A third millennium kiln from the Oman Peninsula

In 1970–71 a pottery kiln was excavated by a Danish expedition led by K. Frifelt at Hili in what is now part of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. The kiln and its contents, which date from the second half of the third millennium BC, are important additions to our knowledge of prehistoric ceramic production in the Oman Peninsula.     

Supply routes and the consumption of glass in first millennium CE Butrint (Albania)

Archaeological, historical and analytical evidence can identify trade patterns and the movement of people and products and thus reveal the cultural and economic connections that existed at a given time. In the case of first millennium CE glass, the manufacture of raw glass in a limited number of glass making installations with unique compositional characteristics makes it possible to trace the likely origin of the raw materials at consumption sites. In this way the analytical characterisation of a large corpus of glass finds can identify changes in the supply routes of high-end industrial products from the Roman to the middle Byzantine period.     

In the beginning: Marhashi and the origins of Magan's ceramic industry in the third millennium BC

Ceramics from the Jiroft plain in southeastern Iran are compared with material of Umm an-Nar-type dating to the mid- and late third millennium BC in the Oman Peninsula. Technological and stylistic comparisons suggest the strong possibility that potters from the Iranian side of the Straits of Hormuz may have been the instigators of Magan's earliest ceramic industry.     

The Wadi al‐Hijr (Sultanate of Oman) in the third millennium BC

In 2010–11 a pedestrian survey of the western end of Wadi al‐Hijr in northern Oman identified 1507 archaeological features in a 124 km² area. Data were collected on each feature's architectural characteristics, associated artefact assemblages, topographic and environmental locations, condition of remains, and relations to other archaeological features. The majority of datable features belong to the third millennium BC and divide unequally between the Hafit and Umm an‐Nar periods. While the majority of these third‐millennium BC features were tombs, other feature types were identified, including towers, settlements, quarries, dams, enclosures, and possible platforms. Third‐millennium BC features were organised into clusters and ranged considerably in size, from a few features to several hundred. All of the clusters established during the Hafit period were maintained in the Umm an‐Nar period, suggesting a continuity throughout the third millennium. Some preliminary hypotheses regarding settlement patterns are suggested.     

Fridtjof Nansen and the Aegean population exchange

This article examines Fridtjof Nansen’s role in elaborating the compulsory Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923–1924. Thrust into a spiralling crisis, the League’s High Commissioner took on humanitarian, representational and negotiating roles having long-term as well as immediate impact, while the Norwegian’s emergence at Lausanne as chief spokesman for an agreement widely considered reprehensible invites scrutiny of his interventions. Drawing on recent publications and key archival sources, the analysis presses four strands of argument. First, while Nansen helped articulate the exchange idea along with Greece’s Eleftherios Venizelos, he neither originated it nor provided the essential political impetus. Second, Nansen’s oft-cited ‘first mention’ of making it compulsory assigns him a misleadingly strong role in a solution chiefly engineered by Kemal’s Turkey. Third, his impact on the agreement’s scope, involving exemptions for minority populations in Western Thrace and Constantinople, was limited. Fourth, Nansen’s ultimate push for a lasting settlement blended pragmatism with strategic vision. Subsequent delays and wider political failure not of his making to secure equitable property exchange highlighted the harsher aspects of a deal all the main parties in fact favoured, Nansen recognized as necessary and which thwarted a still worse calamity.     

Searching for Ancient Shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea: the Discovery of Chios and Kythnos Hellenistic Wrecks with the Use of Marine Geological-Geophysical Methods

This paper presents the results of two deep-water archaeological surveys recently conducted in the Aegean Sea, and the advantages of using conventional marine geological techniques in deep-water archaeology. Two Hellenistic wrecks were discovered: one in the Chios-Oinousses strait at 70 m, was a concentration of over 400 amphoras in a 1.5-m-high, high-backscattering, morphological high; the second, west of Kythnos island, at 495 m, consisted of a few amphoras scattered in a 20 × 20-m-wide area. Side-scan sonar was integrated with high-resolution sub-bottom profiling, and the integration of the two data-sets proved to contribute significantly to realistic interpretation of the sonar targets.
© 2007 The Authors     

The Origin and Archaeometallurgy of a Mixed Sulphide Ore for Copper Production on the Island of Kea,Aegean Sea,Greece

At the hill of Agios Symeon, on the island of Kea, Aegean Sea, Greece, ancient metallurgical slags with a high Pb–Zn–Cu content have been found. Thermodynamic simulations have been carried out, using the FactSage? thermodynamic database computing system, with a view to understanding the ancient metallurgical processes that produced the observed slag compositions and morphologies. The simulations demonstrate that the slag samples resulted from Cu‐making processes. It would thus appear that mixed ores were used, containing Cu₂S–FeS–PbS with significant amounts of sphalerite (ZnS) as impurity. The roasted ores were reduced at relatively high oxygen potentials at ～1125°C to form Cu containing low levels of Pb, Fe and Zn.     

Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic Coastlines of Greece and the Aegean

Abstract

Reconstructions of the late Quaternary paleogeography of Greece and the Aegean show that at 18,000 years B.P. the northern Aegean and northern Adriatic formed large coastal plains traversed by many rivers. Broad plains also existed off the coast of Elis and the present Gulf of Korinth, and along the Anatolian coast. Many islands, such as Kerkira, Euboea, and the northern Sporadhes, were connected with the mainland, and most of the Cycladic islands were joined together in a Cycladic semi-peninsula. The post-glacial rise of sea level beginning ca. 15,000 B.P. restored around 9,000 B.P. the coastal geography to approximately its present configuration. The late Quaternary paleogeography and its subsequent changes have many archeological implications that are worth serious consideration. The well-watered northern coastal plains may have furnished subsistence for a plains population quite independent of the resources of the northern mountain regions, and they constituted easy access to the Greek peninsula from the NE and NW. Loss of coastal plain land during the post-glacial rise of sea level drastically changed the resource base in many areas. The island of Melos, known source of obsidian for toolmaking since at least 10,000 B.P., may have been discovered considerably earlier when access to the island was largely over land.     

Vegetation,land, and wood use at the sites of Bat and Al‐Khashbah in Oman (fourth–third millennium BC)

About 4200 charcoal fragments have been identified from the fourth‐ to third‐millennium BC archaeological sites of Bat and Al‐Khashbah in order to gain an understanding of plant resources available at the sites. Acacia sp., Ziziphus sp., and Tamarix sp. were the main taxa identified at both sites and indicate a similar vegetation composition as today. Phoenix sp. (date palm) charcoal also has been found at both sites. Whereas the cultivation of date palm for the 2700–2300 BC layers from Bat was likely, given other circumstantial evidence (i.e. local cereal cultivation and floodwater irrigation), it is unclear whether date palm was cultivated at Al‐Khashbah. Especially for the older periods (3300–2700 BC) it is possible that nomadic pastoralists were exploiting and/or managing wild date palms. The find of Avicennia marina at Al‐Khashbah indicates long‐distance contacts with the coast.     

Critical GIScience in Canada in the new millennium

Critical GIS (CGIS) is an approach to evaluating GIS technology that draws upon multiple intellectual tool kits—from geography, social theory and computing science. While its roots are in the battles between human geographers and GIScientists in the 1990s, CGIS has emerged as an independent, constructive approach to enhancing the power and appeal of GIS. CGIS is also beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate component of the broad tent that is GIScience. This short article reviews the emergence of CGIS, discusses its influence on the discipline of GIScience and finally explores the state of CGIS in Canada.     

Dendroarchaeology of the mid-first millennium AD in Constantinople

The 1st millennium AD was a time of great transition in Europe and the Mediterranean. At the heart of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) was a pivotal trade hub for the Aegean region. Establishing a precise and accurate dating framework for the development of this remarkable city and a chronological reference for this critical time period for the Mediterranean region is of great importance to a wide range of scholars. Here we present a new 213 year tree-ring record from 89 oak samples placed in time by dendrochronology and supported by radiocarbon analysis and historical documentation. It represents the middle of the first millennium AD in Constantinople. The tree-ring series are derived from pilings recovered from the extraordinary excavations of the so-called “Theodosian harbor” at Yenikap?, Istanbul, along with timbers from other sites and buildings around the city, including one of the most famous sites on the Istanbul sky-line—Hagia Sophia. They provide potential for new insight into a time period in which earthquakes, the Justinianic plague, and even a possible tsunami struck the city, and during which dramatic changes in climate have been recorded in other paleoenvironmental proxies. The chronology is the first published tree-ring series from the Aegean region to cover the ‘event’ years of AD 536–7 and 542 which are characterized by anomalous growth in other tree-ring series from around the world, but interestingly these event years are not evident in this tree-ring sequence.     

