Things and the Slow Neolithic: the Middle Eastern Transformation

This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the adoption of farming and settled life in the Middle East can be enhanced by a consideration of the dependencies between humans and human-made things from the Late Glacial Maximum onwards. Often not considered in discussions of the origins of agriculture is the long process of human tooth size reduction that started in the Upper Palaeolithic and can reasonably be related to the increased use of grinding stones that created softer and more nutrient-rich plant foods. A consideration of the use of groundstone tools through the Epipalaeolithic and into the Neolithic shows that they were entangled with hearths, ovens, houses and settlements, exchange relations and notions of ownership. The practicalities of processing plants drew humans into pathways that led to intensification, population increase, sedentism and domestication. Much the same can be said for other human-made things such as sickles, storage bins, domestic animal dung and refuse. The dialectical tensions between human-thing dependence and dependency generated the movement towards Neolithicization. Human-thing dependence (involving human dependence on things, thing dependence on humans and thing dependence on other things) afforded opportunities towards which humans (always already in a given state of entanglement) were drawn in order to solve problems. But this dependence also involved dependency, limitation and constraint, leading for example to increases in labour. In order to provide that labour or in other ways to deal with the demands of things and their entanglements with other humans and things, humans made further use of the affordances of things. There was thus a generative spiral leading to sedentism and domestication.     

The Role of The Gentleman's Magazine in the Dissemination of Knowledge About Electric Fish in the Eighteenth Century

Although torpedoes and Malopterurus, a Nile catfish, had been described and even used medically in antiquity, their discharges were poorly understood before the second half of the eighteenth century. It was then that their actions, along with those of certain South American “eels,” became firmly associated with electricity. The realization that an animal could produce electricity marked a turning point in the history of neurophysiology, which had long described nerve actions with recourse to animal spirits. By examining The Gentleman's Magazine during the period when electric fish were becoming electrical, one can begin to appreciate how new discoveries about these unusual creatures captured the imagination of scientists and were filtered down to the literate public.     

Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this article we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and ‘real’ politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined.     

Appalachian Anxiety: Race,Gender, and the Paradox of “Purity” in an Age of Empire, 1873–1901

Abstract

This article positions emergent interest in the southern mountains at the end of the nineteenth century within the broader context of U.S. imperialism and immigration. In these years, observers proclaimed that the Appalachian South was a reserve of “pure American stock.” Accordingly, Appalachian people were said to have provided a bulwark to the effects of immigration within the nation, but equally as crucial, the region was protected from the supposedly dangerous racial contamination that occurred from exposure to, and contact with, colonized peoples abroad. However, other observers recorded dangerous levels of moral and behavioral decline in the mountain South. This article exposes the tension of an allegedly superior population that is perceived to have declined into abject poverty and moral depravity. Doing so provides insight as to why Appalachia looms as a contradictory place of much fascination in the U.S. cultural imaginary.     

The Social Context of Settlement in Norway in the First Millennium AD

The Viking Age was an important watershed in European history, characterized by the centralization of authority, the adoption of Christian ideology, the growth of market trade, the intensification of production and the development of urbanism. Together, these phenomena mark the beginning of Scandinavian state formation. However, the dates at which each occurred - and the unequal rates at which different state attributes were adopted in 'cores' and 'peripheries' - remain to be fully explored and explained. These issues can be illuminated by world-systems theory and brought into focus by studying the date at which key aspects of the Viking Age were adopted in a Scandinavian periphery - the Norse Earldom of Orkney and Caithness, northern Scotland. The present study questions not only why peripheries change, but why they do not change, or change more slowly than neighbouring cores.     

Behavioural archaeology and refuse patterns: A case study

This paper examines the association and distribution of different classes of refuse around a late Iron Age and Roman settlement in Essex, England. It is shown, for instance, that bone and pottery refuse from the eating of meals was distributed differently from that deriving from food preparation. Some conclusions are then drawn about activity variation within the settlement. Clearly, this approach can extract a great wealth of information from extensively excavated settlements, but it is also argued that similar studies are both feasible and necessary for small‐scale, rescue excavations.