Archaeometrical characterization of pigments and paintings on Pre-Hispanic pottery from the regions of Fiambalá and Chaschuil (Catamarca,Argentina)*

The results of an analysis of pigments used in slips and designs deployed in ceramic assemblages recovered from archaeological sites located in different environments, expressing the socio-historical process developed in the regions of Fiambalá and Chaschuil (Catamarca, Argentina) during the last 1500 years are presented. The sample, formed by fragments of different ceramic styles and natural pigments, was analysed via Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. Results indicate the continuity in use of certain pigments (mainly hematite for red hues and Mn oxides in combination with magnetite for black paints) within the different socio-political organizations that inhabited the region from the first to the 14th centuries ce , in spite of the diverse shades of colour, which suggests an intentional search linked with their cultural conventions. For the Inca Period, this scenery of continuities in minerals employed for reds and blacks is complemented by the use of new compounds (Ti oxide, apatite and gypsum) in order to generate the ‘cream’ tones applied as slips, all of which have not been identified for previous moments.     

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat,female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.     

Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation.     

Changes in the body,glaze and enamel compositions of early Meissen porcelain, 1723–c.1740

The evolution of early Meissen body, glaze and colorant compositions is examined using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) measurements on three artefacts that can be accurately dated to the period 1723–c.1740. The results are interpreted based on recipes recorded in the earliest documents of the Meissen archives. The pure Aue kaolinite contains low levels of Ti and can be distinguished from secondary clays, for example, clay from Colditz. The excess Ti in the glaze versus the body reported earlier and confirmed by the present authors is explained by the exclusive use of Colditz clay for the glaze, as described in the recipes before 1730, providing a terminus ante quem for Meissen porcelain exhibiting this particular asymmetry. After 1730, the presence of elevated Ti in the body could serve as a marker for the experimental admixture of clays to Aue kaolinite to alter its properties. Based on the detection of As, Ba and Bi, it is suggested that smalt from Erzgebirge was the colorant for blue enamels until at least 1725.     

Artificial Intelligence, 3D Documentation,and Rock Art—Approaching and Reflecting on the Automation of Identification and Classification of Rock Art Images

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - Rock art carvings, which are best described as petroglyphs, were produced by removing parts of the rock surface to create a negative relief. This...     

“The producers on the one side,and the capitalists on the other”: Labor Reform,Slavery, and the Career of a Transatlantic Radical

Abstract

Through exploring the neglected career of John Campbell, an Irish-born Chartist refugee who ascended to a leadership role in the antebellum American labor movement, this article seeks to shed light on how revolutionary upheaval in Europe, debates over immigration, and sectional conflict affected working-class politics. Focusing on the period 1848 to 1851, and tracing Campbell's rapid evolution from a radical opponent of slavery to an ardent supporter of black subjugation, I argue that labor historians need to pay closer attention to shifting local and national contexts to understand the racial politics of labor agitators. Yet even as Campbell's views changed, his commitment to a producerist vision remained constant; by 1851 he had simply added people of African descent to a list of “idle” nonproducers who lived off the labor of workingmen. His proslavery twist on producer ideology suggests historians of antebellum social relations may need to go beyond interrogating the racial dimensions of artisan republicanism to gain a fuller understanding of the variety of working-class attitudes to race.     

Migration,Geographies of Marginality and Informality—Impacts on Upper and Lower Ends of Urban Systems in the North and South

Since the onset of post-industrialism, the research focus in the developed world has increasingly shifted to the role of the information and communication technology, knowledge workers and the creative sector in the global economy. It has led to what could be described as an iceberg approach to economic research. In this approach, the focus is primarily on what happens in the part of the global economic iceberg above the waterline—the “clean”, “fast-moving”, “technologically advanced” elements of the global economy. However another element of the global economy, the informal sector, is growing at an alarming rate in cities in both the developed and developing worlds. These activities are unobtrusively operating in a part of the iceberg below the waterline that receives relatively little attention from the research community. The purposes of this paper are to demonstrate how the information networks created in the iceberg above the waterline are being used by a growing section of the society in the developing world in order to reach first-world destinations. It shows how informality is changing the urban landscape in first-world cities where large concentrations of non-Western populations occur. The paper then shifts its attention to the overwhelmingly informally driven economies of African cities and outlines the inappropriateness of standard economic measures to accurately portray conditions there.     

THE RELIGION—the Gthen Way of Exessian of the Human,Ghast and Dininity

In the outer circle of the Barkor Street,Lhasa City of Tibet,a gallery named as＂Art Gallery of Traditional Handcrafts＂is located,specializing by making clay sculptures and masks. Surprisingly,two artisans have the same name as Penpa who are working for this gallery.For the sake of easily identifying them, people are used to calling the elder one as senior Penpa,and the young one as junior Penpa.Their common perspective might be that they both have already worked for making masks for 12 years.They,by     

Righting the course? Humanitarian intervention,the war on terror and the future of Afghanistan

