Resilient Social Actors in the Transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age on Cyprus

Journal of World Prehistory - Our understanding of the earliest Iron Age on Cyprus has long remained somewhat obscure. This is the result of both a relative lack of material evidence and the fact...     

Rethinking Middle Bronze Age Communities on Cyprus: “Egalitarian” and Isolated or Complex and Interconnected?

Current views of Cyprus during the Middle Bronze Age (or Middle Cypriot period) depict an island largely isolated from the wider eastern Mediterranean world and comprised largely if not exclusively of “egalitarian,” agropastoral communities. In this respect, its economy stands at odds with those of polities in other, nearby regions such as the Levant, or Crete in the Aegean. The publication of new excavations and new readings of legacy data necessitate modification of earlier views about Cyprus’s political economy during the Middle Bronze Age, prompting this review. We discuss at some length the island’s settlement and mortuary records, materials related to internal production, external exchange and connectivities, and the earliest of the much discussed but still enigmatic fortifications. We suggest that Middle Bronze Age communities are likely to have been significantly more complex, mobile, and interconnected than once envisaged and that the changes that mark the closing years of this period and the transition to the internationalism of Late Bronze Age Cyprus represent the culmination of an evolving series of internal developments and external interactions.

     

Scientific Discourse and Local Discourses: The Case of African Archaeology

To the extent that knowledge is the product of a complex construction of Nature-Culture facts more or less perpetuated, the challenge, for archaeology as science discovering and explaining the pasts for developees, is to learn how to manage: (1) its scientific “facts” more or less stabilized or hardened in function of precise, reproducible, universal “buildings of facts,” these facts being combined in networks and allied to specific societal facts, according to a dichotomy between Nature and Culture positioned as incommunicable poles of the world, and (2) traditional, ordinary, daily “facts,” local, contextual“facts” encountered during our activities, publications, lectures, and exchanges with everybody. These facts link approximately or unconsciously Nature and Culture, two poles we moderns have created and separated ontologically. How to produce a legitimate cooperation between these two conflicting discourses during the applications and the improvement of the processes which form, even in the case of archaeology, what is currently termed “development.”Pour l’archéologie en tant que science découvrant et expliquant les passés des peuples en voie de développement, le savoir étant le produit, selon les cultures, de fabrications complexes de faits de Nature-Culture plus ou moins pérennisés, le défi consiste à apprendre à gérer ensemble: (1) ses “faits” scientifiques, plus ou moins stabilisés ou durcis selon des “mises en fait” précises, répétables, universelles, ces faits étant établis en réseau et alliés à tel ou tel secteur de la société en question selon une dichotomie établissant la Nature et la Culture comme pôles incommunicants du monde; et (2) les “faits” de savoirs traditionnels, ordinaires, quotidiens, faits locaux, contextuels rencontrés durant nos activités, publications, cours et échanges avec tout le monde. Ces faits lient approximativement ou inconsciemment la Nature et la Culture, ces deux pôles que nous, modernes, avons créés et ontologiquement séparés. Comment légitimement, même en Archéologie, faire collaborer ces deux discours, en conflit lors des applications et améliorations des processus relevant de qu’on appelle couramment le Développement?     

On the typology of the texts that appear on migration‐era bracteates

Historiographically, the main tradition of interpreting the Old Germanic bracteates has been that developed by Karl Hauck in the late 1960s. Much contested by critics, Hauck's bracteate iconology has also influenced the way the runic legends that appear on the golden amulets are understood in much continental scholarship. This paper presents an alternative interpretation of such testimonies of early Nordic language based on a less‐ambitious approach to the decoration and associated epigraphy of the controversial migration‐period finds, grounding its analysis in a more explicitly theorized linguistic and semiotic hermeneutics.     

Harmony and Melody in Discourse on European Cohesion

From a corpus constituted by the five Cohesion Reports written by the European Commission, the article, using the methods of textual analysis, highlights the production of a European discourse on the territories participating to a process of institutionalization. Thus, starting from various authors analyses who validate the idea of institutionalization, the authors propose here to further explore this idea, using a method based on a lexical analysis software. The aim is then, on the one hand, to assess the extent to which the discourse of the Commission has elements of stability to justify the idea of institutionalization or, in the other hand, the elements of change over time that could compromise the very idea of institutionalization. The authors present the following results: the Commission discourse has important features of stability. Nevertheless, beyond this finding, there are changes at work. Their expression is rendered possible by the polysemy of the notions mobilized, and they are driven partly by a “rational” representation, but above all by the interplay of the succession of tensions and mind-shaping contexts in the construction of Europe.     

Unexpected Wind Power ‘Potentials’: The Art of Planning with Inherited Socio-Geographical Configurations (France)

Abstract

The deployment of wind power induces deep changes in landscapes and territories. The politicization of wind power generates new ad hoc collectives. In the French case, because of the institutional framing resulting from landscape and wind power policies (centralization, feed-in tariffs, private developers), collectives of emerging wind power landscapes are regularly set apart from wind power planning processes. This paper explores the extent to which these recompositions and new collectives could be part of emerging wind power potentials. The empirical evidence stemming from our case studies shows that wind power technology, like any other technology, is not endowed with a potential per se. Wind power potentials differ – ‘capitalistic’, ‘controversial’, ‘negotiated’, ‘conditional’ – depending on planning processes and inherited configurations. The notions of striated space and smooth space enable us to adopt a relational perspective on these emerging collectives and to account for the role of inherited socio-geographical configurations and planning processes.     

Does size matter? Foreign aid in Taiwan's diplomatic strategy, 2000–8

This article is the first systematic attempt at estimating the size of Taiwanese foreign aid and, thus, the cost of Taiwan's aid diplomacy. It questions the Republic of China (ROC) President Ma Ying-jeou's justification of his ‘diplomatic truce’ with China as necessitated by an ineffectiveness of his predecessor Chen Shui-bian's costly aid diplomacy. Deriving its evidence from the ROC governmental budgets, local media reports and interviews with Taiwanese officials involved in foreign aid implementation, the article argues that President Chen did not engage in ‘generous financial aid’ and proposes that this parsimony, rather than futility of aid diplomacy as a strategy to expand Taiwan's international space, should be considered as contributing to Taipei's diplomatic failures from 2000 to 2008.     

A tale of two sites: Functional site differentiation and lithic technology during the Late Pithouse period in the Mimbres area of Southwestern New Mexico

The raw materials from which stone tools are made can provide considerable information relevant to behavioral variation within a prehistoric population. By examining the stone used for tools from two different types of Late Pithouse period (A.D. 550-1000) residential sites from the Mimbres Mogollon area of Southwestern New Mexico, this paper illustrates how understanding the lithic landscape of a region provides a means to assess behavioral variation in stone procurement practices. The analysis indicates that the differences in mobility and economic pursuits between longer-term residential sites containing pit structures and a shorter-term seasonal residential site with ephemeral architecture structured the raw material procurement practices of site’s occupants. Pit structure sites were focused on agricultural pursuits and used a technology that centered on the production of informal tools fashioned from locally available raw materials. The seasonal residential site focused on wild resources and evidenced greater reliance on formal tool production using raw materials acquired from beyond the immediate vicinity of the site. Despite increasing sedentism and agricultural dependence of the region’s population, some portion of the population exercised seasonal mobility strategies and associated technological and behavioral practices more typical of hunting and gathering populations, suggesting a diverse socio-economic system within the region.