Extraordinary Creatures: The Role of Birds in Early Iron Age Slovenia

ABSTRACT

Depictions of birds are overrepresented in the Dolenjska Hallstatt culture, and appear on over a quarter of artefacts depicting animals. A wide variety of artefacts with birds have been found primarily in graves, and crosscut gender, status, and age. However, poor preservation of zooarchaeological remains has made reconstructions of lived human-bird interactions difficult. This study uses ecological and ethological data, combined with local imagery, to provide insight into prehistoric human-bird interfaces in this area, and the cultural conceptions surrounding these interactions. Birds would have been a constant presence in the lives of Dolenjska Hallstatt people; however, human relationships with them were based more on observation than direct interaction. Birds were ubiquitous in imagery, and it is proposed that this stemmed from Dolenjska Hallstatt conceptions of birds as important observers of human actions, ritual mediators, and possibly guides or guardians. Their differences from humans and other animals distinguished them – they were set apart, and depictions highlighted non-normative behaviours. Birds in the Dolenjska Hallstatt worldview were more than animals, ascribed extraordinary capabilities that made them ritually potent and richly symbolic creatures.     

The meaning of sedentism and mobility in an archaeological and historic context

Sedentism is a commonly used concept in settlement pattern analysis. In a recent review of this concept Rafferty (1985) found “sedentary” to be related to both settlement permanence and site size. Both space and time are fundamental aspects of sedentism. While maintaining permanence as a central factor, this paper discusses further aspects of sedentism primarily in relation to the use and meaning of space. A case study based on archaeological and historical materials on Sami and Norwegian settlements in arctic Norway is used as an illustration. In arctic Norway prehistoric maritime settlements have often been interpreted as being either transhumant or sedentary. The prehistoric case of sedentism is then viewed in relation to the historically known differences in settlement permanence in space and time for Norwegian and Sami populations in the same area of arctic Norway. It is proposed that models of sedentism should not only be based on ecological, economic, and adaptational considerations but should also include the importance of the meaning of place in the relationship between human populations and landscape.     

History, Time, and Knowledge in Ancient India

The lack of interest in history in ancient India has often been noted and contrasted with the situation in China and the West. Notwithstanding the vast body of Indian literature in other fields, there is a remarkable dearth of historical writing in the period before the Muslim conquest and an associated indifference to historiography. Various explanations have been offered for this curious phenomenon, some of which appeal to the supposed currency of certain Indian philosophical theories. This essay critically examines such "philosophical explanations."
I argue that it is not true that there was no history in ancient India, and it is not surprising that there was no developed historiography or scientific history. It is both true and surprising that there was no real importance attached to history in ancient India. An adequate philosophical exxplanation for this historica phenomenon, however, is not to be found in appeals to the influence of indigenous metaphysical theories about time and the self. A much more plausible philosophical explanation appeals instead to certain features of classical Indian epistemology.     

Sami Rights and Sami Challenges

In this article the authors analyse the conflict in contemporary Sami politics in Sweden. To understand this conflict a historical perspective is necessary, and the authors reconstruct the ideas and beliefs in the public debate that has legitimized a system of Sami rights over more than a century, and analyze the challenges to these by the Sami movement. Two parallel themes are discussed: the first deals with the continuity and change of the Swedish Sami policy, where the authors show how ideas and beliefs concerning the Sami have limited the possibilities of political action. The second theme focuses on the political mobilization of the Sami in Sweden and their challenges of the established view of the Sami in official policy. One of the conclusions made is that it is of importance to grant indigenous peoples, like the Sami, some kind of secure political platform from which they could participate in the democratic procedure and legitimately counter‐act the power of the nation states in which they live.     

The fruits of migration: Understanding the ‘longue dureé’ and the socio-economic relations of the Early Transcaucasian Culture

The appearance of the Early Transcaucasian Culture (ETC) across large portions of the Near East in the 3rd millennium BC is commonly cited as one of the best archaeologically documented and broadly studied cases of a prehistoric migration. This study uses the ETC to develop a model of what happens when migrants move into regions that are already inhabited by emerging or complex societies. In particular, this study focuses on how immigrant populations can integrate themselves into indigenous communities in a physical, socio-political and economic sense, and how a migrant group’s identity can be constructed and maintained alongside these indigenous communities.     

