Stones from Bavaria: Iranian Lithography in its Global Contexts

This essay traces the circulation of the industrial commodities of lithographic presses and stones and compares the uses to which these commodities were put in Iran with other regions at the same time. Using Persian travelogues as sources on scientific exchange, the essay compares Iran's access to lithography with its spread through Europe, Russia and South and Southeast Asia. Using lithography as a gauge of Iran's integration into an industrializing global economy, it compares state-led Iranian attempts to access lithographic commodities with attempts by other regional powers to develop local sources for these ‘stones from Bavaria’. After tracing the role of Christian Evangelicalism in the technology's dissemination, the essay finally contextualizes Iranian uses of lithography in global developments in illustrated and newspaper printing.

Since the art of Lithography has risen to considerable celebrity, attempts have been made to discover the same species of stone…

– Aloys Senefelder, 1819

     

Integration of use-wear with protein residue analysis – a study of tool use and function in the south Scandinavian Early Neolithic

This study presents research on how an integration of use-wear analysis with protein residue analysis can produce new results on prehistoric tool use and function. Thirty flint artefacts from an Early Neolithic TRB site in south Sweden were analysed for both use-wear and protein residues. The results show a positive correlation between the two methods. The Early Neolithic tools analysed were primarily used to process fish.     

Surveying the Boundaries of Historical Linguistics and Archaeology: Early Settlement in South Central Africa

Drawing on evidence from South Central Africa, this paper explores two methods for linking the linguistic and archaeological records. Since the 1960s, scholars have correlated the hypothesized spatial and temporal overlaps of linguistic speech communities and pottery traditions, with varying success in the face of revisions to linguistic classifications and debates over pottery typologies. This paper assesses similar correlations between speech communities within the Bantu-Botatwe family and ceramic traditions of South Central Africa. Then, it proposes direct associations for specific activities and tools attested in both the linguistic and archaeological records in order to test correlations between pottery traditions and speech communities as well as the reliability of glottochronology. The development of a dense cluster of direct associations between the two records converging on the “when and where” of historical processes allows for the incorporation of theoretical and historical interpretations founded on one body of evidence into narratives developed from another type of data and, therefore, facilitates a “peer” engagement between the disciplines.     

The Archaeology of Baseball: Landscape and the Power of Place

That material culture is constitutive of culture as well as being one of its outcomes plays out especially strongly when one looks at the relationships between human communities and their landscapes. Cultural landscapes are created by communities, which in turn adapt to the landscape’s physical and social dimensions. This paper explores the dynamics of the landscape of American baseball through the eyes of the archaeologist, thereby creating an archaeology of baseball.     

Catalyzing Cultural Heritage Data for Mission Success: Project ORCHID

Cultural resources professionals of the U.S. Air Force partnered with other stakeholders in recent years to ensure U.S. military personnel engaged in contingency actions, disaster response, and other related activities have sufficient visibility of host nation important cultural properties to avoid or minimize harmful effects. Since 2009, Project ORCHID has established a baseline of institutional knowledge, procedures, and planning information to begin to meet this need. This paper summarizes the main components of the project to date.