‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya

Bells were an inescapable part of fourteenth-century urban life. They signalled the hours of the day and times for prayers; they warned of tempests and enemy armies; they heralded masses, funerals, and deaths. The pealing of bells brought men, women, and children together, choreographing communal behaviour in time and space. Bells echoed the vox Domini, calling out the deaths of holy men and women, celebrating the working of miracles. The ubiquitous presence of bells reflected the omnipresence of God in the medieval world. Their echoes transformed private moments into collective experiences, elevating the mundane into the miraculous. Scholars have rarely examined the religious aspects of bells, looking instead at their more practical side, especially their utilisation as markers of time and the allegedly concurrent rise of mercantile culture. This article approaches bells from the viewpoints of those men and women who heard them and wanted them rung. Focusing on sources from Christian clerics, we see that medieval men rang the bells with clear, but many possible, purposes in mind. By marking time and prayers, Christian church bells helped to create and facilitate communities within dioceses, spurring and choreographing their actions. During funerals, bells broadcast private moments, giving them communal significance. The transformative, creative function of bells is clearest in their role in miracles. In Manresa, the vision experienced by a few became a community affair when the church bells gathered the people; the bells transformed an ordinary day into one where the people, as a community, received divine favour. Finally, with the deaths of holy persons, the tolling of bells transformed private, even anonymous deaths, into moments of wonder as God’s hand touched the world.The pealing of bells defined Christian communities in the Mediterranean and, at the same time as rulers and elites throughout the region were seeking to control minority groups, those same groups were seeking to exercise control over the sounds within their own communities. Through the pealing of bells, churchmen across Catalunya sought to direct the thoughts and prayers of their listeners. When the Christian clerics of Catalunya rang their churches’ bells, they had specific aims in mind, yet, as the evidence demonstrates, the pealing of the bells never meant just one thing. This article demonstrates that there is much more to understanding medieval bells than knowing ‘for whom the bell tolls’; we have to look at the listeners as much as the ringers in order to understand their cultural significance in medieval Europe. This article is a first step in how such a study could be begun.     

Myths,missions, and mistrust: The fate of Christianity in 16th and 17th century Japan

This article examines accepted opinion regarding the persecution and demise of Christian/Catholic missions in 16th and 17th century Japan. Many of the key issues associated with the encounter of European missionaries and Japanese feudal systems of authority and power resonate with contemporary interest in transculturalism, semantic slippage, personal agency, and the intimate interplay between religion, politics, and economics. Burdened with rigid standards of belief, heresy, and race from European inquisitions as well as Mesoamerican conquests, the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries made numerous strategic blunders that contributed to their fates, both as recipients of expulsion orders and, finally, on the execution grounds.     

A humerus story: Albatross element distribution from two northwest coast sites,North America

The distribution of the skeletal elements of albatross from the Maple Bank site is compared with those for ducks and gulls at that site and others on the northwest coast of America. The element distribution was very different between species and between sites. The proportions of albatross bones found suggest that there was a cultural reason for the elements present, probably the curation of wing bones for toolmaking and other uses. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Hohokam of Southwest North America

The Hohokam reached an apex of sociopolitical development between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in the Sonoran Desert of North America. Hallmarks of the Hohokam tradition included red-on-buff pottery, large-scale canal irrigation agriculture, and monumental buildings, including ball courts, platform mounds, towers, and Great Houses. The development and elaboration of Hohokam society from their ceramic-producing predecessors during more than two millennia (ca. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1450, or later) is a remarkable example of an arid land adaptation in the New World. The enigmatic collapse of Hohokam society took place shortly before European colonialists entered the North American Southwest in the mid–sixteenth century. Various agents (e.g., floods, disease, warfare) of this event are poorly understood and require additional study. So, too, does the degree of historical continuity between contemporary indigenous peoples and precontact archaeological cultures (e.g., Hohokam) in what is now Arizona and northern Mexico.     

The Archaeology of War: A North American Perspective

This article reviews recent archaeological research on warfare in prestate societies of native North America. This survey comprises six regions: Arctic/Subarctic, Northwest Coast, California, Southwest/Great Basin, Great Plains, and Eastern Woodlands. Two lines of evidence, defensive settlement behavior and injuries in human skeletal remains, figure prominently in archaeological reconstructions of violence and warfare in these regions. Burning of sites and settlements also has been important for identifying the consequences of war and investigating more subtle aspects of strategy and directionality. Weaponry and iconography have to date provided important but more limited insights. Although considerable disparities exist between regions in the archaeological evidence for intra- and intergroup violence, all regions show a marked increase after A.D. 1000. These findings suggest that larger forces may have been responsible for escalating violence throughout North America at this time.     