慈利白公城遗址出土木材种属的鉴定研究

慈利白公城遗址历史悠久,具有重要的考古价值。该遗址出土了大量木质井壁及少量其他木质文物,为了解这些木材的特点,以及为木材保护提供相关的参考,通过徒手切片,并利用光学显微镜对该遗址出土的10件木质样品进行鉴定。结果表明其中1件为无患子(Sapindus. mukorossi Gaertn.),1件为冷杉(Abies fabri(Mast.)Craib),2件为湖南杨桐(Adinandra. acutifolia Hand.-Mazz.),2件为香椿(Toona sinensis A. Juss.),4件为润楠(Machilus pingii Cheng ex Yang)。通过实验结果,初步推测井壁的制作在当时是比较重要的工作,此时已经在选择性地使用木质井壁原料。从树种适宜生长的环境上看,同时期该遗址附近可能是以阔叶材为主的针阔叶混交林,气候温暖湿润。     

Bodies in Motion: Narratives and Counter Narratives of Gendered Mobility in European Later Prehistory

Normative notions of sex and gender were prevalent in discussion of European prehistoric societies until the last quarter of the 20th century. The progressive work that challenged a binary approach, published particularly in the 1990s, created an anticipation for further nuanced interpretation. This paper argues that, in contrast to this expectation, there was a surprising return to narrating a past of binary sex and gender. Societal roles have continued to be imagined as formalised through structures based on biological sex, with men seen as active mobile agents, while women were passive and static homemakers. We argue that not only is this unhelpful, the archaeological evidence renders it incorrect. We highlight the inherent conflicts in the data to show that investigating sex and gender in the past is difficult with imperfect and complex archaeological evidence. It requires careful and deliberate consideration to avoid normative explanations. In conclusion, we propose that investigating mobility is a particularly effective topic for examining past gendered societal roles.     

Conflicts Over the Repatriation of Sami Cultural Heritage in Sweden

Abstract

More than 400 years of colonization and assimilation policy by the Nordic states has created a new situation for Sami culture. Over this long period the Sami heritage has become thoroughly marginalized, but today the more overt conflicts that we find elsewhere in the world between colonizing states and indigenous peoples have diminished. Such conflicts are, perhaps, more characteristic of an earlier stage of the colonial frontier, and they have been replaced by post-colonial forms of consensus. Despite the shared experiences of the Sami in their recent history, some important differences have emerged between Nordic states in how the Sami heritage is perceived and how it is managed. Much more than in Norway, the dominant attitudes of the Swedish state continue to echo the discriminatory attitudes of the past, but in a more restrained way. This continuity of attitudes is demonstrated here using examples of current policies and practices. Particularly in Sweden, there are continuing conflicts between nationalism and the Sami world view, but I argue that these old conflicts are no longer the main problem in Scandinavia. Instead, scholars, Sami leaders, and others concerned with heritage in the north are finding common cause in opposing what we might call the ‘wilderness assumptions’ of policy makers in the south, especially within the neo-liberal Swedish state. These assumptions have been reinforced by the restructuring of state finances, and they are now leading towards neglect of northern cultural heritage and its associated institutions, particularly museums. These assertions are supported using examples from various museums and through case studies of the repatriation of Sami cultural objects such as drums and siejdde-stones, and the continuing problems with Sami skeletal remains.     

“We are Reindeer People,We Come from Reindeer.” Reindeer Herding in Representations of the Sami in Russia

Abstract

Reindeer herding, a tourism emblem of the European North, is also part of a long-lasting tradition of objectification of Sami culture in Russia. Sustained in the popular imagination by Russian ethnography, the dominant order's agent for legitimization of Soviet ethnic policies, in the 1990s the tradition of exoticization and “othering” was strengthened by Western anthropological and political engagement with the indigenous debate in Russia, transposing on the Sami the imagery and ideals of the global indigenous movement. Business aspirations to utilize the persistent imagery of exotic otherness gave birth to ethnographic tourism in the Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia, which markets indigenous culture as an attraction. In this paper, I analyze how these diverse discourses equally reify and exploit the concept of Sami reindeer herding and the effects that such representational economy has on the community.     

The Siting of Medieval Castles and the Influence of Ancient Places

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the ways in which the siting of castles in England was influenced by the remains of monuments and landscapes from the prehistoric and Romano-British periods. It explores the character, distribution and scale of ancient monument reuse as evidenced through the archaeological and documentary record, in an attempt to discern patterns in peoples’ responses to monuments from the ancient past. It considers the ways in which these places were perceived by both the ruling elite and the local community: exploring how inherited landscapes were used in castle building to structure concepts of belonging, constituted through memory and genealogy. The conclusion is that ancient places were reused by castle builders from the 11th to the 14th century as part of an evolving narrative aimed at enhancing rights to people, place and power.     

