The Legacy of Nineteenth-century Replicas for Object Cultural Biographies: Lessons in Duplication from 1830s Fife

The St Andrews Sarcophagus and Norrie's Law hoard are two of the most important surviving Pictish relics from early medieval Scotland. The entanglement of their later biographies is also of international significance in its own right. Soon after discovery in nineteenth-century Fife, both sets of objects were subject, in 1839, to an exceptionally precocious, documented programme of replication through the enlightened auspices of an under-appreciated antiquarian, George Buist. This well-evidenced case study highlights how and why replicas, things that are widely prevalent in Europe and beyond, are a ‘thick’ and relatively unexplored seam of archaeological material culture that we ignore at our peril. These particular replications also offer new insights into the vision, intellectual and practical energies of early antiquarian societies, and their web of connections across Britain and Ireland.     

Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: disruptive empathy and binationalism in Israel/Palestine

This article develops a theoretical framework for shared and inclusive Jewish and Palestinian deliberation on the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba. It argues that a joint Arab-Jewish public deliberation on the traumatic memories of these two events is not only possible, however challenging and disruptive it may be, but also fundamental for producing an egalitarian and inclusive ethics of binationalism in Israel/Palestine. In order to develop this conceptual framework, we first present some examples, most notably Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the sun (Bab al-Shams), which bring the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba together in a fashion that disrupts the dominant, antagonistic and exclusionary Israeli and Palestinian national narratives. We then interpret Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, which transforms ‘otherness’ from a problem to be disposed of into a moral and emotional challenge, as a political concept that best captures and explains the disruptive potential of a joint deliberation on these traumatic events. The figure of the refugee, constitutive of Palestinian and Jewish histories and identities, we suggest, serves as a herald of this binational and disruptive ethics. We conclude that ‘empathic unsettlement’ also has a productive and transformative potential which gives further (however partial and initial) meaning, shape and content to the ethics and democratic politics of binationalism heralded by the refugee.     

Nahua Patterns of Colonization in Maya Towns of Guatemala, 1524 to 1582: The Indigenous Records

This article seeks to further contribute to our understanding of the outcomes of earlier Nahua-Spanish alliances after Guatemala was pacified. The richly documented struggles of the Maya-Pok'omam communities around Lake Amatitlan in Guatemala between 1524 and 1580 reveal - in microcosm - the larger processes some of them stretching back into the pre-contact period that Mesoamerican scholars call ‘conquest-after-conquest.’ As this essay highlights, fifteen years after the initial phase of the Spanish conquest of Guatemala had ended, Nahua conquistadors from Central Mexico initiated their own colonization of Maya-Pok'omam towns, mobilizing both Nahua and Kaqchikel migrant groups to settle there. Within these Maya towns, the Nahua conquistadors impinged upon Maya economic assets, sharing them with their Dominican allies while maintaining political and social control over their local Maya subjects. Nahua economic and political encroachment of Maya assets finally brought about distinct and recognizable currents of Maya dissent against their foreign overlords, in parallel to the revival of local historical legacies of self-rule.     

Context, curation, and bias: an evaluation of the Middle Paleolithic collections of Combe-Grenal (France)

The site of Combe-Grenal is arguably the reference site for the Mousterian of southwest France. Bordes excavated the site over a period of 13 years and generated a large collection of lithics and fauna from a deep series of 64 Lower and Middle Paleolithic levels. Though Bordes only partially published his work at the site, its long stratigraphic sequence and particularly its collections have been subjected to numerous studies over the years and have figured prominently in several long-running debates concerning the Mousterian. Recently, the authors undertook a project to inventory and analyzed these collections along with the documentation of their archaeological context. In so doing, however, a number of serious problems became apparent with the collection in its current state, problems that cannot easily be resolved given the state of the available documentation. These problems have important implications not only for results of studies based on these collections, but more generally, they also point to problems in terms of how archaeological collections are curated.     

Why does (archaeological) micromorphology have such little traction in (geo)archaeology?

Archaeological deposits are often complex and illustrative of an intricate interplay between geogenic and anthropogenic inputs and formation processes. Even for those archaeologists—particularly prehistorians—who consider the basic principles of natural stratigraphy to excavate their sites, they nonetheless typically underutilize the observations and data available at the microstratigraphic level. The technique of soil micromorphology—or archaeological micromorphology as referred to throughout this paper—has seen an astounding increase in its use to answer archaeological questions and archaeological sediments in the last decades. However, we consider that this tool is still quite underutilized and not as mainstream as other techniques. In this paper, we briefly reflect on what can be some of the causes underlying this situation and how we (that is, both producers and consumers of micromorphology data) can go about to change it. The main idea is that we need to establish a better and more approachable way to present micromorphological results and be better at integrating them with the macroscopic archaeological data and research questions.     

Scanning electron microscope analysis of sediments from Tabun Cave,Mount Carmel,Israel

Scanning electron microscope analysis of sediments from Tabun Cave has revealed a detailed palaeoenvironmental history for the area. Basal units (Garrod's F and G layers) derive from wind-blown materials, intermediate units (E) are wind-blown derivatives but with marine modification, and the upper units (D, $\text{B}\text{C}$) exhibit only aeolian modification to grain surfaces. As had been previously postulated, the analyses also provide supporting evidence for chemical alteration phases within the sediments.     

Contrasting Resistance and Alliances in the Ethnic State of Napiniaca,Chiapas (Mexico) (1521–1590): The Anthropological and Historical Aspects

The present article aims to re-evaluate the gamut of ostensible alliances forged between colonial subordinates and those who subordinated them in the ethnic state of Napiniaca, Mexico, as well as identify the social spaces and contexts in which such alliances were formed and ultimately fell apart. It will do so by attempting to “unwrap” indigenous strategies and forms of resistance based on the admittedly limited texts we currently possess, in light of modern research and theory in both (ethno) history and anthropology.     

Notes,Documents, and Bibliographies

Documenting the Great Game: ‘World Policy’ and the ‘Turbulent Frontier’ in the 1890s; Gordon Martel

Recent Work on the Great Game in Asia; Philip Amos