The Almshouse in Dutch and English Colonial North America and its Precedent in the Old World: Historical and Archaeological Evidence

To establish historical and archaeological contexts for the case studies presented in this volume, this paper presents a review of the literature on the history and archaeology of almshouses. Because both English and Dutch colonial almshouses were based on European precedents, this paper examines historical research and archaeological work conducted in The Netherlands and England, as well as their North American colonies.     

自养与本色之深入：1929年世界经济危机冲击下的华北基督教

1929年世界经济危机发生后,西方基督教差会被迫减少对华传教事业经费,裁减传教士人数,对华北基督教产生重要影响。华北教会为此提倡受托主义,鼓励教徒捐献,并减少职员薪金;同时,教会为减轻经济负担,还组织各种义工训练班,注意培养义务工作人员为教会服务;教会学校与医院在差会经费减少的形势下,通过裁员减支、增收学费与住院费及向政府、社会力量请求援助等多种形式维持运营。此次经济危机有利于增强中国教会及教会机构的自养,破除教徒的依赖心理,推动了中国教会的本色化进程,但不能从根本上使其摆脱对西方经费的依赖。     

Hopewell Archaeology: A View from the Northern Woodlands

A tremendous amount of research on Hopewellian societies in the Northern Woodlands of the United States has been conducted within the last decade. This article summarizes the main themes and directions of that current research and presents a general model of Hopewellian societies. Local communities appear to have been small in size and relatively sedentary; sets of these communities shared a greater sense of cultural identity within a lineage and possibly clan organization, with each riverine drainage system occupied by a mosaic of lineages. Each in turn was spatially centered on specific clusters of religious, nonresidential public architecture. Alliances were based on a number of historically shifting variables, including religion, kinship, politics, and economics. It is suggested that future research continue existing methodologies and analyses and consider new ecological, genetic, and ideological research as a means of adding greater local historic nuance to this general model of Hopewellian societies.     

The politics of expressive forms,ethnographic practice,and indigenous–state relations

This review examines four recently published ethnographies of North American Indian communities in both the United States and Canada, each reflecting the ways in which sovereignty and self-determination are realized and compromised. The evolving indigenous polities discussed in these works each articulate with the nation-state that encompasses them in different ways, in large part by virtue of the kinds of resources the communities are perceived to manage by salient institutions in the dominant society. These works are also insightful concerning the possibilities and limitations of ethnography in highly politicized settings.     

The New Economics of North American Arctic Oil

Over the past five years there has been a remarkable resurgence in oil and gas exploration in the North American Arctic. From completed disinterest only a half a decade ago the region has attracted billions of dollars in new investments from a host of different international oil companies. Unlike the past booms in the region, which inevitably ended in busts, this new wave of development is different. This article examines the changes in both the Arctic itself as well as the global energy environment and concludes that the North American Arctic will see slow bust sustained development over the coming decades, ultimately becoming one of the last great oil producing regions in the world.     

“Horned cattle and pack horses”: zooarchaeological legacy collections from the unauthorized (and unscreened) Spanish Fort

ABSTRACT

In 1689, the governor of La Florida ordered the construction of a fort near the Muscogee (Creek) ancestral community of Apalachicola, supplying it with a caravan of “horned cattle and pack horses.” The fort, referred to as “Spanish Fort,” was abandoned a year later. Archaeological investigations of the fort were carried out in 1960 without sieving, and a large collection of faunal remains was minimally studied. Despite the limitations of the recovery methods, a recent analysis of these zooarchaeological legacy collections provides insight into the provisioning strategies of the Spanish military 150 years after initial colonialism began. Spanish Fort was better provisioned than its predecessors, such as Fort San Juan, but with a limited range of domesticated livestock—only cattle and horses. The presidio may have traded with the Apalachicola community in order to diversify their diet, but butchering marks indicate that the presidio’s soldiers processed their own meat at the fort. Having learned hard lessons from earlier colonial expeditions, Spanish military colonialists minimized the outpost’s vulnerability by not relying heavily on the local Native American population, while building a transactional relationship with Apalachicola to ensure the community’s cooperation. The zooarchaeological materials from Spanish Fort also indicate that the fort was intentionally destroyed by fire, providing a glimpse of Spanish adaptive strategies as the mission of securing the inland Southeast from rival colonialism abruptly ended.     

