Abundant Gifts of Stone and Bone

An abundance of points, flakes, bones, shells, and bodies is considered sufficient to raise the hypothesis that these offerings and their places constitute a type of fertility shrine. This paper documents several possible lithic and bone-offering places in eastern North America, among them Allumettes Island, Quebec; Tick Creek Cave, Missouri; James Creek, West Virginia; and Pen Point, South Carolina. Perhaps the most significant Late Archaic shrine marked by an abundance of points, deer bones, and human burials is Indian Knoll, Kentucky. The proposed fertility or increase rite practiced was that for a hunt god.     

Cutting Power Lines within the Palace? Countering Paternity and Eurocentrism in the 'Geographical Tradition'

This paper attempts to combine critical feminist and post-colonial approaches to suggest how more inclusive histories of geography may be written. Drawing on the specific example of women travellers in West Africa during the late nineteenth century, the paper proposes strategies to disrupt the masculinist and eurocentric construction of 'the geographical tradition'. These strategies include moving beyond a disciplinary focus, disrupting essentialisms, interrogating whiteness and authority, and attempting to reveal the historical agency and resistance of colonized others. The problematic and antagonist relationship between the recovery of the agency of white women and the recovery of non-Western agency and resistance is recognized, and it is suggested that countering eurocentrism requires a rethinking of current forms of countering paternity.     

Tangible belonging and national indifference: Being German in interwar Hungary1

Building on arguments from my book Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary, this article examines the sense of ‘being German’ in Hungarian-German villages in interwar Hungary. The basic argument is that rural dwellers possessed a kind of tangible belonging (a tangible sense of being German, in this case) defined by the immediate world around them and that this tangible belonging was continually in negotiations with other constituencies trying to define Germanness, such as Reich Germans, Hungarian-German leaders, and the Hungarian state as well as other Hungarians. This article also engages with the concept of national indifference, which has become a very common catchphrase in explanations concerning belonging in East Central Europe, especially in borderland regions and on the margins of states.     

Rural Opportunities: Minimalist Policy and Community-Based Experimentation

Rural America's experiences with federal policies provide lessons on both the benefits and liabilities of minimalist policy attention and community-based policy experimentation. Prior to the New Deal federal rural policies promoted incentives to settle vast territories, subsidize private development of internal market structures, and invest in the benefits of higher education. The New Deal redirected rural policies to more narrow foci on the farm economic and environmental crises. These new, more centralized policies were built upon the rapid expansion of the Department of Agriculture into the first modern federal bureaucracy, politically legitimized on the basis of community-based policy experimentation. The seemingly unintended consequence of these emergency efforts to rescue farming was the marginalization of most non-farm policy concerns. The resulting minimalist federal approach to rural America was due to the absence of a unified national constituency for rural concerns. Understanding rural America's inadvertent experimentation in minimalist policy attention and in community-based policy structures can inform current policy initiatives to decentralize federal authority.     

The Use of Mineralogy to Identify Sources of Soapstone Artefacts: an Example from Soapstone Ridge,Georgia (USA)

The late Archaic Soapstone Ridge quarries, near Atlanta, Georgia, are the largest sources of archaeological soapstone in the south‐eastern USA. Ten soapstone artefacts from the coastal plain, over 200 km south of Soapstone Ridge (SSR), were used in an attempt to relate their mineralogy to that of the Soapstone Ridge quarries and to investigate the utility of mineralogy in the sourcing of soapstone. There is an overall similarity in the abundance of the major soapstone minerals, talc, chlorite and amphiboles in the artefacts and the SSR soapstone. Differences in the variety of amphibole (tremolite/actinolite, magnesiohornblende and magnesiocumingtonite/anthophyllite) and FeTi oxides (magnetite and ilmenite) eliminate SSR as a source for some of the artefacts. The compositions of chlorite (Cr), magnesiohornblende (Si, Al) and Fe oxides (Cr, Mn) in other artefacts are not consistent with a Soapstone Ridge source. The talc compositions are identical in the artefacts and the SSR soapstone. The mineral assemblage and compositions of two artefacts are consistent with a Soapstone Ridge source. Despite an overall similarity in the modal mineralogy of the artefacts and Soapstone Ridge quarries, there is enough diversity to distinguish between artefacts from Soapstone Ridge or some other source. Mineralogy is a useful tool for the evaluation of soapstone sources.