A Little Bit of Dirt

An examination of the surface deposit of an Etruscan cup said to have been dug up in Cheshire suggests instead that it had been buried in Italy and brought to England in recent times. The method described here might usefully be employed to assess the provenance of buried artefacts.     

Bilingual districts as an instrument in Canadian language policy

"Accommodation of a multi-ethnic population within the territory of a single state has been recognized as a world-wide problem. Within such a society language maintenance is frequently the avenue through which cultural groups seek to preserve their identity. This paper describes and evaluates the Canadian experience of language planning by concentrating on the bilingual district, the key spatial instrument in the federal Official Languages Act. The paper argues for a cautious and spatially varied application of the 1969 Act and seeks to suggest ways in which a geolinguistic analysis may further our understanding of plurilingual societies."     

The Moorehead Phase Occupation at the Emerald Acropolis

The Emerald site, also known as the Emerald Acropolis, was an early Mississippian pilgrimage center key to Cahokia’s development. This paper presents the hitherto unpublished results of two archaeological projects conducted at the site, one led by Howard Winters and Stuart Struever in 1961 and the other by Robert Hall in 1964. These investigations produced the most comprehensive information on Emerald’s Moorehead phase (1200–1300 CE) occupation, during which two of its mounds were capped, a secondary mound was constructed on the central mound, and a mound-top structure was erected on this secondary mound. Similar activities took place throughout the region during the thirteenth century, a time marked by dramatic social, political, and religious change in Greater Cahokia. Based on these data, we argue that people returned to Emerald to memorialize or draw on the powers inherent there and thus reincorporate this place into the newly imagined thirteenth century Cahokian world.     

Telepresence-Enabled Maritime Archaeological Exploration in the Deep

Telepresence-enabled exploration of deep sea environments has developed over the past 30 years, providing access to archaeologists, scientists, and the general public to sites otherwise inaccessible due to depth. Pioneered through the inception of the JASON Project in the late 1980 s, telepresence missions have expanded to two dedicated ships of exploration, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer and exploration vessel Nautilus, and has been implemented on a series of opportunistic missions on other vessels. This paper chronicles the history of the use of telepresence for the exploration of shipwrecks in deep water as well as how this capability has allowed the public to engage with such missions. Broadening the scope of who can explore the deep sea, telepresence has also expanded what is observed and documented in the deep, which speaks to humanity’s use of the maritime world and an archaeology of discard through our material disposed of into the deep sea.     

Urban commons are more‐than‐property

Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more‐than‐property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time.