A re-assessment of Basketmaker II cave 7: massacre site or cemetery context

Our ongoing investigation of early maize farming in the American Southwest has entailed stable isotope analysis and accelerator radiocarbon dating of Basketmaker II remains from sites in the Four Corners region. Here we report radiocarbon dates on a large mortuary assemblage excavated by Richard Wetherill in 1893 from a burial cave in southeastern Utah. It has long been thought that all individuals interred in Cave 7 were massacred in a single violent attack given embedded projectiles and evidence for blunt force trauma. However, accelerator radiocarbon dates on purified bone collagen (n = 96) do not lend strong support to this argument, even among the subset of individuals with clear evidence for violent injuries. Moreover, nearly 80% of Cave 7 burials examined in the study show no evidence of perimortem trauma and no adult females or subadults under the age of 12 appear to have suffered violent deaths. Rather than an anomalous single-event massacre, the Cave 7 radiocarbon dataset suggests that raiding and intra-group, male/male violence was episodic among Basketmaker groups in southeastern Utah. Population densities were relatively high and individuals interred in Cave 7 and elsewhere in the region were heavily dependent on maize agriculture, a prehistoric economic strategy typically characterized by high amplitude fluctuations in productivity. Variability in the array of grave goods accompanying Cave 7 male burials and elsewhere suggests competitive social differentiation likely heightened during periods of resource shortfall leading to intra-group conflict, raiding and perhaps ritualized acts of violence.     

From the "Phoenix of Legends" to the "Ultimate Monument" of the times: stadia, spectators, and urban development in postwar Paris

This article analyzes the renovation and construction of the Parc des Princes and the Stade de France in post-Second World War Paris. The history of the two stadia testifies to a shift in the envisioned role of stadia in the Parisian basin between the late 1960s and the end of the twentieth century and stands as evidence for the emergence of new urban planning actors. Both stadia were also critiqued as symbols of broader problems with Parisian urbanization, notably as manifestations of anti-democratic planning processes. At the same time, the Parc and the Stade also reflected an emerging consensus over the role of spectator sport in society, accompanied by attempts to re-envision mass sporting spectatorship as a more democratic and familial practice. This article thus situates the two stadia within the history of Parisian urbanization and within broader global urbanizing processes.     

British Assessments of Tipu Sultan’s Hill Forts in Northern Mysore, South India, 1802

Hundreds of early modern forts dot the South Indian landscape, but more is known about their art-historical aspects than how these fortifications were built, maintained, and used. The latter aspects are examined in a comparative analysis of six Mysore hill forts, using East India Company surveys that were prepared in 1802 shortly after British forces took command of these installations from Tipu Sultan’s garrisons. These highly detailed inventories show that the hill forts were poorly maintained, inadequately supplied, contained relatively few garrison buildings, and, from the British perspective at least, were inadequately armed to mount a successful defense. At the turn of the century, these forts were functionally obsolete, ill prepared to serve as supply depots, and strategically valuable only to quiet local populations and deny the use of such places to potential enemies.     

“Manure Manufactories”: Materializing the Metabolic Rift in Nineteenth-Century Deerfield,Massachusetts

The modern world has seen a variety of agricultural crises deriving from a problem known as the “metabolic rift,” in which capitalist agriculture depletes soil nutrients through intensive monocropping and fertilizing. This problem is fundamentally historical and material, and visible in the archaeological record. A manuring platform found in Deerfield, Massachusetts, offers a material vantage point through which to explore the contradictions of early capitalist agriculture. Increasing market penetration into the New England backcountry in the early nineteenth century spurred farmers to increase productivity, at the cost of sustainability. Wealthier farmers were able to capitalize on this transition, while poorer farmers were forced into wage labor or out-migration.     

Multiply vulnerable populations: mobilising a politics of compassion from the ‘capacity to hurt’

This paper reflects on the concept of insecurity defined as ‘the capacity to hurt’. It begins by considering asylum seekers and refugees as hyper-precarious groups that have experienced bodily, material and psychological ‘hurt’ in the UK. At the same time, the paper considers how these hyper-precarious groups are perceived to have the capacity to hurt (bodily, materially, psychologically and spatially) the majority population. Having drawn out two understandings of the capacity to hurt—both the ability to be or feel hurt and the act of hurting others, we argue that a shared recognition of what it means to feel hurt (co-suffering or suffering together)—albeit to very different extremes and with very different consequences—and an understanding of the processes which drive this might be mobilised politically to challenge the act of hurting others. In doing so, we argue for a group politics of compassion to respond to increasingly insecure times.     

The Capetian apanages and the nature of the French kingdom

The Capetian apanages have traditionally been studied from the perspective of the developing national monarchy. This approach is anachronistic; its premises are drawn from a later century, and even within the Capetian period it groups together with little differentiation the attitudes and intentions of five generations of kings.The context for the early Capetian apanages is the successional customs of the nobility, which the kings knew well from having seen them practised by their baronial neighbors. The determining concepts behind these measures were not those of the crown and the royal domain, but rather the societal ones by which, through the succession, the individual members of the family were ordered in relation to the family's lands.Only in the last quarter of the thirteenth and the first quarter of the fourteenth centuries did the kings and the Parlement impose the series of rulings which molded Capetian practice into a distinctively royal pattern. For most of the period under consideration, the territorial kingdom was treated as an aggregate of separable holdings, most of which were the private inheritance of the ruling family.     

死亡的日本人和牵牛花-腾冲挽歌

中午骄阳似火,凉爽的小树林特别诱人.腾从毛茸茸的矮种马上跳下来让商队马帮在这里宿营.爬过前面的一座大山就到达缅甸的伊洛瓦底江河谷了,而目的地印度还像传说中有一百个太阳的地方那样遥远.在仅仅只有一个太阳的这里休息看来是很好的.腾在天气和旅行方面是很在行的.他喜欢眼前这条小河谷的景象:泉水清澈,土地肥沃,物产丰富,地势开阔.四周的高山像冲刷过那样干净,给人一种舒适安全的感觉.