From Crafting to Caching: Technological and Iconographic Analyses of Blue Creek Cache 37

This paper presents technological and iconographic analyses of a Late Classic (a.d. 600–830) lithics cache recovered from the ancient Maya site of Blue Creek, Belize. The cache consisted of 21 obsidian prismatic blades and a number of chert artifacts, including 21 stemmed bifaces, a large laurel leaf biface, and a tridentate eccentric. The technological analysis of the stemmed bifaces identified three distinct stem production techniques that may be attributable to a combination of idiosyncratic knapping gestures and laterality, or handedness. A survey of Maya iconography demonstrated that large laurel-leaf bifaces and tridentate eccentrics occur in scenes depicting sacrifice and the burning of human remains, often by ritual specialists titled ch’ajoom, or “person of incense.” It is suggested that the presence of a large laurel-leaf biface and tridentate eccentric in the cache may indicate that Blue Creek was the residence of ch’ajoom at some point during the Late Classic period.     

“We are Gauteng People”: Challenging the Politics of Xenophobia in Khutsong,South Africa

Abstract: This article seeks to shed light on the May 2008 violence against foreign Africans living in South Africa, and the issue of xenophobia more broadly, by examining the case of Khutsong, a poor township on the edge of Johannesburg that did not experience xenophobic attacks. Arguing against prevailing explanations that link xenophobia with poverty and deprivation, this study examines the opposition to xenophobia that developed in Khutsong. It highlights the centrality of a community‐based organization, the Merafong Demarcation Forum (MDF), in halting the spread of violence. In its recent struggle against municipal demarcation, the MDF nurtured a collective sense of place that granted primacy to provincial boundaries while downplaying ethnic and national divisions. The article argues for the need to examine local social struggles and their intersections with broader political‐economic trends when accounting for the presence or absence of violent xenophobia.     

Wildmen on the Cyberfrontier: The Computer Geek as an Iteration in the American Wildman Lore Cycle

This paper argues that the image of the computer geek that took shape around the turn of the twenty-first century borrowed elements from earlier American constructions of the wildman. In particular, the geek, like prior wildmen, compressed ideas about four conflicting values: liberty and danger, authenticity and fakery.