Doing Archaeology as a Feminist: Introduction

Gender research archaeology has made significant contributions, but its dissociation from the resources of feminist scholarship and feminist activism is a significantly limiting factor in its development. The essays that make up this special issue illustrate what is to be gained by making systematic use of these resources. Their distinctively feminist contributions are characterized in terms of the recommendations for “doing science as a feminist” that have taken shape in the context of the long running “feminist method debate” in the social sciences.     

Representing Commerce in Tallis’s London Street Views

This essay examines how the London Street Views organize the city as a space of commercial interaction, one that is curiously at odds with an image of crowded Victorian streets full of shoppers, street-sellers, advertisements, and window displays. As a commercial directory, it is at once tightly self-referential and open ended, cross referring information between the lists of businesses, the advertisements, and the street elevations while also including advertisements for shops in other streets and neighbourhoods than that focused on in each issue. This essay considers the distinctiveness of Tallis’s project by contextualizing his Street Views within a range of forms of urban commercial information, including directories and advertisements.     

Strengthening gender justice in the Asia-Pacific through the Rome Statute

Many conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region have included sexual violence crimes targeted primarily against women. However, in comparison to other regions, Asia-Pacific states have been reluctant to embrace international law innovations to end impunity for such crimes into the future, as evidenced by their unwillingness to become signatories to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Of the 39 countries constituting the Asia-Pacific region, only 17—less than half—have joined the Rome Statute. This article initially surveys some of the reasons for non-ratification of the Statute. It further examines the role of civil society and the potential normative impact of the Statute to enhance national sexual violence legislation and prosecutions. Finally, it identifies some practical steps that the Australian government could take to encourage regional states to ratify, implement and enforce the Rome Statute in order to further protect all victims of international crimes and bolster the broader Women, Peace and Security framework.     

The NATO-Warsaw Pact competition in the 1970s and 1980s: a revolution in military affairs in the making or the end of a strategic age?

The NATO-Warsaw Pact military competition at the heart of the Cold War was also the incubator of a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA) in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, which predates the better-known American concept of RMA of the 1990s.     

“Like Barnabas and Saul”: Malagasy Converts in Britain, 1839–1841

In 1839, six Malagasy Christians arrived in Britain under the auspices of the London Missionary Society. The group had been persecuted in Madagascar for their faith. They were introduced to the British evangelical community as saints and martyrs who were dependent on the missionary society, but their decision to undertake the long journey was shaped by their spiritual beliefs, their desire to develop their education, and their wish to eventually become evangelical missionaries in Madagascar. At public meetings around the country, the Malagasy used a Christian frame of reference to describe their personal stories and their hopes for the future of Christianity in Madagascar. As speaking subjects, not merely objects of spectacle and display, they communicated to British audiences their credibility as fellow Christians, educated individuals, and civilised human beings.     

Holocene climatic change and past Irish societal response

The extent to which North Atlantic Holocene climatic perturbations influenced past human societies is an area of considerable uncertainty and fierce debate. Ireland is ideally placed to help resolve this issue, being occupied for over 9000 yr and located on the eastern Atlantic seaboard, a region dominated by westerly airflow. Irish bog and lake tree populations provide unambiguous evidence of major shifts in surface moisture through the Holocene similar to cycles recorded in the marine realm of the North Atlantic, indicating significant changes in the latitude and intensity of zonal atmospheric circulation across the region. To test for human response to these cycles we summed the probabilities of 465 radiocarbon ages obtained from Irish archaeological contexts and observe enhanced archaeological visibility during periods of sustained wet conditions. These results suggest either increasing density of human populations in key, often defensive locations, and/or the development of subsistence strategies to overcome changing conditions, the latter recently proposed as a significant factor in avoiding societal collapse. Regardless, we demonstrate environmental change is a significantly more important factor in influencing human activity in the landscape than has hitherto been acknowledged.