Quality Assurance in Archaeological Survey

To have confidence in the results of an archaeological survey, whether for heritage management or research objectives, we must have some assurance that the survey was carried out to a reasonably high standard. This paper discusses the use of Quality Assurance (QA) approaches and empirical methods for estimating surveys’ effectiveness at discovering archaeological artifacts as a means for ensuring quality standards. We illustrate with the example of two surveys in Cyprus and Jordan in which resurvey, measurement of surveyor “sweep widths,” and realistic estimates of survey coverage allow us to evaluate explicitly the probability that the survey missed pottery or lithics, as well as to decide when survey has been thorough enough to warrant moving to another survey unit.     

Critical geographies and geography’s creative re/turn: poetics and practices for new disciplinary spaces

We are two feminist geographers working as practitioners and researchers in creative geographies and the discipline’s creative re/turn. Human geographers interested in new representational and non-representational methods and methodologies are, as we explore in this article, increasingly turning to artistic and creative modes of expression, including (amongst others) literary and visual arts, in which we are both involved. For some time now, we have been curious about what we experience as a lack of expressly politicized critical interrogations of the discipline’s creative re/turn and a shortage of expressly critical and politicized creative outputs. In this article, then, we explore geography’s embrace of creative practices as research methods and as means of developing outputs but, more specifically, we ask about where and how decolonizing, feminist, anti-racist, and/or queer voices, practices, and theorizations might fit within the creative re/turn. Using two different creative geographic works (one a book of poetry, the other a curation project), we trouble what we conclude may be ongoing (perhaps unconsciously) masculinist, often White and colonial, perhaps overly heteronormative, modes of geographic inquiry and practice within geography’s creative re/turn. In this context, we reflexively consider our own creative practices as ones that may offer examples to open new critical spaces and modes of representation for creative geographers.     

Anzac for Sale: Consumer Culture,Regulation and the Shaping of a Legend, 1915–21

After the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915, the word Anzac began to appear with increasing frequency to brand a range of Australian consumer products, and many traders applied to change the name of their businesses to Anzac. On 25 May 1916, the federal government issued War Precautions Regulations prohibiting the unauthorised use of the word Anzac ‘in any trade, business, calling or profession’. This article explores applications to use the word Anzac for commercial purposes between 1915 and 1921 to argue that consumer culture became a battleground where individuals and groups competed to assert ownership over the word and the social currency it represented.     

Sweep widths and the detection of artifacts in archaeological survey

In many parts of the world, one of the principal means for discovering archaeological resources is terrestrial archaeological survey for small scatters of generally unobtrusive artifacts on the surface. Yet archaeologists have expended relatively little research on the factors that affect detection of such artifacts or the impacts they have on the reliability of surveys. We employ mock survey of plowed fields ‘seeded’ with a variety of artifacts in order to evaluate the effectiveness of pedestrian survey (fieldwalking) with respect to search time and transect spacing. Our results confirm theoretical expectations about the diminishing returns on increases of search effort, while also demonstrating variation in ‘sweep widths’ for different artifact types and surveyor speed and the effects of walking toward or away from the sun. Preliminary results have implications for the most efficient spacing of survey transects as well as the evaluation of completed surveys, since some artifact types have extremely low probabilities of detection even at high densities of search effort.     

Doing gender and the GeoHumanities – celebrations and intoxications

Abstract

This paper celebrates Gender, Place and Culture’s 25th Anniversary by staging a dialogue of sorts between feminist, queer and trans knowledge projects and the interdisciplinary field of practice based GeoHumanities, in other words creative research practices such as film-making, theatre, creative writing or live art. In embracing the vibrancy of these fields together the paper addresses two much wider issues; firstly, the continued challenges that these knowledge projects face, especially in an era of post-truth and the undermining of expertise, which together risks a reactive retrenchment of academic practices. Secondly, within the GeoHumanities, feminist scholar-practitioners have been leading the way in evolving the critical-political dimensions of these interdisciplinary practices, but as they acknowledge, much more remains to be done to ensure that the critical potential of these doings is realised.

In short, this paper asks, what can/have GeoHumanities ‘doings’ contributed to the challenges of gender based knowledge projects, and further, how can/are the critical questions framed by these knowledge projects evolving GeoHumanities practices? Three large concerns frame discussion of possibilities for mutual learning and advancement; what forms of knowledge count; who can make and legitimate knowledge, and how we might build critical perspectives for the transformations claimed in the name of these practices? As such, the paper honours GPC’s quarter century through a forward looking celebration of exciting scholarly practices that remain committed to the foundational tenants of feminist, trans and queer knowledge projects: namely their ongoing critique and remaking of knowledge hierarchies, academic practices, and the political economies of the academy.     

Displaying marginalised and ‘hidden’ histories at the Imperial War Museum London: The Second World War gallery regeneration project

Using Imperial War Museums’ redeveloped Second World War Galleries as a case study, this provocation discusses the ways in which refocussing outmoded British narratives to a transnational viewpoint and using the interpretive framework of ‘total war’ can help us to deliver new, authoritative and multifaceted narratives where ‘hidden’ histories can be displayed, and scrutinised, in plain sight.