Rigorous Reasoning, Reflexive Research and the Space for 'Alternative Archaeologies'. Questions for Maritime Archaeological Heritage Management.

As England's heritage policy is shaped around us, it is vital that there is debate, and some consensus, among the maritime archaeological community on core management questions. These include approaches to degrading underwater sites, how to deal with shipwrecks threatened by development, and crucially, who should be driving these decisions. This paper argues that there is a need for self-critical analysis of the meaning of 'heritage'. It problematises the notion of professional archaeologists as 'guardians of the archaeological record' and the conception of 'heritage' formed without reference to ideas of the past being a product of the present and, therefore, the potential for the production of multiple pasts.
© 2007 The Author     

Settlement history in the eastern Rub al-Khali: Preliminary Report of the Dubai Desert Survey (2006–2007)

Regional archaeological survey in desert areas of Dubai, U.A.E., has identified numerous archaeological sites in this rapidly changing landscape. Subsurface geophysical surveys have been undertaken in concert with surface collection and test excavation to document the extent and chronology of each site. Contrary to expectations that deserts were permanently abandoned following the end of the mid-Holocene pluvial phase around 4000 BC, two sites, Al-Ashoosh and Saruq al-Hadid, show evidence of substantial occupation during the late third and early first millennia respectively. These findings suggest that the Rub al-Khali supported human settlement much later than is generally thought, challenging traditional understandings of the region's cultural and environmental histories.     

The Neoconservatives and the Pope: Misreading John Paul II in George Weigel's Biographies

With the recent release of his autobiographical narrative of the composition of the papal biography, Witness to Hope, prominent Catholic neoconservative George Weigel has invited a reexamination of the presentation of John Paul II to the world by Catholic neoconservatives. In his biographies, George Weigel crafts an often misleading portrait of Pope John Paul II as the pope of American liberalism and neoconservativism. Ironically, at the same time, the story of Weigel's biographies contains the story of the rise and fall of the Catholic neoconservative movement in America.     

Marsone, Pierre, The Steppe and the Empire: The Formation of the Khitan [Liao] dynasty-4th-10th Centuries [History]

Conventional treatments of Chinese history include a "Liao/Khitan dynasty" existing on the northern frontier from 907 to 1125,ruled by the ethnically distinctive Khitan (Qidan) people.As Pierre Marsone points out in the foreword to La Steppe et l'Empire,in many histories discussion of this polity is absent or perfunctory.Indeed the work to which Marsone's title alludes,the classic 1938 L'Empire des steppes by René Grousset,presented a comprehensive history of steppe empires yet spared only a few pages of its bulk for the Khitan state.Such neglect obstructs historians' understanding of long-term trends.The Chinese world had seen powerful empires with some degree of "foreignness" before,but this was a new kind of entity that proved immune to the accustomed methods of Chinese policy.Too powerful to play off against other states,with an administration too systematized to succumb to personal politics,the Liao/Khitan empire became such a fixation of Northern Song (960-1127) policymakers that the political history of the latter cannot be effectively told without frequent reference to the former,and it is no coincidence that the two Asian superpowers collapsed nearly simultaneously.In turn,the Liao/Khitan empire set the precedent for the stable hybrid bureaucratic states that were so important in later Chinese history.Marsone's work makes the valuable contribution of clarifying how this empire came into being.The resulting account is an invaluable corrective to dynastically delimited narratives in which the Liao empire appears in the tenth century as an abrupt and novel development,epitomizing the Great Man model of history in the form of its founder,Yelü Abaoji.     

South polar greenhouse insects (Arthropoda: Insecta: Coleoptera) from the mid-Cretaceous Tupuangi Formation,Chatham Islands,eastern Zealandia

Stilwell, J.D., Vitacca, J. & Mays, C., April 2016. South polar greenhouse insects (Arthropoda: Insecta: Coleoptera) from the mid-Cretaceous Tupuangi Formation, Chatham Islands, eastern Zealandia. Alcheringa 40, xxx–xxx. ISSN 0311-5518

Rare insect body fossils have been discovered for the first time after 175 years of research on the Chatham Islands, eastern ‘Zealandia’. The coleopteran (beetle) insects, dated to ca 95 Ma and extracted from fine-grained, upper delta plain facies in the lower Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian–lowermost Turonian) Tupuangi Formation at Waihere Bay on the remote Pitt Island, represent the most southern, polar-latitude (ca 70–80°S) faunal assemblage from the Cretaceous recorded to date. Three species are represented in the insect fauna: a portion of a segmented abdomen of a probable carabid? ground beetle and two distinct coleopteran elytra, one preserved with a brilliantly iridescent carapace upon discovery, comparable with Cretaceous taxa within the Buprestidae (metallic wood borers), but identification with the Chrysomelidae (leaf beetles) or Tenebrionidae (darkling beetles) can not be discounted entirely. Another specimen has more weakly preserved greenish iridescence and has a morphology consistent with Carabidae; given the preservational deficiencies and rarity of material, the specimens are attributed to Buprestidae? genus et species indeterminate and Carabidae? genus et species indeterminate A and B, respectively. These coleopteran fossils represent the only recorded iridescence in Mesozoic invertebrates from Zealandia. Importantly, these mid-Cretaceous insects existed in South Polar forests near the height of the ‘hothouse’ phase of relatively warm, alternating intervals of full daylight in the summer months and total darkness during the winter, before eastern Zealandia diverged at ca 83 Ma from the Marie Byrd Land region of West Antarctica, as part of the final break-up of Gondwana.

Jeffrey D. Stilwell* [jeffrey.stilwell@monash.edu], Jesse V. Vitacca [jesse.vitacca@gmail.com] & Chris Mays [chris.mays@monash.edu], School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University, Clayton VIC 3800, Australia. *Also affiliated with the Australian Museum, 6 College Street, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia.