Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 2. April 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 2 Front cover GDP WORLD New York City's daily carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 as one‐tonne spheres visualized to engage the ‘person on the street’ (still from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtqSIplGXOA ). As the gross domestic product (GDP) turns 80 this year, it is time to reflect on the profound impact that this ‘almighty number’ has had on our societies. GDP drives not only our economies, but also our political social systems. Politicians are rewarded when GDP goes up and kicked out of office when it goes down. Democratically elected governments are bound to adhere to GDP‐friendly policies. As GDP has removed traditional issues of distribution and social justice from public debate by reducing the political economy to the ‘correct’ management of the business cycle, it has afforded unprecedented power to all sorts of technocrats, from central bankers to credit rating agencies. As it turns out, GDP has turned our societies into cages of consumerism, where the political notion of citizen has been largely replaced by that of consumer. But the convergence of contemporary crises, from climate change to the global economic downturn, opens new opportunities to contest the power of GDP. By looking at the economic, political and anthropological impacts of the GDP at work, this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY intends to stimulate a cross‐disciplinary reflection on the type of society we live in. We begin in this issue with an exchange between Lorenzo Fioramonti and Jane Guyer on their respective takes on these indicators. Back cover OLDEST HUMAN FOOTPRINTS IN EUROPE? As the soft sediments of the East Anglian coast are eroded away, the underlying evidence of past human occupation is revealed. In Happisburgh, on the Norfolk coast, archaeologists have discovered tools and other evidence of early human activity as early as 800,000 years ago. Most recently, after a storm, a set of footprints were revealed in the silt of an extinct estuary. The footprints are thought to belong to a small group of adults and children, and have been dated between 780,000 and 1 million years old; this would make them the earliest known human footprints outside of Africa. Subsequent to being photographed, they were washed away by the sea. In this issue, Richard Irvine reflects on the significance of these findings for anthropologists engaged with environmental change. Encounters with the past shape how we understand time in coastal environments, allowing us to think beyond present day coastlines and imagine environments in flux. However, in a location such as Happisburgh, the impact of coastline changes are a source of major controversy, as the cliffs retreat by metres each year and the land under people's houses is swept away into the sea. Observing these processes of destruction and revelation at work, we sit at the intersection of long term variation and present‐day dilemmas.     

Urban-Riverine Hinterland Synergies in Semi-Arid Environments: Millennial-Scale Change,Adaptations, and Environmental Responses at Gerasa/Jerash

This interdisciplinary study addresses issues of urban-riverine hinterland relationships in semi-arid environments over millennia at Gerasa/Jerash in Jordan, presenting research that stimulates new lines of enquiry with much broader implications than those relating to this single site. Through the presentation of new data on wadi-sediment responses to social and environmental change, we assess ways in which urban settlements, their hinterlands, and rivers interact over long time periods and how such changes may be read together with historical sources and shed new light on urban-hinterland dynamics. We explore the hypothesis that synergistic relationships between an urban core and its hinterland are essential to the long-term sustainability of both. Our integrated approach gives new insight into settlement dynamics and resource use and carries implications for our understanding of the present through the past.     

Intertidal Foraging on Atolls: Prehistoric Forager Decision-Making at Ebon Atoll,Marshall Islands

Prehistoric molluscan assemblages provide insights into long-term patterns of human landscape use, environmental change, and human impacts to marine resources. The investigation of forager decision-making regarding the selection of certain mollusc taxa and/or the exploitation of particular habitats is fundamental to understanding human-environment interactions in the past, and is relevant for understanding trajectories of human impacts to the intertidal zone in coastal settings. We document variability in the collection of molluscs at two archaeological sites on Ebon Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands: one on a windward, intermittently occupied islet, and the other on a permanently inhabited leeward islet. All molluscan taxa were assigned to a range of habitats within a hierarchical classification scheme for intertidal marine environments. The relative abundance of taxa from each habitat was used as a proxy for forager decision-making. We report a generalized, non-selective, foraging strategy focused on gastropod taxa from the high intertidal and supratidal. These results indicate that rather than focusing intensively on select taxa, intertidal foragers targeted particular marine habitats, taking advantage of the predictable behaviors of the molluscs that inhabit them.     

