Provenance of Weeden Island “sacred” and “prestige” vessels: implications for specialized ritual craft production

ABSTRACT

Weeden Island mortuary ceremonialism united distinct cultures across the Late Woodland social landscape. The Weeden Island pottery series is central to recognizing regional ceremonial parity, with prestige (elite) and sacred (cult) wares showing strong similarities among distant sites. Finely made vessels and their ostensibly shamanistic themes led archaeologists to consider the liturgical and political roles of ritual specialists, whose tasks might have included vessel manufacture in centralized locations. This research evaluates the prospect of craft specialization and centralized production of sacred and prestige wares through comparisons of the provenance of vessels from three Florida localities: Palmetto Mound (8LV2), the mounds at Melton (8AL5, 8AL7), and McKeithen (8CO17). Results of Neutron Activation Analysis and petrographic analysis show that the majority of the sampled vessels were made far from the mounds in which they were deposited, from a variety of locations but especially within the area between Kolomoki and the Tallahassee Hills. We argue that production was not centralized but may have been specialized to the extent that an integrated ritual network was necessary to coordinate rules of manufacture and use that were evidently observed by all participants.     

Building Bridges of Trust: Child Transports from Finland to Sweden during the Second World War

Seventy thousand children were moved to Sweden from Finland during the Second World War with the purpose of giving them a break from the calamities of war. Moving children for this reason was common practice in the Western world during the twentieth century. Officially, the motives have always been humanitarian, but political motives have often played an important role — commonly, to foster suitable citizens within planned societies. Political goals were important in the moving of Finnish children, but in a different way. In this article, I suggest that the children were used as ‘commodities of compassion’ in a Swedish politics of indemnification.     

Australia's flawed approach to trade negotiations: and where do we sign?

Economists have warned for many years that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) will not necessarily increase economic welfare in Australia given the relatively small size of the economy and the country’s lack of negotiating coin. The Productivity Commission cautioned in its major report on PTAs that there seemed to be a mindset of ‘agreements for agreement’s sake’, in part because of fears of missing out on a bandwagon that has attracted Australia’s major trading partners. Political and security considerations have played an important role in shaping Australia’s approach to PTAs. When politics trumps economics in negotiations of PTAs there is a risk of a rush to premature agreement that produces sub-optimal outcomes, that undermines broader plurilateral and global negotiations, and that introduces new and undesirable distortions in trade and public policies. Various theoretical approaches to trade policymaking provide insights into why Australian governments have been willing to conclude these sub-optimal deals.     

Australia's trade policy dilemmas

In recent years, Australia has had a very active agenda for the negotiation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) whose net economic benefits remain at best unclear. There has been a strong defensive element to some of this PTA activity but the Howard government also used PTAs to pursue non-economic objectives, such as the promotion of foreign policy and security interests. This article broadly outlines Australia's PTA policy and the problems and dilemmas that it has generated. More importantly, it looks ahead to consider likely scenarios for trade policy under the Rudd Labor government. Each of these scenarios has different implications for policy strategies and outcomes. This article concludes that while there could be significant pay-offs should Labor choose to pursue its traditional preferences for non-discriminatory trade arrangements, the world has changed considerably since the heydays of the multilateral trade system. A commitment to reinvigorating multilateralism will require strong political leadership, imaginative thinking, and creative diplomacy.