Wood and Fire: Scotland’s Timber Cursus Monuments

This paper offers the first comprehensive overview of Scotland’s early Neolithic timber cursus monuments. This small group of sites has, in recent years, been viewed as a significant element of the early Neolithic repertoire in northern Britain, and forerunner to the later earthwork cursus monuments found across the British Isles; but as yet their treatment has been at a largely superficial level. The article draws together the evidence from excavations, cropmarks and the authors’ own fieldwork. As well as describing the monuments, the study also offers a new interpretation of the construction, role and destruction of these monuments within the context of the woodland world of lowland Scotland in the first half of the fourth millennium BC.     

An improved OSL chronology for the Still Bay layers at Blombos Cave,South Africa: further tests of single-grain dating procedures and a re-evaluation of the timing of the Still Bay industry across southern Africa

This paper presents a series of new single-grain optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages for the Still Bay at Blombos Cave, South Africa, and compares them to previously published OSL, thermoluminescence (TL) and electron-spin resonance (ESR) ages for this site. Details are provided about the measurement and analytical procedures, including a discussion of the characteristics of the OSL signals of individual quartz grains. This forms the basis for further investigations into the sensitivity of the equivalent dose (D_e) estimates to a range of different analytical approaches, including changes in the size of the test dose, the choice of signal integration interval, the subtraction of an appropriate background, and isolation of the most light-sensitive (‘fast’) component of quartz OSL. We also report the results of an inter-operator test of D_e determination using seven new samples from Blombos Cave, and demonstrate the reproducibility of results obtained for two samples that had been dated previously at another laboratory and were measured and analysed again in this study. Together, these tests validate the robustness of the Blombos Cave single-grain OSL age estimates to a variety of alternative OSL dating procedures. We have incorporated, for the first time, these ages for Blombos Cave into a data set of all single-grain OSL ages for Still Bay and Howieson's Poort sites across southern Africa, and have used a statistical model to re-evaluate the timing and duration of the Still Bay industry. We calculate the most plausible start and end dates of the Still Bay as 72.2 ka and 71.3 ka, respectively – amounting to a duration of 0.9 ka – and estimate (with conventional 95% confidence) that this industry began no earlier than 75.5 ka, ended no later than 67.8 ka and lasted no longer than 6.6 ka.     

Natural Right and The Origin of Species

Abstract

This article concerns the relationship between Abraham Lincoln's natural right argument against slavery and contemporary Darwinian biology. It is frequently supposed that the latter undermines the former. I argue to the contrary that natural right has been rediscovered independently by modern Darwinian biology, and that it largely confirms Lincoln's understanding of human nature.     

Neanderthal Survival in the North of the Iberian Peninsula? Reflections from a Catalan and Cantabrian Perspective

In the debate over Western Europe??s Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition we need to consider the importance of both the chronology and the ecological context of the different techno-complexes, as well as the organization of production and consumption activities. In this article we study the adaptative strategies of Middle Palaeolithic human communities based on the information obtained from archaeological sites north of the river Ebro. This transition in the northern part of the peninsula presents a chronological and geographic dichotomy, with the appearance of the Upper Palaeolithic and survival of the Middle Palaeolithic. The geographic distribution appears to indicate intergroup competition and the existence of contact, albeit of an unverified nature. This competition would explain the time that elapsed before one of the cultural, and perhaps biological, groups triumphed over the other in a process culminating in the expansion of Upper Palaeolithic technology.     

Futurologists Look Back

The gulf between indigenous and western experiences in the Americas may appear so vast as to obscure the relevance of knowledge about the ancient past to challenges of today. Yet, in imaging alternative futures, people of varied cultural dispositions find experiential accord. As both product of and precedent for social action, materiality provides archaeologists some purchase on interventions of change. In the recursive relationships between place and being, between thing and entanglement, we observe temporalities that privilege historical practice as the locus of social action. Examples from the ancient American Southeast illustrate what form an archaeology of alternative futures might take.