“The music never stopped”: naming businesses as a method for remembering the Grateful Dead

ABSTRACT

Memorialization on the cultural landscape is a common method of celebrating the legacy of an event or person significant to the history of geographical location. The Grateful Dead is a band that continues to define the ideals of the late-1960s San Francisco Sound through their music’s creative freedom and inclination toward experimentation. Although the original lineup of the Grateful Dead is no longer intact, the spirit of the music they created and their psychedelic appeal has been preserved on the cultural landscape. Despite differing reasons for naming their business after the band, hundreds of business owners in the United States have collectively preserved the Grateful Dead’s presence on the cultural landscape. In this paper we explore the distribution of businesses in the United States with Grateful Dead-related names, and how the presence of these business names enriches the cultural landscape with the memory of the band’s music as a product of the iconic San Francisco Sound.     

Evaluating Ancient Whale Exploitation on the Northern Oregon Coast Through Ancient DNA and Zooarchaeological Analysis

Whales have long been an important part of Pacific Northwest Coast human subsistence and lifeways. Native peoples on the Oregon Coast were not known to hunt whales, but a humpback whale phalange with an embedded bone harpoon at the Par-Tee site (35CLT20) and ethnographic accounts raised the possibility of opportunistic whale hunting. We analyzed a suite of whale remains from Par-Tee and performed ancient DNA-based species identifications on 30 specimens. The assemblage includes gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus, 60.7% of the assemblage), humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae, 32.1%), minkes (Balaenoptera acutorostrata, 3.6%), and orcas (Orcinus orca, 3.6%). While the species composition is similar to those found in archaeological deposits from systematic whaling areas in Washington and Vancouver Island, bone modification patterns and element representation reveal important differences. Our analysis demonstrates that whales were likely a supplementary part of human subsistence at Par-Tee and, while opportunistic whale hunting likely occurred, it may have been secondary to scavenging and utilization of beached and/or drift whales.     

Social meaning in the English lesser gentry house: a West Yorkshire study

This paper analyses the archaeological and documentary evidence from three West Yorkshire houses—Calverley Old Hall, Shibden Hall and Oakwell Hall—to re-evaluate narratives of gentry emulation in 16th- and 17th-century English housebuilding. Gentry houses have long been absorbed into the literature of elite country houses, with homes of the lesser gentry serving primarily as emulative examples of national architectural and social trends. This paper suggests a more nuanced interpretation of these homes as sites of multi-faceted household relationships, where the inhabitants consciously incorporated and resisted elite trends and used space to establish and maintain control.     

New life in Japan's ‘endingness’ business

The Japanese deathcare and Buddhist goods industry is a growing field, emerging out of radical shifts in the socio-economic conditions of everyday life: smaller households, an ageing population and more irregular employment/lifestyle patterns. Based on fieldwork, this article reports tectonic ruptures within Japan’s household-based mortuary system and Buddhist practice. It takes readers to ENDEX, the premier convention for Japan’s ‘ending industry’, where new ‘life’ emerges from the falling away of older death rites that get remixed and remade into newer experimental practices, businesses and business subjectivities. Examples range from high-tech gravestones and drones to competitions for the ‘Hottest Priest’ and best encoffiner. This article engages with these new necro-technologies and asks why the old deathcare system is falling apart. What are the socio-material effects of its unravelling? And what does the futurity of necro-praxis look like in Japan (and elsewhere) when the existential fabric of mortality may be torn apart?     

Working-with: talking and sorting in personal archives

This paper draws upon experiences of working in a personal archive in a domestic space in order to contribute to recent debates about archival formation, conduct and practice. By exploring the collaborative practices of working-with an archive owner in ordering and cataloguing a collection, we provide methodological insights into how historical geography research is carried out. Although such working-with in archives is, we argue, a common practice amongst researchers, these interactions with others are often absent from published work. This paper provides an explicit discussion of these often hidden collaborations and socialities, highlighting their importance for the conduct of archival research in three specific areas. First, we show how working-with actively (re)shapes and (re)makes archival materials and the stories that emerge from them. Second, we argue that working-with the owners of archives, but doing so without clearly defined research aims and going against the grain of productivist methods of working, can be rewarding both within and beyond academia. Third, in focussing on working-with, the paper extends conceptions of the archive and archival practice. We argue that the domestic setting of archival work produces particular patterns of archival conduct and disrupts the boundaries of collections themselves.     

NOSTALGIA AND (PRE-)MODERNITY

This article argues that, in the fourteenth century, there was a wave of nostalgia that was provoked by extreme structural change: this was a moment of demographic catastrophe (with famine and plague), endemic warfare, economic fluctuation, intensified urbanization, and intellectual and spiritual novelties. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed that nostalgia and modernity are intimately connected. Given these framings of nostalgia as a modern phenomenon, this article seeks to explore the implications of premodern nostalgia. It begins by setting out the arguments for the intertwining of nostalgia and modernity. Some have argued that modernity brings a sense of rupture and that this produces nostalgia. Others, relatedly, have argued that modernity seems to speed up our experience of time and that this produces a nostalgia for a slower-paced and more predictable past. I juxtapose these arguments with evidence of fourteenth-century outpourings of nostalgia across a range of contexts in England, Italy, and France. I analyze examples of nostalgia in political contexts (both radical and reactionary), nostalgia for apparently lost economic orders, nostalgia for a lost set of chivalric values, and nostalgia for disrupted social orders. I then suggest that these fourteenth-century manifestations of nostalgia were actually produced by precisely the features of the period that are usually deemed to be exclusive to modernity: it was rapid, rupturing structural change that provoked nostalgic regret. Nostalgia, then, would seem to indicate that there are features of the fourteenth century that might be deemed modern. However, rather than simply trying to therefore push back the moment of the birth of modernity, I argue that nostalgia is indicative of the problems of periodization. The presence of nostalgia across epochs—these echoes across the webs of time—suggest that lines of periodization, birthing moments, need to be treated with extreme caution. And it is appropriate that such a reminder should come from a phenomenon such as nostalgia, which is, after all, about resonances and echoes across time—resonances that are amplified, distorted, whispered even, but that all challenge and complicate any straightforward sense of either linear or cyclical time.