A HISTORY OF THE SPECIES?1

By rejecting the old divide between prehistory and history, the group of scholars behind Deep History opens a new window on the problem of the unity and diversity of human experience over the very long run. Their use of kinship metaphors suggests not only a link between modern society and the deep past, but also perhaps a way to imagine the common legacy of the human species. But what emerges from Deep History is hardly a sunny story about the distant origins of social justice and ecological harmony. The other central metaphor of the book—the fractal—uncovers the slow prelude to the Anthropocene. Rather than seeing a sharp break in the Industrial Revolution from an “organic” to a fossil fuel‐burning economy, these scholars stress the history of environmental destruction that has accompanied human expansion. My critical reading presents an alternative understanding of deep history as an arena for a new politics of species. Here a cornucopian understanding of human adaptation clashes with a new pessimism about the climatic fragility of Neolithic civilization.     

Above and Beyond: Zomia and the Ethnographic Challenge of/for Regional History

James Scott’s notion of Zomia proposes a new look at historical and social dynamics in a vast area of the Asian hinterlands, in terms of deliberate state‐avoidance that came to an end through the nation state’s superior techniques of control. Zomia is a concept metaphor that defines the social reality it purportedly only describes. My examination points to a pervasive problem with the historicization of highland regions in Europe as much as in Asia. Juxtaposing Scott’s case with two other definitions of Zomia, I call attention to the way concept metaphors define social landscapes and historical dynamics. Drawing on the work of several Europeanists, I suggest a model of rural–urban relations that does not privilege either a community or the state as the principle of society and history, which may overcome the separate disciplinary biases of anthropology, history and political science.     

U‐2 flights in the North: Western strategy,intelligence requirements and political risks

Reindeer herding in Scandinavia has in recent years been studied as a common‐pool resource problem. In such studies the size of the herds are often analysed in relation to issues like economics, demography, and technology. In this article the author discusses the size of reindeer herds in relation to social and organisational issues in the light of experiences from an environmental assessment.     

Detecting the medieval cod trade: a new method and first results

This paper explores the potential of stable isotope analysis to identify the approximate region of catch of cod by analysing bones from medieval settlements in northern and western Europe. It measures the δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values of cod bone collagen from medieval control samples collected from sites around Arctic Norway, the North Sea, the Kattegat and the Baltic Sea. These data were considered likely to differ by region due to, for example, variation in the length of the food chain, water temperature and salinity. We find that geographical structuring is indeed evident, making it possible to identify bones from cod caught in distant waters. These results provide a new methodology for studying the growth of long-range trade in dried cod and the related expansion of fishing effort—important aspects of the development of commercialisation in medieval Europe. As a first test of the method, we analyse three collections of cod bones tentatively interpreted as imported dried fish based on a priori zooarchaeological criteria. The results tentatively suggest that cod were being transported or traded over very long distances since the end of the first millennium AD.     

The late prehistory of xinjiang in relation to its neighbors

Recent research by Chinese archaeologists has identified many late prehistoric (2000-400 B.C.) oases, pastoral settlements, and cemeteries in eastern Central Asia (Xinjiang province of China). The synthesis presented here organizes the data into 10 archaeological cultures, defined on the basis of ceramics, burials, small finds, and architecture. The archaeological cultures reveal two periods, corresponding to the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The oases cultures formed a core area before the Chinese Han period and maintained close contacts with nearby highland pastoralists in Siberia and western Central Asia. The evidence for interaction between Xinjiang and the complex cultures in China and western Central Asia is evaluated with regard to the origins of the early Xinjiang cultures.