The (Mis)Use of Disaster as Opportunity: Coerced Relocation from Celaque National Park,Honduras

Abstract: “Disaster capitalism” refers to political economic processes that take advantage of mass trauma to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies, facilitating the redistribution of wealth and exacerbating socio‐economic divisions. Here the basic tenets of disaster capitalism are applied in another context: how natural disasters can be used to impose exclusionary protected area conservation principles with similar socio‐economic consequences and ecological ramifications. The post‐Hurricane Mitch relocation of resident populations from Celaque National Park, Honduras serves as a case study whereby a natural disaster, combined with the effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies, created the opportunity to implement a universal model of exclusionary nature protection. The resultant displacement and increased semi‐proletarianization of the affected population effectively served the capitalist interests of international conservation and the agro‐export coffee industry and, contradictorily, worked against the proclaimed goals of nature preservation through exclusionary national park policies.     

In defence of oblivion: the case of Dunwich,Suffolk

This article examines the way in which the town of Dunwich, Suffolk, once the capital of a Saxon kingdom and the sixth largest town in England, has constructed its identity from its long history of experiencing coastal erosion. Now as a small village, Dunwich has built a cultural heritage industry devoted to presenting absence to its visitors and residents, through many diverse forms: historiography, archaeology and the material culture displayed and commodified in the Dunwich Museum. Local pride in this history of disappearance runs strong, as was demonstrated when a proposed monument to the lost town was rejected by village residents. Connecting this sense of identity both to critical investigations into the nature of loss, transience and disappearance, as well as to the future of local and global environmental processes, this article considers whether a site whose construction of loss-as-identity should be allowed to survive past its natural lifespan – especially one that, given the process of erosion involved, can be measured. If the dominant cultural logic at a site tends towards absence rather than presence, I here ask what justifications exist for forestalling that identity in the name of conservation and preservation.     

Statistical means for identifying hunter–gatherer residential features in a lithic landscape

Techniques are described for extracting circular rock features from landscapes dominated by clasts of the same type from which cultural features are composed, using as a test case a large stone circle residential site in western Wyoming, USA. Methods consist of point plotting all relevantly-sized culturally and naturally-deposited clasts in the field and identifying potential cultural features using point density analyses tools in ArcGIS. Potential rings are either accepted or rejected as cultural features by comparing clast frequency, density and distribution in internal, feature-ring, and external spatial buffers to ethnoarchaeological data recording stone circle size and morphology and to similar data generated from a control sample of off-site, naturally-occurring clasts. The results of the analysis are used to discuss group size, mobility type, and duration of site occupation and to explore problems of assessing such at surface archaeological sites resulting from palimpsest-type site formation processes.     

The late adoption of cattle and pig husbandry in Neolithic Central Turkey

This paper summarizes and interprets zooarchaeological evidence for cattle and pig domestication in Neolithic Central Anatolia. Biometric and demographic data indicate that domestic cattle first appear in the region in the late seventh millennium cal BC while domestic pigs are not evident until the mid fifth millennium. This places the origins of cattle and pig husbandry in Central Anatolia considerably later than in neighboring regions. Reasons for this delay in the spread of productive animal husbandry practices are explored.     

Further Thoughts on the Imperial Endgame and Britain's Dirty Wars

The publication of my book Imperial Endgame: Britain's Dirty Wars and the End of Empire in 2011 provoked many to respond, although not with a criticism that was consistent across the board. In my work, I intentionally did not draw a moral conclusion and took care to present what I considered a balanced account of British decolonisation, without praise or condemnation of past actions. This has made my argument vulnerable from several directions since, as reviewer Ashley Jackson commented, ‘it is rather difficult to know on which side the author's bread is buttered’. This paper is an attempt to bring clarity to my argument and to continue the debate on some of the aspects of Britain's end of empire that my book discussed.