Recent Major Themes and Research Areas in the Study of Human-Environment Interaction in Prehistory

ABSTRACT

We report a study in which we systematically reviewed the recent literature dealing with human-environment interaction in prehistory. We first identified the 165 most highly cited papers published between 2005 and 2015. We then identified the major research themes covered in the sample of papers and assessed whether the themes fall into clusters and/or vary greatly in popularity. Subsequently, we identified potentially important lacunae. Our review identified dozens of themes and four major clusters: 1) improving our reconstructions of past environments; 2) the impact of climate change on past human societies; 3) human adaptation to past environmental conditions; and 4) human impacts on past environments. We also identified several gaps that led us to make a number of suggestions for future work. One is to pay more attention to the epistemology of causality. A second is to take into account nonlinearity when considering causal relationships. A third is to study the impact of chronological uncertainty on analyses. Lastly, our review revealed that there are differences between the aspects of human-environment interaction in prehistory that interest scholars and those that interest policy-makers and the general public. This needs to be addressed for obvious reasons.     

Finding a middle ground: Conservation challenges among stakeholders in coastal Tanzania (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Recently, evictions associated with climate change mitigation in the Rufiji Delta of Tanzania sparked intense debate about the ethics of coastal conservation between academics, NGOs (non‐governmental organizations) and government officials working in the region. Some actors argue that environmental change is a myth used to wrest control of natural resources from local communities, while others point to the urgency of environmental protection and action on climate change. Insights gleaned from interviews with multiple government officials, NGO employees, academics, and coastal village residents in Pangani, however, reveal a more complex and perhaps less contentious situation in coastal Tanzania. Although they often proffered different solutions, different stakeholder groups articulated the same key challenges in nuanced ways that shed a more hopeful light on currently heated conservation and development issues.     

Investigating shellfish deposition and landscape history at the Natia Beach site,Fiji

The relationship between environmental variation and subsistence practices is a central point of discussion in much Oceanic archaeology. While human predation can significantly reduce prey populations, environmental variation also contributes to reductions in prey abundance, possibly leading to increased human competition and resource scarcity. At the Natia Beach site, Nacula Island, Fiji, geoarchaeological evidence suggests that coastal progradation began soon after initial occupation of the coastal plain. Additionally, at approximately 650 BP a marked increase in clay and silt deposition occurred. Changes in coastal geomorphology may be explained by landscape response to regional Mid-Holocene sea level fall combined with human induced soil erosion due to upland settlement. Smaller scale environmental changes associated with climate variability may have also played a role. Additionally, landscape change appears to have had a measurable impact on local nearshore mollusks that are sensitive to high levels of water turbidity. Minor evidence of human exploitation is observable in this shellfish assemblage, although changes in predation pressure may have allowed shellfish populations to recover. Increased ceramic diversity and fortified settlements also appear at approximately 650 BP on Nacula and other parts of Fiji. The suite of changes at Natia may be explained by processes of regional and local environmental changes, and human adaptation in terms of subsistence, spatial organization, and competition.     

Dwellers by the Sea: Native American Adaptations along the Southern Coasts of Eastern North America

This comparative synthesis examines archaeological and ethnohistoric data pertaining to Native American coastal adaptations along the southern coasts of the eastern United States. We consider the totality of experiences of people living along coasts, examining such issues as technological innovation, environmental variability and change as it relates to site visibility, the built environment, the use of coastal food resources, the nature of complex coastal Calusa and Guale polities, and European contact. We link our topical discussions to broader issues in anthropology, arguing that the archaeology of southern coasts has much to contribute to our understanding of worldwide adaptations to coastal environments and broad-scale shifts in the trajectories of human societies.     

Ratko Mladić: Relativism,myth and reality (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This editorial explores the context of the arrest and subsequent extradition to the ICTY at the Hague of Ratko Mladi?, former Bosnian Serb Army Commander. As Mladi? acquired an almost mythical status among the Serbs, the issue of dealing with the recent past is important, especially when relativized in relation to recent events. This offers an excellent opportunity for the anthropology of violence and reconciliation processes, as well to re‐examine some of the old debates of the relationship between universalism and relativism when it comes to human rights. Since some of these issues have been present there for a number of years, Serbia offers a unique opportunity to further our understanding of some of these processes.     

