Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes.     

“The Hunting of the Earl of Rone.” The Emergence of “New” Folklore Motifs: Individual Creativity and Group Control

In 1798, a French expeditionary force under General Humbert landed in County Mayo to support the United Irishmen's rebellion. Both the French and their local allies were eventually defeated by British and Yeomanry troops, but the memory of the events and personalities of “the Year of the French” was still strong when the Irish Folklore Commission started its collecting mission in the 1930s. This article suggests that the folk narratives of these events can be collated into an alternative, and more democratic, version of the rebellion. Popular interest rested not with the French general (except as a scapegoat for defeat) but with local men (and women) of less elevated status. The common people of Ireland were, in their own narratives, less directed from above and more agents in their own right. These are less a corrective to the supposedly “authoritative” histories written by professionals and diffused through the media and education system, than a coherent, alternative historiography.1 The ballad “The Men of the West” was composed by William Rooney, one of the most enthusiastic organisers of the centenary commemorations of 1798. The ballad was set to the air of “Eoghan Cóir,” a song attributed to the eighteenth‐century Mayo poet Richard Barrett [Riocard Bairéad], who was implicated in the Rebellion.      

Last Glacial Human Settlement in Eastern Cantabria (Northern Spain)

While the excavation of individual sites remains fundamental to the creation of the Palaeolithic archeological record, increasingly the focus of prehistoric research is on human adaptations to and within natural regions. Such a reorientation implies viewing sites and occupations as samples of different suites of activities in various habitats across space and time; it is dependent on the use of radiocarbon to date and relate occupation residues among sites; and it necessitates the application of methods to uncover patterns of human mobility as an integral aspect of subsistence economy, demographic arrangements and social relations. This paper contributes to the regional study of Last Glacial foragers by presenting preliminary aspects of a case study from the Asón River basin in eastern Cantabria. Assembled here are data from several recent and a few older excavations in sites distributed between the present shore of the Bay of Biscay and the uplands of the Cantabrian Cordillera. The main sites are El Otero, La Chora, La Fragua and El Perro near or at the present mouth of the river, the classic cave of El Valle in the mid-valley, and El Mirón and El Horno near the cave art loci of Covalanas, La Haza and Cullalvera in the upper valley. While the highest density of known sites in the whole drainage area occurs during the Magdalenian and Azilian periods (17–10 kya), there is evidence for substantial abandonment of the montane interior during the Mesolithic, when human settlement was concentrated around the estuary of the Asón, after which time the whole valley was repopulated in the Neolithic.     

First contribution of the excavation and chronostratigraphic study of the Ruways 1 Neolithic shell midden (Oman) in terms of Neolithisation,palaeoeconomy, social-environmental interactions and site formation processes

The NeoArabia project tries to understand how environmental, social, economic and technological factors work in concert to influence settlement and abandonment along a latitudinal transect of 1200 km from UAE to southern Oman. This region was affected by wide north–south variations in the Indo-Arabian monsoon, marine upwelling activity and eustatic variations in the Mid-Holocene. On the local settlement scale, this transect is based on fine stratigraphic excavations and permits the reconstruction of the site formation processes and site catchment analysis. A large number of studies have been conducted on the Ruways-1 site, focusing on a deep stratified sequence corresponding to three millennia of occupation. These studies include on-site climate-environmental signal analysis, local palaeogeography and environmental reconstruction, reservoir effect studies, typo-technological studies, palaeoeconomic strategies, anthropological studies, sclerochronological studies and, finally, site formation processes, the understanding of which makes it possible to explain the potential and limits of the archaeological excavation. The first results confirm the richness of these archaeological archives for documenting the socio-environmental dynamics, but also the richness of its complex sedimentary structure and the importance of conducting fine and multidisciplinary excavations to answer questions about the rhythms and functions of occupations and the causalities of socio-environmental changes.     

The show must go on: Collapse,resilience, and transformation in 21st-century archaeology

Collapse is a theme addressed by specialists from many disciplines, from environmental and sustainability studies to popular culture and the hard sciences, as well as by archaeologists and historians. This review focuses on three recent books about past collapses and sets them in the context of collapse studies. The new contributions build on the growing body of collapse theory and increasing data on individual case studies, but each takes a new direction, adding to the ongoing debates about collapse, resilience, and transformation. While taking us forward, it is apparent that issues of definition and terminology are still an issue in collapse studies. The review also demonstrates that collapse is an area of lively research that can be regarded as a recognizable subfield of archaeological and historical research that also crosses over into other disciplines.     

Review article: Movers and Shakers: the Barbarians and the Fall of Rome

Books received for review:
The Lombards . By Neil Christie.
The Goths . By Peter Heather.
The End of Roman Britain . By Michael E. Jones.
The Huns . By Edward A. Thompson (revised by P. Heather).     

Of stones and bones: Interpreting site function in the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic of Western Europe

Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic excavations have usually yielded both artifacts and faunal remains in a variety of environmental settings across a latitudinal range from Belgium to Portugal. In some cases there seem to be functional relationships within levels between ungulate species and skeletal elements on the one hand and associated lithic and osseous artifacts on the other. In other cases—perhaps because of their nature as occupational and depositional palimpsests—the relationships are murkier. Examples examined here include La Riera and El Mirón caves (coastal and montane Cantabrian Spain, respectively), Dufaure rockshelter (Pyrenean lowland France), Magrite cave, Pape rockshelter, and Bois Laiterie cave and the Huccorgne open-air site (Ardennes upland, transitional zone, and central plateau of Belgium, respectively), and the Vidigal shell midden (coastal southern Portugal). The interpretation of site function (e.g., multi-purpose residential site, specialized logistical camp, or transit bivouac) is a matter of pragmatic, interdisciplinary, situation-specific analyses, and parsimony.     

Aging mountain gazelle (Gazella gazella): refining methods of tooth eruption and wear and bone fusion

This paper refines current methods for aging mountain gazelle (Gazella gazella), one of the most common species hunted by prehistoric humans in the southern Levant. Most importantly, we present a new tooth wear scheme for aging the lower deciduous fourth premolar (dP₄), the lower permanent molars (M₁, M₂, M₃) and the lower fourth premolar (P₄) of the gazelle. Broader wear stages for complete mandibles and individual teeth and bone fusion stages are also provided. Finally, a comparison of the tooth wear and bone fusion data indicates that the two methods can be linked at the important transition when a gazelle reaches adulthood (ca. 18 months of age). The completion of the fusion of the gazelle skeleton corresponds directly to the replacement of the dP₄ by the P₄ and the beginning of wear of the M₃. The coincidence of these aging indicators allows for direct comparison of gazelle bone fusion and tooth wear data.