Finding Russia in Botswana: AIDS,Archaeology, and the Power of the Ancestors

The materialization of memory is one way in which the past becomes a powerful agent for negotiating the present. Today in Botswana, archaeological sites have become sites of memory where ancestors have been invoked for healing in response to the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. This paper concentrates on one site, Khubu la Dint?a, where a local community practiced an ancestral healing ceremony, phekolo, as a way to restore spiritual balance. Told through a set of narratives that integrate ethnographic interviews with one of the former church elders, Russia, the article chronicles the trajectory of the church, the perceived power and active role of the ancestors in this ceremony, and the complex web of morality and practicality in which alternative narratives emerge during a time of social disruption and later fall apart. This paper complements the others in this issue by focusing on how memory, place, time, and material culture are recursively engaged: a process that includes formal and accepted to marginal and even ephemeral viewpoints and holds lessons for how we as archaeologists approach and curate the past.     

Creating Memory and Negotiating Power in the Olmec Heartland

The creation of political landscapes requires the production of places made significant through acts of social remembering. The Gulf lowlands of Mexico exhibit some of the best known acts of social remembering in Mesoamerican prehistory. In this article, we engage political and practice-based frameworks for understanding the process of collective remembering in an examination of how the Olmecs and their successors inscribed their landscape with buildings, monuments, and rock art in ways that invoked the past while reframing it within the needs of their present. In particular, we explore the Olmecs’ memorialization of individuals and events in sculptures and offerings and their creation of narratives through the juxtaposition of sculptures and architecture. We then examine the creation and erasure of collective memory at the regional center of Tres Zapotes as expressed in the biographies of six monuments. We end with a comparison of “metropolitan” and hinterland carvings recorded in regional survey around Tres Zapotes. These examples situate social memory as an evolving entity molded and stretched by competing interests in an ongoing process of conflict and negotiation.     

Collective Remembering in Archaeology: a Relational Approach to Ancient Maya Memory

Drawing on a case study from the Maya site of Actuncan, Belize, this article presents collective remembering as a way to conceptualize the relational construction of memory by ancient societies. Emphasizing the process of remembering allows archaeologists to investigate how memory divides as well as unites. Over time, the interactions between humans and between humans and their landscape that take place as part of everyday life produce memories of the past that are inaccurate and inconsistent between individuals. In particular, people who interact frequently, either due to geographic proximity or similarity in socioeconomic status, tend to form mnemonic communities—communities based on a similar understanding of the past—that may serve as identity markers differentiating them from other groups. At Actuncan, the community’s past was collectively remembered across times of prosperity and subjugation. First, the site was a Late and Terminal Preclassic seat of an early divine king who built a monumental ceremonial center. Second, when the site was subjugated during the Early and Late Classic periods, the ceremonial center fell out of use, but the site’s commoner households remained continuously occupied. Finally, in the Terminal Classic period, the site’s residents reestablished Actuncan as a local seat of authority following the Classic Maya collapse. The community’s use of the Preclassic monumental core during the Terminal Classic period indicates that the memory of the site’s Preclassic apogee served to legitimize their Terminal Classic authority. However, the Preclassic past was remembered in a manner consistent with contemporaneous cultural forms and the site’s recent past of subjugation.     

Revisiting Floods and Civilization in North-western Indian Subcontinent During 4th to Mid-2nd Millennium B.C. in Archaeological Perspective

Indus civilization or Harappan civilization, one of the oldest civilizations of the world, occupied a region that is an active flood plain. In the same region, even today floods are a major problem which every year kill hundreds and displace millions, rendering them homeless. In this paper, we have taken up the interesting task of how Harappans faced floods, and more importantly methods and strategies they developed to counter the effect of these floods as well as the drain they had on their might and economy. This prospect explores some new themes of Harappan historiography which will be vital for a better understanding of this civilization in addition to imparting lessons for the present and future generations, as for as management of the floods is concerned.     

Multiproxy approach to the study of Medieval food habits in Tuscany (central Italy)

A multiproxy approach based on archaeobotanical, organic residue and isotopic analyses was carried out on materials from 12 Medieval archaeological sites in Tuscany (central Italy), in order to provide a diachronic overview of local diet in rural and urban sites from the mid-eighth to the fourteenth centuries AD. Archaeobotanical analyses were applied to 130,578 seeds/fruits, residue analyses involved 87 samples from cooking and storing vessels, whereas analyses of carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes included 63 human bone samples and 26 animal specimens. The results indicate that from the mid-eighth century AD, crop production was of high quality similar, to that of the Roman Age. The main cultivations were naked wheats, barley and horse bean, a diversity that attests the technological skills reached by Tuscan peasants during the whole Middle Ages. Different cereals and pulse abundantly supplemented the diet. This strategy not only ensured peasants’ subsistence in the mid-eighth century AD, minimizing the risks of environmental adversities, but it also increased crop production – from the mid-ninth century AD on, for the revived markets and trade. Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries AD, C4 plants had a dominant role in the peasants’ diet, when the wheat production was strictly collected first by the landlords and then by the cities for their own needs. Crop production was integrated by swine farming; animal meat consumption is well documented in rural and urban populations from the ninth century AD. Wine and olive oil, considered important elements of diet in Medieval Tuscany, have a very scarce presence, but they are recorded for later periods, mainly in urban areas and in higher social classes, such as the religious and aristocratic ones. In fact, only between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD was the great expansion of olive groves and vineyards recorded, when cities and urban populations claim to have access to these luxury foods.     

