Welsh Indians and savage Scots: History,antiquarianism, and Indian languages in 18th-century Britain

This paper compares late eighteenth-century claims for the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian and for the existence of Welsh Indians. It shows that although both claims were supported in part by appeals to similarities between Celtic and American Indian languages, the appeals in each case were very different. On the one hand, the Edinburgh literati who supported Ossian's authenticity focused on expressive structures shared by all primitive societies. On the other hand, radically Protestant antiquarians and philologists focused on lexical similarities that they argued demonstrate a genetic link between certain American Indians and the Welsh. The paper uses this fundamental difference underlying a superficial similarity, to explore in greater detail the distinction between philosophical historians among the Edinburgh literati, who were religiously moderate, politically conservative, and promoted Scotland's integration into a modern, polite, commercial and English-speaking empire, and the Welsh antiquarians, who were religious and political radicals and whose interest in the Welsh Indians reflected and reinforced their attempts to resurrect a distant golden age of Celtic Britain.

pe’nguin. (1) A bird. This bird was found with this name, as is supposed, by the first discoverers of America; and penguin signifying in Welsh a white head, and the head of this fowl being white, it has been imagined, that America was peopled from Wales …     

Imagined homeland: landscape painting in Palestine in the 1920s*

Abstract. This essay examines the proposition that landscape representations both reflect and endorse national ideology. By studying in detail selected landscape paintings by Jewish artists in pre‐State Israel some of the assumptions linking landscape and nationalism will be revisited. In particular, I shall challenge received notions in Israeli art historiography that interpret the numerous landscape paintings of the 1920s as directly expressing the identification with Zionism – the Jewish national movement. Analysis of the subject repertoire reveals that artists usually ignored images of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. They preferred instead to depict oriental countryside or ancient cities in an emblematic idealistic manner supported by stylistic borrowings from contemporary French painting. The country in these paintings is more an idea than a reality. Yet they evoke neither the biblical past nor a Zionist futuristic vision, but rather an oriental Arcadia of an unspecified time.     

Welsh Indians and savage Scots: History, antiquarianism, and Indian languages in 18th-century Britain

This paper compares late eighteenth-century claims for the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian and for the existence of Welsh Indians. It shows that although both claims were supported in part by appeals to similarities between Celtic and American Indian languages, the appeals in each case were very different. On the one hand, the Edinburgh literati who supported Ossian's authenticity focused on expressive structures shared by all primitive societies. On the other hand, radically Protestant antiquarians and philologists focused on lexical similarities that they argued demonstrate a genetic link between certain American Indians and the Welsh. The paper uses this fundamental difference underlying a superficial similarity, to explore in greater detail the distinction between philosophical historians among the Edinburgh literati, who were religiously moderate, politically conservative, and promoted Scotland's integration into a modern, polite, commercial and English-speaking empire, and the Welsh antiquarians, who were religious and political radicals and whose interest in the Welsh Indians reflected and reinforced their attempts to resurrect a distant golden age of Celtic Britain.

pe’nguin. (1) A bird. This bird was found with this name, as is supposed, by the first discoverers of America; and penguin signifying in Welsh a white head, and the head of this fowl being white, it has been imagined, that America was peopled from Wales …

—Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755.     

The Fabulous Tales of the Common People,Part 1: Representing Hadrian’s Wall

Abstract

Hadrian’s Wall is one of the most instantly recognizable ancient monuments in the UK. This paper explores the historical and contemporary visualization practices which have created this iconic image. Moving between the disciplines of archaeology, cultural geography, and heritage and tourism studies, the paper draws upon a variety of data sources such as paintings, photographs, models, and reconstructions to consider how the Wall is visually represented within contemporary public discourse. The paper focuses on digital photography and considers the ways in which images create and sustain particular readings of the Wall’s function and significance. These contemporary representational practices demonstrate strong continuities, and earlier images are used to provide historical context. Emphasis is placed on the monument’s landscape setting in visual representations and the importance of this environmental context for readings of the Wall’s cultural and political significance. The present paper deals primarily with representations of the Wall, but it is argued that these representational practices are also fundamentally embodied. The physical encounters of visitors and archaeologists will be considered in greater detail in the second part of this study (Witcher, forthcoming).     

