Sailing Rock Art Boats

Amongst the thousands of Bronze Age rock art images that are found along the paleogeographic coast lines of southern Scandinavia the most ubiquitous is the boat. A few are furnished with what look like a mast or sail. These attributes have largely been ignored or explained away as features or objects other than rig because it is widely accepted that the sail was not used in Scandinavia until the 8th century AD. But what if after all they really are depictions of rig? Might this suggest that the sail was not only known but perhaps used here over a 1,000 years earlier than previously accepted? Starting from the bases of the images and the environment in which they are found, this paper asks whether vessels of the types we believe belonged to the Scandinavian Bronze Age could have been sailed? These evaluations led to a series of sail trials in a canoe undertaken in the archipelago of the Swedish west coast in the late summer and autumn of 2005. The successful results of these trials were later transferred to the Tilia, a full-scale reconstruction of the Hjortspring boat, a vessel dated to 350 BC but believed to belong to a long-established boatbuilding tradition stretching back into the Bronze Age. This is the report of the hypothesis behind these trials as well as their planning, execution and immediate results.     

After Utopia: Leftist imaginaries and activist politics in the postsocialist world

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to special issue ‘After Utopia: Leftist Imaginaries and Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World’, we explore the theoretical implications for thinking about activism as a form of historically situated practice in the former socialist world. Building on insights from the papers included in this issue, which draw on ethnographic research in Ukraine, Armenia, Bosnia and along the Balkan refugee route, our introduction considers both the fragility and resilience of leftist imaginaries in the aftermath of lost utopian dreams of socialism and the betrayed promises of post 1989 democratic transformation. We do so in four moves, (i) by offering a reframing of postsocialism as a problem-space of historical and political consciousness; (ii) by interrogating the figure of the activist in its self-conscious and ethnographically embedded guises; (iii) by heeding Sherry Ortner’s call to think beyond ‘dark anthropology’ and finally, (iv) by considering what it might mean to imagine, and model, political alternatives in both activist and scholarly work.