Dietary life histories in Stone Age Northern Europe

We present here a framework for using stable isotope analysis of bone and teeth to study individual life history. A sampling strategy and analytical approach for stable carbon and nitrogen analysis of bone and dentine collagen optimised for intra-individual purposes is put forward. The rationale behind this strategy, various requirements and constrains, and recommendations on how to modify it according to variations in material and analytical instrumentation, are discussed and explained in detail. Based on intra-individual data for 131 human individuals from Mesolithic and Neolithic sites in Northern Europe, we consider the sources and various kinds of variation one is likely to find, and how the data can be explained and transformed into an archaeologically meaningful interpretation. It is concluded that the use of stable isotope analysis to trace individual life history is not limited to carefully excavated, neatly preserved, single burials with articulate skeletal remains. Even collective burials, disturbed graves, disarticulated human remains in cultural layers, or other depositions that deviate from what is often considered as a “proper burial”, offer the possibility to look at individual life biographies.     

Constructing community at civic-ceremonial centers: pottery-making practices at Crystal River and Roberts Island

ABSTRACT

Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI36, 8CI40, 8CI41) are neighboring mound complexes on Florida’s west-central Gulf Coast, with mainly sequential occupations during the Middle and Late Woodland periods, respectively. Previous work at Crystal River produced assemblages marked by a diversity of pastes and surface treatments, suggestive of distinct communities of practice. However, these excavations were unsystematic and poorly controlled, thus confounding understanding of temporal and spatial variation in practice. Recent excavations in domestic areas, combined with the analysis of older collections from mounds, support a finer-grained understanding of variation in ceramic production. Our analysis suggests that communities of practice persisted through time, although there is variation that corresponds well with changes in settlement.     

Muslim village intellectuals: The life of the mind in northern Pakistan

The findings reported in this article would not have been possible without the help and support of many people in Chitral. Fieldwork in Chitral was conducted with the generous support of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, an ESRC research studentship, and a grant from the British Academy Society for South Asian Studies. It has also benefited from sustained and insightful criticism from Dr Susan Bayly, and from four anonymous AT reviewers. Pseudonyms are used for places and people throughout the text.

• 1. 

  I first lived Chitral as a school-leaver in 1995 and made three subsequent visits before conducting a 20-month period of 'formal' anthropological fieldwork in the region between April 2000 and October 2001. This period of fieldwork was followed up by three further shorter stays.

       
  
  

The representation of time at two shaker village sites

Abstract

Historical restorations spatialise time, thus sometimes being criticised for their static representation of a dynamic reality. Yet restorations, like the groups they represent, themselves have complex histories. This paper explores how forms of representation relate to intended content historically, through discussion of two American sites: Hancock and Pleasant Hill Shaker Villages. Founded in the early 1960s, both saw demands for change by the 1990s. With the passing of the founders, these museum villages began to reevaluate their interpretive practices and plan for the future. The paper focuses on earlier decisions which have affected the representation of time.     

Dig for Victory! New histories of wartime gardening in Britain

Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party politicians have recently drawn on popular understandings of austerity associated with Britain’s wartime domestic gardening campaign, this article broadens the range of histories associated with Dig for Victory. It suggests firstly that far from simply encouraging self-sufficiency, the government conceptualised Dig for Victory as requiring the extension of order and control into the domestic sphere. Second, it shows how the ideal figure of a national citizen digging for victory elided differentiated gender and class experiences of gardening, and finally the article demonstrates that statistics of food production were more about fostering trust than picturing the realities of vegetable growing. By so doing the paper illuminates the particular ways in which present-day articulations of Dig for Victory’s history are partial and selective.     