The potential of destruction in art and science

ABSTRACT

Artist and researcher Neal White argues for the potential role of radical engagements in science by drawing on the work of pioneers of conceptual art: John Latham (1921–2006), Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) in the UK, and György Kepes (1906–2001) and Robert Smithson (1938–1973) in the US. Starting with destruction as a positive force in artistic practice, White examines the ideas developed by these artists as a conceptual framework for thinking through time, chemical process and event structures within the context of the Cold War. In further examining the social context and contemporary landscape of cultural forms servicing science in terms of the communication of ideas, or underpinning further a knowledge economy, he argues for artists to engage science on their own terms, through a renewal of radical practices. This would in turn create new and critically framed work of benefit to culture and society more generally.     

The age of the Cambro-Britons: hyphenated British identities in the seventeenth century

ABSTRACT

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Welsh writers including the antiquary Humphrey Llwyd, the bard Gruffudd Hiraethog, and the epigrammatist John Owen began referring to themselves as Cambro-Britons. The term was quickly adopted and popularised by English writers, often in ways that show an imperfect grasp of the intentions behind the hyphenated phrase. Whereas the Welsh had hoped that the English and Scots would adopt similar hyphenated identities, English writers tended to interpret “Cambro-Briton” as an intensified and potentially comical expression of Welshness. Though Welsh writers largely ceased to employ the term after the 1620s, the use and misuse of “Cambro-Briton” in English texts continued unabated throughout the century.     

Hermoupolis: the archaeology of a Mediterranean industrial city

Abstract

Hermoupolis, on the island of Syros, developed in the nineteenth century as the first industrial city in Greece. Its historical monuments are of more than national importance, providing evidence which does not survive elsewhere of particular processes, and forming a landscape which illuminates the whole history of industrialisation.     

Localizing the Different Faces of Archaeological Landscapes in South India

Siruthavoor is a village situated 40?km south of Chennai in south India. The people of this village share their landscape with archaeological remains of south India’s past, including Iron Age–Early Historic burials and medieval temples. As an archaeologist, having witnessed and been both an indirect and direct participant in the changing reactions, actions, and perceptions of the community towards these monuments, I use this paper to explore the implications we can draw from the interaction between archaeological landscapes and various actors, spanning a period of twelve years. In India, as in many other countries, archaeological landscapes, monuments, and objects face the possibility of alteration, conservation, preservation, or destruction. The factors involved in this, I argue, are specific to localized conscious and unconscious decision-making by people living around such archaeological sites. Delving deeper into these issues will help us understand these often seemingly inexplicable choices that imperil the continued presence of archaeological monuments in the contemporary landscape. The behind-the-scenes events that occur in the ‘field’ of archaeology often remain untold, and yet they hold a lot of information. Through this narrative, this paper explores some of the subjectivities that we need to acknowledge as academics.     

“Land of Unfinished Monuments”: The Ruins-in-Reverse of Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

By focusing on the design and reception of successfully completed monuments, historians have overlooked the presence in nineteenth-century America of monuments that were left unfinished for decades, or even aborted altogether. This article recovers numerous such monuments, and shows how contemporaries seized on them not merely for their aesthetic value as homegrown ruins to be visited and sketched, but also for their rhetorical value as expressions of unfinished political and social struggles. In refashioning these incipient historical memorials as ironic anti-monuments to contemporary problems, diverse groups – radical workingmen and conservative Whigs, female activists and chauvinist newspapermen, patriotic Americans and critical Englishmen, proslavery southerners and abolitionist northerners – elaborated a broader discourse of unfinishedness. The fragments of these monuments could even figure the nation itself as a work-in-progress, contrary to current arguments about the construction of national identity through notions of organic wholeness. The article also questions scholars' assumption that monuments inevitably promote a culture of forgetting by projecting images of consensus and closure. In turning to the reception of monuments during their often-lengthy construction, we can perceive their more complex relationship to dominant ideologies and narratives of the nation-state.     

Language,geography and identity: The case of the Welsh in London

This paper explores the role of language in the construction of Welsh identities in London. It begins by mapping out some key theoretical connections between language, geography and identity, and argues that a reading of diaspora theory might be helpful in conceptualizing Welsh identities in the British capital. In particular, diaspora theory stresses that identities are made up of multiple social axes that need to be seen relationally. Diasporic identities make connections with more than one place challenging the notion of culture and language as delimited by the boundaries of particular national spaces. For many Welsh people in London, language is an important part of their attempts to meet others who share a common identity. London-Welsh societies facilitate this need, defining language in different ways, and interweaving the linguistic with other social axes to form powerful senses of belonging. Whilst London is a key migration destination, it is also a space of Welsh identities that draw centrally upon language, but make different geographical connections with Wales. The paper concludes by arguing that a diasporic reading of such processes allows a wider and more progressive understanding of the Welsh language, and highlights the importance of geography in doing so.     