The US‐led post 9/11 ‘intervention’ in Afghanistan was, by definition, not a humanitarian intervention. The intervention in Afghanistan was defined as an act of self‐defence by the US and it was one of the first steps in the ‘war on terror’ by the US and its allies: it had no intention or clear strategies for long‐term stabilization, state‐building or development. The US‐led international coalition failed to ‘find’ Al‐Qaeda in the short term and new arguments had to be made to justify continued international presence. The initial agenda was quickly blurred by a mismatch of intentions including those of long‐term stabilization and state‐building. The ideas developed through the Bonn Agreement (2001–5) and continued through the Afghanistan Compact (2006–10) have focused on building a centrally governed state (sometimes defined as democratic) that has a monopoly on the use of force. Their shortcomings are already well‐documented: the urgency of the Bonn Conference and of the adoption of the Bonn Agreement ostensibly meant trading expediency and stability for accountability and a clean slate, which is not to say that there were no good intentions at Bonn from stakeholders, but that Afghans and the international community put power‐sharing before progress. The choices made at Bonn may have contributed to the culture of impunity and the entrenched poverty that is gripping Afghanistan today. This article responds to the claims that state‐building and all that goes with it are not the responsibility of the ‘international community’ by addressing the accountability and humanitarian paradoxes. The question remains, however, about who should be responsible for reform and politically accountable in the aftermath of non‐humanitarian (and indeed even humanitarian) interventions?     

Dating and provenance of glass artefacts excavated from the ancient city of Tall Zirā‛a,Jordan

Fourteen glass objects recovered from excavations at the ancient city of Tall Zirā‛a, Jordan, were analysed using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to determine the period and origin of manufacture. The composition of glasses manufactured in the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and Iron Age are distinctly different, therefore major element analysis can be used to distinguish between the groups relatively easily. The LA-ICP-MS analysis provided quantitative trace element data which were used to determine the provenance of those glasses identified as LBA. This research discusses the implications of the presence of both Egyptian and Mesopotamian LBA glasses and examines the varying compositions and colour strategies employed in both the LBA and Iron Age objects. Specifically, glass in the LBA was considered to be one of the highest status items attainable, playing an instrumental role in diplomatic gift-giving. When considered with the archaeological information, the significance of these finds at Tall Zirā‛a indicates that this city was a settlement of high status, not primarily a convenient trading stop on the Transjordan route.     

Pigments from the Zuiddorp (Zuytdorp) ship sculpture: red,white and blue?

SUMMARY: The Dutch East India Company ship Zuiddorp (also known as Zuytdorp) met its demise in 1712 at the base of steep cliffs along the Western Australian coast. Material from the shipwreck includes an extraordinary example of a caryatid herm from the ship’s stern counter. A recent study of this sculpture and the pigments found on its surface demonstrates Zuiddorp’s archaic stern construction and adornment, which is more of a late 17th-century, than an early 18th-century, Dutch Indiaman. This paper discusses the results of this study and emphasizes how the smallest pieces of evidence can broaden our understanding of contemporaneous regional Dutch East India Company shipbuilding practices.     

Rituals of Consumption and the Politics of Feasting on the Eastern African Coast,AD 700–1500

Historically, the Swahili of the eastern African coast have performed feasts through which they negotiated and contested social power. Feasts draw on tradition and practice, but create the space for, and conditions of, imbalance and social debt. Drawing on this historical frame, I examine the archaeology of feasting in the more distant Swahili past, AD 700–1500, in particular looking at how feasts can domesticate distant power—the power drawn from objects and practices from elsewhere. By charting changing assemblages of imported and local ceramics alongside settlement and food preferences, I examine developments in feasting patterns and the way feasts provided a social context within which local and distant power could be translated into authority.     

René of Anjou,King of Sicily,and the order of the Croissant

Founded in 1448 by René, Duke of Anjou and titular King of Sicily, the Order of the Croissant represents one of many secular orders of chivalry established by late medieval rulers. An examination of the Order's statutes and membership indicates that the Croissant was more than a colourful convocation of knights. As René's personal creation, the Croissant served as a political instrument not only for controlling his vassals, but also for advancing his territorial claims.     

Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining,Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano

Abstract: This paper examines processes of primitive accumulation and livelihood dispossession on the Bolivian Altiplano. Through empirical examination of the social and environmental effects of mining waste, the paper demonstrates that indigenous campesino community members are experiencing livelihood dispossession by way of three interrelated forms of accumulation: accumulation of toxic sediments on agricultural fields; accumulation of water and water rights by mining firms; and accumulation of territory by mining operations. In the case under examination, full proletarianization is not taking place, and processes of dispossession are not a “fix” for an overaccumulation crisis. The paper argues for greater attention to the contingent role of nature's materiality in processes of dispossession and accumulation.     

Settlement studies and the archaeological survey of North Norway — A discussion based on the survey of North Troms

By the end of the 1984 field season a systematic archaeological survey of the county of Troms was completed. At the same time a revision of the survey was started. The survey of Troms is part of a nation‐wide archaeological survey, connected with the production of an Economic Map of Norway. Though the validity of the methods and the results of this survey have been questioned, few attempts have been made at evaluating the archaeological data base produced by the survey. The current total revision of the survey makes this task even more urgent. The aim of this paper is to contribute towards such an evaluation, by utilizing the survey data from six North Troms municipalities in an attempt at constructing a history of settlement for this area.