Cultural Geography of American Foodways: An Annotated Bibliography

Despite recent interest in indigenous knowledge, few studies have linked it with indigenous beliefs system and its role in environmental stewardship. This link is important to cultural geographers interested in the study of small-scale cultural groups and how they relate to the environment. It also helps us understand the cultural dimensions of environmental stewardship and resource conservation. Based on a study of a monkey sanctuary in Ghana, West Africa, this paper argues that indigenous belief systems form an essential part of indigenous knowledge and that they can serve as a very effective tool for the protection of sacred groves and isolated patches of rainforests that have fallen victim to development as a result of increasing globalization, population pressures, and the spread of Christianity. The paper concludes that indigenous beliefs are not just a relic of the past but something that is needed today and may be needed in future for the conservation of natural resources in indigenous societies.     

Fish tanks of eastern Crete (Greece) as indicators of the Roman sea level

The ancient fish tanks and fish traps of Crete are relics of the Roman domination of the island; they were usually constructed near the major urban centers of that period. The direct relationship of their various functional characteristics with past sea levels and the relatively accurate determination of their construction dates establish them as sensitive indicators of sea level change through space and time.     

Land Tenure, Archaeology, and the Ancestral Pueblo Social Landscape

Archaeology relies upon evidence of past human modification of the natural landscape in order to infer past human social dynamics on the site, local, and regional levels. Given the inferential linkages between past landscape use and social relationships, archaeology can benefit from an approach that more explicitly delineates relationships between systems of land use and land tenure, the social means through which people define and assert land use rights. This research outlines a set of methods for modeling prehistoric land tenure systems and developing a middle range theory of land tenure relationships that may assist archaeologists in their investigations of prehistoric resource access systems. Land tenure systems are complex risk-buffering strategies that are conditioned by the labor invested in food production, the size of groups holding direct access to productive lands and resources, and the temporal duration of land access rights. The role of these variables is supported by cross-cultural data from a worldwide sample of food-producing societies. The land tenure model is applied to data from the prehistoric Southwest to help explain local and regional changes in food production, settlement size, and community organization in southwest Colorado between 900 and 1300 A.D.     

Accurate sex identification of ancient human remains using DNA shotgun sequencing

Accurate identification of the biological sex of ancient remains is vital for critically testing hypotheses about social structure in prehistoric societies. However, morphological methods are imprecise for juvenile individuals and fragmentary remains, and molecular methods that rely on particular sex-specific marker loci such as the amelogenin gene suffer from allelic dropout and sensitivity to modern contamination. Analyzing shotgun sequencing data from 14 present-day humans of known biological sex and 16 ancient individuals from a time span of 100 to ∼70,000 years ago, we show that even relatively sparse shotgun sequencing (about 100,000 human sequences) can be used to reliably identify chromosomal sex simply by considering the ratio of sequences aligning to the X and Y chromosomes, and highlight two examples where the genetic assignments indicate morphological misassignment. Furthermore, we show that accurate sex identification of highly degraded remains can be performed in the presence of substantial amounts of present-day contamination by utilizing the signature of cytosine deamination, a characteristic feature of ancient DNA.     

Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time

This article investigates the differential structure and representation of time in memory and history. It examines two moments in Jewish historical thought—in the Middle Ages, and in works written within and after the Holocaust—and demonstrates the fundamentally liturgical nature of Jewish historical memory in selected texts from these two periods. Following the groundbreaking work of Yerushalmi, it seeks to demonstrate that for Jews, historical experience is incorporated into the cyclical reenactment of paradigmatic events in Jewish sacred ritual. Recent or contemporary experiences acquire meaning only insofar as they can be subsumed within Biblical categories of events and their interpretation bequeathed to the community through the medium of Scripture, that is to say, only insofar as they can be transfigured, ritually and liturgically, into repetitions and reenactments of ancient happening. In such liturgical commemoration, the past exists only by means of recitation; the fundamental goal of such recitation is to make it live again in the present, to fuse past and present, chanter and hearer, into a single collective entity. History, in the sense that we understand it to consist of unique events unfolding within irreversible linear time, is absorbed into cyclical, liturgical memory.
This article argues that the question of Jewish history—both medieval and post-Holocaust—poses in a compelling fashion the question of the relationship between memory and history more generally, and serves to contest the current tendency in academic historiography to collapse history into memory. It claims that to the extent that memory "resurrects,""re-cycles," and makes the past "reappear" and live again in the present, it cannot perform historically, since it refuses to keep the past in the past, to draw the line, as it were, that is constitutive of the modern enterprise of historiography.     

