The Reconstitution of Aapravasi Ghat,a Nineteenth-Century Immigration Depot in the Capital City of Port Louis,Mauritius, through Archaeology

Aapravasi Ghat is a World Heritage property and represents the mass immigration of Indentured Laborers after slavery. The Indenture Labor System started in 1834 but the site was established as a permanent immigration depot in 1849. For about a century the depot was used for arrival and departure of indentured laborers from Asian and African countries. Archaeological investigations highlighted the space distribution and everyday functioning of the depot. Simultaneously, structural modifications made before, during and after its occupation as a depot, could be identified. This paper relates the findings made through historical archaeological research and reconstruct the site during the different time period while focusing on the indenture period.     

Views into the Fragments: An Approach from a Microhistorical Perspective

The approach I call the “singularization of history,” which I have been developing in recent years within the methodological structure of microhistory, is the main subject of this article. It has the precise aim of defining the ways in which scholars can use sources to enter into the past in as detailed and varied a way as possible without becoming trapped within the received channels of the grand narratives. I will make an attempt to demonstrate what the Icelandic School of Microhistory (ISM) is all about and its connection to the scribal culture in the country, as well as the importance of ego-documents for microhistorical analysis. The central element in the analysis of this paper will be the sources themselves—their creation, their context within the events they describe, the opportunities they present for analysis, and in what kind of academic context they have become a subject for enquiry.     

Assessment of the Permeability of Historical Defensive Systems: the Case of the Lines of Torres Vedras

As the largest part of military usage of the territory depends on a thorough analysis of its morphology, spatial analysis with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software reveals a great potential as a way for studying battlefields and/or other military buildings and scenarios from the past, while supporting interpretations of territorial occupation and related organization of military forces through event simulation. This paper presents a GIS-based method to model and assess the permeability of historical defensive systems from the period that preceded the mechanization of warfare of the late nineteenth century, i.e., based on artillery installed in fortifications. The method was applied to analyze the permeability of the Lines of Torres Vedras (LTV) defensive system, a multi-line fortification complex which was operational during the Peninsular War in the beginning of the nineteenth century and located north of Lisbon, Portugal. The structures of the LTV and local terrain were modelled in GIS using a set of proposed parameters that support territorial analysis, combined with the capability of contemporary weaponry. A methodical quantification and combination of these parameters enabled a better understanding of the systemic design of the defensive lines in terms of its permeability, contributing to a discussion of the LTV particular military setting based on the interpretation of these indicators. Global and sectorial analyses of the permeability of the LTV defensive system were conducted.     

“Poor White” Recollections and Artifact Reuse in Barbados: Considerations for Archaeologies of Poverty

Archaeologists regularly confront the material realities of economic inequality. This article contributes to a growing body of literature on the archaeology of poverty but challenges archaeologists to consider how such approaches are politically weighted and directly come to bear on how communities experience economic hardship in the present. Additionally, through a case study of a “poor white” tenantry in Barbados, this article suggests that material culture from sites associated with people of limited economic means necessitates alternative interpretive methods that combine archaeological, historical, and oral sources.     

Uniform Probability Density Analysis and Population History in the Northern Rio Grande

One of the basic challenges facing archaeology is translating surface evidence into population estimates with sufficient chronological resolution for demographic analysis. The problem is especially acute when one is working with sites inhabited across multiple chronological periods and the production curves for pottery types are unknown. In this paper, I present a Bayesian statistical method which I call uniform probability density analysis that is tailored to this situation. This method combines uniform distributions derived from the local pottery chronology with pottery assemblage data to reconstruct the population history of individual settlements. I also illustrate applications of this method at the site and regional level using data from Cuyamungue and the surrounding Tewa Basin/VEP II New Mexico project area. The results allow one to identify a period of significant population movement corresponding to the period of Tewa ethnogenesis in the thirteenth century CE.     

The Camera “at the Trowel’s Edge”: Personal Video Recording in Archaeological Research

Video recording is increasingly becoming a favourable medium in archaeological research, particularly as an unconventional documentation tool that captures the elusive processes of ongoing interpretation in an audiovisual format. Our research forms part of the Personal Architectonics Through INteraction with Artefacts (PATINA) project, a project focused on the design of technologies for supporting research. Archaeological fieldwork is one of the research environments being studied by the project, and one of our primary concerns was to observe and record current research practices in the wild and to examine the influence of new technologies on those practices. This research brings together well-established and advanced observation techniques used in social sciences and computing fields such as human–computer interaction with archaeological research and presents the deployment of an off-the-shelf wearable camcorder as a recording interface in archaeological fieldwork. The article discusses the user evaluation methodology and the results, while addressing long-standing and timely theoretical discussions on the role of video recording in archaeological research.     

Historicising Material Agency: from Relations to Relational Constellations

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis, and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of ceramic fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC–third century AD): the fluid, the categorical and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such, a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.     

The “Hidden” Code: Coding and Classifying in Rock Art. The Case of Northwestern Patagonia

In spite of its importance for rock art studies, rock art motifs coding and classification process is not always made explicit. In this discussion of the process of rock art classification, we consider an exploratory research employing two different criteria for the coding of a northwestern Patagonian rock art motifs database. One coding makes use of a ‘lumping’ criterion, and the other uses a ‘splitting’ criterion. Each of these criteria will be evaluated using cladistic analysis, recording how each coding criterion affects results. As a conclusion, and given our results, the use of more than one coding criterion is suggested when classifying rock art.     

Simulating Lithic Raw Material Variability in Archaeological Contexts: A Re-evaluation and Revision of Brantingham’s Neutral Model

This paper presents a systematic re-evaluation of Brantingham’s (American Antiquity, 68(3), 487-509, 2003) neutral model of raw material procurement. I demonstrate that, in its original form, the model is ill-suited to the identification of archaeologically visible patterns, as it can only simulate processes governing the composition of toolkits and these differ substantially from those influencing the composition of discard records. I discuss and implement a series of modifications, and provide a detailed analysis of discard records produced under revised model definitions. On this basis, I argue that qualitative similarities in patterns generated by the neutral model and those evidenced in archaeological contexts cannot be used to prove, or disprove, the adaptive or functional significance of raw material variability (cf. Brantingham 2003). However, I show that the revised model can be used to detect deviations from neutral expectations quantitatively and within well-defined error ranges. I outline a new set of predictions for what archaeological variability should look like under the simplest procurement, transport, and discard behaviors, and argue that deviations from each of these may be traceable to specific behavioral domains (e.g., biased mobility, raw material selectivity). I also demonstrate that (a) archaeological sites or assemblages do not offer an adequate proxy for the average composition of ancient forager toolkits; (b) assemblage richness is, by itself, a very poor predictor of occupational histories; and (c) that the common practice of calculating expected frequencies from distances to sources is flawed, regardless of how such distances are measured.