A historiography of an ahistoricity: on the beothuk indians

The Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland have long been perceived as a cultural anachronism in the native history of northeastern North America. They appeared to represent cultural holdovers from some earlier age that had been preserved in a primitive state due to isolation on a cold North Atlantic isle. To many, their history seemed shallow, timeless even. Those that supported this position did so by drawing on four lines of evidence. They interpreted Beothuk material culture and other cultural “traits” as indicative of an archaic state; they cited the Beothuk's place of residence‐a northern island‐as evidence of isolation from other peoples and the march of time; they cited linguistic differences as further evidence of isolation; and finally, the fact that the Beothuk became extinct seemed to offer proof that these people had indeed belonged to another age, incapable of making the leap from prehistory to the modern era. This article explores this evidence and attempts to understand the “logic” or rationale by which scholars come to view the Beothuk and their history as timeless.     

Facilitating native land reacquisition in the rural USA through collaborative research and Geographic Information Systems

A large proportion of American Indian reservation lands are owned by non‐Indian entities. A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a powerful tool for visualising land tenure changes, and public participation GIS (PPGIS) is one approach for using spatial technologies to facilitate the identification and reacquisition of reservation lands by tribes. While some tribes have successfully harnessed GIS for land management and for systematically identifying lands for reacquisition, others struggle to implement land management systems such as GIS for these purposes. This paper situates PPGIS in relation to other forms of participatory action research and outlines our use of a PPGIS framework to engage undergraduate geography students in the mapping of land tenure status on ten rural Minnesota Indian reservations as part of a collaborative partnership with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF). A PPGIS framework allowed us to collaboratively define research goals in response to tribal community needs and provided structure for student work with partner reservations to develop and implement tailored mapping and analysis techniques. Two sets of findings are significant. First, the assembly of a standardised set of maps for American Indian reservations in Minnesota provides a tremendous visual and analytical resource for ILTF and individual tribes to pursue land reacquisition within reservation boundaries. Second, from a PPGIS perspective, we found that working with a coordinating or ‘bridging’ organisation provided key benefits by enabling education of both the student–faculty partners and the individual tribes. The PPGIS model empowered both partners by allowing tribes to harness a powerful technology to assist in visualising land‐based assets and allowing students to contribute to native land reacquisition efforts through application of their GIS skills. This mapping helps facilitate economic and cultural viability in tribal communities by providing an important visual catalogue of existing land‐based assets, in support of future land acquisition and economic development planning.     

Moral Spaces and Sexual Transgression: Understanding Rape in War and Post Conflict

When it comes to rape in war, evocative language describing rape as a ‘weapon of war’ has become commonplace. Although politically important, overemphasis on strategic aspects of wartime sexual violence can be misleading. Alternative explanations tend to understand rape either as exceptional — a departure from ‘normal’ sexual relationships — or as part of a continuum of gendered violence. This article shows how, even in war, norms are not suspended; nor do they simply continue. War changes the moral landscape. Drawing on ethnographic research over 10 years in northern Uganda, this article argues for a re‐sexualization of understandings of rape. It posits that sexual mores are central to explaining sexual violence, and that sexual norms — and hence transgressions — vary depending on the moral spaces in which they occur. In Acholi, moral spaces have temporal dimensions (‘olden times’, the ‘time of fighting’ and ‘these days’) and associated spatial dimensions (home, camp, bush, village, town). The dynamics of each help to explain the occurrence of some forms of sexual violence and the rarity of others. By reflecting on sexual norms and transgressions in these moral spaces, the article sheds light on the relationship between ‘event’ and ‘ordinary’, rape and war.     

Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos

Abstract

It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practical implementation. The results of these experiments are used to validate policy change and reversal. This allows rural residents a degree of manoeuvrability in their engagements with the state that is striking given the “authoritarian” status of the current regime. It can explain and is used to justify, for instance, the oft-observed gap between policy and actual practice. This room for manoeuvre comes at the price of “playing the game”, at least for a while, of the latest policy fad, sometimes with disastrous consequences for rural livelihoods. I use the example of an irrigation project that was implemented in the south of Laos from 1999–2002 to examine “experimental consensus” at work as policy was received, engaged and eventually relinquished.     

Changes in starch grain morphologies from cooking

One of the three main plant microfossils, starch grains are increasingly used as markers of diet, plant domestication, tool use and site organization, because their morphology and features provide a means to identify the plant that produced them. However, starch grains are susceptible to damage when they are exposed to heat in the presence of water, as in cooking. We documented the changes that occur in the starch grains of 10 domesticated plant species due to exposure to different cooking methods, in order to better understand how cooking alters the appearance of the grains, and if these cooking methods might be identifiable in the archaeological record. Our results show that some cooking methods produce unique, identifiable damage on some types of plant starches, but generally each plant species reacts uniquely to cooking. In order to record the changes for each plant species, we have created a database, available at (http://www.osresearch.net/∼hollyf/starchdb/index.cgi), to which registered users can add their own images of cooked starch grains.     

American home: Predatory mortgage capital and neighbourhood spaces of race and class exploitation in the United States

Predatory home mortgage lending has become a central concern for housing research, public policy and community activism in US cities. Regulatory attempts to stop abuses, however, are undermined by claims that ‘predatory’ cannot be defined or distinguished from legitimate subprime lending, and claims that the industry performs a public service by meeting the needs of low‐income, high‐risk consumers (many of them racially marginalized) who would have been denied credit in previous years. We evaluate these claims in historical‐geographical context, drawing on David Harvey's theory of class‐monopoly rent to analyse what is new (and what is not) in contemporary financial exploitation. We use a mixed‐methods approach to (1) provide econometric measures of subprime racial targeting and disparate impact that cannot be blamed on the supposed deficiencies of borrowers, (2) qualitatively assess the rationale for judging particular subprime practices and lenders as predatory, and (3) trace the connections between local practices and transnational investment networks. The fight against predatory lending cannot succeed, we argue, without a renewed analytical and strategic emphasis on the class dimensions of financial exploitation and racial‐geographical discrimination.     

Pencils and Pixels: Drawing and Digital Media in Archaeological Field Recording

Within the context of a growing emphasis on digital recording, what is the place of analog drawing in archaeological fieldwork? In this article, we situate the increased application of digital drawing methods by providing several historical examples of archaeological field drawing in British archaeology to demonstrate the connection between understanding the archaeological record and illustration. Given this background of analog archaeological recording, we then explore the current state of archaeological field drawing and the affordances of digital illustration for recording and interpreting the archaeological record, review literature in architecture and design regarding the cognitive function of analog and digital drawing, and discuss the possible future implications of born-digital or paperless archaeology.