Mongolian Deer Stones,European Menhirs,and Canadian Arctic Inuksuit: Collective Memory and the Function of Northern Monument Traditions

Northern peoples and those living in the Arctic and environments with broad vistas created cultural landscapes with distinctive monument traditions that supported their cultural and political systems. This paper explores three societies in different geographic regions and time periods during the past 10,000 years that used stone monuments to humanize their landscapes and invoke or honor gods or spirits, mythological ancestors, or deceased leaders. Canadian and Greenland Inuit and their predecessors of the past thousand years marked their lands with abstract human figures known as Inuksuit; Neolithic and Bronze Age Europeans built megaliths, henges, and passage graves; and Mongolian Bronze Age nomadic pastoralists populated the central Asian steppe with burial mounds (khirigsuurs) and anthropomorphic deer stone monuments. Each tradition contributed in different ways to shape and perpetuate the society’s values by invoking spirits, ancestors, or heroic leaders. The enduring presence of these creations reinforced cultural or ethnic identity through ritual, group ceremonialism, landscape values, communal enterprise and labor, and collective memory. This paper identifies commonalities and differences between these traditions and how they functioned. We also see how successive societies perpetuate, change, reinterpret, or invent new uses and meanings for ancient monuments and their landscape settings to create new ethnicities and histories for their own times.     

Properties of ancient landscape: the present prehistoric in twentieth-century Breckland

The paper considers the presence of prehistory in the Breckland region of East Anglia in the twentieth century, addressing the ways in which ancient landscape became bound up with definitions of regional identity and claims to cultural and/or archaeological authority, and contributing to debate over the animation of landscape. Sites considered include the flint mines of Grimes Graves, with its controversial mid-twentieth-century Neolithic ‘chalk goddess’, and the ancient trackways of the region. Grimes Graves and the Brandon flint-knapping industry focus discussion concerning the poetics of flint. Archaeological debate is set within the wider characterisation of Breckland as a ‘primitive’ landscape. While some found in prehistory equivalents for a progressive modernity, others found an escape from or antidote to a fallen modern world, a sensibility continued in recent imaginings of the ancient landscape. The paper concludes by exploring the parallel presence of the twentieth-century past in the region via selected monuments and relics.     

Chubut,Argentina: a contested Welsh ‘first-place’

Abstract

In an attempt to escape British hegemony, the Welsh established a Patagonian colony in 1865, in what is now the Chubut Province of Argentina. The historical struggles the immigrants faced upon settling the land are rooted in the landscape and commemorated in different versions of Patagonian regional history through provincial museum narratives that serve as a method of solidifying Welshness in Chubut. Contemporarily, the local tourism industry constructs the Welsh as the first settlers in the region, while minimally representing predecessor groups like the indigenous communities or Spanish colonials. Curiously, the representation of these other heritage communities throughout heritage displays actually serves to bolster the Welsh ‘first-place’ claims over the region. These tensions are seen throughout community-based museums in the region that assert a locally rooted hybrid identity by acknowledging local historical diversity, while simultaneously recalling and emphasising the [Welsh] homeland heritage. This paper explores how ‘first-places’ can be a source of symbolic conflict, while simultaneously serving as a dynamic, heritage construction mechanism. This research investigates how the Welsh diaspora negotiates its identity through the mobilisation of heritage, to make claims about the Chubut Province as a symbolic Welsh first-place, as well as broader Argentine heritage.     

“An alternative discourse”: Local interpreters of antiquities in the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

The premise of Ottoman indifference to “antiquities” was already widely assumed by early modern travelers and archaeologists and continues to inform contemporary discussion of cultural patrimony in post-Ottoman nations. However, it is contradicted by numerous accounts of local interpretations of ancient monuments and local resistance to the efforts of outsiders to remove antiquities. Local interpretations of monuments constituted an alternative discourse that cohered around a set of recurring concerns, while also developing over time. The potential of these local interpretations to expand the discourse of academic archaeology has been obscured by their classification as elements of a timeless folklore, which is understood to speak to the customs and manners of the interpreters, not to the objects of interpretation.     

