Bioarchaeology and the Skeletons of the Pre-Columbian Maya

This review explores the past two decades of research on ancient Maya skeletons. The focus is on how this work has contributed to our understanding of health, diet, social change, inequality, migration and mobility, war, violence, and ritual practice, with special attention given to recent methodological developments and debates in the bioarchaeology of the Maya. This review essay highlights the most recent findings in the bioarchaeology of the Maya and how those results were achieved. The essay concludes with suggestions for future research and highlights areas of potential collaboration that have been underutilized to address broader anthropological questions.     

Moments of Proximity: Former Political Prisoners,Postmemory and Justice in Indonesia

This article builds upon recent anthropological engagements with postconflict transitional justice processes, suggesting that ethnography can illuminate the ways in which these processes involve the negotiation of both physical and symbolic space, and intergenerational, postmemorial identities and relationships. This is demonstrated through my fieldwork observations of a 2005 class action lawsuit filed by eks-tapol (former political prisoners) in Indonesia against current and former heads of state. Tracing the symbolic resonances and the sometimes confrontational relationships brought into play around the court case, the article examines how a significant aspect of the ways in which victims of state violence situate themselves after the violence has ceased involves locating themselves, other citizens and state actors in intergenerational relationships.     

Settlement Reorganisation and the Rebirth of the Ottoman Empire: Bayesian Modelling Narrows Dates for Post-Medieval Occupation at Kaman-Kalehöyük,Kırşehir Province,Turkey

The Ottoman reoccupation of the site of Kaman-Kalehöyük (K?r?ehir Province, Turkey) apparently occurred sometime during the fifteenth century CE, a time of massive territorial and administrative transformation in the Empire. A rich suite of archaeobotanical material recovered from the site offers a potentially invaluable source of information on Ottoman-era Anatolian agroeconomy, especially since historiographic research on the topic has uniformly ignored archaeological perspectives. Here we present results of a multi-proxy analysis aimed at establishing an absolute multiphasic chronology for Kaman-Kalehöyük’s Ottoman occupation, founded upon Bayesian statistical modelling of high-precision radiocarbon dates from cereal remains. We use the new chronology to position Kaman-Kalehöyük’s resettlement within a historical context, allowing a new perspective on settlement responses to large-scale Ottoman sociopolitical change in Anatolia.     

Adaptation,Resilience and CAP Reform: A Comparison of Crofts and Livestock Farms in Scotland

In this paper, we assess the recent and anticipated changes on Scotland’s livestock-producing crofts, using a representative survey of Scottish farmers undertaken in 2013. We find that crofters are similar to other livestock farmers, both inside and outside of the traditional crofting counties, in terms of age, years of involvement in the holding and percentage of identified successors, but are less likely to own their holdings or to operate them for profit. Crofters reported being more subsidy dependent than other livestock producers, and many appear likely to retreat from crofting in the event of substantive subsidy reductions. However, crofting respondents identified input costs, regulations, commodity prices and climate change as having had greater influence on how they manage their crofts than the 2005 transition to the ‘Single Farm Payment’. Overall, crofters reported making fewer changes than their counterparts in non-crofting counties, but similar levels to those of other livestock farmers within crofting counties, suggesting less ‘room for manoeuvre’ within the remote areas in which most crofts are located. However, there is some evidence that ‘active’ crofts are ‘bouncing forward’ in response to recent challenges, particularly into forestry and agri-tourism, also reporting significantly higher perceived economic prospects.     

ON THE MANY WAYS OF SAYING MEMORY

This essay examines the concept and the discourse of collective memory in view of interpreting the novel function with which it has been endowed in recent decades and the problematic character of its interpretation. To this end, it focuses on the recent book by Manuel Cruz, On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History, which examines the contemporary functions that collective memory has assumed in recent decades and takes into account interpretations of it elaborated in a number of seminal works that have set the framework for contemporary ways of understanding it. My investigation engages critical analysis of the psychological approach to collective memory that Cruz adopts, which, in interpreting recent public preoccupation with collective memory as an expression of trauma occasioned by the Holocaust and other horrific twentieth‐century events, assumes that analogous psychic mechanisms govern forms of remembrance in the public sphere and memory in personal and small‐group interaction. By taking into account alternate possibilities of interpretation, suggested above all by the public function of the mass media, I seek to widen the scope of enquiry to scrutinize in a broader perspective the contemporary role of collective memory and its political significance in the public realm.