The Ins and Outs of Death in the Iron Age: Complex Funerary Treatments at Broxmouth Hillfort,East Lothian

Evidence for Iron Age funerary treatments remains sporadic across Britain and formal cemeteries are especially elusive. One important exception is Broxmouth hillfort, East Lothian, excavated during the late 1970s but not yet published. New analysis of the human remains from Broxmouth provides evidence for three distinct populations: a formal cemetery outside the hillfort, isolated graves within the ramparts, and a scatter of disarticulated fragments from a range of domestic and midden contexts. The latter group in particular provides significant evidence for violent trauma; isotopic evidence suggests that they may be the remains of outsiders. Together the human remains shed light on complex and changing attitudes to death and the human body in Iron Age Britain. The material from Broxmouth is considered in the light of emerging evidence for fluid and pluralistic treatments of the dead in the Iron Age of south‐east Scotland.     

Exploring the potential of the popular culture and world politics agenda: actors,artefacts and the everyday

ABSTRACT

The PCWP agenda has contributed a great deal to the discipline of world politics, empirically, methodologically and theoretically. However, there is scope to expand upon certain aspects of this body of scholarship. In particular, the agenda is developing some unfortunate hierarchies in its focus on high-budget ‘blockbusters’ at the expense of data from the everyday. It is displaying a lack of imagination in terms of its methodologies and forms of output, despite the aesthetic and creative nature of many of the artefacts. Finally, it is evincing a reluctance to explore representations beyond the textual or the visual, at the expense of other forms of representation, including sound, taste or, as I argue in this paper, artefactuality.     

Freedom of information and transparency in Scotland: Disclosing persons as things and vice versa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Contemporary ideals of democratic governance hold that public trust in the workings of public authorities is achieved through measures such as allowing free access to information. Yet 18 months participating in and observing the activities of users of Freedom of Information legislation – introduced in Scotland in 2005 – and civil servants disclosing information under it reveals that public trust and transparency do not always flow from increased access. Treating ‘transparency’, not as a known phenomenon, but as something that emerges in ethnographic observation and analysis, this article moves beyond an idea of transparency as being the simple revelation of an object by a subject, and in doing so challenges the fixed distinction between persons and things on which transparency as it is understood by Freedom of Information legislation appears to rely.     

'Our son Obama': The US presidential election in Western Kenya

Writing from the city of Kisumu located 60 kilometres from the birthplace of Barack Obama's father, the authors describe the Obama-mania gripping Kenya and follow Kenyans' debates, both light-hearted and serious, concerning Obama's kinship ties to Kenya and the expectations these raise. They argue that Kenyan's hopes and fears surrounding the US elections should be understood in the context of the contested December 2007 Kenyan elections and the violence that shook Kenyan society in their aftermath; and they trace some of the faultines of race and class that came to the surface during the hightened emotions surrounding the US election and Obama's victory.     

TREGIFFIAN: THE CHRONOLOGY OF AN ENTRANCE GRAVE

The Tregiffian project involved the analysis and dating of the archive from unpublished excavations in the 1960s and 1970s at an entrance grave in Penwith, Cornwall. A major aim of the project was to establish a robust chronological basis for the use of the entrance grave for burial: 10 samples of cremated human bone were submitted for radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling undertaken. The modelling indicates that the use of the chamber for burial between began in 1780–1510 BC and ended in 1595–1425 BC. The results are hugely significant as they provide the first modelled dating from a Penwith entrance grave. This paper discusses the results from the radiocarbon dating project and reconsiders entrance graves in the wider context of the Early Bronze Age megalithic tombs which are found around the Irish Sea.     

The interplay between school and home location and its relationship with children’s subjective well-being

ABSTRACT

The aim is to determine the extent to which children’s subjective well-being (SWB) varies according to age, gender and the fact of living in the same context as the school (urban/rural) or not, in representative samples of 8, 10 and 12-year-olds (N?=?3708) in Spain. The existence of a match between schoolchildren’s living context and that of their school was the most common situation for the participants. The results, analysed using linear regression models and analysis of variance (ANOVA) with complex samples, show that a match between home and school context is not associated with statistically different levels of SWB in the three age groups (8, 10 and 12-year-olds) or by gender. Whereas no interactions between age, gender, school context and home location contribute to explaining overall life satisfaction, some do contribute to explaining the modified version of the Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS) used here.     

Points and prey: a quantitative test of the hypothesis that prey size influences early Paleoindian projectile point form

Understanding the causes of variation within and between projectile point types is an important task for Paleoindian archaeologists since they rely heavily on points to investigate such things as settlement dynamics and hunting practices. One long-held explanation for the variation in early Paleoindian point form is that prey size influenced the size and shape of projectile points. The study reported here evaluated this hypothesis with standard and geometric morphometric data recorded on Clovis and Folsom points from the Southern Plains and Southwest that are associated with mammoth or bison remains. Points used to hunt mammoth were found to be larger and of a different shape than points used to hunt bison, which supports the hypothesis. However, when both point type and prey size were taken into account, the results ran counter to predictions. Potential explanations for this discrepancy are discussed.