Visual and aural intellectual histories: an introduction

ABSTRACT

If the subject matter of intellectual history is the study of past thoughts, the intellectual history of the visual arts and music may be characterised as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to verbal texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural per se. If we accept that ideas can have visual and aural, as much as verbal form, then the histories of art and music are significant repositories of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (creative artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But the ways in which those thoughts are articulated as aural or visual “texts”, and the ways in which they can be accessed by those who seek to understand them, will be specific to each art form, and represent a distinctive kind of intellectual activity in each field.     

The Siting of Medieval Castles and the Influence of Ancient Places

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the ways in which the siting of castles in England was influenced by the remains of monuments and landscapes from the prehistoric and Romano-British periods. It explores the character, distribution and scale of ancient monument reuse as evidenced through the archaeological and documentary record, in an attempt to discern patterns in peoples’ responses to monuments from the ancient past. It considers the ways in which these places were perceived by both the ruling elite and the local community: exploring how inherited landscapes were used in castle building to structure concepts of belonging, constituted through memory and genealogy. The conclusion is that ancient places were reused by castle builders from the 11th to the 14th century as part of an evolving narrative aimed at enhancing rights to people, place and power.     

Thirty years of anastelosis works on the Athenian Acropolis, 1975–2005

Abstract

The year 2005 saw the completion of thirty years of work on the new anastelosis of the monuments of the Athenian Acropolis. The works began solely as a means of rescuing the Acropolis monuments from the urgent problems they faced in the 1970s, especially fracturing and disintegration resulting from the rusting of the iron reinforcing elements that had been embedded in the monuments during earlier restorations. In the course of these works, however, various situations emerged, most of them previously unforeseen, which led to more extensive restoration interventions on the monuments. The purpose of these has been to correct the errors made during the earlier interventions, to improve the general state of preservation of the monuments and to display the inherent values and quality of the monuments in all their richness. To a certain degree, these interventions alter the conventional image of the Acropolis in a way that is significant but not dramatic. The works already completed, the current interventions on the monuments and the future programme are explained, along with the distinctive qualities of the interventions and the situations that emerged during their execution. Finally, the changing image of the Acropolis landscape is discussed.     

'Up ewig Ungedeelt!' Schleswig-Holstein 1864–1920

Abstract

The border region of present-day Denmark and Germany has had a turbulent history. This paper will discuss the different influences of both countries on the landscape and upon the local community, using a landscape biographical approach. The landscape is filled with monuments commemorating various violent events in the region. The paper analyses how the Danish minority of Germany and the small German population of Denmark reacted to these changes. It considers how these changes are marked in the landscape, looking at Schleswig-Holstein from both perspectives.     

Bilingualism and geographical knowledge: A case study of students at the University of Wales,Aberystwyth

This paper explores the role of languages in the constitution of geographical knowledge. We argue that the fact that people speak different languages is significant to the ways in which they engage with geography as a subject. We unpack some of the processes through which languages make a difference to geography through an empirical project based on students at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where geography is taught bilingually through Welsh and English. Student geography is a particularly interesting arena to further this theme, because of students' mediating role in translating professional geography into the popular sphere, which in the case of students at Aberystwyth is also a different linguistic sphere. Our empirical work suggests that the use of Welsh creates a particular linguistic culture of geography, because of the shared experience of specific practices and politics in bilingual education. This makes a difference to the kinds of geography consumed and produced by bilingual students. Through a discussion of the linguistic identity of Welsh geography, we address some of the implications and limitations of this social formation. We conclude by arguing that a focus on language has the potential to open up new ways of talking about geography.     

The imperative of struggle: feminist and gender geographies in the United States

Abstract

The groundbreaking work of feminist and gender geographies has substantially advanced the nature of inquiry in the United States. In centering gendered ways of knowing, geographers have reframed disciplinary analyses of landscape, place, and space by troubling the normativities associated with lives, politics, and location. Though undoubtedly thriving, the visibility and impact of feminist and gender geographies have been confronted by history and changing political contexts. This essay extracts challenges to conceptualizing and doing feminist and gender geographies in the United States. By linking national freedom struggles to the current political climate and by reviewing the landscape of U.S. higher education, the essay asserts that scholars engaged with feminist and gender geographies can find utility in reflection, and by doing so, can resist contemporary disciplinary challenges to theory and practice.