Canadian economic geography at the millennium

Over the last quarter of a century the Canadian economy experienced a series of profound changes which have affected every level of society. They include new forms of flexible production, fundamental changes in regulation at all spatial scales, structural shifts away from manufacturing towards service sector activities, the rise of information technology (IT) and computerization at the workplace, the feminization of the labour market, and, what has become the leitmotif of the age, globalization. Such changes are intimately connected with geography. By that we mean not merely that they take on a geographical form, but that geography is pan of their very constitution. In this sense Canadian economic geographers are exactly in the right time and the right place to make use of their skills. Indeed, over the last five years there has been an explosion of literature by Canadian economic geographers on precisely these kinds of changes that are simultaneously both economic and geographical. In reviewing that literature the paper begins by situating Canada within its wider global setting, which we then follow by surveying the diverse writing around the three broad sectors that make‐up the Canadian economy: the resource sector, the manufacturing sector, and the service sector. We conclude by highlighting two particular research themes within Canadian economic geography that have become especially germane over the late 1990s. The first is on new labour markets and forms of work both of which have been transformed during the last decade; and the second is on new forms of industrial innovation, which are clearly pivotal to the future well‐being of the country for the next millennium. Au cours des vingt‐cinq dernières années, l'économie canadienne a connu une série, de changements profonds qui ont affecté toutes les couches de la société. Ces changements comprennent les nouvelles formes de production flexible, les changements fondamentaux dans la réglementation à toutes les échelles spatiales, la mutation structurelle du secteur industriel au secteur tertiaire, la montée de la technologie de l'information (Tl) et l'informatisation sur le lieu de travail, la présence plus importante des femmes sur le marché du travail, et, ce qui est devenu le leitmotiv de notre époque, la mondialisation. De tels changements sont intimement liés à la geographie. Par la, nous ne disons pas simplement qu'ils prennent une forme géographique, mais que la géographie fait partie intégrante de leur constitution. Dans ce sens, les géographes‐économistes canadiens arrivent, si l'on peut dire, au bon endroit au bon moment pour mettre leurs connaissances à profit. En effet, on assiste depuis les cinq dernières années à une recrudescence impressionnante des travaux de géographes‐économistes canadiens portant, précisément, sur ces types de changements qui sont à la fois économiques et géographiques. En faisant le compte‐rendu de cette littérature scientifique, cet article situe d'abord le Canada dans son contexte mondial plus large, passe ensuite en revue ce qui a étéécrit au sujet des trois grands secteurs qui forment l'économie canadienne: les secteurs primaire, secondaire et tertiaire. Nous concluons en mettant en relief deux thèmes de recherches de la géographie économique canadienne qui sont devenus particulièrement pertinents depuis la fin des années 1990. Le premier traite des nouveaux marchés du travail et des nouvelles formes de travail, qui ont tous deux subi des transformations au cours de la dernière décennie. Le second traite des nouvelles formes d'innovation industrielle, qui sont cruciales pour le bien‐être futur du pays à l'aube du nouveau millénaire.     

The Economics of Saltfish Production in the Aegean During the Classical and Hellenistic Periods

Despite a dearth of literary and archaeological evidence for the commercial production of salted fish or fish sauces in the Aegean during the Classical and Hellenistic periods it has been argued, based on a variety of proximate data, that such production must have been common. This paper suggests those arguments are probably wrong. It argues first that the absence of archaeological evidence for regional Aegean production and trade is itself not necessarily meaningful since a similar absence exists for the Black Sea region during the Classical and Hellenistic periods when commercial production and trade is otherwise well attested; in the Black Sea the most common varieties of saltfish were produced without the use of permanent installations such as salting vats and shipped not in amphoras but in large baskets, thereby leaving little trace in the archaeological record. Evidence for regional Aegean production is also, however, largely absent from the literary and epigraphic sources where a number of key pieces of evidence have been misinterpreted. The evidence suggests instead that commercial catches even of species well suited for preservation would have been marketed fresh. This can be explained in part by the fact that in the Aegean different environmental constraints obtained. More importantly, institutional factors often would have made the commercial production and trade of salted fish and fish sauces uneconomical. Even where local conditions of glut periodically prevailed the possibility of household production may have prevented the development of commercial production on any meaningful scale.