Quantifying Ship Shape in Archaeology: Evaluating 3D Geometric Morphometrics

The analysis of the archaeological remains of ships and boats, in particular hull shapes, have been central to wider analysis of performance, function, and significance within past societies. This article reviews established methods of quantifying shape in ship and boat archaeology—linear measurement ratios and form coefficients—and evaluates the utility of 3D geometric morphometrics (GM). The 3D shape of 30 vessels from north‐west Europe dating between 325 BC and AD 1915 are quantified to study how hull shape relates to a vessel's function and intended operating environment. A comparison of the three methods highlights the importance of analysing the complexity of a hull in a holistic manner and demonstrates that 3D GM outperforms the traditional methods.     

试论清代中国西藏地方政府与不丹之间的宗藩关系

本文以我国西藏地方政府的历史发展为主线,试图弄清它与周边地方政权不丹之间早期交往的历史,追溯两地宗藩关系的产生、发展,并分析了随着清朝中央政府的衰落和英国政府加强对南亚渗透,两地宗藩关系逐渐弱化并瓦解的过程。     

The dark side of cultural policy: economic and political instrumentalisation,white elephants,and corruption in Valencian cultural institutions

Cultural policy is usually assessed as a positive element for socio-economic development and therefore, its criticism is generally confined to poor implementation and discussion of its social effects. However, it is occasionally analysed as an instrument that produces unsustainable development, as a generator of white elephants, or as a means of waste, corruption, and clientelistic domination of the political sphere. This is what we might call the ‘dark side’ of cultural policy. Our case study of the city of Valencia (Spain), focussing on two of its major cultural institutions, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and the Palace of Arts, exemplifies this cultural policy dimension. This article aims to analyse the systemic and contextual causes of this phenomenon of cronyistic behaviour and to elucidate in what sense it can be understood as a contingent drift specific to a particular territory or as a structural condition of cultural policy.     

Memories of humiliation,cultures of resentment towards Edom and the formation of ancient Jewish national identity

While the impact of wars and national humiliations in the ancient Jewish cultural nationalism has been studied extensively, little has been written about the role of the related phenomena of cultures of resentment against foreigners or minority groups. Well before the Hellenistic period, the Jewish tradition had already created its own perfect enemy whose very name became synonymous of Israel's most malicious antagonist: Edom. This article aims to study the changing attitudes towards the Edomites/Idumaeans from the late Judaean kingdom to the Roman period using a long‐durée perspective, particularly the growth of memories of humiliation and feelings of resentment product of the alleged crimes of Edom during Judah's fall and exile.     

A place in the sun: the British housing market’s (de)construction of Andalusia

Abstract

Andalusia has become one of the main destinations for British residential tourists, attracted by leisure, a mild climate and the search for a better lifestyle. Prompted by its interest in selling houses, the real estate industry has devised an image of the Andalusian landscape that is, to all intents and purposes, partial and biased. The purpose of this research is to assess the importance of the elements and features that characterise this particular vision of this Spanish region, paying particular attention to more rural inland areas. For this, an empirical study has been conducted based on content analysis of real estate websites targeting British buyers. This study has revealed that: (i) the misrepresented and romantic projection of the image of Andalusia still persists to a certain extent. Among the main elements and attributes that characterise the landscape are all those that emphasise the region’s sublime, picturesque and exotic nature; other main landscape qualities and unique areas, specifically, any that today enjoy natural or cultural legal protection due to their heritage value, are less important in this cultural construction; (ii) the various parts of Andalusia are treated unequally. Malaga province and the rest of the Baetic Mountains are much better represented than other areas (the Guadalquivir Valley and the Sierra Morena mountains). This imbalance sometimes results in a distorted construction of the territory. This way of conceiving Andalusia puts Malaga at the heart of the region, and the further from the Costa del Sol, the more peripheral the regions become; (iii) the complexity of the landscape as a cultural expression is reduced to a set of simplified features that can be easily digested by a social group focused not on experiencing, but on consuming the landscape.     

A microarchaeological approach for the study of pits

Abstract

The study of the technology underlying pre-industrial storage structures has an interest from an anthropological and archaeological perspective, in terms of the evolution of key cultural and cognitive capabilities, often related to the transition to food production.

Microarchaeological techniques offer a unique perspective on the study of pre-industrial storing technologies. In this work, examples are presented from two archaeological contexts in different climatic and socio-ecological situations during the Holocene in S Asia and SW Europe. Microarchaeological techniques used in this study include micromorphology, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and phytolith analyses. The comparative study of two pits highlights key aspects of the decision-making process involved in technological solutions of storage: ? The choice of a location for the construction of a given storage facility is highly affected by contextual climatic, microclimatic, soil and bioturbative factors

? The time taken to consume stored foodstuffs seems to affect technological investment as much as the intrinsic conservation requirements of the stored taxa

? The use of fire to hygienise pits implies that such structures were not conceived for single use

? Pre-industrial storage systems can be seen as modular structures, which components (e.g. topographical location, sediment type, lining type, hygienisation techniques and cover) can be recombined to improve storage performance for different climatic settings and foodstuffs.

     

Still ‘breadwinners’ and ‘providers’: Singaporean husbands,money and masculinity in transnational marriages

As international marriages continue to be on the rise around the world, and in East and Southeast Asia in particular, there is an increasing need for more focused studies on the phenomenon. While the extant literature has paid attention to the complex dynamics of marital intimacies through a ‘gender-sensitive’ lens, the experiences of men are still largely under-examined. This article considers the gendered and classed subjectivities of Singaporean husbands who have married Vietnamese wives and focuses on ‘money’ as a key vehicle through which the men are able to construct masculinities in the spaces of transnational marriage and family. We argue that these non-migrant men engage with transnational processes and practices strategically in order to reclaim respectable and honourable masculine status. In doing so, they dislodge themselves from the idiom of ‘failed masculinity’ commonly ascribed to men who seek foreign spouses, but at the same time reproduce dominant models of masculinity predicated on ‘breadwinning’ and ‘providing’. This article draws on the narratives of 20 Singaporean Chinese men from a range of social backgrounds to demonstrate the endurance of money and economic potency in the performance of masculinities.     

What is on the craftsmen’s menu? Plant consumption at Datrana,a 5000-year-old lithic blade workshop in North Gujarat,India

The exploitation of lithic resources was an important aspect of prehistoric resource exploitation strategies and adaptation. Research has mostly focused on technological and spatial aspects of lithic factory sites, often overlooking how these sites were integrated within local socioecological dynamics in terms of food acquisition and consumption. The aim of this paper is to study plant consumption at Datrana, a 5000-year-old lithic blade workshop in North Gujarat, India, in order to understand its occupants’ subsistence strategies. The results of archaeobotanical, mineralogical and soil pH analyses show that the occupants of this factory site were consuming local crops but not processing them, suggesting that either (a) food was being processed in other areas of the site or (b) it was acquired in a ‘ready-to-consume’ state from local food-producing communities. This study highlights the integration of a lithic factory site within its surrounding cultural and natural landscape, offering an example of how the inhabitants of a workshop interacted with local communities to acquire food resources.