Interstitial women: East African experiences

Kilbride, Philip Leroy and Janet Capriotti Kilbride. Changing Family Life in East Africa: Women and Children at Risk. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. xv + 271 pp. including references and index. $29.95 cloth.

White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. xiii + 285 pp. including notes, references, and index. $34.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.     

Warriors and blacksmiths: Mediating ethnicity in East African spears

Ethnoarchaeology offers some ability to transform contemporary forms of social constitution into a method for interpreting prehistoric social patterns and for understanding the coevolution of symbolic and utilitarian technologies. In north-central Kenya, one social caste of Lokop pastoralist actors (warriors) interacts with another (blacksmiths) to build a technology for socially constituting gender and social age. Three aspects of this process can help to direct analogous archaeological research in prehistoric contexts. First, this case reiterates that symbols for and symbolic acts of gender and social age continually help actors to constitute or negotiate their places within varied social fields. It is clear, however, that the connection between social prestige—essentially the goal of Lokop personal adornment—and real economic or political power is not necessarily direct. For Lokop herders, foreign traits of spear morphology are the stylistic raw material for constituting internally defined social fields. Ethmic distinctions are more pasively constituted, almost as an epiphenomenon. Second, the constituative significance of material symbols may be grasped without appealing to or understanding the cultural meaning of forms (in an emic sense) from only the archaeological evidence. In fact, prehistorians should not concern themselves with attempts to reconstruct the meaning of cultural phenomena. Rather, archaeological inquiry should attempt to infer the meaningfulness of formal traits within a specific social context, based on significant material patterns in the archaeological record. Third, the items of meaning themselves are constituted with their own material means of production, and these systems may be interpreted through economic models more familiar to archaeology. The Lokop case encompasses producers and users both as specialists. Blacksmiths rely on their marginal positions in herding society to make them the brokers of morphological traits. Warriors, also accustomed to marginal status, effectively collaborate with blacksmiths to set up their own future place as elders. For archaeological applications in prehistory, the exchange and processing of raw materials should reconstitute economic hierarchy in a very clear manner.     

Transitions in Palaeoecology and Technology: Hunter-Gatherers and Early Herders in the Gobi Desert

The desert and arid steppes of Mongolia and northern China were geographically central to the spread of pastoralism and the rise of pastoralist states, but research on the organizational strategies of pre-pastoralist hunter-gatherers and the spread of herding has been extremely limited. Until recently, catalogues of sites collected by Westerners in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the body of English-language publications on Gobi Desert prehistory. This article introduces a wealth of new site-specific and interpretive data, drawing on English-language sources as well as Russian- and Mongolian-language publications to create a synthesis for the prehistory of the Gobi Desert from the end of the Last Glacial Maximum to the adoption of herding. Special emphasis is placed on the relationship between a major shift in desert ecosystems, comparable to the ‘greening of the Sahara’, the establishment of an oasis-based broad-spectrum foraging strategy, and progressive desertification and deforestation after 2000 BC. We conclude that an oasis-based adaptation was contemporaneous with the expansion of forests and wetlands and persisted throughout the early stages of herding. A major decline in these economies occurs after 1000 BC, in conjunction with continuing trends towards heightened aridity and major societal changes across Northeast Asia. The persistent co-existence of Bronze Age burials and microblade-based habitation sites around oases, as well as similarities in material culture, suggest that these groups overlapped geographically or were the same entity.     

Disaster Management in the United States: Examining Key Political and Policy Challenges

The failures associated with the Hurricane Katrina response call attention to the challenges of, and the need to better understand disaster management practices in the United States. This article reviews several recent contributions to the field of disaster research and considers four key issues: the concept of disaster vulnerability, how individuals respond to hazard risks, challenges associated with effective hazard mitigation, and the idea of policy learning in the area of disasters. Beyond a review of these aspects of disaster management, future directions in disaster research is discussed.     

For Richer,for Poorer: Marriage and Casualized Sex in East African Artisanal Mining Settlements

Migrants to Tanzania's artisanal gold mining sites seek mineral wealth, which is accompanied by high risks of occupational hazards, economic failure, AIDS and social censure from their home communities. Male miners in these settlements compete to attract newly arrived young women who are perceived to be diverting male material support from older women and children's economic survival. This article explores the dynamics of monogamy, polygamy and promiscuity in the context of rapid occupational change. It shows how a wide spectrum of productive and welfare outcomes is generated through sexual experimentation, which calls into question conventional concepts of prostitution, marriage and gender power relations.     

Middle and Later Stone Age lithic technology and land use in East African savannas

This paper examines changes in the use of sites and lithic raw materials during the later Middle Stone Age (MSA) and early Later Stone Age (LSA) in East Africa. It proposes two models of hunter-gatherer land use and technological organization in East African savannas and examines changes in the procurement and use of raw materials in MSA and LSA lithic assemblage sequences from Lukenya Hill, Kenya, and Nasera Rockshelter, Tanzania. Changes in procurement strategies across the transition are related to technological change, mechanical properties of raw materials, and changes in site use and in mobility.

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Résumé Cet article examine les effets de l'existence locale de matières premières lithiques en Afrique orientale au cours du paléolithique moyenne et au début du paléolithique supérieure. Il propose deux modèles d'utilisation de la terre et d'organisation technologique par les populations des savannes d'Afrique orientale vivant de la chasse et de la cueillette, et examine les changements sur le plan de l'approvisionnement en matières premières et de leur utilisation dans les séries de collections lithiques du paléolithique moyenne et du paléolithique supérieure provenant de Lukenya Hill au Kénya et de Nasera Rockshelter en Tanzanie. Les modifications des stratégies d'approvisionnement au cours de la transition correspondent au changement de technologie, aux caractéristiques mécaniques des matières premières et aux changements dans l'utilisation des sites et la mobilité.

     

Iraq and Hubris: Avoiding History a Review Essay

Book reviewed in this article: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War: Michael Isiko. and David Corn Blind into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq: James Fallows Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq: Stephen Zinzer The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife;s CIA Identity: Joseph Wilson The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake to Build the Case for War in Iraq: Peter Eisner and Knut Royce Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: or, How Not to Learn From the Past: Lloyd C. Gardner, Marilyn B. Young, Eds.     

Tooth marks and human consumption: ethnoarchaeological mastication research among foragers of the Central African Republic

Taphonomically, much research has focused on the way in which predators and humans vie for calorically rich sources of protein. Anecdotal evidence from ethnographies and experiments indicate that humans will—as do other obligate carnivores and omnivores—modify animal bones with their teeth during consumption. Recent ethnographic research among the Bofi foragers of the Central African Republic provides an opportunity to explicitly understand the way in which humans imprint bone during mastication. This research identifies the signature of human tooth marks on small mammal skeletons and addresses the way in which these marks may be archaeologically visible. The data presented herein suggests that any model seeking to discuss the range of human dietary choices would be strengthened by considering the impact of humans in zooarchaeological small fauna assemblages that may or may not have technological indicators of a human presence.