Using lithic assemblage formation to approach Middle Palaeolithic settlement dynamics: El Salt Stratigraphic Unit X (Alicante,Spain)

The superposition of anthropogenic remains usually results in archaeological palimpsests, hindering an accurate characterization of the behavior underlying such remains. Aimed at facing this methodological constraint in the study of Palaeolithic contexts, we present a contextual approach to Neanderthal settlement dynamics based on an understanding of lithic assemblage formation processes. We focused on a set of lithic artifacts from the Middle Palaeolithic site of El Salt. With the goal of isolating temporally constrained units of behavioral analysis, we analyzed the spatial distribution of lithic, faunal and combustion remains. Then, the lithic records from each of the resulting units were analyzed from a genetic and technical perspective. This goal was achieved by identifying lithic Raw Material Units (RMU) through observations on reduction processes, refits and their spatial distribution. Our results suggest that El Salt SU X lithic remains represent several diachronic human occupation episodes and different site functions. This study illustrates the benefit of investigating lithic assemblage formation processes to alleviate the palimpsest problem in Palaeolithic contexts.     

Geology/archaeology in action: a personal perspective

This article uses Bruno Latour’s concept of Science in Action to consider the relationship between archaeology and geology. It is argued that neither the New Archaeology nor Postprocessual Archaeology provides a strong foundation for dialogue between archaeology and geology. Significant differences in temporal scale and structure pose a significant hurdle to integration of geology and archaeology. However, the practice of both disciplines is characterized by an internal tension between the use of imagination and intuition versus a reliance on data. This dynamic provides the basis for cooperation between geology and archaeology, but it must be realized that collaboration requires that geologists be seen as equal partners in inquiry rather than as specialists in service of an archaeological research agenda.     

Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill? A Low-Cost and Time-Efficient Molehill Survey of the Lost Medieval Harbor Site of Monnikerede,Belgium

Grasslands pose a particular problem for archaeological survey involving artifact assessment, as no material is plowed up to the surface. Although finds in molehills are often the only source of information available on sites with such low visibility, an archaeology of molehills has thus far been largely disregarded. Yet, by applying a low-cost and time-efficient methodology, both the potential and the pitfalls of molehill archaeology come to the forefront. At the medieval harbor site of Monnikerede, it was possible to assess material culture and to locate certain structural elements. However, when artifact densities were compared with the underlying geophysical anomalies, a more complex relationship appeared at the level of individual features.     

When Strategic Plans Fail to Lead. A Complexity Acknowledging Perspective on Decision-Making in Urban Development Projects—The Case of Kortrijk (Belgium)

Nowadays, cities formulate long-term strategies to address the challenges and opportunities they face. Numerous strategic plans or planning instruments are developed for this purpose. In this article, we would like to examine the role, impact and relevance of these types of plans in decision-making processes concerning urban development projects (UDPs) in the Flemish Region of Belgium. To what extent do strategic plans succeed in capturing and steering the complexity of spatial interventions in contemporary urban contexts? We argue that a complexity-acknowledging perspective provides a more realistic and adequate view here by seeing strategic plans as only one among many elements in the set of tangled inter- and intrastrategic processes which together determine UDPs. A comparative and qualitative case study was carried out in the city of Kortrijk. The decision-making of three UDPs was studied thoroughly. Interviewing key actors and analysing policy documents helped us to (re)construct the complex decision-making processes and to stipulate the meaning of all involved formal plans and planning tools.     

Roman pottery production in Civitas Tungrorum,central Belgium,during the first–third centuries ce

Aspects of Roman pottery production at the workshops of Kontich, Tienen, Rumst, Grobbendonk and Clavier-Vervoz in the Civitas Tungrorum of central Belgium are explored. A total of 150 wasters from five sites were studied macroscopically, as well as via a combination of thin-section petrography, geochemistry and scanning electron microscopy, in order to gain insights into ceramic technology and aspects of the organization of production. Particular emphasis was given to the individual technological sequences and shared strategies of raw material selection, paste preparation and firing employed at the five adjacent sites. The integration of petrographic and geochemical data permitted the establishment of compositional reference groups for the Roman kiln sites of Civitas Tungrorum, which can be used to track their products within the surrounding landscape.