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.     

Rethinking voter identification: its rationale and impact

Voter ID is a contentious issue in electoral democracies worldwide. This article surveys arguments for and against voter ID in the Australian context, presenting data from the first election in the country to require it. The data demonstrate a differential impact on regional electorates and on electorates with concentrations of Indigenous voters. While the law in question (from the State of Queensland) was moderate in its overall impact, confusion created by it may have suppressed turnout. The law has since been repealed, but voter ID now has the support of a conservative majority on the Commonwealth Parliament’s electoral matters committee. We conclude that voter ID is not a solution to eliminating fraud, but an additional bureaucratic layer upon the ritual of casting a ballot and a hurdle with unintended consequences.     

International accompaniment,reflexivity and the intelligibility of power in post-conflict Guatemala

ABSTRACT

‘International accompaniers’ use their physical presence as a form of peaceful intervention to deter political violence against local human rights defenders. Threatened members of Guatemala’s civil society have relied on accompaniment as part of their security strategy since the early 1980s. Approximately one thousand volunteers from a dozen countries have accompanied in Guatemala. International accompaniment has been a key component of the effort to prosecute former military general and president Efraín Ríos Montt and other perpetrators of mass human rights violations in Guatemala. Victim witnesses and their legal counsel have included accompaniment as part of their protection strategy since 2000. Important questions have nonetheless been raised with respect to accompaniment’s effectiveness as a tool for witness protection and the possibility that it reinforces power inequalities. This article builds on Gada Mahrouse’s critique of accompaniment and draws on Michel Foucault’s understanding of reflexivity and power. The authors use insights from two case studies to support the argument that accompaniment’s usefulness as a tool for witness protection depends on its ability to accommodate the witnesses’ position within webs of interconnected power dynamics and the multiple ways in which they conceive of security. It also depends on how intelligible these different power dynamics are to accompaniers. This argument is used to highlight how accompaniment in Guatemala is relevant for other situations where the prosecution of human rights atrocities is long term and depends on witness testimony.     

Quality Quartz: working stone at a bronze age kerbed Cairn at Olcote,near Calanais,Isle of Lewis

This paper discusses an assemblage of worked and smashed quartz associated with a Bronze Age kerbed cairn at Olcote. Most analytical treatments of quartz in Scottish prehistory have been structured around a pervasive dualism: quartz working is either the mundane use of a low quality raw material or the ritual use of a symbolically laden referent. The assemblage from Olcote highlights the dangers of such dichotomous analytical positions.     

Animals Old and New. Multiple Perspectives on the Meaning of Beasthood

Caton, Hiram, ed. The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. Lan‐ham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1990. xiii + 351 pp. including references and index. $38.75 cloth, $22.75 paper.

Monberg, Torben. Bellona Island Beliefs and Rituals. Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 9. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991. xix + 449 pp. including appendixes, references, and index. $42.00 cloth.

Lindstrom, Lamont. Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. xvi + 224 pp. including references and index. $29.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.