Henri Kowalski (1841–1916): A French Musician in Colonial Australia

French virtuoso pianist and composer Henri Kowalski visited Australia in 1880 and then returned in 1885 when he settled in Sydney for twelve years. This article explores his introduction of French repertoire, institutional practices and musical instruments to colonial Sydney. It demonstrates that for a short period at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a much stronger French presence in musical life in Australia than has previously been acknowledged.     

New World Paleoethnobotany in the New Millennium (2000–2013)

This article evaluates the current state of paleoethnobotany since Hastorf’s 1999 review published in this journal. We discuss advances in methods, ancient subsistence reconstructions, the origins and intensification of agriculture, and how plants inform on issues of political economy and identity. Significant methodological developments in the extraction, identification, and analysis of starch grains and phytoliths have led to advancements in our knowledge of early plant domestication and the transition to food production. Paleoethnobotanists increasingly are using more complex quantitative techniques to characterize their data, which have resulted in more nuanced interpretations of plants that fall within the purview of social archaeology and allow us to address issues related to gender, identity, and ritual practice.     

Humanists and Travellers,Gorgons and Gorillas: Hanno the Navigator's Periplus and Early Modern Geography (1530–1630)

This article is concerned with early modern interpretations of Hanno the Navigator's Periplus, an ancient travel account of a Carthaginian voyage down the coasts of Africa. The early modern period saw a rise in interest in geographical knowledge, and the ways in which different authors used Hanno's voyage reflects their understanding of the role of geography in conceptualising the world. In these discussions, writers had to negotiate between the confusing portrayals of the voyage in the received classical tradition and new reports brought by voyages of exploration. Here, I will discuss how these syntheses between humanist methods and contemporary travellers' accounts were shaped by the economic and political concerns tied to the first wave of European overseas expansion. Amid this climate, ancient geographical knowledge found pragmatic applications in contemporary issues of navigation, commerce and claims of territorial possession, as well as shaping European perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘the other’. This paper thus seeks to situate humanist practices and classical knowledge within the wider context of overseas voyages and early modern political and economic developments.     

Popular and prevalent: Asian trade goods in northern New Spain, 1590–1850

Much previous scholarship has assumed that Pacific trade goods were generally restricted to the urban centers of colonial Latin America and had little influence on the culture of interior provinces. Documentary and archeological records from remote areas of northern New Spain indicate otherwise and may serve as an example of the range of Asian trade goods elsewhere in colonial Latin America. This essay focuses upon Parral and New Mexico, showing that Asian goods-especially porcelain and textiles-reached some of the most remote areas of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Throughout the colonial era, the desire to establish and maintain a sophisticated lifestyle on the periphery seems to have been operative, with imported Asian goods as signifiers of status and prestige. Although fewer imported Asian goods may have been available in the remote northern regions than in urban areas, archeological and documentary evidence indicates their quality was equal to that of the metropoles, suggesting that daily life on the northern frontier was not as poor and isolated as previously assumed, but rather, actively participated in the international trade of the times.     

Seeking Horses: Allies,Clients and Exchanges in the Zhou Period (1045–221 BC)

Journal of World Prehistory - Horses and chariots—and the associated technology and expertise—derived from the steppe contributed to the success of the Zhou conquest of the Shang in c....     

Who's “That Girl”: British, South African, and American Women as Africanist Archaeologists in Colonial Africa (1860s–1960s)

This paper reviews the accomplishments of British, South African, and American women Africanist archaeologists who worked between the 1860s and the 1960s. Despite their many significant contributions to African archaeological method and theory, especially those exposing the importance of indigenous populations to their own cultural development, the work of these women tends to be either appropriated or ignored by their contemporaries and by present day archaeologists. A postcolonial feminist analysis draws on the colonial context in which African archaeology developed and the continued Western domination of the discipline to provide a background for understanding how and why these women are omitted from historiographies of African archaeology.Cette étude revise les accomplissements des femmes archéologues Africanistes anglaises, sudafricaines et Americaines, qui travaillaient entre les années 1860 et les années 1960. Malgré leurs plusieurs contributions d'importance à la méthode et la théorie de l'archéologie Africaine, en particulier celles qui exposaient l'importance à leur propre développement culturel des populations indigènes, leurs travaux tendent à être ou appropriés ou ignorés par leurs contemporains ou par les archaéologues d'aujourd'hui. Une analyse féministe post-coloniale utilise le contexte colonial dans lequel l'archéologie Africaine s'est développée, et la domination occidentale soutenue de cette discipline, à fournir une base pour comprendre comment et pourquoi ces femmes ont éeté omises des historiographies de l'archéologie Africaine.     

