The coming of age of the history of archaeology

Publications and organizational developments relating to the history of archaeology from 1989 until June 1993 are critically examined. Attention is paid to the changing motivations for producing such publications, their shifting intellectual orientation, controversies, especially as they relate to internal vs external approaches and the epistemological status of explanations, problems of verification, and the status of these studies as a subfield within archaeology.     

The Clear Categories of Olive Pink

This paper explores Olive Pink's writings of the 1930s, with particular emphasis on her stern moral convictions, and her insistence that persons of mixed Aboriginal and other descent were not Aborigines. It suggests that these two issues were linked, and may best be understood in the context of the contemporary preoccupation with saving a race which had long been regarded as doomed to extinction.     

THE CHRONOLOGY OF GROUPS OF DIES FOR LARGE ISSUES OF ANCIENT COINS USING MAHALANOBIS DISTANCES*

Discriminant analyses of distances and angles obtained from 25 coins struck by P. Crepusius in 82 BC permitted the correct chronology for five groups of closely-related dies to be obtained by the method of Carter and Frurip. Twenty distances and 15 angles were measured on 10 x projections of the coins which represented five groups of dies separated in time from each other. The use of all or many variables gave poorer results than the use of five to ten variables having a high ‘figure of merit’, defined as the maximum range of mean values for a given variable in the five groups of dies divided by the mean standard deviation of the variable in the five groups. It is recommended that chronologies of ancient coins be determined from Mahalanobis distances by using only variables of relatively high figure of merit.     

COMPOSITIONAL CHARACTERIZATION OF FRENCH LIMESTONE: A NEW TOOL FOR ART HISTORIANS*

Limestone from quarries known to medieval craftsmen and from the monuments they built and embellished, as well as from carvings now in museum collections, has been characterized by neutron activation analysis. Specimens from 38 quarries in the Lutetian and Jurassic limestone formations of France and from sculptures in American and French museums have been tested, and the results have been compiled in a data base to which art historians may refer when attempting to determine provenance for sculptures. Multivariate statistical analysis of concentration data shows stone from a particular quarry in the Paris basin to be compositionally homogeneous and distinguishable from other quarries in the same formation. The same approach to data related to quarries near the Burgundian abbey of Cluny finds general agreement between classifications based on compositional and on petrographic data, but the number of samples available for analysis at the time of writing was insufficient to achieve the finer distinctions reported for the Paris basin.     

MAPPING THEM 'OUT': EURO-CANADIAN CARTOGRAPHY AND THE APPROPRIATION OF THE NUXALK AND TS'ILHQOT'IN FIRST NATIONS' TERRITORIES, 1793–1916

As social constructions of reality, maps embody the values, truth-claims and power-structures of the cultures that make them. Using a variety of interpretive methodologies, geographers and cartographers have developed the thesis that, through selective 're-presentation', maps 'work' at a discursive, symbolic level. In focusing on the artifact itself, however, they have tended to forget that maps are made by someone. Indeed, as part of a wider institutional network, organized and reified by people in pursuit of certain goals, maps serve to create and sustain territories. In a colonial context, moreover, maps arrest and de-legitimize the territorialization of some cultural groups even as they enfranchise and legitimize that of others. Maps are, in this view, ideological weapons. In this paper I use a materialist hermeneutic to investigate the way in which maps helped to actualize the territorial dispossession of the original inhabitants of what is now British Columbia. Beginning with the charts of George Vancouver and Alexander MacKenzie, and ending with the Indian Reserve maps of the 1916 Royal Commission, I illustrate this thesis by tracing the cartographic encirclement of the Nuxalk and Ts'ilhqot'in First Nations. As an essential adjunct in the Euro-Canadian colonization of the region, the analysis has implications for our understanding of the social, political, and juridical function of maps within contemporary land claims discourse.