Recovering the past from above Hibabiya — an Early Islamic village in the Jordanian desert?

Britain and the Middle East were the two areas in which the technique of aerial archaeology was pioneered in the 1920s. Overwhelmingly the latter took place in Syria where a French Jesuit priest, Antoine Poidebard, worked for a generation. Further south in Transjordan — as it then was — three men presided over a brief (1927–1929) but fruitful period: an archaeologist with a passion for the newly developing technique (O.G.S. Crawford) and two pilots of the Royal Air Force with an amateur interest in what they saw beneath their wings (Flt. Lt. P.E. Maitland and Gp/Capt L.W.B. Rees). An aerial photograph published at the time seemed to identify a ‘village’ as prehistoric. Over eighty years later and just after it was destroyed, a fresh examination and the rediscovery of some crucial dating evidence have combined to identify it as, probably, an early Islamic village on the desert fringe.     

Full Spectrum Archaeology

Full spectrum archaeology (FSA) is an aspiration stemming from the convergence of archaeology’s fundamental principles with international heritage policies and community preferences. FSA encompasses study and stewardship of the full range of heritage resources in accord with the full range of associated values and through the application of treatments selected from the full range of appropriate options. Late modern states, including British Columbia, Canada, nominally embrace de jure heritage policies consonant with international standards yet also resist de facto heritage management practice grounded in professional ethics and local values and preferences. In response, inheritor communities and their allies in archaeology are demonstrating the benefits of FSA and reclaiming control over cultural heritage. Archaeology and heritage management driven by altruistic articulation of communal, educational, scientific and other values further expose shortcomings and vulnerabilities of late modern states as well as public goods in and from FSA.     

Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland,CA

This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place‐specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco‐based model of “tech gentrification” results in deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in the US as well. Treating Oakland as a “crossroads of theory”, this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors’ activist and empirical work, it contends that “thinking from Oakland” demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal.     

Identification of Suspected Horn from the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718), North Carolina,USA

Infrared spectroscopy can be a valuable tool for conservators and archaeologists to help identify archaeological artefacts. We present a case‐study on the identification of an artefact recovered by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources (NCDCR) Underwater Archaeology Branch from an early‐18th‐century shipwreck (31CR314). The wreck is assumed to be the remains of Queen Anne's Revenge, which sank off the North Carolina coast in 1718. A sample of the artefact was analysed by infrared spectroscopy to identify it. Prior to spectroscopic analysis it was speculated that the sample could be animal horn or leather. © 2011 The Authors     

On Behavioral Depression in White-tailed Deer

Behavioral depression is a decline in prey availability because of enhanced alert response, movement away from areas, increased social behavior, and other responses to predators. This form of resource depression is an alternative hypothesis to be contrasted to over-exploitation that potentially explains a decrease in hunting efficiency over time should the zooarchaeologist observe a decline in the relative abundance of remains of high-rank prey. Gregarious ungulates, such as many North American cervids, may exhibit such behavioral responses under predation. The white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), one of the most common high-rank prey animals from Holocene archaeological sites in eastern North America, is less gregarious, more r-selected, and exhibits greater home-range fidelity than other cervids. As a result, whitetails are less likely to exhibit behavioral depression than other North American ungulates, which may explain their common occurrence in Holocene archaeological faunas, such as that from the Eagle??s Ridge site in southeast Texas where resource depression appears to have occurred from 4,500 to 1,500?years ago. The behavioral ecology of ungulate species should be considered on a case-by-case basis to develop testable hypotheses about prehistoric human predation.     

Genes, language, and culture: an example from the tarim basin

Summary. The Tarim Basin ‘mummies’ of western China continue to fascinate scholars and the general public alike due to their ‘Caucasoid’ features, well‐preserved material culture, and putative ‘European’ origins. However, there have been some uncritical efforts to link these archaeological cultures to those of other ancient Eurasian groups (e.g. the Celts) by applying syllogistic reasoning to multi‐disciplinary evidence. In an attempt to provide a more cautious synthesis of the prehistory of the Tarim Basin, this paper will briefly summarize the archaeological, physical, and linguistic evidence that has been used to model human settlement of this region. These data will then be related to recent molecular anthropology research on modern populations of Central Asia, focusing especially on the Uighur in relation to their neighbours. While the genetic history of the modern peoples of a particular region is not necessarily related to their prehistoric antecedents, it is argued that the Tarim Basin experienced a surprising cultural and biological continuity despite immigration from both east and west into Xinjiang Province. This conclusion has a number of possible political ramifications in the present day that must be addressed in future literature on the subject.