Teotihuacan pottery as evidence for subsistence practices involving maguey sap

As in most other pre-industrial cities, urban life at Teotihuacan was closely intertwined with ceramic technology, perhaps nowhere more so than in the realm of foodways. Here, we use two kinds of information derived from ancient pottery—ceramic residues and intra-site sherd distribution patterns—to shed new light on the city’s subsistence economy. We concentrate in particular on the amphora, a type of vessel that may have been used to contain aguamiel and pulque, liquid foodstuffs made of maguey sap. Distributional data distilled from surface collections of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project are informative about patterned variation in the use of these pots at the scale of the entire city. More focused analyses are aimed at chemical characterization of organic residues preserved in ceramic sherds recovered from recent excavations. Part of a broader project aimed at identifying both animal and plant remains, the results of the residue analysis provide the first direct identification of pulque remains in Teotihuacan pottery.     

Unfolding the relationship between resilient firms and the region

ABSTRACT

This research explores organizational resilience in four manufacturing firms in four different regions of Norway. While regional resilience has gained attention in research, there have been few studies with a micro-level focus, investigating firms and their distinctive features of resilience. We chose a qualitative multiple-case study approach and employed a critical incident technique to study resilience in selected firms that had experienced external shocks and shifts in regard to changing markets, globalization and advances in technology. Each, however, had managed to continually develop resilience capacity over time. Our framework considered three dimensions of organizational resilience: the cognitive, the behavioural and the contextual. We address how resilience is sustained over time, the evolutionary nature of organizational resilience in firms and how resilient firms relate to the region. We found that all three dimensions of resilience capacity were evident in each firm, but appeared as a complex and unique blend. Furthermore, each dimension was supported by regional ties and affiliations. The findings suggest that organizational resilience is a dynamic capability conditioned by firm–region interactions, which are cultural, social and economic. Regional resilience is built through the contribution of the firm to the economic and social systems of the region.     

“The Story of the Man Who Whitened His Face”: Bernini,Galileo, and the Science of Relief

This essay argues that Bernini orchestrated the relief surfaces of his sculptures through an exacting science of optical perception. It connects his understanding of the relief structure of his sculptural work to Galileo’s contemporaneous discovery of the cratered surface of the moon to contend that art and science shared similar concerns in the visual analysis of relief perceived as patterns of light and shadow. Through a full contextualisation of one of Bernini’s many workshop aphorisms, about a man who whitened his face, it demonstrates the scientific, art-theoretical, and practice-based considerations that informed Bernini’s understanding of optics in the sculptural rendering of facial likeness through the medium of white marble.     

Early Maritime Desert Dwellers in Namaqualand,South Africa: A Holocene Perspective on Pleistocene Peopling

ABSTRACT

South Africa's northern Namaqualand coastal desert is the southern extension of the Namib. Today, this region is semi-desert with patchy subsistence resources and scarce, unpredictable rainfall. Yet this ancient desert landscape possesses residues of human activity stretching back into the Middle Pleistocene, evidenced by heavily weathered surface finds, including handaxes and Victoria West cores. Such old finds in so harsh an environment raise important questions: how do human movements into this area relate to local palaeoenvironmental changes, and how has this relationship changed through time? While no dated Middle Pleistocene sites presently exist to reconstruct the earliest hominin dispersals, several late Pleistocene sites now have chronostratigraphic sequences that can be brought to bear on these questions. This article presents chronological and subsistence-settlement data for one such site, Spitzkloof A Rockshelter in northern Namaqualand's rugged Richtersveld. Humans are shown to have visited the site very sporadically between ～50,000 and 17,000 cal BP. Unlike most of the subcontinent, the most intensive occupations occur during early Marine Isotope Stage 2, when multiple proxies suggest enhanced humidity associated with intensified winter rainfall. We examine these data using the region's better-developed Holocene archaeological record to create predictions about the earliest coastal desert dwellers.     

The Paths of the European Conquest of the Atlantic: Osteological Evidence of Warfare and Violence in Gran Canaria (XV Century)

European expansion in the Atlantic in the Late Middle Ages often implied the use of violence, involving tactics and weaponry unknown to some of the affected populations. Among the first places to suffer this violence were the Canary Islands, whose conquest lasted the whole of the 15th century. Documentary information about this historical episode is abundant, whereas archaeological evidence testifying to it is very rare. However, an individual from an indigenous funerary context of Gran Canaria (placed in a collective burial cave and wrapped in a shroud made of vegetable fibres) displays a large number of wounds, both on his skull and on the rest of the skeleton, probably caused by swords, suggesting a mortal attack conducted by one or more aggressors. Based on the study of injuries, it is considered a potential explanation of their origin, concluding that most likely this case may be associated with the process of the conquest of the Island. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On Language, Culture, and Social Action

This article outlines the theoretical developments experienced in historical studies over the last two decades. As a consequence of the growing critical reconsideration of some of the main theoretical assumptions underlying historical explanation of individuals' meaningful actions, a new theory of society has taken shape among historians during this time. By emphasizing the empirical and analytical distinction between language as a pattern of meanings and language as a means of communication, a significant group of historians has thoroughly recast the conventional notions of society, experience, interests, culture, and identity, and has developed a new concept of social action. Thus, historiographical debate seems to have started to transcend, for the first time, the longstanding and increasingly futile contest or dilemma between objectivism and subjectivism, between materialism and culturalism, between social and intentional explanation, or between social constraints and human agency. The groundwork has now been laid for an alternative to the declining paradigm of social history that does not entail a revisionist return (be it partial or complete) to idealist history but opens a quite different path.     

Greek Trade in Iberia: The Extent of Interaction

Traditional research has looked at Greek trade in Iberia from a diffusionist standpoint: the Greeks would have been the major agents of cultural change. It was still accepted that this constituted a direct, inevitable, substantial and transformative action on an eminently receptive and passive society. In this paper we question the true extent and weight of Greek trade in the cultural transformations which occurred in Iberia during the 6th to 4th centuries BC. Our proposition in this paper is to define and determine the extent of the process of interaction brought about by Greek trade. In our opinion, there was never absolutely decisive Greek-Iberian interaction in the development process: it was led by internal forces.