Morgawr: an experimental Bronze Age‐type sewn‐plank craft based on the Ferriby boats

This paper reports on the construction of a full‐scale Bronze Age‐type sewn‐plank boat based on the Ferriby boats. The boat, which was named Morgawr, was constructed in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth, England, during 2012 and the first months of 2013, as part of a larger exhibition in the museum. This paper provides the background and context of the project, describes the process of building the craft, and reflects in particular on differences between Morgawr and the ‘hypothetical reconstruction of a complete sewn‐plank boat’ published in 1990 by Ted Wright and John Coates which formed the basis for this project.     

The Politics of Emotion in Participatory Processes of Empowerment and Change

In this article I reflect on the role of critical analysis and emotions in participatory approaches to empowerment and change. I argue that, in participatory research and practice, certain cognitive and analytical knowledges are prioritized as principal catalysts of empowerment and transformation at the cost of recognizing, and making full use of, the empowering potential of emotional and embodied knowledges. This argument is developed based on 2 years of fieldwork in a local youth participation project in Mejicanos, a poor and violent neighborhood in El Salvador, aiming at empowering young people by involving them in participatory action research (PAR). ¹ As part of my research, I looked critically at the young people's PAR process, asking whether and how they felt empowered by it and whether and how social change came about. Originally, the research did not focus on emotions, yet, in an inductive fashion, emotions and embodied knowledges evolved from fieldwork as crucial elements in understanding participation, empowerment and social transformation.     

An overview of bitumen trade in the Near East from the Neolithic (c.8000 BC) to the early Islamic period

The aim of the paper is to summarise the present state of knowledge concerning bitumen trade in the Near East from the Palaeolithic (70,000 BP) to the Early Islamic period. During the Palaeolithic and Early Neolithic period, bitumen utilisation was mostly concentrated in settlements close to oil seeps. From the Ubaid 3 period, bitumen from the Mosul area became more important and was traded as far as the southern Persian Gulf. The Uruk period is a turning point for Mesopotamian history as settlements evolved into city‐states. These cities had a great need for raw materials, and this marks the beginning of large‐scale exploitation of Hit bitumen. This bitumen was traded at settlements along the Euphrates, where a large trade network was established. Hit bitumen entered the Persian Gulf at the turn of the second millennium (Dilmun period). Bitumen from Iraq (Mosul and Hit) became predominantly used in most settlements along the southern coast of the Gulf. During this period Iranian bitumen was also exported and this supply tended to increase, especially during the Partho‐Sasanian period. Dead Sea bitumen had its own exchange network, which was concentrated across present‐day Israel and Egypt where it was extensively used for mummification.     

Civil Liberty in Hobbes's Commonwealth

Hobbes has been long accused of providing a political philosophy that threatens individual liberty. While some commentators have tried to rescue him from this criticism, little attention has been paid to the specifics of his statements on such topics as freedom of speech, censorship, and property rights. In this paper, I examine what Hobbes says on these issues and conclude that his overwhelming priority is to defend liberty once peace has been secured. I conclude by suggesting that Hobbes's political project has some similarities with current liberal proceduralist theories of justice.     

Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill? A Low-Cost and Time-Efficient Molehill Survey of the Lost Medieval Harbor Site of Monnikerede,Belgium

Grasslands pose a particular problem for archaeological survey involving artifact assessment, as no material is plowed up to the surface. Although finds in molehills are often the only source of information available on sites with such low visibility, an archaeology of molehills has thus far been largely disregarded. Yet, by applying a low-cost and time-efficient methodology, both the potential and the pitfalls of molehill archaeology come to the forefront. At the medieval harbor site of Monnikerede, it was possible to assess material culture and to locate certain structural elements. However, when artifact densities were compared with the underlying geophysical anomalies, a more complex relationship appeared at the level of individual features.     

The European Union as a Gated Community: The Two‐faced Border and Immigration Regime of the EU

Abstract: Within the European Union, an internal liberalisation of cross‐border labour mobility for EU citizens is currently being combined with the tightening of control and management efforts at the external borders. At the same time, attempts are being made to strategically select immigrants from new member states as well as from outside the EU who will be of economic value. In this paper we argue that by implementing such protectionist and selective immigration policy, the EU has come to resemble a gated community in which the bio‐political control and management of immigration is, to a large extent, the product of fear. Often fear manifests itself in terms of fear of losing material gain, eg the anxiety of losing economic welfare or public security. More often, however, this fear relates to the entrance of the immigrant, the stranger and is, as such, associated with a fear of losing a community's self‐defined identity. These perceived threats to a community's comfort lead to the politicisation of protection, whereby the terra incognita beyond the border is justifiably neglected due to the indifference and the intentional blindness shown to the outside. Hiding in a gated community in order to protect this comfort zone and trying to exclude outsiders, ‘Others’, from the community, is not only in vain since the desire for completion of the Self can never be fulfilled, but what remains still more troublesome, is that this tendency will sustain and reproduce global inequality and segregation, both in the material as well as symbolic sense.     

THE WORDS OF HISTORY

In From History to Theory, Kerwin Lee Klein writes a history of the central terms of the discipline of theory of history, such as “historiography,” “philosophy of history,” “theory of history,” and “memory.” Klein tells us when and how these terms were used, how the usage of some (“historiography” and “philosophy of history”) declined during the twentieth century, and how other terms (“theory” and “memory”) became increasingly popular. More important, Klein also shows that the use of these words is not innocent. Using words such as “theory” or “historiography” implies certain specific ideas about what the writing of history should be like, and how theoretical reflection on the nature of history and its writing relates to the practical issues of the discipline. In the second half of his book, Klein focuses more on the concept of memory and the memory boom since the later part of the 1980s. He observes that “memory” came to be seen as a kind of “counterhistory,” a postcolonial, fragmented, and personal alternative to the traditional mainstream discourse of history. Klein does not necessarily disagree with this view, but he does warn us about unwanted side effects. More specifically, he argues that the discourse of memory is surprisingly compatible with that of extremist right‐wing groups, and should be treated with suspicion. Although Klein certainly has a point, he presents it in a rather dogmatic fashion. However, a more nuanced version of Klein's criticism of memory can be developed by building on Klein's suggestion that there is an intimate connection between memory and identity.