Sheepcotes: Evidence for Medieval Sheepfarming

SHEEPCOTES were late medieval buildings for the shelter of flocks and the storage of fodder, among other functions. They are visible as earthworks and are recorded in documents. This study uses mainly Gloucestershire examples to provide insights into medieval sheep husbandly, and changing patterns of land management.     

Medieval Tin-Glazed Painted Tiles in North-West Europe

ALL OF THE KNOWN medieval tin-glazed tiles from NW. Europe beyond the Mediterranean littoral are discussed. They appear first c. 1290 in the Toulouse region and 14th-century examples are known from scattered sites in southern France, from the lower Loire valley and SE. Brittany, and from Flanders and Holland, with related material in Hamburg and East Anglia. The tiles are generally painted in green and brown and were locally produced. There is extensive documentation for the manufacture of such tiles for the Duke of Burgundy's chateau at Hesdin in French Flanders in the 1390s, and documentary evidence also records two Spanish tilers working for the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Berry at Dijon and Poitiers in the 1380s. Extant fragments from these sites and from Bourges and Mehun-sur-Yièvre include for the first time some with designs painted in blue. There is as yet no evidence for the continuing production of tin-glazed tiles in any of these areas during the 15th century or for locally-produced tin-glazed pottery before the late 15th or 16th century.     

Sceattas in Anglo-Saxon Graves

ANGLO-SAXON SILVER PENNIES (sceattas) are rare as gravegoods, but their provision was a regular element of burial practice in a small minority of later 7th-century-furnished inhumations and later burials. Although the number both of coins and burials is very small, they show patterns of deposition and treatment that have both a cultural and a broader chronological significance. This sample provides a window on social and symbolic attitudes to the coinages as elements of the broader material culture of contemporary society, and constitutes important corroborating evidence that the Primary Phase issues embodied a new degree of monetisation in 7th-century England.     

Between Large-N and Small-N Analyses: Historical Comparison of Thirty Insurgency Case Studies

Abstract

The authors study the 30 insurgencies occurring between 1978 and 2008 using four methods crossing the qualitative/quantitative divide. The four approaches are narrative, bivariate comparison, comparative qualitative analysis, and K-medoids clustering. The quantification of qualitative data allows the authors to compare more cases than they could “hold in their heads” under a traditional small-n qualitative approach, improving the quality of the overall narrative and helping to ensure that the quantitative analyses respected the nuance of the detailed case histories. Structured data-mining reduces the dimensionality of possible explanatory factors relative to the available observations to expose patterns in the data in ways more common in large-n studies. The four analytic approaches produced similar and mutually supporting findings, leading to robust conclusions.     

AIDS as Occupational Hazard: Racial Mixing and Historical Space in Malaysia's Multinationals

In Malaysia, bangsa, a term blending race and ethnicity, structures modes of social and political‐economic organization that reflexively challenge and reinforce the significance of race, not just to the country's three main groups but to the construction of risk as well. Tracing this reflexivity, the author bridges a historical rendering of Malaysia's colonial‐capitalist incorporation with an ethnographic unpacking of its social artifacts: notions of space, place and race that confer on factories a high‐risk label for HIV/AIDS. It traces how multinational corporations, as landscapes of multiracial modernity, are both the quixotic trophies of Malaysia's global integration and a source of social dread. Risk is ethnographically shown to be more a sociohistoric dynamic than a statistical probability, reflecting ideas of racial individuation and ideals of social stability and cultural immiscibility anchored in colonial governance structures of nineteenth‐century Malaya and operative in contemporary Malaysia.     

Fixity and fluidity: chiefly authority and settlement movement in colonial Botswana

This article proposes that anthropologists and historians of colonialism, landscape and the colonial construction of chieftaincy in Africa should examine particular case studies in more detail to elicit the complex social and material processes implicit in such notions. In particular it focuses upon the colonial conflation of the notions of settlement nucleation and sedentism in the period of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in Botswana (1885–1966), processes of material change, and the position of Tswana chiefs with regard to settlement and authority. The perceived “failure” of the Tawana chiefs in Ngamiland District to exert settlement control over the dispersed population is analyzed through detailed colonial records of conflict to argue that what failed was the colonial construction of chieftaincy itself, as well as the colonial imagination of landscape in Africa. The article’s emphasis upon the materiality of dwelling in the landscape also seeks to convince historians and anthropologists alike of the vast research potential of material culture in the analysis of colonial histories, social and cultural change, and indigenous notions of modernity.     

The influence of temperature on rehydroxylation [RHX] kinetics in archaeological pottery

Almost all archaeological ceramics undergo slow, progressive rehydroxylation by chemical combination with environmental water. The reaction is accompanied by an expansion, and also by the small but measurable mass gain that provides the basis of the RHX dating method. The rate of the RHX reaction increases with increasing temperature. Here we describe comprehensively the effects of temperature on the RHX process in relation to the dating methodology. We deal in turn with the kinetic model of the RHX reaction, the temperature dependence of the RHX rate, and the influence of varying environmental temperature on the RHX mass gain. We define an effective lifetime temperature and show how this is calculated from an estimated lifetime temperature history. Historical meteorological temperature data are used to estimate the lifetime temperature history, and this can be adjusted for long-term climate variation. We show also how to allow for the effects of burial in archaeological sites on the temperature history. Finally we describe how the uncertainties in estimates of RHX age depend on the estimates of temperature history and effective lifetime temperature.