Reflections on Collaborative Archaeology and Large-Scale Online Research Infrastructures

ABSTRACT

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is an archive working at a national level in the UK, ensuring that archaeologists have access to high quality and dependable digital resources, including openly licensed legacy data for reuse. The ADS acts as a metadata aggregator for archaeological data held by larger heritage agencies and smaller regional organizations and participates in international aggregation infrastructure projects such as ARIADNE, which allows users to access archaeological resources held in many countries from a single interface. Large-scale infrastructures can facilitate the building of long-term, complex relationships and active collaborations, not just technical solutions. This paper reflects on the roles of stewardship and equity within ARIADNE and the ADS, two large-scale online research infrastructures, and how these types of infrastructures may help to create a more collaborative archaeology, including lessons learned, challenges and opportunities, and thoughts for the future.     

Gender Awareness in Migration Theory: Synthesizing Actor and Structure in Southern Africa

Recent developments in migration theory mirror two concerns writ large across the development literature, namely the attempt to reconcile structure and agency and the importance of gender. Using the specific context of southern Africa, this article analyses the development of migration theory over the last forty years and the dialectic between gender and the structure-agency dyad. It is argued that gender is an essential tool for unpicking the migration process and that a gender perspective has enriched and been enriched by a model of migration allowing analytical space for both the agency of migrants and the structures which surround them. Juxtaposing the various theories which have been brought to bear on migration in southern Africa also reveals the extent to which new models and classificatory systems have developed on the basis of agendas set by preceding conceptual frameworks, distinctions between competing models rarely being as clear-cut as the mode of scholarship would have them appear.     

Crossing the Factory Frontier: Gender, Place and Power in the Mexican Maquiladora

A pressing question raised by contemporary feminist theorists is how to conceptualize the intricate relationship between women as social agents and "Women"— an ideological representation of a female subject. Scholars have shown how women must often disavow this Woman in trying to establish their own careers. This article explores one facet of this issue by tracing one woman's journey through a Mexican maquiladora in the hope of demonstrating how this ideology produces the capitalist division of labor through the reproduction of sex-difference, nationality, and ethnic categories within one firm. The account raises some interesting questions about resistance, which may not be resolvable in the context of the workplace alone.     

Maintaining the Bar: Regulating European Barmaids in Colonial Calcutta and Rangoon

In 1902 the government of India banned the employment of European women as barmaids in Calcutta and Rangoon. This article examines this intervention, proceeding from the premise that a close look at this ban, and the women whose lives were affected by it, illuminates the entangled and at times contradictory ideas about gender, sexuality, mobility, labour and racial boundaries that characterised British imperial policy in India and Burma at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article argues that European barmaids, while seemingly marginal, in fact occupied a unique and important position within the British Empire, being at the heart of the recreational worlds of Calcutta and Rangoon. It further argues that the ban on the employment of barmaids reflects a wider official ambivalence about the new social forms emerging from the interactions of mobile subjects in these colonial port cities. Finally, it argues that Curzon’s and his colleagues’ intervention to ban the barmaids demonstrates the way that the relations of empire were negotiated through the control of mobile subjects.

The employment of barmaids was controversial in multiple sites across the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including in London. Yet the campaign against barmaids in London was unsuccessful, whereas the campaigns in Calcutta and Rangoon succeeded. The particular dynamics of the specific colonial context help to explain this difference: European barmaids in South and Southeast Asian colonial cities were marginal in multiple dimensions. Some of the women employed as barmaids were members of the domiciled European community, who occupied a place on the margins of both Englishness and ‘whiteness’. The barmaids’ employability in drinking establishments catering to a predominantly but not exclusively European clientele was in part a function of their European identity, yet that identity meant that their presence in the morally ambiguous space of the bar posed a threat to British prestige. To colonial officials, including Curzon, European women’s employment behind the bar was additionally problematic because these women could be employed in serving alcohol to non-European men in an inversion of the desired colonial hierarchy.     

Recent archaeological research at Saruq al‐Hadid,Dubai, UAE

In September 2014, the University of New England (UNE), Australia, began a three‐year programme of archaeological fieldwork and post‐excavation analyses focused on the site of Saruq al‐Hadid. In this paper, we present the initial results of our current field and laboratory research particularly related to site stratigraphy and formation processes, relative and absolute chronology, and the preliminary results of various programmes of post‐excavation analyses including archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, ceramic and archaeometallurgical studies. These studies provide new data to build into the archaeological understanding of Saruq al‐Hadid that has, to date, focused largely on intensive excavation.