Past or present? Differentiating California prehistoric native American remains from forensic cases: An empirical approach

The goal of this project is to provide additional data and statistical analyses for differentiating between prehistoric/historic Native American remains and modern forensic cases that may be potentially confusing. Forensic anthropologists often receive requests from local law enforcement to infer whether skeletal remains are of forensic or non‐forensic significance. Skeletal remains of non‐forensic significance are commonly of Native American ancestry, but the empirical methods common for determining Native American affinity from skeletal remains have not been established for California prehistoric/historic Native Americans. Therefore, forensic anthropologists working in California lack empirical methods for not only identifying prehistoric California Native American remains, but also differentiating them from modern/forensic populations whose skeletal attributes are similar. In particular, skeletal remains of Latin American US immigrants of indigenous origins are becoming more present in the forensic anthropological laboratory, and can exhibit the same suite of skeletal traits classically used to identify Native American affinity. In this article, we initiate an investigation into this issue by analyzing both craniometric and morphoscopic data using a range of statistical methods for differentiating prehistoric Northern California Native Americans from modern Guatemalan Maya. Our discriminant analyses results indicate that by using nine craniometric variables, group classification is 87% correct. In addition, seven morphoscopic variables can predict group classification correctly for 77% of the sample. The results suggest that it is possible to differentiate between our two samples. Such a method contributes to the efficient and empirical determination of temporal and geographic affinity, allowing for the repartriation of Native American remains to their tribes, as well as the accurate analysis of forensically significant remains. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Confrontation and conciliation: the sami,the crown and the court in seventeenth-century swedish lapland1

This article aims to discover in what kind of legal cases conflicts may be traced between the Sami and representatives of the Crown, and in which situations conciliation is apparent; and it also answers the questions of how and why this happened. It is evident, from the court rolls from the court district of Jukkasjärvi (one of the two northernmost lappmarker in Sweden at this time), that the Crown prosecuted the Sami for sexual offences and crimes against religion. This was due to the prevailing ideology of the seventeenth century, in which Lutheran Christianity prevailed, and because the court was the arena for a power discourse: there was a “right” way to live and behave. This came into conflict with Sami tradition. The Sami themselves pursued a desire and need for conciliation, which becomes apparent in cases of crimes such as murder, manslaughter and grand theft, but also in civil cases, e.g. inheritance. This was due to the fact that the population was quite small, bound together in different relations, and because large-scale conflicts were not beneficial to Sami communities. Even though the Crown Court was an arena of power, it was also used by the Sami for their own ends, and thus we can see an interactive Sami society, independent of the prevailing political Lutheran Christian ideology and its discourse.     

PERISHABLES AND WORLDLY GOODS — ARTIFACT DECORATION AND CLASSIFICATION IN THE LIGHT OF WETLANDS RESEARCH

Summary. Archaeology has long operated from the premise that there was a diverse and ornate organic 'clothing' on the 'dry skeleton' of the past which evades excavation. This paper evaluates the evidence from recent wetlands excavations and considers the implications of the paucity of organic containers found, and the lack of decoration on recovered organic materials, in Britain. It is argued that this negative evidence has important ramifications for our understanding of production and the classification of 'things' in later prehistoric societies. These issues can obviously not be addressed without considering the wealth of organic artifacts recovered at Glastonbury and an extended discussion of its material culture assemblage is included. In conclusion it is stressed that by its relative invisibility 'organic archaeology' has been prone to our normative projections onto the past. The role played by organic goods cannot be understood as being constant and can only be appreciated within their broader archaeological context.     

传统建筑泥灰类加固材料的性能研究与机理探讨

人们已经发现一些古建筑所使用的传统材料具有较好的加固作用,其耐久性、强度、与建筑本体的和谐、以及与环境的友好等方面都具有突出的优点。但是由于当时科学技术水平的限制,以及天然材料混合物本身的复杂性,这些传统材料的加固机理一直未被人们充分认识。为了利用和发展传统材料的优势并为古建筑和文物保护服务,本工作选择最具中国特色的以石灰等无机材料为基料,以糯米浆和蛋清等天然生物材料为配料的古代建筑灰浆配方和三合土配方,开展了一系列加固性能研究,并且结合现代SEM和XRD分析仪器,对一些典型的样品进行了微观结构和形貌分析。结果发现,这些古代配方具有现代复合材料的某些特点,即通过无机/有机相互协同的效应,达到了较好的加固效果;重要的是发现糯米浆具有一定的生物矿化的模板作用,即糯米浆的生物大分子对碳酸钙的结晶和生长起到了调控作用,使方解石结晶体的大小和形貌具有一定程度的有序性。本研究为传统材料进一步科学地应用于古建筑和石质文物的修复加固提供了新的思路。