Coastal environments and their role in prehistoric migrations

In recent years, increased attention has been turned towards the role of coastal environments in facilitating the global dispersal of humans. Previous approaches have focused on locating, dating and linking coastal archaeological sites, in order to create an overall impression of population movement across continents. When considerations of the actual process of colonization have been presented, they have been predicated on a series of assumptions regarding the nature of the coastal environment. The most important of these is that the coastal zone is homogenous and stable, on space and time scales relevant to human migration. This paper aims to test this and other assumptions by considering the true nature of the palaeo-coastal zone on global to continental scales and on timescales commensurate with migrating populations. Evidence is presented from Pleistocene and Holocene palaeo-environmental and archaeological records, so covering the major migrations of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. The principal conclusion of this study is that the coastal zone is in fact characterized by a significant degree of environmental heterogeneity and instability on a multitude of spatio-temporal scales. This in turn has significant implications for how we interpret the actual process of colonization.     

THESE ROCKS WERE MADE FOR WALKING: ROCK ART AT LEIRFALL,TRØNDELAG,NORWAY

One of the largest sites with Bronze Age type rock art in Norway is found at Leirfall in Stjørdal, Nord‐Trøndelag. The site, which consists of five panels, is dominated by footprints but at the same time a great variety of motifs is present. The footprints seem to lure visitors to walk from panel to panel, even across the panels, which are located at three different levels. The main focus is on the middle level, where the main panel (Leirfall III) contains more than 700 rock carvings. The walks between and around the panels are described; at the same time the Leirfall rock carvings are seen in a wider context. Most footprints are likely to represent children and it is argued that the site was used for the performance of public rites during initiations. However, symbols normally found only on decorated grave cists are present, too, particularly on the upper panel, which cannot be seen from below. Death rituals may also have been performed.     

A Disgruntled Tourist in King Arthur's Court: Archaeology and Identity at Tintagel,Cornwall

Abstract

'Welcome to Tintagel, the birthplace of King Arthur' is a phrase often repeated at this small village on the north coast of Cornwall where legend, childhood stories and merchandise all serve to attract thousands of visitors per year. As 'a place to go', the area provides stunning coastal scenery, a romantic ruined castle and a highly commercialised village. Tintagel Island, owned by the Duchy of Cornwall but managed by English Heritage, plays centre stage as the 'birthplace' in question. On-site, the character of Arthur is largely debunked as a literary phenomenon and, furthermore, a survey of day-trippers revealed that visitors were left in an interpretive limbo — arriving with ideas of Arthur and leaving knowing little about Tintagel.

Whilst the aesthetics of the castle and scenery go some way towards mitigating against disappointment, on site encounters with kitsch representations of the past combine with more amorphous senses of pseudo-spiritual atmospheres as well as experiences of walking, eating and drinking to ultimately provide a 'grand day out'. The marketing ephemera and heritage presentation all serve to create, reinforce and suppress different identities of place which are revealed as being a fairly cohesive package of Celtic-Arthuriana. This paper questions the ways in which visitors' expectation and imagination are mediated through experience of place.     

Flexibility or exploitation? Corporate social responsibility and the perils of universalization (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

As anthropologists and other critics of capitalism turn their attention to the controversial and burgeoning corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, most focus on conflicts in community relations and environmental degradation. Few scholars have examined equally pertinent questions of labor restructuring, even though these transformations emerged at about the same time as the rise of CSR. In this article, we draw on research in two Peruvian mining communities to explore the potential contradiction between the simultaneous mandate for corporations to present themselves as responsible employers, on the one hand, and the drive to rationalize labor and reduce financial responsibility for the workforce, on the other. We suggest that for both corporate officials and some scholars, this tension remains a latent one because CSR discourses and documents generalize corporate interests as the interests of mines as a whole.     