生之意志的最后温存——论岜沙苗寨的生命教育

在地球某个角落,生活在林荫中的一群人用他们的行动和习俗演绎着对神的虔诚,对祖先的眷念及对生命的特殊理解。他们被称为中国最后一个枪族部落,大树的民族。他们过着大部分中国人所向往的桃源生活,享受着现代人已久违的那份清淡与宁静。这就是至今仍信仰着人树同体的贵州从江县岜沙苗人。     

Violent histories and the ambivalences of recognition in postcolonial Papua New Guinea*

On the 23 July 2009, in a ceremony at the Bomana War Cemetery near Papua New Guinea’s capital city Port Moresby, 86-year-old Wesley Akove was awarded the first of a series of ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel commemorative medallions’ given by the Australian government to PNG civilians who had assisted Australian troops during the Second World War. If the awarding of Mr Akove’s medallion is in many ways an archetypal enactment of the ‘politics of recognition’, consideration of three other instances of encounter between Orokaiva people in PNG’s Oro Province and Australian colonial forces disrupt the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel trope on which this recognition ritual hinges. These encounters include the wartime executions of Orokaiva men by Australian forces, recent protests by landowners along the Kokoda Track and the murder of two European gold miners at the beginning of the twentieth century by Orokaiva warriors. Considered together, narratives about these encounters speak to an asymmetrical field of power in which Australia acts to control the terms and temporalities of the recognition it offers to wartime carriers and their descendants, enacting particular, contingent forms of relationality in ways that reproduce colonial hierarchies.     

Evidence of interpersonal violence at the Chalcolithic village of Shiqmim (Israel)

Three circumscribed depressed fractures were found on the skull of an adolescent boy recovered from a primary intramural burial at the Chalcolithic site of Shiqmim, northern Negev, Israel dated to (∼4500–3200 BCE). The fractures were located on the left side and back of the skull. They are circular in outline and have sharp margins containing numerous small bone fragments. These indicate that the skull was fractured when the bone was still fresh and were the probable cause of death. The location of the fractured areas is typical of blows inflicted by a right‐handed individual in face‐to‐face conflict. The size and shape of the fractures, suggests that they were inflicted by a blunt instrument, possibly a mace head. The absence of any signs of healing or infection indicates that all fractures occurred within a short space of time and resulted in death. Neither biological characteristics nor burial pattern show any unique features that distinguish this individual from others recovered at this site. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New Story of Red River Valley

Legend has it that it was some500 years ago when the localleader Qoigyi Raodun GuisangParba built on Gyangze’S Zong-shan Hill the first palace calledGyikarze,from which the county’S     

Elaboration of a settlement system: the New England village in the federal period

Contemporary New England villages arose as nineteenth-century central places. The emergence of these commercial places reflected not the creation of something new out of whole cloth but an elaboration of an existing settlement system, a legacy of the colonial period and a manifestation of long-standing cultural habit. Town centers, more or less equally spaced and comprised of little more than a meetinghouse and a tavern, served as foci for town activities, as auxiliary central places. Most of the considerable localized economic exchange that characterized the colonial period occurred at dispersed places. The emergence of true central places about colonial town centers in the federal period marked a shift in scale or a general and widespread development of extra-local exchange, division of labor, and provision of centrality—the ability of a place to provide goods and services beyond the needs of its residents. Central places became accretions of full-time nonfarmers, of storekeepers, artisans, and professional people. Moreover, these places were interlinked to form a system of central places and, although a sorting process took place, the system was both a material manifestation of contemporary economic experience and an elaboration of the colonial settlement system.     

Intensification revisited: assessing resource specialization at Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI41), Florida

ABSTRACT

Archaeologists typically associate resource intensification with population expansion, environmental change, and political strategizing. Many Late Woodland and Mississippian societies of the Southeast eschewed dietary diversity in favor of harvesting fewer types of resources that could meet the subsistence demands of incipient aggregation. Foods such as maize and shellfish can provide humans with predictable caloric yields and are amenable to control by individuals or corporate groups. However, some archaeologists have identified scenarios in which small-scale societies intensified resources in the absence of population growth and social inequality. Ritual economies can periodically place high demands on the materials used for gatherings and ceremonies. These events then may leave material residues of economic intensification, which archaeologists might easily mistake as evidence for population expansion or social evolution. We use diversity and equitability estimates of zooarchaeological deposits from Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI41), Florida, to demonstrate that some Woodland period societies periodically intensified their use of resources amidst population decline and heightened ritual activity. We suggest that the inhabitants of the area harvested shellfish at increasingly high rates to provide the material basis for a series of ritual interventions that aimed to circumvent the effects of rapid social and ecological change.