‘The Chicken or the Egg?’ Interregional Contacts Viewed Through a Technological Lens at Late Bronze Age Tiryns,Greece

This paper reviews the environmental circumstances of the ostrich and its eggs, in order to provide a geographical overview of past human usage and modification of ostrich eggshells in the Aegean and, more specifically, at Tiryns, while placing this craft in its contemporary context in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean basin. This ostrich shell evidence from Tiryns is contextualized and analysed through the approach of the chaîne opératoire in order to understand the material in the framework of Tiryns' Late Bronze Age craft activities, and within the Late Bronze Age Aegean network of contacts that brought this material to Tiryns in the first place.     

PROJECTIONS OF RACE,NATURE, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC CHILDHOOD IN EARLY EDUCATIONAL CINEMA AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CANADA

In this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as Other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.