Too little,too much: Cultural feminist geographies

This paper traces some of the contours of recent critiques of cultural geography and reflects upon the implications they have for the continuing vitality of a feminist geography concerned with the cultural. The paper seeks to work away from this current disenchantment suggesting that in the field of feminist geography there are explicit intellectual and political imperatives that keep central the field of concerns associated with cultural geographical perspectives. Along the way we examine emergent scholarship on the governance of gender through culture concepts, the idea of gender as a form of foundational ordering grammar, the implications of non-representational claims for feminist scholarship, and the nature of performativity. We conclude by encouraging feminist cultural geography to chart the emergent geographies of relational natures and material cultures that reveal gender as both embodied and discursive, given and enacted.     

RADIOCARBON MEASUREMENT BY ACCELERATOR MASS SPECTROMETRY: AN EARLY SELECTION OF DATES

Dates from the first runs of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit span the range from present to c. 17,000 bp, with errors (1 s.d.) from ± 100 to ± 300 years. Material dated comprises bone, wood, charcoal, seeds, organic residues in pottery, and charcoal inclusions in slag.     

X-RAY FLUORESCENCE ANALYSIS OF MUSEUM OBJECTS: A NEW INSTRUMENT

A new X-ray fluorescent analyser is described which uses a miniature X-ray tube or radioisotope source as alternative means of primary excitation. The advantages of this approach as compared to previous methods, particularly where elements low in the periodic table are concerned, is discussed. The second part of the paper describes an application of the technique. The non-destructive analysis of valuable ceramics, where elements low in the periodic table are important for differentiation purposes, has previously presented a problem. By using the ‘Isoprobe’such measurements are possible. In this instance the separation of early Chinese porcelains into Northern and Southern production groups is shown to be possible. Although samples have been ground from the wares for comparison with optical emission spectrometry, it is shown that analysis of the unglazed portions of the pots themselves gave similar results.     

DEVELOPMENT‐DRIVEN ARCHAEOLOGY: BANE OR BOON FOR BIOARCHAEOLOGY?

Summary.   Through much of the world there is a move towards policies of in situ preservation of the buried archaeological heritage, typically supported by small-scale investigative excavations (often called 'evaluations'). In this review we attempt to judge the success of these policies in England and Wales, from the standpoint of bioarchaeology. We consider particularly the value of data for plant and insect macrofossils from trial excavations associated with development (a) in producing information which contributes towards research agendas, and (b) as a guide to the preservational condition of organic archaeological deposits.