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.     

Early Domestic Dogs in North America and Their Origins

Abstract

Archaeologists have contributed much new information relating to types of domestic dogs that were present in pre-Columbian North America. Questions yet to be answered are: Where did the basal stock for these early Western Hemisphere dogs originate? What were they like morphologically? Some reported early canids, particularly those from late Pleistocene deposits, are subject to question as to their domestic role. These and related problems are discussed.     

Black man's Burden: some South African parallels with North America

ABSTRACT

Muthi, intelezi and associated rituals have played an important role in the lives of Africans for many centuries. For almost everything they do, muthi and rituals are applied, more so during times of war. Controversy around the use of intelezi, muthi, ritual killing and the role of izinyanga in, prior to and during the colonial period, is well documented. This paper, first, challenges the Comaroffian analysis of the subject which purports to contextualise the ‘deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends’. They add that the discourse is entirely about ‘modernity’ and ‘neoliberalism’. Here I fundamentally disagree with this explanation; I indicate that it is a cultural continuity. The paper contends that ritual killing and muthi use continues into the present and was prevalent during the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal during the 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, the paper will discuss the centrality of the use of muthi during the violence. I reason that izinyanga played a clandestine but powerful role in this violence. In this, they were at the core of the violence and of the rise of warlords to power in the region. In this paper, I will also present reasons (or offer recommendations) why historians should pay attention to these practices in the recent past, as well as in colonial times. For one thing, they are a means of understanding the present. However, in many ways, because of its reliance on oral histories and insider content, this paper is neither history nor ethnography, but could be described as historical ethnography.     

对华北地区旧石器两大文化传统的反思

贾兰坡先生提出华北地区旧石器存在分别以大型石器与小型石器为特征的两大文化传统.本文通过对华北地区主要的旧石器遗址和地点文化特征的总结分析,发现石料的分布和两大文化传统的分布是完全重合的.所以,这种大小石器的分布区域不是文化因素的结果,而是自然资源(石料)分布差异的结果.所谓华北旧石器两大文化传统,是在受到原料制约的情况下自然产生的文化面貌.     

Collaboration for Local Economic Development: Business Networks,Politics and Universities in Two Swedish Cities

In this article we want to show how conceptions about collaboration for local eocnomic development in Sweden are constructed on national and local levels. We also show how these conceptions have been realized in two different company networks; in the city of Östersund (“Odenskog företagsstaden”) and in the city of Karlskrona (“Telecom City”). In politics and research, local collaboration or cluster formation are viewed as important tools and levers for local economic development. However, we argue that the local labour markets and unemployment rates in our case studies do not differ significantly, despite very different strategies for collaboration. Therefore, we suspect that the political focus on collaboration is a way of legitimizing the change in regional policy rather than a delegation of real power to the local level. If this continues, we fear that the current regional policy is reduced to a discourse of popular concepts rather than a real instrument for local economic development.     

Two Vanished African Maritime Traditions and a Parallel from South America

Maritime traditions that extend along coastlines are more vulnerable to disruption and disappearance than areal trading networks. The paper describes two cases from Africa, the likely early movement of Bantu speakers down the coast of West Africa and the Swahili trading diaspora that reached southern Mozambique by at least the seventh century. Both of these have disappeared from the ethnographic and historical record but can be recovered through archaeology and linguistics. A parallel is made with the trade route that linked the coastal region of Peru and Ecuador with Western Mexico and may have been active from as early as 4,000 bp until the Spanish conquest. The hypothesis is that areal networks, such as those in island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, which are driven by colonisation and bidirectional exchange, are more likely to persist because they are more resilient due to the number of broken ‘links’ they can withstand. Linear expansions may be driven by a quest for trade and resources but are usually not necessary to survival.     

Courting Actresses and Exploring Love in Early Republican China

This article focuses on the early Republican theater as a popular site of experiments with love and discusses the significance of pengjue courtship between actresses and male patrons. It argues that while the literati still played a role in shaping theater patronage culture, employing the discourse of qing and the scholar-beauty romance, the popularization of pengjue enabled a more flirtatious mode of love that combined male homosociability and heterosexual desire. Male patrons’ courtship of actresses was marked by frivolity and performativity, as well as economic calculations. It deviated from the traditional ideal of qing and the New Culture notion of romantic love and thus aroused intense criticism from conservatives and reformists alike. However, this article argues that the practice of pengjue created an alternative affective sphere for performing gender, contesting social norms, and exploring new forms of love in the public space of commercial theater and in everyday life.     

Race and Gender in the United States of America

Books reviewed in this article: Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol Ann D. Gordon (ed.), The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti‐Slavery 1840‐1866 Ann D. Gordon with Bettye Collier‐Thomas, John H. Bracey, ArleneVoski Avakian and Joyce Avrech Berkman (eds), African AmericanWomen and the Vote 1837‐1965