Excavations at Muweilah. Preliminary Report on the First Two Seasons

Two seasons of excavation have been completed at the site of Muweilah in the United Arab Emirates. The excavation is prompted by a desire to examine the manner in which humans inhabited arid regions in the past. The project seeks to understand the subsistence practices at this site within the broader context of settlement patterns in late prehistoric southeastern Arabia and to examine some of the biases and prior assumptions concerning human occupation of environments which are often considered hostile and marginal. The results obtained in the first two seasons of excavations are presented below and they indicate that a positive contribution will be made towards achieving these objectives.     

Human Adaptive Responses to Catastrophic Landscape Disruptions During the Holocene at Numundo,PNG

Prehistoric land use and social activity in West New Britain, PNG, are well documented, although the landscapes – largely shaped by catastrophic volcanic eruptions – in which these took place, and the relationships people had with these landscapes, are poorly understood. We define the evolving landscape at Numundo, from prior to the Witori-Kimbe 2 eruption (W-K2, ca. 3600 BP) to after the Witori-Kimbe 4 eruption (W-K4, ca. 1400 BP), using fossil phytolith and coral evidence at eight archaeological sites to provide environmental evidence of the human responses to periodic catastrophic events. From ca. 5900 to 3600 BP, all the sites were coastal and disturbed. Early disturbance reflected natural forest recovery after W-K1 (ca. 5900 BP), whereas the later landscape was largely shaped by human activity. In contrast, forest regrowth was limited after W-K2 and open environments typical of human activity with a mosaic of regenerating, disturbed and managed vegetation, persisted until W-K3. Environmental recovery from W-K3 and W-K4 (ca. 1700 BP and ca. 1400 BP) differed completely, reflecting severity of the volcanism and the short time between eruptions. The landscape after W-K3 was largely a naturally recovering landscape, in contrast to effective vegetation recovery and significant human exploitation of the landscape – again a mosaic of regenerating, disturbed and managed vegetation – after W-K4. The social history is one in which people evolved increasingly flexible land-use practices, enabling them to re-settle this periodically disrupted landscape, and to take advantage of an increasingly broad range of habitats suitable for cultivation. The human response to this highly dynamic landscape represents a close relationship between social and natural processes, as people became increasingly better at re-settling an unpredictably disrupted landscape; both the social and environmental processes within this landscape become equally influential and instrumental in shaping the effects of the other.     

Fish communities and populations during the post-Saladoid period (AD 600/800–1500), Anguilla,Lesser Antilles

Analysis of vertebrate remains from two archaeological sites indicates human exploitation did not adversely impact fish populations and fish communities during the post-Saladoid period (AD 600/800–1500) on Anguilla, northern Lesser Antilles. Barnes Bay (AL-14-BB) and Sandy Ground (AL-03-SG) are contemporaneous, large village sites located within 10 km of one another in similar terrestrial and adjacent marine environments. Despite substantial human population growth and increasing social complexity by AD 1000, residents at these sites exploited the same marine fishes and captured similar relative frequencies of fish families throughout the occupational sequence. No evidence of overfishing is found, either as a decline in the mean size of members of three fish families or in the ranges of size of these families through time. Evidence of a greater use of some members of a fourth family is found at Sandy Ground during the later post-Saladoid. It is likely that economic or social factors, rather than environmental change, contributed to this increase. By identifying specific locations where human over-exploitation did or did not impact fisheries, we may begin to distinguish patterns and characteristics which led to unsustainable fishing in the past at other sites, or in other circumstances.     

Human Responses to Changing Environments in Central Africa Between 40,000 and 12,000 B.P.

Reconstructions of the Equatorial forest in Central Africa fuel the debate on whether hunter-gatherers at the end of the Pleistocene were capable of living in or off the forest prior to the advent of agriculture. Their traces are rare and often reduced to their stone equipment. In an attempt to see to what extent technology and environmental exploitation are interrelated, all Central African sites dated between 40,000 and 12,000 B.P. are analyzed for their material culture, the environmental setting at the time of the occupation, and the exploitation of that environment. Although the evidence is still circumstantial, two large technological traditions have been recognized in Central Africa at the end of the Pleistocene, the Lupemban and microlithic industries, and both are associated with a variety of environments. This, in combination with a fragmented forest and concomitant increase of ecotone during the Last Glacial Maximum, would have enhanced rather than hampered human occupation in the area. It may be argued that the inherent flexibility and capability of exploiting a variety of environments enabled the hunter-gatherer communities to face and adapt to environmental changes regardless of stone technology.     

