Silent Voices,Hidden Lives: Archaeology,Class and Gender in the CMS Missions,Bay of Islands,New Zealand, 1814–1845

This paper explores the themes and tensions of class and propriety at one of New Zealand’s early European settlements, a Church Missionary Society mission in the Bay of Islands. Archaeological investigations at the site of the Te Puna mission house revealed a cellar containing, among other articles, items connected with domesticity and feminine concerns, demonstrating the presence of women and their daily activities. The interweaving of the archaeological and historical record sheds light upon the replication of class and culture through themes such as the “cult of domesticity” at this remote location, a decade prior to British colonization.     

Sense and the city: exploring the embodied geographies of urban walking

Within UK pedestrian policy, walking is promoted as a sustainable mode of transport that benefits both the body and mind. However, much policy discussion assumes all walking to be the same and a largely self-evident means of transport, whilst many academic engagements with walking are highly abstract theorisations that lack any systematic empirical exploration of actual pedestrian practices. As such, there is little that unpacks the experiences of those who navigate, negotiate, and traverse the city streets in their day-to-day lives. In contrast, this paper aims to situate and understand the practice of everyday walking in the unfolding experiences of urban pedestrians. Walking is positioned and understood as a socio-technical assemblage that enables specific attention to be drawn to the embodied, material and technological relations and their significance for engaging with everyday urban movements on foot. The analysis draws upon in-depth interview and walking photo diary data from participants in the inner London boroughs of Islington and Hackney. Particular analytic attention to the different styles and conventions of urban walking and how these are intimately linked to bodily senses and the materiality of the city provides an opportunity for creating an increased engagement between urban and pedestrian policy and urban and social theory.     

Missionization in New Zealand and Australia: A Comparison

This paper discusses missionization in New Zealand and Australia during the nineteenth century. Despite sharing aspects of colonial history and a geographical proximity in the South Pacific, the development of missions in both countries was disparate, leading to two very different types of missions, types I have identified as the “household” mission in New Zealand and the “institutional” mission in Australia. In both types common themes can be found, concerned with the “civilizing mission,” domesticity, and gender roles. These two types of missions were replicated in other parts of the globe, such as North America and the Pacific.     

The Study of Archaeological Floors: Methodological Proposal for the Analysis of Anthropogenic Residues by Spot Tests,ICP-OES,and GC-MS

The identification of chemical activity residues on archaeological surfaces requires the analysis of large numbers of samples, which can be costly and time consuming. Researchers wishing to apply sediment chemistry often are confronted with a dilemma of which technique to use and how to accommodate sediment chemistry into their budget. We propose an approach to the identification of chemical activity residues in which semiquantitative spot tests, which are cheap, quick, and easy to apply, are employed as an initial phase of analysis in order to leverage the results of more time-consuming and costly instrumental techniques. Three examples that pair spot tests with gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy and inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry analysis show that spot tests successfully identify areas of interest. This approach can save both time and research funds.     

Saharan dust: sources and trajectories

The Sahara is the world's largest source of aeolian desert dust, but precise information on specific sources of this material is poor and sometimes contradictory. This paper uses daily data from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) for 1999 to identify source areas for major dust events and their trajectories of long-range transport. Two major source areas are identified: the Bodélé depression and an area covering eastern Mauritania, western Mali and southern Algeria. Both of these major dust sources are primarily driven by natural factors since they are little affected by anthropogenic activities.     

‘High Politics’ and its Intellectual Contexts*

Recent interest in the historiography of ‘high politics’ has centred mainly on historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s, above all Maurice Cowling. Less attention has been paid to the modified agendas pursued by the next generation of scholars. This essay explores some pioneering attempts to make sense of the structural relationships between 19th‐century British ‘high politics’ and its ‘intellectual’ contexts, focusing on a cluster of seminal 1980s studies by the historians Michael Bentley, Richard Brent, Boyd Hilton, and Jonathan Parry. Together, these works demanded a fundamental rethinking of how Victorian politics operated.     

Telling Stories: The Mycenaean Origins of the Philistines

The story of the Philistines as Mycenaean or Aegean migrants, refugees who fled the Aegean after the collapse of the palace societies c.1200 BC, bringing an Aegean culture and practices to the Eastern Mediterranean, is well known. Accepted as essentially true by some, yet rejected as little more than a modern myth by others, the migration narrative retains a central place in the archaeology and historiography of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age (LBA/EIA). In recent years, and despite an increasingly shaky theoretical basis, the migration hypothesis has nevertheless seemed to drown out other interpretations and characterizations of the period, claiming a normative position that is undeserved. In this paper I explore the continuing power of this nineteenth century narrative and seek to show why it is less convincing than its prominent status would suggest.