A Review of “Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898–1939, and A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early Twentieth Century Erotica in Spain”

Abstract

Christopher Rivers. Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux, Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. xii + 275 pp.

Brian T. Fitch. The Fall: A Matter of Guilt. (Twayne's Masterwork Studies.) New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. xii + 136 pp.     

A Communist Party in New Caledonia (1941–1948)

During and immediately after the Second World War, in common with all French colonies, New Caledonia experienced intense political upheaval. It is little known that both the political awakening of the native people and the successful questioning of colonial authority by immigrant Asian workers had their origins in a political movement with communist sympathies. Led by strong and colour personalities - Jeanne Tunica y Casas, Florindo Paladini, Vincent Bouquet, Henri Naisseline, Henri Lemonnier - the Caledonian Communist Party, which had regular contacts with its Australian and French counterparts, knew how to present the first Kanak political claims and to set up an embryonic political organisation by and for Kanaks. The present article recounts this forgotten page of New Caledonian history: forgotton because the Christian missions, allied with the colonial administration, were quick to nip in the bud what appeared to be too radical a questioning of the established order.     

Phoenician–Punic amphorae in northern coastal Etruria: New evidence from Pisa (Italy)

This study outlines the circulation of Phoenician–Punic amphorae in northern coastal Etruria, with a particular focus on Pisa (Italy), where their presence has been attested since the mid-eighth century BCE. A set of specimens from Piazza del Duomo was analysed by minero-petrographic and geochemical techniques. The results were compared with literature data from Mediterranean production areas. The research allowed a better definition of the role of Etruscan Pisa in the frame of commercial and cultural routes in the Mediterranean, specifically in the Tyrrhenian area, also providing the opportunity to review the attestations of Phoenician–Punic amphora on a regional scale.     

Colonial Dreams and Nightmares: British and French Perceptions of Republican Policies in Spanish Morocco (1931–1936)

Historians’ continuing interest in the origins of the Spanish Civil War has recently extended to the colonial policies of the Spanish Second Republic in Morocco, a relatively unexplored issue in previous decades, which has informed new approaches to the military uprising of July 1936. Foreign sources and archives, however, have been generally overlooked in this context. This article claims that British and French delegates in Morocco made critical observations about republican reforms in Spanish Morocco, which have much to add to this debate. They raised questions regarding the continuity of republican policies in Morocco and the anti-republican attitudes within the Army of Africa. They also challenged conventional knowledge concerning the difficulties encountered by alternative colonial projects in Morocco. In the end, their reports not only questioned metropolitan options but also anticipated the attitudes of the British and French governments, vis-à-vis the military rebellion.     

Scenarios of Poiesis: Italian New Media (1994–2004)

This essay attempts to read a number of interventions in Italian new media over the last decade as both a response to and an implicit critique of posthumanism. After a brief discussion of the principal terms in question—new media, interaction, and posthumanism—and a survey of the most important contributors to the discourse of posthumanism in Italy, the essay maps the principal features of Italian media as embodied by the works of three contemporary new media artists. These characteristics include the privileging of a prosthetic model for understanding interaction and more generally the staging of interaction as moments of poiesis. They also include more recently the cancellation of the boundaries between ‘scientific’ and cultural images. The essay insists that by foregrounding the primacy of Italian cultural patterns for determining how meaning is generated in new media, Italian new media artists implicitly critique a reifying tendency among posthuman observers in Italy. The essay concludes with a broad assessment of the importance of poiesis for an Italian technological imaginary.     

Mera chimaera: the Reformed and conformist ecclesiology of John Prideaux (1578–1650)

Starting from a dramatic confrontation between Heylyn and Prideaux at the 1633 Oxford Act, this article analyses Prideaux’s views on the nature, authority, and polity of the Church. Unlike Heylyn, Prideaux has not been the subject of significant study and this article aims to fill that gap. It argues that by emphasising election, invisibility, and synodical authority, Prideaux’s ecclesiology offered a rejoinder to what some Laudians had begun to say about the Church. It establishes that Prideaux consistently demonstrated his loyalty to the established polity of the English Church, defending Episcopacy as iure divino and celebrating the liturgical provisions of the Prayer Book, long before they came under threat during the 1640s. The article also examines Prideaux’s Anti-Puritanism, showing him to be more open than Sanderson to the idea of a moderate Puritan. Given Prideaux’s acknowledged significance, this article significantly enriches our picture of Early Stuart Conformity.