to propagate a militarised civilian aerial theatre, and hence airmindedness, in both Britain and Australia.     

The material culture of the modern world

SUMMARY: We discuss results of a content analysis of material culture articles in Post-Medieval Archaeology in the context of the development of historical archaeology as a discipline. We conclude that the journal remains an important outlet for detailed field reports, but in recent years, influenced by social and anthropological theories, the discipline has matured and articles have changed from antiquarian artefact presentations to contextualized material culture studies. Expansion of the journal’s temporal frame to include the recent past has so far had little effect, but the journal has benefited from the broadened international range of articles and the intellectual and theoretical backgrounds they convey.     

Approaching the archaeology of value: a view from the modern world

SUMMARY: The abundance of goods in the modern world has a tendency to prejudice interpretation of their value, but the way people value their goods is complex, relative and changeable — scarcity is just one factor. There is a long history of value theorization across the social sciences, but archaeological considerations of value remain uncommon and focused on prestige goods. In this paper, I review alternative conceptions of value through the lens of the modern world, with an example of Spode creamware used by a governor in the early decades of colonial Sydney. I argue that the process of devaluation, through discard and waste, offers a unique archaeological understanding of the shifting values people of the modern world placed on commodities.     

The multi-national state in modern world history: The Chinese experiment

The paper seeks to grasp the conditions under which the idea of the multi-national state developed in twentieth-century China. Although the idea of multiple nationalities was taking hold at the beginning of the twentieth-century in Europe—especially in Eastern Europe, it first found institutional expression in the Chinese Republic declared in 1912. While the grounds for the emergence have to do with the transition from empire to nation-state in many countries of the world, the idea in China also drew from imperial Chinese conceptions of an imperial federation. Moreover, the impact of the multi-national state in China was long-term and we can find an important dynamic of Chinese politics in this formation.