Writing violence in Seventeenth-Century Yucatan: Fray Bernardo de Lizana's Devocionario de nuestra Señora de Izamal y Conquista espiritual de Yucatán (1633)

Although long considered a minor work, Franciscan friar Bernardo de Lizana's Devocionario de nuestra Señora de Izamal y Conquista espiritual de Yucatán (1633) is key for understanding what the author himself termed the ‘spiritual conquest’ of colonial Yucatan. Deploying José Rabasa's concept of ‘writing violence,’ this essay shows how this text works to promote a culture of forceful spiritual conquest, reminiscent of the culture of spiritual conquest of the primitive Yucatecan church (1545–1562), in order to complete the conquest of the last independent Maya on the peninsula.     

Capac Women and the Politics of Marriage in Early Colonial Peru

During the major Inca civil wars, Atahualpa had almost exterminated Huascar’s kin. Only a few capac women, those who descended from Manco Capac, the founder of the Inca dynasty, remained alive. Atahualpa had planned to take them as his principal wives since only this type of marriage could successfully maintain the authority of the Incas over a large Andean territory. The Spanish arrival in 1532 interrupted his plans, but it did not eliminate Inca claims of sovereignty through marriage. In fact, it was through marriage that Atahualpa aimed to establish political alliances with Francisco Pizarro. While both Incas and Spaniards understood marriage on their own terms, there were many instances in which both were willing to redefine their own concepts of marriage in their struggle for power. In all of these, the women engaged in these unions were not only conscious about their political roles, but agents in the main historical events of this period.     

Child migrants and deportees from Poland and Ukraine after the Second World War: experience and memory

This article aims to compare the biographical experiences and individual memories of child deportees and migrants from Eastern Europe. The analysis is based on a field study of over 100 biographical interviews in two local communities situated in the borderland regions which were particularly exposed to post-war displacement, resettlement and population exchange: Ukrainian Galicia and Western Poland. The author claims that although the history of these two distant communities was totally different, contemporary memory of being a refugee/deportee/forced migrant, losing one's home/homeland and watching the deportation of the previous inhabitants of one's new place of residence bear many similarities. While analysing autobiographical narratives, I attempt to find common threads and topics generated by their experiences as children, as well as explain the differences by exploring the social context of individual memory, with a special accent on post-war socialisation and the Polish and Ukrainian memory culture. The author also strives to show how and why the children's memories differ from those of their parents.     

A microarchaeological approach for the study of pits

Abstract

The study of the technology underlying pre-industrial storage structures has an interest from an anthropological and archaeological perspective, in terms of the evolution of key cultural and cognitive capabilities, often related to the transition to food production.

Microarchaeological techniques offer a unique perspective on the study of pre-industrial storing technologies. In this work, examples are presented from two archaeological contexts in different climatic and socio-ecological situations during the Holocene in S Asia and SW Europe. Microarchaeological techniques used in this study include micromorphology, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and phytolith analyses. The comparative study of two pits highlights key aspects of the decision-making process involved in technological solutions of storage: ? The choice of a location for the construction of a given storage facility is highly affected by contextual climatic, microclimatic, soil and bioturbative factors

? The time taken to consume stored foodstuffs seems to affect technological investment as much as the intrinsic conservation requirements of the stored taxa

? The use of fire to hygienise pits implies that such structures were not conceived for single use

? Pre-industrial storage systems can be seen as modular structures, which components (e.g. topographical location, sediment type, lining type, hygienisation techniques and cover) can be recombined to improve storage performance for different climatic settings and foodstuffs.