Ancestral memories and early medieval landscapes: the case of Sierra de Ávila (Spain)

This paper focuses on early medieval funerary practices from a landscape perspective in central Iberia. Rock‐dug graves constitute the most conspicuous remains in this region, but their informative potential has not yet been realized. The preliminary outcomes of an ongoing research project are presented here. This aims to contextualize such funerary cases by examining a mid‐altitude mountain study‐area. Through the use of intensive archaeological surveying and geographic information systems, the paper characterizes two basic funerary types: isolated graves and rural disordered cemeteries, which responded to two social strategies led by local households. By recalling ancestorship, they constituted effective mnemonic resources, contributing to claiming rights and forging identities among these dispersed and predominantly small‐scale herding communities.     

Underwater Archaeology in Colombia: Between Commercial Salvage and Science

International Journal of Historical Archaeology - This article summarizes the progress and current state of underwater archaeology in Colombia over the past three decades. It also presents the...     

Formulaicity in Child Ballads as a Means to Express Assertiveness

Oral traditions resort to formulas not only for memorability, but also to transmit meaning of socio-historical import. In the case of Child ballads, ‘she kilted her kirtle’ and ‘she took her mantle her about’ serve to construct an image of powerful women. Thus, at least in some ballads in English, the stereotype of passive women breaks down.     

Are universities ready for interculturality? The case of the Intercultural University ‘Amawtay Wasi’ (Ecuador)

This article focuses on the creation of the Intercultural University ‘Amawtay Wasi’ in 2003, and its evolution up until its final suspension from the university system in Ecuador. I reflect on the difficulty of implementing educational approaches based on locally situated cultural identities that involve epistemologies different from those which are hegemonic in academic spheres on the global level. From the point of view of the indigenous movement, the current situation is solely the result of the ignorance and arrogance of the state, which ‘has led to a backlash against the gains made by indigenous people that has even led to a decline in terms of indigenous rights’, calling the current government a government of ‘a new colonization’ (Salvador). However, interviews conducted in the years after the closure of Amawtay Wasi bring to light certain discourses and opposition that go beyond the obvious intellectual and political reluctance of the current government to maintain the Amawtay Wasi Intercultural University.     

AMS C dating of early human occupation of southern South America

The time of appearance of a persistent and demographically-viable hunter-gatherer population in late Pleistocene southern South America must be determined by evaluating evidence from as large as possible a sample of candidate archaeological sites in the region. We co-ordinated the AMS dating of multiple bone and charcoal samples from previously-excavated strata at the following sites: Arroyo Seco 2, Paso Otero 5, Piedra Museo, and Cueva Tres Tetas (all in Argentina), and Cueva del Lago Sofia 1 and Tres Arroyos (both in Chile). With one possible exception, we did not obtain new results to confirm earlier observations of pre-Clovis-age cultural activity at any of the sites considered in this study. The possible exception, Arroyo Seco 2, is considered in detail elsewhere [Politis G., Gutierrez M.A., Scabuzzo, C. (Eds), in press. Estado actual de las Investigaciones en el sitio 2 de Arroyo Seco (región pampeana, Argentina). Serie Monográfica INCUAPA 5. Olavarría]. However, our results for the samples which were the most preferred indicators of cultural events (hearth charcoal and cut-marked bone) confirm that people were in the southern cone of South America at or soon after 11,000 BP (13,000 cal BP). Considered alongside recent age estimates for the Clovis culture in North America, these results imply the contemporaneous emergence of a consistent and archaeologically-robust human occupation signal at widely-separated locations across the Western Hemisphere. Such findings suggest that Palaeoindian demic expansion may have involved more than one terminal Pleistocene dispersal episode.