Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Archaeometric analysis of ceramic production in Tiwanaku state (c.500–1000 ce): An exploratory study

The chemical and mineralogical characterization of seven ceramic fragments produced within Tiwanaku state (c.500–1000 ce ) is reported. The instrumental techniques used included X‐ray elemental and mineralogical chemical analysis, Raman spectroscopy, and scanning and light microscopy. The results indicate there are several clay types, although they show similarities, such as the use of a plant‐based temper. The red colour of the decoration is hematite, and manganese oxides such as jacobsite are present in the black. The white colour is a mixture of gypsum and clay, and the orange is a mixture of hematite and clay. The use of colours, the quality of the clays and the temperatures reached during pottery firing point to expertise in ceramic production and to complex decision‐making processes. The multi‐elemental archaeometric approach documented here could become an important tool to shed a light on ancient ceramic technology and the internal variance of Tiwanaku pottery.     

From commodity to money: The rise of silver coinage around the Ancient Mediterranean (sixth–first centuries bce)

The reasons why the Western Mediterranean, especially Carthage and Rome, resisted monetization relative to the Eastern Mediterranean are still unclear. We address this question by combining lead (Pb) and silver (Ag) isotope abundances in silver coinage from the Aegean, Magna Graecia, Carthage and Roman Republic. The clear relationships observed between ¹⁰⁹Ag/¹⁰⁷Ag and ²⁰⁸Pb/²⁰⁶Pb reflect the mixing of silver ores or silver objects with Pb metal used for cupellation. The combined analysis of Ag and Pb isotopes reveals important information about the technology of smelting. The Greek world extracted Ag and Pb from associated ores, whereas, on the Iberian Peninsula, Carthaginians and Republican‐era Romans applied Phoenician cupellation techniques and added exotic Pb to Pb‐poor Ag ores. Massive Ag recupellation is observed in Rome during the Second Punic War. After defeating the Carthaginians and the Macedonians in the late second century bce , the Romans brought together the efficient, millennium‐old techniques of silver extraction of the Phoenicians, who considered this metal a simple commodity, with the monetization of the economy introduced by the Greeks.     

The Concept of Taboo in Raga,Vanuatu: Semantic Mapping and Etymology

This article discusses the two terms that convey the concept of taboo in Raga, the language of north‐central Vanuatu originally spoken in north Pentecost, and provides linguistic evidence expanding on the information published previously by the anthropologists Masanori Yoshioka and John Patrick Taylor. Based on the corpus collected in north Pentecost in the period 2015–2017, and on older ethnographic and religious written material, a semantic map is proposed for the two taboo‐related Raga terms: sabuga and gogona. Reviewing the terms that designate the concept of ‘taboo’ in the neighbouring languages, the study also explores the possibility of borrowing and semantic interference from other languages, and proposes that sabuga is a reflex of Proto Oceanic *tabu, albeit an irregular reflex, and gogona a reflex of Proto North and Central Vanuatu*kona ‘sacred, taboo’.     

Variation in human bone bioerosion during the Late Eneolithic/Bronze Age in Moravia (Czech Republic): A novel approach to BSE-SEM image quality and quantity assessment

Human bones from Late Eneolithic graves and Bronze Age settlement pits in Moravia (Czech Republic) were studied to reconstruct their post-mortem histories based on the distribution of their microbial destruction. Backscattered electrons in a scanning electron microscope (BSE-SEM) were used for visual assessment of bioerosion. Visual data from the histological analysis were transformed into quantitative data using the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) toolkit. The results show that the presence of bioerosion is different between the two groups of samples. The bones from settlement pits display extensive bioerosion whereas the bones from graves display no or arrested bioerosion. The absence of bioerosion in graves is most probably linked with tomb burials of Corded Ware Culture. Given the tombs are frequently not preserved archaeologically, the state of bone bioerosion may serve as an indicator of their existence.     

Inca builders at Machu Picchu National Archaeological Park

Knowledge about the Inca measurement system is based on information from the colonial chronicles and modern studies of the 16th-century Quechua dictionaries. Based on those texts, we can presume that the Incas used an anthropometric system of measurement adopted from the proportions of the human body. Using cosine quantogram analysis and statistical verification, it is possible to verify the existence of the measurement system used by the Inca architects. For this purpose, a measurement series of architectural and water infrastructure elements were collected from 3D point cloud of the Chachabamba and Machu Picchu settlements in Machupicchu National Archaeological Park.     

Inconsistent,downplayed, and pathologized: How mining's gendered impacts are considered in BC environmental assessment

To what extent do mining environmental assessments in British Columbia (BC) consider gendered impacts? How are they considered? And how are these considerations shaped during the environmental assessment process? To answer these questions we undertook a systematic review of all completed BC mining environmental assessments between 1995 and 2019 (n = 37). Through a careful reading of documentation archived in the BC Environmental Assessment Office registry, we found that 60% of projects did not consider the gendered impacts of mining development; the remaining 40% of projects inconsistently assessed gendered impacts. While noting an increase in gender considerations in environmental assessments since 1995, also quantified in our results is what has not changed. Even where gender is considered, the assessments often collapse this concern into one of “women's issues,” obscuring intersectional impacts and downplaying violence along racialized and gender diverse lines, including those experienced by Indigenous women, children, two-spirit, trans, queer and non-binary people. Environmental assessment is a regulatory tool designed to adjudicate the impacts of mining projects, yet our results lead us to conclude that it is also a tool of environmental injustice, compounding and further sedimenting heteropatriarchal and racialized patterns produced through generations of settler colonial resource extraction in BC.