Some Critical and Methodological Aspects of Shoreline Determination: Examples from the Baltic Sea Region

Coastal shorelines worldwide are generally unstable and changing. The study of the precise relation between any archaeological site and the shoreline at the time when the site was used is therefore complicated, but still often not met with appropriate methodological approaches. In this article, we test models based on phosphate analysis and discuss how they can be used to detect ancient shorelines. We propose that a model of increased and oscillating phosphate values at the former water level is considered reliable and useful in areas with advancing shoreline.     

Paleodietary analysis of the sacrificial victims from the Feathered Serpent Pyramid,Teotihuacan

The consumption of different types and quantities of food frequently serves as a practice that expresses and reinforces social distinctions among individuals within complex societies. This study explores the dietary behavior of probable sacrificial victims interred within the offering complex underlying the Feathered Serpent Pyramid as a line of evidence concerning the identities and life experiences of individuals selected for inclusion within one of Teotihuacan’s public monuments. Stable carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotope values from rib samples of 12 individuals within the Feathered Serpent Pyramid complex were compared with those of 14 individuals interred in residential contexts within the city. Results provide new information concerning daily subsistence at Classic period Teotihuacan (ca. A.D. 200–600) and highlight the dietary distinctiveness of individuals interred within the Feathered Serpent Pyramid as compared to the general residential population of the site, particularly in terms of the carbon isotope composition of protein sources consumed by a number of the sacrificial victims. Oxygen isotope analysis suggests that most individuals from the Feathered Serpent Pyramid resided within the local Teotihuacan area during the years immediately prior to their deaths, indicating that the unique dietary pattern seen in stable carbon isotope values cannot be attributed to nonlocal residence prior to sacrifice. Rather, these dietary differences may suggest that the group of individuals selected for interment within the Feathered Serpent Pyramid offering complex maintained a distinctive social or economic identity as compared to the rest of the Teotihuacan population during their lives.     

A Note on Kalhori Kinship Terms

Despite the great number of studies conducted by Western scholars exploring kinship terminologies in different languages, there seems to have been little attempt at dealing with kin words in Iranian languages like Kurdish. More specifically, Kalhori, as a southern dialect of Kurdish, has rarely been subject to studies of this nature. Underlining the significance of such studies in the wider linguistic and anthropological contexts, this study attempts to explore kin words Kalhori speakers use to refer to or address their relatives. We also make an attempt to investigate the possibility of presenting a formal explanation of the terms by placing them in a componential analysis framework.     

The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge to Environmental History

This article discusses the program of environmental history within the larger discipline of history and contrasts it with more recent contributions from post‐constructivist science. It explores the ways in which post‐constructivism has the potential to productively address many of the shortcomings of environmental history's theories and models that environmental historians themselves have begun to view with a critical eye. The post‐constructivist authors discussed in this article, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, both represent challenges to the ways in which nature and the natural sciences tend to be conceptualized as non‐problematized entities within environmental history. They also challenge the ways in which dichotomies of nature and culture tend to be reproduced within the program of environmental history. It is argued that these post‐constructivist contributions represent a radical and arguably more truly historical way of introducing non‐human actors into the historical narrative, and thus represent a potential reinvigoration of environmental history that would embrace a more radical historicity, greater diversity, and openness to difference.     

Alternative Zuliefersysteme im Brauereisektor – Regionalmodelle des Braugerstenbezugs in Bayern

Standort - Seit Jahrzehnten wird Bier größtenteils in standardisierten Wertschöpfungsketten produziert, wobei die Kontexte der Rohstofferzeugung kaum mehr nachvollziehbar erscheinen....     

The role of a Chaco-Era great house in the Southern Cibola Region of West-Central New Mexico: The Largo Gap great house community

Largo Gap is one of several late Pueblo II (a.d. 1050–1130) Chaco-style great houses located in the southern Cibola region of west-central New Mexico. This region is at the interface of two Southwestern cultural areas: Mogollon and Pueblo. We report results of survey and excavation research at the Largo Gap great house and associated community to explore the role great houses in this region served for local populations, as well as their articulation with other great houses across the “Chaco Sphere.” The results identify Largo Gap as an architecturally “Chacoan” structure and that use of this structure incorporated both Mogollon and Puebloan material culture. The use of ceramics from both ancestral culture groups indicates that the local community was multi-ethnic, and suggests a socially-integrative role for the great house within this region.     

The Kvarnbo Hall: Reconsidering the Importance of the Late Iron Age Åland Islands

This article accounts for and contextualizes a newly discovered monumental longhouse, a potential hall from the Late Iron Age, on the Åland Islands, Finland. The 45 m long building and its location are discussed in regional and historical context, in comparison to the full data set of coeval houses on Åland, and are argued to signal a social stratification, manifesting a higher level of achievement in this Late Iron Age society. This is further examined in the context of Iron Age settlement development. A rapid and large-scale colonization to Åland, evident in the middle of the first millennium AD, is for the first time explanatorily discussed, addressing the question of why this process occurred. Sudden population growth is linked in part to large-scale climatic disturbances, with fatal consequences in those areas of heavy agricultural dependency, forcing population movement to Åland driven by the presence of maritime resources, particularly seals, and available land.     

Circulation,modernity, and urban space in 1960s Beirut

In this essay, I explore the role of circulation in Beirut’s urban space and society in the early 1960s. Drawing primarily from the Lebanese francophone newspaper L’Orient, I show how the rise of automobility in postcolonial Beirut brought with it the imposition of certain kinds of moral and civic geographies that prescribed how citizens should use and move through the city. I argue that the newspaper’s narratives about matters of infrastructure and traffic law abidance reveal concerns with not just how people moved through the city, but with the everyday configuration of a rational, modern, biopolitical order.