Historicism and constructionism: rival ideas of historical change

ABSTRACT

A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization.     

A Comparison of Past and Present Episodes of Gully Erosion at Wangrah Creek,Southern Tablelands,New South Wales

Erosion gullies at Wangrah Creek expose walls of at least two previous episodes of gully erosion. Past gullies were of a similar size to those of today but were not as widespread across the region at any particular time. The causes of past and present erosion are examined by mapping points of gully initiation and comparing the geomorphic history with an independent palaeo-environmental history. Past gullies were the result of intrinsically unstable conditions, possibly caused by the expansion of swampy deposits increasing runoff. In contrast, the present gully erosion is the result of major environmental change caused by European settlement, which had a greater effect on gully erosion than any other environmental change over the last 10,000 years. At Wangrah Creek, sites of gully initiation indicate that the present erosion was caused by localised disturbances to the valley floor.     

Crafting forgiveness accounts after war: Editing for effect in northern Uganda (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

After two decades of conflict and internment in camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), the Acholi people have returned to their homes and are trying to heal their wounds after the long war in northern Uganda. Bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, cultural organizations, and religious institutions are involved in the politically and personally sensitive work of reconciliation. Yet for most people, the actual restoration of peace lies in establishing an everyday life and being able to rebuild relationships with kin, friends and neighbours. In a collaborative project with an installation artist, the authors collected personal voice accounts of these ‘social repair’ processes and audio edited them in order to share them with a local public. The editing process raised critical issues regarding ‘editing for effect’, which are of wider relevance for discussions of ethnographic representation and social processes of editing past experience. As a way of crafting and controlling material, editing is always ‘for effect’. But the authors were struck by the powerful potentials of this artistic editing and by the difficulty in foreseeing or controlling its consequences among listeners. They suggest that personal processes of forgiveness resemble processes of editing, in the sense that past experience is revised and given narrative form, with an effect on the present and future of social relationships. When we edit, we foreground and background segments of data and experience, and cut parts of our representations. We do so while deciding something is irrelevant and other aspects should ‘stand out’ for the receiver and ourselves as more important.     

Identifying palaeo-environments and changes in Aboriginal subsistence from dual-patterned faunal assemblages,south-western Australia

Palaeo-environments and past human subsistence patterns are difficult to determine from dual-patterned faunal assemblages where human and non-human predators have accumulated and intensively modified animal bones. This paper examines such records in the Leeuwin–Naturaliste Region of south-western Australia, where a thin belt of coastal limestone contains caves and rock shelters with rich faunal deposits. The Late Pleistocene and Holocene part of this record derives from four archaeological sites: Devil's Lair, Tunnel Cave, Witchcliffe Rock Shelter and Rainbow Cave. Correspondence analysis combined with cluster analysis enables a preliminary assessment of habitat changes using simple species abundances in the faunal assemblages and comparison with indices of past human activity in the sites and the species’ present habitat preferences. These inferred changes, consistent with previous analyses of faunal remains and tree charcoal, suggest that late Holocene sites document Aboriginal occupation in coastal heath, scrub and woodland. Late Pleistocene deposits record hinterland occupation at times of low sea-level when the coast was up to 30 km seawards of its present position and the surrounding vegetation was open-forest or woodland. As rainfall increased and vegetation changed in the Holocene, species foraging in open-woodland declined or became locally extinct, while species requiring closed canopy habitats increased. Rank-order correlations of taxa and archaeological remains from depositional sequences before and after the environmental change indicate that the occupiers of late Holocene sites favoured the same generalist species that occupiers of Late Pleistocene sites had favoured, which were available at all times. Prey habitats, foraging behaviours and historic records of ethnographic hunting and settlement pattern suggest that this local continuity is consistent with maintenance of a “dispersive mode” subsistence pattern in the region.