Reconstruction of Caprine Management and Landscape Use Through Dental Microwear Analysis: The Case of the Iron Age Site of El Turó de la Font de la Canya (Barcelona,Spain)

This paper presents the results of a pilot study using dental microwear analysis on 23 sheep and goat teeth dated to the 6th century BC from the Iron Age site of El Turó Font de la Canya (Barcelona, Spain). This study aimed to reconstruct livestock management practices and landscape use. The dental microwear pattern indicates that sheep and goats could have been grazing in the same area where vegetation was composed of shrubs, bushes and non-graminaceous plants on an eroded landscape, although additional supplies of fodder cannot be excluded. This scenario is compatible with the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data which suggest a possibly increased territoriality, land degradation and an increase of woodland clearance during Iron Age in the North-east of the Iberian Peninsula. Furthermore, we applied two recent microwear approaches which provide more information about mortality events and the possibility of distinguishing between an intensive and extensive management. This paper demonstrates how this method can be used to better understand animal husbandry practices and landscape use in Late Prehistory.     

‘Las Indias del Pirú en lo alto de España … ’. Relaciones entre la Nueva corónica de Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala y los qeros coloniales

It is proposed that there is an iconographic and epistemological relationship between some drawings in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno and the images recorded in several colonial wood vessels (qeros) which circulated widely during the time that Guaman Poma was writing his letter to the King of Spain. This connection shows that the work of Guaman Poma was not an isolated or singular act in the colonial context and that both communicative and creative processes, that of the Nueva corónica and that of the qeros, formed part of a process of shared colonial semiosis through which Andean societies maintained a certain autonomy in the production and circulation of their own discourses. Secondly, the article discusses the epistemological tension that results from the coexistence of different narratives (European and Andean) that used their own temporal and spatial categories to account for new colonial conditions.     

Emer Martin and multimodal family dysfunction: More Bread or I’ll Appear (1999)

Emer Martin’s More Bread or I’ll Appear (1999) revisits the discourse of the family in Ireland between the 1970s and the 1990s. This article contends that Martin intersects her work with family “issues” of the day so as to accommodate the representation of what can be termed as multimodal family dysfunction. She provides insights to the role of women, family and global female diaspora. This paper draws upon work by Diarmaid Ferriter, Alpha Connelly and the tenets of transnational feminism to account for the historical, ideological and sociocultural contexts of the time. For Martin, dysfunction is multimodal in the way in which the Irish family portrayed faces real “hidden issues” from different discourses. Her novel also focuses on the “wounds” that have been the effect of abuse, secrets, appearances, violence and lack of communication within the family. Another mode of Martin’s representation of dysfunction considers the transnational experiences of her female characters on the margins of an Ireland becoming global. Her novel invokes transnational perspectives so as to commit to dislodging nation-centric and family-centric visions of Ireland.