The Pottery Informatics Query Database: A New Method for Mathematic and Quantitative Analyses of Large Regional Ceramic Datasets

There is an increasing demand within the humanities and social sciences to use computers to analyze material culture and discover patterns of historical and anthropological significance. Using southern Levantine Iron Age (ca. 1200–500 BCE) ceramics as a test case, the Pottery Informatics Query Database (PIQD) provides a novel solution for constructing regional ceramic typologies. Beyond digitally archiving 2D/3D-scanned ceramics, the PIQD encodes ceramic profiles as mathematical representations. This method of digital preservation enables rapid queries to be conducted in a mathematically grounded approach. In this sense, the queries are similar to online Basic Local Alignment Search Tool searches developed in the field of genetics by rapidly associating large quantities of digital vessel profiles to each other based on similar morphological traits. The PIQD is an open-source online tool that enables scholars and students to test humanities-related hypotheses against ceramic data in ways that conventional publications or other databases cannot provide. Regional spatial patterning of the ceramic data is delivered over a Google Earth-based user interface. In this paper, we present the PIQD as an objective method for developing a comprehensive ceramic typology of an entire region of archaeological study and provide an arena to conduct novel scientific research. We then demonstrate through a case study its analytical capabilities to handle large datasets of 3D scans and digitized 2D ceramic profiles and generate cultural inferences with the ceramic assemblages of the Iron Age II “Edomite” region located in modern southern Jordan. PIQD adds an important methodological tool to the post-excavation cyber-archaeology tool box.     

Waging peace: a new generation of Ixiles confronts the debts of war in Guatemala

ABSTRACT

This article describes the impunity embedded in the Guatemalan peace process after the genocide that shapes how Ixiles approach the debts (incurred by complicity, death and kinship) of war, as illustrated by their response to the 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt. The trial preceded a precipitous 2015 political crisis over corruption within the government of Otto Pérez Molina, a former army general and intelligence chief for Ríos Montt. The question that haunts the trial and these more recent marches for justice, in a country where citizens have long been subject to a life of democratic dictatorship, is how men like Pérez Molina and Ríos Montt maintain and grow their power even while their names are synonymous with murder, torture and clandestine graves. By examining the assumptions made by those in authority as they determine forgiveness, punishment, amnesty and reparations, I show how wartime debts act through generations. In the mixed reaction, popularly called pensamientos divididos, ‘divided thoughts’ or aq’olaj iyol yansa’m, of young Ixiles to the Ríos Montt trial, I illustrate a disjuncture that occurs when radically different forms of care intersect in the area most impacted by the genocide. Through fifteen years of ethnographic engagement, I trace the story of one Ixil family and their reactions to the trial to show how humanitarian efforts to confront war crimes are not simply restorative. While the trial opens the possibility for a collective remembering of violence and the (re)ordering of social ethos, in the Ixil area it also produces a moral economy of violence.     

Mitigating defeat: Vidal de la Blache’s 1885 France Frontière Nord-Est et Alsace-Lorraine

One contributing factor to France’s devastating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War was a lack of geographic knowledge at all levels of the army. As a result, politicians proposed significant educational reforms in the 1880s, which included an enhanced role of geography in the national curriculum. In order to improve access to and understanding of that subject, French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache published a series of Cartes murales that appeared in classrooms throughout the nation. Yet his Carte 10 France Frontière Nord-Est et Alsace-Lorraine, one such map, deviates from his primary mission of teaching pupils about the nation and focuses instead on the delicate topic of France’s new border with Germany. This article will examine Vidal’s map, on which he accurately presents the post-1871 political landscape. However, his cartographic discourse (colour, text, symbols), based on his geographic writings and national sentiment, differentiates Alsace-Lorraine from the new German Empire and helps his readers to question its authority over the two provinces.     

An Empire of the Scholars: Transnational Lawyers and the Rule of Opinio Juris

The eternal conflict between justice and violence is the theme of director John Ford's last great film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the world of the American West where Ford's story is set, justice does not just happen; it is a work of manly courage that encompasses a willingness—in extreme cases—to kill those men, such as Liberty Valance, who challenge law and order. Justice will require, as Plato said, a rightly ordered soul, but it will be a soul that must do violence to realize justice in a world that too often resembles a Hobbesian state of nature. In Ford's view, the truth of these violent origins of justice are more likely to be obscured than illuminated by the civilized historian's account of this truth. And we do violence not merely to justice but also to truth itself if we fail to respect the hard reality that civilization requires such measures.