Teeth of juvenile woodchucks as seasonal indicators on archaeological sites

The woodchuck, Marmota monax, a burrowing scuirid of eastern North America, was a common food animal of prehistoric peoples. Since the species has a single, brief birthing period all juveniles are at a comparable stage of development at a given time. Widths of the continuously growing incisors, development of the cheek teeth and alveoli, and loss of deciduous teeth have been determined from a sample with known dates of collection. These data are compared to juvenile woodchuck remains from an archaeological site to determine season of kill.     

Population growth,climatic cooling,and the development of collector strategies on the Southern Plateau,western North America

A change in human adaptations on the Southern Plateau during the fourth millennium B.P offers the opportunity to investigate the process by which immediate-consumption strategies are replaced by delayed consumption strategies among hunter-gatherers. Assemblage structure and settlement pattern are used to infer the nature of resource acquisition strategies between 2000 and 6000 radiocarbon years B.P., and the results are compared with a proxy record of population and a detailed reconstruction of terrestrial and riverine paleoenvironments. Results show that a strategy of mobile and later occasionally sedentary foraging with little use of storage technology persisted until as late as 3500 B.P and was abruptly and without detectable gradation replaced by a strictly scheduled, semisedentary, logistically organized, storage-dependent collector strategy. The change took place at a time of depressed population and 400 years after a period of climatic cooling had begun, thus eliminating both demographic pressure and environmental determinism as explanations. The evidence could be explained by prolonged selective pressure of an increasingly seasonal environment acting on successively attempted behavioral variants, but the widespread rise of collector-like strategies throughout the west at about the same time leaves open the question of exogenous development and highlights the importance of climatic change.     

Bridging prehistory and history in the archaeology of cities

Abstract

Archaeology is ideally suited for examining the deep roots of urbanism, its materialization and physicality, and the commonalities and variability in urban experiences cross-culturally and temporally. We propose that the significant advances archaeologists have made in situating the discipline within broader urban studies could be furthered through increased dialog between scholars working on urbanism during prehistoric and historical periods, as a means of bridging concerns in the study of the past and present. We review some major themes in urban studies by presenting archaeological cases from two areas of the Americas: central Mexico and Atlantic North America. Our cases span premodern and early modern periods, and three of the four covered in greatest depth live on as cities of today. Comparison of the cases highlights the complementarity of their primary datasets: the long developmental trajectories and relatively intact urban plans offered by many prehistoric cities, and the rich documentary sources offered by historic cities.     

Clovis Hunting and Large Mammal Extinction: A Critical Review of the Evidence

The North American archaeological phenomenon known as Clovis is famous for the fact that a number of sites that contain diagnostic Clovis artifacts also contain the remains of mammoth and perhaps other extinct genera. In the past, this has led many to assume that Clovis subsistence adaptations were organized around large, now-extinct mammals. It has also seemed to support the argument that the colonization of the Americas by hunters about 11,500 years ago caused the extinction, either directly or indirectly, of some 35 genera of primarily large mammals. Here, we review all sites known to us that have been suggested to provide evidence for the association of Clovis-age archaeological material with the remains of now-extinct Pleistocene mammals. Of the 76 sites reviewed, only 14 provide strong evidence that Clovis-aged people hunted such mammals. Of these sites, 12 contain the remains of mammoth, while two contain the remains of mastodon. Although the prime focus of the analysis we present is on Clovis-age archaeological associations with now-extinct mammals, we conclude that there is no evidence provided by the North American archaeological record to support the argument that people played a significant role in causing Pleistocene extinctions here.     

Warfare in Prehistoric and Early Historic Eastern North America

Recent criticisms of the use of historically and ethnographically recorded conflicts as models for warfare in prehistoric times force archaeologists to reexamine assumptions about the frequency, severity, and effects of intergroup fighting. In eastern North America, skeletons of victims and palisaded settlements—the only information consistently available on intergroup hostilities—indicate that the prevalence of conflicts varied greatly over time and space. Occasionally the attacks, typically ambushes of small numbers of people, cumulatively resulted in numerous casualties.Variation in palisade strength is consistent with the organizational structure and warrior mobilization potential of late prehistoric societies in different parts of the Eastern Woodlands.