Her Mirror,His Sword: Unbinding Binary Gender and Sex Assumptions in Iron Age British Mortuary Traditions

At the site of Hillside Farm, Bryher, on the Isles of Scilly, a materially rich single Iron Age inhumation was discovered containing the unsexable fragmented remains of one adult with a number of high-quality metal grave goods including an iron sword with a bronze scabbard and a bronze mirror. Swords and mirrors have long been considered high-status, oppositionally gendered grave goods that crosscut regional divisions in the pre-Roman British Iron Age (c. 800 B.C.–A.D. 43). Their combined presence within the burial of a single individual represents a touchstone within the ongoing unraveling of a long-held, interconnected set of reified binary sex and gender assumptions that have permeated discussions of British Iron Age mortuary contexts. In better recognizing this web of “binary binds,” we can deconstruct the a priori, exclusionary, interconnected sex and gender assumptions that configure how we investigate the terms of engagement between materials and persons in these burial contexts. Crucial to this analysis is an approach to patterning that (1) does not begin with a search for sex and gender as evidence of male and female dichotomies, (2) sees the potentiality for any component of a mortuary assemblage to have multiple points of significance, and (3) embraces data ambiguity. Developing such critical approaches will ultimately contribute to the deployment of more inclusive forms of analysis that do not reify sex and gender as the primary organizing principles within mortuary contexts, aiding scholars in avoiding assumptions that bind sex and gender analyses into artificially binary paradigms.     

Developing a Collaborative Strategy to Manage and Preserve Cultural Heritage During the Libyan Conflict. The Case of the Gebel Nāfusa

The paper discusses the potential of a collaborative scheme for the development of a protocol for recording and managing the cultural heritage in Libya. The critical political situation in the country urges the development of cultural heritage management policies in order to protect it more thoroughly and consistently. Moving on from the numerous international initiatives and projects dealing with a mostly “remote” approach to the issue, the project here presented to engages with staff members of the Department of Antiquities (DoA) in the development of a joint strategy for the application of remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) to the preservation and monitoring of Libyan cultural heritage. A series of training courses resulted in an initial development of new ways of recording and analysing field data for a better awareness of the full range of threats that the archaeology of the country is subject to. Focussing on the case of the Jebel Nafusa, the training involved the assessment of site visibility on satellite imagery, the analysis of high-resolution satellite datasets for archaeological mapping, the creation of a GIS spatial database of field data, and the mapping of risks and threats to archaeology from remote sensing data. This led to the creation of of a risk map showing the areas that are affected by a number of threats, thus giving the DoA a tool to prioritise future fieldwork to keep the assessment of site damage up to date. Only a collaborative approach can lead to a sustainable strategy for the protection of the invaluable cultural heritage of Libya.     

Fragmentation and forgetting: Sarajevo’s Vijećnica

In this article I argue that the crisis of common collective heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina is negatively affecting continued peace building processes in the country through an examination of the reconstruction of Sarajevo’s Austro-Hungarian city hall – the Vije?nica. Without a state-level ministry of culture, heritage that attests to a common cultural past uniting the three major ethno-religious groups in the country has suffered immeasurably, especially in comparison to ethnically specific cultural heritage. After the Second World War, the Vije?nica began to embody shared collective memories through its function as the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Nacionalna i Univerzitetska Biblioteka Bosne i Hercegovine). The building’s destruction during the Siege of Sarajevo cemented its place within the Bosnian psyche as a collective memory institution, but its reconstruction is transforming the discourses surrounding the building and the collective memories it embodies. By investigating the reconstruction process and the post-war separation of the National and University Library from the Vije?nica, I show that common collective heritage matters for peace building, and that in Sarajevo, the decay and neglect of such institutions not only mirror the splintering dynamics of ethno-religious nationalism, but also perpetuate them.     

Memory Mapping: Affect,Place, and Testimony in El Lugar Más Pequeño (2011)

This article examines the Salvadoran documentary El Lugar Más Pequeño (The Tiniest Place, 2011) and argues that the film gives new insight into the complicated spaces and practices of memory post-transition and post-conflict through a process I call ‘memory mapping,’ which I define as the aesthetic process of representing the affective, polyvocal, layered relationship between past, present, and place as experienced by individuals and the communities in which they live. Engaging primarily with affect and memory theory, I contend that the film maps post-conflict memory in two specific ways: first, through testimony, and second, through an exploration of the relationship between memory and place. Ultimately, I argue that memory mapping sheds new light on how the aftermath of conflict – the physical, but also the emotional ruination caused by violence – is negotiated in the everyday of human life.     

A statistical view for Chinese zooarchaeology: from the Neolithic to Pre-Han periods

More than 80 years have passed since zooarchaeology first began in China in the early 1930s. Currently, this discipline is one of the most active fields in Chinese archaeology, engaging with other sub-disciplines such as archaeogenetics, archaeobotany, and stable isotopic studies. But how did we end up like this? This paper explores this question by surveying existing zooarchaeological publications from the Neolithic to Pre-Han periods (c. 8000–202 bc). Results show that journals are the most popular publishing type, followed by archaeological reports. Postgraduate theses are also taken into account. With consideration of publication numbers, three chronological periods can be recognised. These phases are associated with political/social events of the twentieth century in China. While the majority of articles concern basic identification, there has been an increasing interest on human-animal interactions during recent years. In addition, while central China is the overwhelming focus of zooarchaeological research, some areas may have been overlooked.     

Sclerochronological analysis of archaeological mollusc assemblages: methods,applications and future prospects

Accreting skeletal tissues found in bone, teeth, otoliths and molluscan shell act as sensitive recorders of local environmental and climatic conditions. Owing to their robust nature, ubiquity and abundance in the archaeological record as well as the potential for high-resolution data acquisition, the accreting skeletal tissues of archaeological molluscs are increasingly employed as palaeoenvironmental proxies. Researchers have chiefly utilised such proxies to extend instrumental records of environmental conditions through palaeoenvironmental reconstruction and explore the impact of environmental and climatic change on human populations. However, the use of environmental proxies from the archaeological record can be hampered by a number of methodological challenges including inadequate sampling strategies, appropriate calibration, the use of inappropriate proxies and the broad extrapolation of localised results. This paper reviews the use of molluscan shell from archaeological contexts as palaeoenvironmental proxies. We focus on the application of sclerochronology—a suite of high-resolution physical and geochemical data recovery methods widely used in conjunction with molluscan shell. This paper presents an overview of the potential of these techniques in approaching more nuanced understandings of human-environment interactions and how they can be more successfully incorporated into archaeological research.