Recent Advances in Maya Archaeology

This paper focuses on the discoveries of the last decade in Maya archaeology, and assesses their impact on previous models and synthetic frameworks. Although the bibliography includes 700 items published during the last 10 years, it is not exhaustive; on the contrary, a frustratingly large number of discoveries had to be omitted. Two areas exploding with new research are (1) the elicitation of a greater variety of data from hieroglyphic texts, and (2) a series of chemical and biological breakthroughs in the analysis of human burials. The former make it easier to assess the role of elite actors or agents in processes of sociopolitical change. The latter hold out the hope of documenting warfare (through skeletal trauma), migration (by tracing tooth enamel isotopes to ground water), status or gender differences in diet (through bone chemistry), and biological connections of individuals to each other and to earlier populations (through DNA). By combining these new data, we are on our way to integrating humanism and science, and to treating Maya polities as case studies in primary or secondary state formation.     

Pregnant Pauses: Agoraphobic embodiment and the limits of (im)pregnability

Drawing upon Robyn Longhurst's recent research on the embodied experiences of pregnant women in public places and her own empirical research on agoraphobia (fear and avoidance of social space), the author investigates the commonalities and possible synergies between the phenomenology of these two apparently disparate conditions. She argues that both pregnancy and agoraphobia might usefully be understood in terms of an experiential intensification of the problems associated with maintaining a stable self-identity by women in contemporary Western society. In both cases, subjects experience a heightened awareness of socially problematic aspects of womanhood and raised sensitivity to the feeling of being 'out of place' in the social sphere.     

The Enigma of the Great Thapsus Harbour Mole

On the East coast of Tunisia, between Sousse and Sfax, lie the scant remains of the ancient city of Thapsus, notable mainly for a battle fought in the civil war in 46 BC. Visits by the authors resulted in the discovery of one of the longest‐known harbour moles in the entire Roman Empire. No ancient sources make reference to any work of such magnitude and the paper suggests that the harbour was never completed, but might have been started by the local emperors Gordianus, none of whom survived long enough to have executed such a project.     

“Resurrection Men” in Dallas: The Illegal Use of Black Bodies as Medical Cadavers (1900–1907)

Although illegal in Texas in the early twentieth century for the bodies of indigents to be used as medical cadavers, archival accounts document Dallas’s early medical schools duplicity in such acts, with secret agreements between medical schools and city and county officials. Evidence of African-American bodies stolen for use as medical cadavers was also uncovered archaeologically during the Freedman’s Cemetery Project in Dallas, Texas, in the early 1990s. The repercussion of these and other acts of racism and exploitation are explored.