Moving peoples,changing diets: isotopic differences highlight migration and subsistence changes in the Upper Mun River Valley,Thailand

The dramatic growth of dietary isotope studies in archaeological literature attests to the significant potential this technique has for shedding light on past societies. Human diet reflects complex, inter-linked factors such as status, cultural preferences or environmental constraints on food production. In this study dietary isotope analysis is used to examine the human skeletal remains from Ban Non Wat, northeast Thailand. The study aims to use isotopic data to give insight into patterns of migration and subsistence strategy during prehistory. Ban Non Wat is the most comprehensively excavated site in the Upper Mun River Valley (UMRV), and understanding of prehistoric society in this area is crucial to answering questions of how social complexity arose in the region. Carbon isotope analysis has highlighted migrant individuals invisible to strontium isotope analysis and shown links between unusual burial practice and differences in diet. Results also indicate that diet changed substantially through time, with more reliance on rice in the Bronze Age, correlated with an increase in social differentiation. There is a move away from reliance on rice agriculture in the Iron Age, a time when oxygen isotopes show that environmental conditions were becoming drier, possibly resulting in rice agriculture becoming less viable.     

A Grocer's Tale: Gender,Family and Class in Early Nineteenth‐Century Manchester

This article examines the diary of George Heywood, a journeyman grocer turned small shopkeeper, who moved to Manchester from Huddersfield in 1809. Heywood's modest lifetime ambitions were to own a grocery shop and find a companionable wife. As a lower‐middle‐class man of humble means and limited ambitions, Heywood does not fit the heroic mould of those working‐class diarists and autobiographers of the nineteenth century that have more readily captured historians’ attention. Yet it is precisely this ‘ordinariness’ that makes Heywood's journal important. His smaller‐than‐life adventures are the very stuff of lower‐middle‐class life, and reveal something of a petit‐bourgeois world from which historians and social commentators have traditionally shied away. His diary allows us to glimpse one form of masculine identity that both fits with and complicates our notions of ‘bourgeois’ masculinity in this period.     

Fragments of an early Islamic Arabic papyrus from Khirbet Hamrā Ifdān

Excavations in 2013 at the site of Khirbet Hamrā Ifdān in the Faynān revealed several pieces of an Arabic papyrus, the first ever found in Jordan. Although the papyrus is poorly preserved, a detailed analysis of the fragments based on parallels have suggested that it dates to the late seventh/early–mid‐eighth century AD. This article discusses the papyrus fragments and places them within their papyrological and archaeological contexts.     

Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History

Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a new historical materialism for Australian history. In particular, we argue for an increased attention to economic questions and data in combination with cultural history sources and analysis; for the greater historicisation of capitalism as itself a specific and contingent phenomenon; and for the application of Marxist tools, without discarding the lessons of the cultural turn and their specific value to Australian history.     

Calculable territory and the West German census boycott movements of the 1980s

This paper argues that recent signs of a hesitant convergence between discourses on sovereignty and territory and discourses on power/knowledge point to ways in which both discourse of power are linked to calculable territory. Both sovereignty and power/knowledge are based upon intervention, and intervention in turn presupposes these two general forms of power. But intervention is also inherently territorial. The historical context for these claims is set through a brief account of the general sciences of order emerging in the early modern period. The theoretical argument is then given a platform by means of a heuristic model of calculable territory, which, while incomplete and partly counter-factual, provides an overarching framework for understanding a range of recent studies of spatial power relations as contributions to a collective genealogy of calculable territory. An important recent change in the genealogy of calculable territory was brought on by the widespread adoption of electronic information and communications technologies in state institutions and other large organizations over the past quarter century. Both the continued relevance of calculable territory and recent changes in its composition and significance for power relations are illustrated by chronicling one important early set of controversies in the emergence of the ‘information age’: the mass boycott movements in West Germany in 1983 and 1987 aimed at blocking the federal census in that country. These boycotts clearly show the links between sovereignty, power/knowledge, intervention and calculable territory.     

Intrinsic or extrinsic population growth in Iron Age northeast Thailand? The evidence from isotopic analysis

Here we present strontium, carbon and oxygen isotope measurements from the tooth enamel of 34 adults from Noen U-Loke, an Iron Age site (c. 300BC–500AD) in the Upper Mun River Valley (UMRV), northeast Thailand. The Mun Valley is rich in archaeological sites from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, with evidence for changes in social complexity, new technologies and population growth. Whether the population growth in the UMRV was intrinsic, as opposed to extrinsically due to immigration, is an unresolved question. Our results suggest low levels of long-distance immigration, with only three (two females, one male) of the thirty-four individuals as probable immigrants from outside the region. We discuss the implications of this result as a contribution to longer-term investigations of population growth, human mobility and fertility during this prehistoric period of substantial societal changes in mainland Southeast Asia.