Sustaining popular music’s material culture in community archives and museums

This article examines the challenges of sustainability faced by community archives and museums that are concerned with the preservation and display of the material culture of popular music’s recent past. The sustainability of grassroots sites of popular music heritage is of great concern due to their role in making accessible cultural artefacts that have limited representation in the collections of more prestigious institutions. Drawing on three sites that have ceased operation – Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg, Mutant Sounds and Holy Warbles – the article highlights difficulties faced by the founders and volunteers of physical and online archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ heritage practices in the medium- to long-term.     

Radiocarbon Dates from the Oxford AMS System: Archaeometry Datelist 35

This is the 35th list of AMS radiocarbon determinations measured at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU). Amongst some of the sites included here are the latest series of determinations from the key sites of Abydos, El Mirón, Ban Chiang, Grotte de Pigeons (Taforalt), Alepotrypa and Oberkassel, as well as others dating to the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and later periods. Comments on the significance of the results are provided by the submitters of the material.     

Old English sǣte and the historical significance of ‘folk’ names

Old English s?te names survive in documentary sources and place‐names, and have been used in historical discourse as evidence for early and middle Anglo‐Saxon socio‐political organization. Earlier analyses, founded on incomplete datasets, have attempted to interpret the material in isolation from its onomastic context; this has led to confusion about the significance of such names. Here the analysis of s?te names is based on a more complete corpus, leading to a radically new interpretation of their distribution, chronology and historical context, with significant implications for our understanding of the evolution of Anglo‐Saxon administrative geography and the wider perception of so‐called ‘folk’ names.     

Kara-tepe,Karakalpakstan: Agropastoralism in a Central Eurasian Oasis in the 4th/5th century A.D. Transition

This paper reports on the results of archaeological field excavations at the site of Kara-tepe, in the semi-autonomous region of Karakalpakstan in northwestern Uzbekistan. Investigations at the site in 2008–2009 turned up an unusually rich assemblage of remains from a household context. Combined analysis of the household botanical and faunal remains has allowed us to reconstruct the agropastoral practices of local inhabitants in this oasis region during a critical period of social and environmental change in the Early Medieval transition (4th–5th centuries a.d.). The results of the study raise important new questions about agropastoralism in the oases of Central Eurasia, highlighting continuities of practice between oasis and steppe populations, and revealing dynamic changes in these systems over time.