Archaeology without gravity: Postmodernism and the past

Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the past and the present have become commonplace: anthropologists now situate cultures in their historical contexts, while historians pursue particularistic ends within politicoeconomic or ideational structures. Archaeologists have cast their nets even more widely, not only toward anthropology and history, but to fields ranging from molecular biology to hermeneutics. Postmodernist approaches maintain that archaeologists should be looking at the past from multiple perspectives and listening to its multivocality. Archaeologists, in fact, not only develop different ways of understanding the past, but actually develop alternative pasts. This paper argues that multiple paths to alternative pasts enhance archaeological understanding and, at the same time, stimulate the development of archaeological theory.     

Middle-Class Ideologies and American Respectability: Archaeology and the Irish Immigrant Experience

This study illustrates the materialization of identity shifts through refined ceramic and glass forms recovered from working class Irish immigrant and Irish-American communities. The sites used in this article were chosen because of their spatio-temporal compatibility covering dynamic periods of Irish identity in the United States. Historians argue that 1880 marks the beginning of an identity shift from Irish immigrant to Irish-American. This research attempts to provide the necessary materials to begin a discourse bringing together material and historical evidence illuminating the conflict between competing ideologies of respectability and changing conceptions of Irish identity in America.     

Holocene climatic change and past Irish societal response

The extent to which North Atlantic Holocene climatic perturbations influenced past human societies is an area of considerable uncertainty and fierce debate. Ireland is ideally placed to help resolve this issue, being occupied for over 9000 yr and located on the eastern Atlantic seaboard, a region dominated by westerly airflow. Irish bog and lake tree populations provide unambiguous evidence of major shifts in surface moisture through the Holocene similar to cycles recorded in the marine realm of the North Atlantic, indicating significant changes in the latitude and intensity of zonal atmospheric circulation across the region. To test for human response to these cycles we summed the probabilities of 465 radiocarbon ages obtained from Irish archaeological contexts and observe enhanced archaeological visibility during periods of sustained wet conditions. These results suggest either increasing density of human populations in key, often defensive locations, and/or the development of subsistence strategies to overcome changing conditions, the latter recently proposed as a significant factor in avoiding societal collapse. Regardless, we demonstrate environmental change is a significantly more important factor in influencing human activity in the landscape than has hitherto been acknowledged.     

The Archaeology of Poverty and the Poverty of Archaeology

In this Editor’s Introduction to this Special Contribution, I explore some central issues surrounding the archaeology of poverty and ponder why it has taken historical archaeologists so long to “discover” poverty as a research topic.     

A rediscovery of caddo heritage

El propósito de este artículo es mostrar la importancia de la colaboracción entre los gobiernos indígenas y los/as arqueólogos/as. Un aspecto de la colaboración es la investigación de las denuncias amparadas bajo el acto de la Protección de las Tumbas de los Indígenas Nativos Norteamericanos y la Repatriación (NAGPRA). Para los Caddo, el trabajar con la comunidad de arqueólogos/as puede fortalecer las denuncias que ellos pueden hacer sobre restos humanos y los objetos funerarios sean adjuntos o no, u objectos sagrados o artefactos de patrimonio cultural que han sido identificados por el NAGPRA.

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Résumé Notre objectif est de montrer l'importance de la collaboration entre les représentants tribaux et les archéologues dans l'étude des revendications du Native American Protection et du Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Dans le cas des Caddo, travailler ensemble avec la communauté archéologique peut seulement renforcer toute demande qu'ils peuvent formuler pour le rapatriement de restes humains et d'objects funéraires associés ou non, d'objets sacrés et tout objet faisant partie du patrimoine culturel défini par le NAGPRA.

     

The rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters

This article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the concept to categorise early eighteenth-century Spanish authors and reforms, and have thereby severed them from their historical context. This article explores the imperial origins of this political culture by shedding light on the generation of knowledge in early eighteenth-century diplomatic and imperial spaces. The article focuses on the overlooked thinker Álvaro José Navia-Osorio y Vigil, Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) – long considered to be a proyectista – and his appeal to the Spanish Republic of Letters to assist him in his project for a universal dictionary; an enterprise that predated Chamber’s Cyclopedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Marcenado’s contributions to the establishment of Spanish intellectual connections with foreign thinkers were, moreover, symptomatic of the political approach of early eighteenth-century ilustrados – transterritorial, transnational, and transversal thinkers who drew on the peninsula’s ties with the Flanders and Italy to revitalise the intellectual life of Spain. These thinkers recovered the study of Muslim Spain, and envisioned the establishment of councils and academies in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Enlightenment, then, originated in the early eighteenth-century from their rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters.     

Immigration,the Celtic Tiger and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article addresses the puzzle of why Ireland has proved so open to immigration. It compares responses to immigrants in the Republic of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger era and during the post-2008 economic crisis and finds no evidence of a political backlash during the latter period even though opinion polls suggest that opposition to immigration had increased and other evidence suggested that there had been an increase in racist incidents within Irish society. Nor did the resumption of large-scale emigration trigger political hostility to immigrants. The outcome of the 2004 Referendum on Citizenship, which removed a constitutional right to Irish citizenship to the Irish-born children of immigrants, suggested that that nationalism still matters hugely and a latent tendency towards ethnic chauvinism amongst the host population. Yet, a decade after the 2004 Referendum it looked as if the old mono-ethnic sense conception of the Irish nation had been disrupted, at least a little bit.